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Gruppenbild mit Gustav und Minna Wächter
Gustav (hintere Reihe stehend) und Minna Wächter (1.v.r.) in Bispingen 1932
© Torkel Wächter

Minna Wächter (née Sonnenberg) * 1881

Scheideweg 35 (Eimsbüttel, Hoheluft-West)

1941 Riga

see:

further stumbling stones in Scheideweg 35:
Gustav Wächter

Gustav Wächter, born 10/24/1875 in Hamburg, deported to Riga on 12/6/1941
Minna Wächter, née Sonnenberg, born 3/12/1881 in Hamburg, deported to Riga on 12/6/1941

Scheideweg 35

Torkel Wächter, grandson of Minna And Gustav Wächter, born in Sweden long after their death and still living there with his family, wrote this text about his grandparents.

On December 22nd, 1902, my grandparents Minna and Gustav Wächter stood under the chuppa, the wedding canopy that symbolizes the future home of the newly-wed couple. Almost exactly nine months later, Minna bore her first son, my uncle Max. Another year and a half later, their second son was born, uncle Max. My father Michaël, called Walter from his birth, was a late arrival, born in 1913. Gustav Wächter was a German civil servant with a great sense of right and wrong and a strong faith in the future. Minna is said to have had the most beautiful eyes you can imagine; she was a housewife and lovingly cared for her family.

The name Wächter ("Watchman”) dates back to the early 19th century, when the German Jews adopted permanent family names. According to the older tradition, the father’s first name was passed on to the children as family name. Thus, Gustav Wächter’s great grandfather Tobias Elias had taken the first name of his father Elias Jacob as his own second name. Elias Jacob had lived in the territory of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany long before there was anything that could have been called Deutschland. Tobias Elias was a musician and a member of Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish funerary society. He stood watch with the deceased the night before the funeral, which was considered one of the noblest mitzvot, the good deeds a Jew could do, as the deceased had no opportunity to repay him. In Yiddish, Tobias Elias was called Tobias Wacherle which became Tobias Wächter in high German.

Tobias Elias was born 1783 in the Hanse City of Hamburg and in the City’s German-Israelitic Community. His son Moritz Tobias Wächter was born 1812 in a Hamburg that was occupied by French troops and had been annexed by Napoleon, a town in the French Empire. Thus, Moritz Tobias Wächter was born a French citizen, or subject, but was nonetheless member of the German-Israelitic Community, even though he lived in Manchester, England for a time, where he managed the family’s tobacco import business. Moritz Tobias Wächter’s son, Hermann Wächter, was born 1839, when Hamburg was once again a sovereign city republic. Hermann’s son Gustav Wächter was born 1875 in the (second) German Reich and thus was the first in the Wächter family who, in the narrower sense of the word, was born as a German.

Minna Wächter, née Sonnenberg, was born on March 23rd, 1885 as the youngest of four children of a Sephardic merchant family with branches in the Netherlands and Denmark. Sephardim is the name given the descendants of Jews who in 1492 were expelled from Portugal, and, a hundred years later, from Spain. The Sephardim came to Hamburg via Amsterdam. The Senate, Hamburg’s government, had invited them to enhanced trade and commerce, and they were the first Jews that were allowed to settle in the City proper. At that time, the German Jews, the Ashkenazim, lived in the Danish territories of Altona and Wandsbek and were only allowed inside Hamburg’s city limits in the daytime.

Minna was only ten years old when her father Isaac Sonnenberg died, so that she was placed under guardianship. She grew up in the Paulinenstiftung, an orphanage for girls, and attended the Israelitic Girls’ School. When she came of age, the heritage of an uncle in Copenhagen fell to her, so that she was able to leave the orphanage and marry Gustav Wächter. Shortly after the birth of my father, the family moved to Eppendorfer Weg, house number 40, to an apartment with the T-shaped layout called "Hamburg Bone.”  

In the following paragraph, my father Michaël Wächter, alias Walter Wächter, gives an account of one of his earliest childhood memories: "I believe I remember something from the time of the First World War. But I am not really sure if it’s a memory of my own or something my parents or my brothers told me later. I am sitting on my mother’s arm, and the whole family is outside on the balcony. We are watching one of the first aerial attacks on Hamburg. It was, naturally, not an air raid in the modern sense of the word, nothing comparable to what happened later. But there were enemy planes over Hamburg, and they were going to drop bombs. I can still feel the comfort I felt in the arms of my mother, and see the anxious anticipations of the rest of my family. I don’t know if the planes actually dropped bombs, or if it was a false alarm.

