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177 pages

English

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When Konrad Schiemann escaped his home in Berlin to begin a new life in England, he didn't know what life awaited him there. An orphan who had lost both of his parents at the end of World War Two, he reached this new country to start again with the help of relatives. Grown up, he decided to practise as a barrister in England and became a judge of the Appeal Court and finally of the European Court of Justice. After having his family and life in Germany torn apart by conflict, he forged a career around his desire to help in the construction of a peaceful Europe.Piecing together extensive correspondence from the war years, A Dual Perspective is the moving memoir of a German orphan who built a new future away from home, and the story of the family he loved and lost along the way. It was only late in life that Konrad came to realise the extent of the extraordinary family into which he had been born: a great-great grandfather who presided over 5 parliaments and the first German Supreme Court, a great grandfather who was a friend of the last Kaiser and a grandfather who joined the Nazi Party despite the opposition of two members of the family later recognised by Israel as Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews from the Nazis. He learned of his mother's close acquaintance with one of the plotters of the assassination attempt on Hitler and it became evident that there was a powerful family history to be traced, and a story to be told.

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Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	10 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781915036735
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2022
by Sir Konrad Schiemann
In partnership with whitefox publishing
Copyright © Sir Konrad Schiemann, 2022
www.wearewhitefox.com
ISBN 978-1-915036-66-7
Also available as an eBook
ISBN: 978-1-915036-73-5
Sir Konrad Schiemann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
Designed and typeset by seagulls.net
Cover design by Tomás Almeida
Project management by whitefox
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
I THE FAMILY BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Eduard von Simson: President of Parliaments and of the Supreme Court
Theodor Schiemann: adviser and friend of the Emperor William II
Paul Schiemann: politician
My Schiemann grandparents
My Simson grandparents
II THE GROWTH OF NAZISM
A historical reminder
Nazism and my parents
Tensions
Great-aunt Elisabeth
III THE SECOND WORLD WAR
My grandparents
My own memories
My mother’s occupation
My mother in Berlin
The introduction to Stauffenberg
What is to be done with Konrad?
The Stauffenberg Plot 1944
IV THE FAILURE OF THE PLOT: AWAITING EXECUTION
Christmas 1944 in Berlin
V WHAT HAPPENED TO MY RELATIVES IN THE EAST
Christmas 1944 in the Baltic
Refugees followed by the first wave of Russians
Rapes, suicides and terror in Altschlage, and yet some kindness 1oo
What happened to the Schwerdtfegers
My Schiemann grandparents after the war
VI THE END OF THE WAR AND THE DEATHS OF MY PARENTS
Helmuth’s last letter
Escape from Berlin
Return to Berlin
We hear of the death of my father
Christmas 1945, Berlin
Despair of my mother
Beate’s last letter
Beate’s death and what followed
VII AN ORPHAN IN BERLIN
My introduction to administrative law
My grandfather copes with the death of his daughter
I learn to cope
VIII WERNER VON SIMSON: A GERMAN WHO GOT OUT BEFORE THE WAR
IX I MOVE TO ENGLAND
English schooling seventy years ago
X THE CHOICE BEFORE ME: GERMANY OR ENGLAND?
Freiburg University
Further encounters with administrators
XI THE BRITISH ARMY
Training
Cyprus
XII TWO MENTORS
The Rev. R. G. Lunt, chief master of King Edward’s School Birmingham
The Rev. Meredith Dewey, dean of Pembroke College Cambridge
XIII CAMBRIDGE
Reading law
A friend: Hugh Mellor
Undergraduate life
The choice before me: the Bar or the European Working Group
XIV THE EUROPEAN WORKING GROUP 1962–8: AN ATTEMPT AT A EUROPEAN PEACE CORPS
XV A NEW FAMILY
XVI MUSIC FOR A WHILE
XVII A GERMAN AT THE BAR
XVIII HIGH COURT JUDGE
XIX THE CONSEIL D’ÉTAT
XX UGANDA
The Busoga Trust
In the villages
Tensions in the diocese
XXI DEATHS IN THE FAMILY
Werner
Kathleen
Martin
David
Gitta
XXII THE FAMILY’S FUTURE
XXIII THE COURT OF APPEAL
XXIV THE FREEMASON CONTROVERSY
XXV THE INNER TEMPLE
XXVI SOVEREIGNTY
What makes a people?
No state is in fact omnipotent
No state should be omnipotent
XXVII THE EUROPEAN UNION
The choice before me: England or Luxembourg
Chateau on the Moselle
The work of the Court
The Brexit debate
The development of my views on the EU
XXVIII THE THINGS THAT MATTER
Appendix
Confirmation Speech
Address by KS on Helmuth James, Count von Moltke
Call Night Address 2003
A Day in the Temple
A Letter from Luxembourg
Notes
Introduction
‘What on earth persuaded you, who are clearly enjoying life here, to leave that life and be a judge in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg instead?’ A number of my colleagues in the Court of Appeal in London asked me this in 2003.
The question which came so naturally to them was one which none of my continental colleagues, friends and family ever asked. For such people, as for me, to play a part in the construction of Europe was both a duty and an honour. Various members of my family had in different ways been engaged on this task for more than 150 years. In some sense my whole life had been a preparation for doing the same.
