Hist 20 podcast 10.1: 1990-99

events in the last decade of the 20th C

Transcript

##last podcast: hedda 2023, events up to date

This podcast is not chronological - by now Hedda has been dead for more than 30 years - but she is in many ways still alive in my heart and in all your minds since we have been talking about her all quarter.
This is an update one how the work on Hedda’s life is going. I have been researching her life, and by that extension the life of many other members of my family now for three years - and there is so much more STUFF. I don’t add it to the podcast bc I worry that if I add all these other people, you will lose focus on the one that got us here: Hedda.
But it is worth knowing that like all research - you start with one question and you end up with 100. I may have found some answers, but I also have a ton of new questions, and that is what makes it fun and keeps me going.

One of the strange things that have happened since this class went online is that I have twice gotten emails from complete strangers who were looking for other family members. Once it was a forensic insurance researcher. Take note - this is a job you can do with a history degree. Forensic researchers are hired by insurance companies to find heirs of people who die without leaving will. That person’s assets have to be distributed, so the forensic researchers look for distant heirs this will go to. 

the other person who contacted me is a Belgian journalist who was looking for German refugees who had fled to Belgium and who had sold art works under duress  to survive during the war - there is a restitution process under way, especially for people whose art works and homes were confiscated by the German government after they left - before the war. Under this restitution process, selling a painting to survive during the way is a similar to losing it to the Nazis - and the journalist was looking for anyone with ties to german jews in Belgium. The Monument Men and The Woman in Gold are two movies that deal specifically with this.

Anyway -  each time I found out something more about Hedda’s family. The insurance agent alerted me to the fact that she had found information about a Thea Seegall - Hedda’s sister - the actress, who was married to a relatively well-known music critic before the war. She left to the US in the mid-1930’s, after her husband left her - it’s unsure if he left her because the marriage was over or if he was under pressure for being married to a jew as the Nazis came to power. Thea’s life in the US is a bit obscure - she married, she divorced, she was in some plays, she worked for an airline and passed herself off as a countess. What I have found so far suggest she was eccentric to say the least. Like Hedda’s other sister Eva, Thea also got cancer - and both sisters died in 1965 - Thea joined Hedda in Belgium - where she had never lived, and Eva died in Paris, where she had been living after spending the war in Switzerland. In fact, this summer I finally met Eva’s son, who is now 78 years old - and who told me Hedda was his favorite aunt!

But a lot of what I know about Hedda comes from the boxes of documents my aunt, my father’s oldest sister, has in her cellar, filled with photos and letters, and documents - everything from the receipts for a moving van to the conferral by the grateful German Nation to Ernst in 1960 after he helped German banks and Belgian banks work together in the aftermath of war. I am still grappling with that - Ernst, who had to flee Germany, who pretended he was deaf and mute when he arrived in Belgium so as not to be found out as a German when war broke out - Ernst whose German nationality was voided bc he was a jew, and who for years did not have a nationality - was nationless - until Belgium agreed to make him and his wife and children a citizen in 1950 - getting a letter of recognition from the German government for his dedicated work! He  also got one from the Belgian government, which for years questioned his right to a Belgian nationality since he had at one point been German. I am trying to imagine the kind of man Ernst was, to have lost so much at the hands of one country’s government and been treated so poorly by another one - to still work for both countries and then years later be honored with prizes from both. he was not a man who held grudges.

I have also learnt a lot from my uncle Leo, whom I had hoped I could invite to speak with you. He is not really comfortable with the idea of being recorded and not being able to have a conversation with his audience. He has been doing research into the records of the family for years - and by records I don’t mean letters and photographs, but records that are kept in archives - like a local archive in Amsterdam and Brussels, and in Jerusalem. His focus has been on his father’s side of the family (Hedda was his grandmother on his mother’s side). His research is much more tragic - about 80 to 90% of my grandfather’s family were killed in the early 1940’s in concentration camps. 

By contrast, most of Hedda’s family survived. Only one distant cousin was sent to a camp - and it is not lost on me that the difference in how one side of the family experienced the 1940’s is very different from how the other one did, and that this is a metaphor for all of human history and experience. One nation’s victory is another one’s loss. A victorious revolution will be written as such by those who benefit from it, but others will only feel pain. 

as i close this cycle of the podcast, and think of how much I have learnt from teaching this class, and from reading your family stories, and from delving deeper into mine, I realize that it is more important than ever to understand the human condition at its most vulnerable, most human, least heroic and memorable. for example when I read in Hedda’s agenda that she met a friend regularly for coffee in Berlin, and that upon arrival in Belgium - after crossing into Belgium secretly by foot in the dark at night across the border - what she did that first day in Brussels was, go for a walk and go for coffee. Sure - war hadn’t broken out yet - but she had just left her parents behind to an uncertain existence, and she was halfway between Berlin and Australia - or so she thought. But Hedda wrote in her agenda that she went for coffee. Who knows what other thoughts crossed her mind, her records show she had coffee. 

And for a week after Robert committed suicide there is nothing in her agenda, until she notes a doctor’s appt. I can only imagine the depth of sorrow that that silence in her agenda means.

I leave you with this thought - i hope none of you ever experience any of the horrors of a war like ww2, or the wars that are currently raging across our globe.  but whatever challenges you do face - and there will always be challenges - face them with humility and courage. know that there were challenges before you, and more challenges will follow. history in textbooks is a construct, but your history is not. don’t let yours be a single story, and don’t judge others by the single story they show you. remember that there are always more stories to discover and that history is never as simple, or as boring, as you think.