33 - Reckonings

Summary

It was not as if the war and its horrors had intersected Straube only as air raids, material loss, and displacement. Human tolls had been exacted, too, on many levels. He and others would have to undergo the stressful denazi-fication investigations initiated by the Americans and continued under the Soviets. Friendships had been severed, as with Adolf Busch, and professional relationships aborted, as with Bruno Walter. He had been close to many who themselves, or whose children, had lost their lives. Straube's ally Goerdeler had been involved in the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life and was executed in February 1945. There had been the Hinrichsens, who had met their brutal end in the camps. There had been the students, marched off to the fronts in the name of “the eternal Germany.” As time passed he would learn of their gruesome fates. There had been the case of Hugo Distler, a bright light issuing from Ramin's organ studio and Grabner's composition class during the late Weimar years. In November 1942 he abruptly took his own life, unable to reconcile his career trajectory with the pressures of a ruthless regime, thus contributing to a sharply rising nationwide suicide rate.

There were others casualties, closer to home. In its last phases the war had claimed Straube's nephews Bertram and Peter, the only sons of his older brother William. In 1918, at the time Karl had acceded to the Leipzig cantorate, William, aged forty-seven, had married the violinist Dora von Möllendorf. With the two boys who soon issued from the union, the family had relocated in 1925 from Berlin to Lake Constance. The move evinced William's general predisposition to turn inward. Whereas Karl's personality was outgoing enough to sustain a career in the limelight, William's sensitive and brooding psyche pushed him to withdraw from the mainstream and work outside the pressures of the art market. To Hertha, Karl fondly referred to his brother as “Willy, the taciturn one.” In 1929 William had retired early from teaching to dedicate himself to his painting. The brothers had kept up with each other over the years, bound not least by common interests in music and art.