At a dinner party in Hampstead some years ago I was asked about my origins and replied that I had spent most of my life aping the manners of an English gentleman but had never been able to conceal my incompetence at cricket, riding, tennis, golf or at talking knowledgeably about sport or the weather. 1 There was an immediate outcry at the suggestion that I should have been guided by the concept of a ‘gentleman’, which was mocked as ludicrous. I had to apologise to my hosts for having innocently provoked in Hampstead a disturbance which I thought would not have occurred in Kensington. I explained that I owed it to my upbringing in England, which involved learning English by reading P. G. Wodehouse aloud to a clergyman born in the nineteenth century. I added that in the Germany in which I had been brought up the concept of an English gentleman was much admired.
My evasive reply is one which I often repeated when others have asked me the same question. I, having come to England from Germany just after the Second World War as an orphan, was anxious, as schoolboys tend to be, to try and fit in with the behaviour of my fellows. This tendency has never really left me.
I had spent some of the war being bombed by the British. My contemporaries had spent some of it being bombed by the Germans. In the 1940s and 1950s to say you were German was to risk abuse rather than encourage friendship. To say you had lost your parents invited explanations and further questions. ‘What did your parents do during the war?’ was a question which I did not want to be posed and, so far as I can recollect, was not posed for most of my life. I was leading a busy and fulfilling life here in England and was not myself at that point interested in my antecedents.
Why then come clean now? A number of factors have come together.
Now that Germany has been generally accepted once more as part of the civilised world, it is easier to be pleased with the fact that my heritage is German than it was at a time when the best course was to forget it.
Since I retired as a judge in the European Court of Justice, my days are no longer filled by a very busy agenda compiled by others as they had been throughout my previous life. So there is time at my disposal. I have always been interested in history, and on my shelves among the unread books were several written by or about my ancestors who had played some part in European history. So I got round to reading them.
My interest in them had been stimulated by my attending a celebration by the German government and leaders of the German judiciary in memory of my great-great-grandfather Eduard von Simson. Much was made of his Jewish origins. This surprised me, because I had come across no trace of specifically Jewish beliefs or practices in my upbringing. Yet personally I had long been fascinated by Judaism, as my bookshelves witness. So I had been very pleased to be invited by my Jewish friends to a seder, a bar mitzvah, the synagogue and even a ritual circumcision.
In the attic there was a large collection of letters written in the 1930s and 1940s which had been given to me as people died and which I had not bothered to read before. Many were written in old German cursive handwritten script, which I then had to try to learn. The handwriting was moreover not always perfect. Fortunately others had been typed.
I read of the friendship between the last German Kaiser and my great-grandfather Professor Theodor Schiemann. I read with astonishment a letter written in 1930 by his son, my grandfather, to my father explaining why he had joined the Nazi Party. I realised for the first time that my mother had expected to be shot for her friendship with Berthold Count Stauffenberg, who with his brother Claus had planned what should be the consequences of an assassination of Hitler. The assassination attempt failed in July 1944. I had been aware that my family lost many friends in the subsequent revenge taken by Hitler but, as I read this, all became so much more immediate.
I stumbled across a wonderful collection of letters by Helmuth James, Count von Moltke to his wife 2 and recalled that my uncle had mentioned him. I saw that he had become a member of my Inn in the 1930s and had been executed on Hitler’s orders in 1945. So I arranged a service in his memory in the Temple Church to which many came. The more I read about him the more I saw that he had been the centre of a group – some politicians of various political convictions, some Christians of various confessions – who together had tried to work out how Europe could best be organised after the fall of Hitler. In due course their ideas played a part in the creation of the European Community after the war.
I was invited to receive from the Israeli ambassador to Germany a medal on behalf of my great-aunt Elisabeth Schiemann, who had been declared one of the Righteous among the Nations for helping the Jews during the war, and so I started to look at her life story.
I was largely brought up by a von Simson uncle who left Germany for England in 1939. I became increasingly conscious of the fact that my Schiemann family past had not been mentioned much and I had not asked any questions about it. Nor had there been much talk of the von Simson family past. Nor did I question those who might have been able to tell me more.
When the Covid pandemic arrived there were no other distractions, and it seemed natural to record and try to make sense of what I was discovering and to try to see how my present has been formed by my family past. For the first time this started to interest me, and I devoted time to finding out.
Then members of my family started asking me questions to which I did not know the answer. It became incr