The Emigrants

uncle's suspicions were justified. Continuing his account of his visit to Wurzburg in summer 1936, Ferber said that one day when they were strolling in the palace gardens Uncle Leo told him that he had been compulsorily retired on the 31st of December the year before and that, in consequence, he was preparing to emigrate from Germany, and was planning to go to England or America shortly. Afterwards we were in the great hall of the palace, and I stood beside Uncle, craning up at Tiepolo's glorious ceiling fresco above the stairwell, which at that time meant nothing to me; beneath the loftiest of skies, the creatures and people of the four realms of the world are assembled on it in fantastic array. Strangely enough, said Ferber, I only thought of that afternoon in Wiirzburg with Uncle Leo a few months ago, when I was looking through a new book on Tiepolo. For a long time I couldn't tear myself away from the reproductions of the great Wiirzburg fresco, its light-skinned and dark-skinned beauties, the kneeling Moor with the sunshade and the magnificent Amazon with the feathered headdress. For a whole evening, said Ferber, I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Wiirzburg came back to me, and the return to Munich, where the general situation and the atmosphere at home were steadily becoming more unbearable, and the silence was thickening. Father, said Ferber, was something of a born comedian or play-actor. He enjoyed life, or rather, he would have enjoyed it; he would have liked to go to the Theater am Gàrtnerplatz still, to the revues and wine bars; but, because of the circumstances, the depressive traits that were also in his character overlaid his essentially cheerful nature towards the end of the Thirties. He began to display an absent-mindedness and irritability which I had not seen in him before; both he and Mother put it down to a passing nervousness, which for days at a time would dictate his behaviour. He went to the cinema more and more often, to see cowboy films and the mountaineering films of Luis Trenker. Not once was there any talk of leaving Germany, at least not in my presence, not even after the Nazis had confiscated pictures, furniture and valuables from our home, on the grounds that we had no right to the German heritage. All I remember is that my parents were particularly affronted by the uncouth manner in which the lower ranks stuffed their pockets full of cigarettes and cigarillos. After the Kristallnacht, Father was interned in Dachau. Six weeks later he came home, distinctly thinner and with his hair cropped