In his memoirs, my father Michaël Wächter, alias Walter Wächter, gives a warm account of Minna’s loving care:
Another memory I have are my mother’s foraging trips to procure food for the family. I assume that this happened during the final phase of World War I or shortly after the war. Forlong periods. We did not have enough to eat and not enough money to buy food at the black market that flourished in town. Thus, my mother did what so many other women in the same situation did: she went on forays to the country and traded goods with the farmers. This enabled her to enhance our monotonous diet that consisted mainly of rutabagas, rutabagas and still more rutabagas – rutabagas in any shape you could imagine. Like other housewives, my mother had learned to use rutabagas as raw material for really surprising culinary creations. We had rutabaga marmalade and rutabaga "burgers.” My mother’s imagination was unlimited when it came to inventing new rutabaga dishes. She had organized a huge pot that was always full of rutabagas. They were either eaten as rutabagas or used as raw material for my mother’s innovative creations. My predominate memory of the time is of the heavy odor of rutabagas that spread all over the house. It hit you as soon as you opened the door.

After the war, rutabagas were no longer served at my parents’ home for many years, no matter in what shape. Once, my mother made the modest attempt to serve us mashed rutabagas, but the protests were so violent that she never made another try. I only came to appreciate rutabagas when I lived in Sweden. During my time at the farm, I became acquainted with mashed rutabagas with bacon, a dish I got to like very much.

When my mother returned from her foraging expeditions, she had always got hold of something. And she was obviously talented in eluding the constables that were always chasing the hoarders. I don’t know how she managed that. Once, she came back with a lot of beechnuts. Obviously, nobody had considered them worth gathering. We, however, really enjoyed them.

I also remember how my mother and I queued on the bank of one of Hamburg’s countless canals, waiting for a scow full of coal to arrive. My eldest brother had been sent ahead early in the morning, before school, to secure a place in the line. Then, my mother took over, and I went with her. I still remember the long, meandering line of people and the black scow. I remember the smell of coal and cold burning in my nostrils while we waited.

One can say that there have been two main streams in the Jewish world since the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 a.d. and forced the Jews to leave the Holy Land. One that ends up on Mount Masada again and again. The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius gives an account of this group of Jews, the Sicarii, who courageously fought against the Roman rule and finally collective suicide at Masada rather than submit to the Roman administration. The second stream is the one that at the time of the destruction of the Temple was headed by Yochanan ben Sakkai. In negotiations with the Romans, he reached an agreement that allowed the Jews to move the religious center of Judaism to the town of Jabne on the Mediterranean coast. There, the scribes could unhurriedly discuss how to deal with the loss of the Temple, which had included the sacrificial altar, and agreed on substituting animal sacrifices by prayer, as is the Jewish custom to this day.

Yochanan ben Sakkai’s successors include Moses Mendelssohn, Rahel Varnhagen and the advocates of Haskala, the Jewish Aufklärung, contemporaries of the aforementioned and active in Altona, Hamburg and elsewhere. The members of the Wächter family were typical representatives of the assimilated German Judaism that evolved in the 19th century, people that shared joy and sorrow with other Germans. Gustav volunteered for military service in World War I, but was classified as indispensable at his job. He saw himself as a German civil servant, a German citizen of Mosaic faith. One of his favorite stories from the Tax and Finance Administration a client who complained to him about a colleague and referred to the man as that Jew.” The point of the story was that the "Jew” was not a Jew, and the client didn’t know that Gustav was. With that story, Gustav wanted to show that German Jews were just like all other Germans, so that it was impossible to tell who was a German citizen of Mosaic faith and who was not.

Gustav gave the following description of himself (Tax Administration, personnel records AW 1 vol. 1):
"Attended the Stiftungsschule von 1815, from which I graduated with the qualification for 1-year military service in 1892. Then I became an apprentice at the grain business of Herr F. A. Schmidt here, where I stayed for three years as apprentice and another three years as commis. Later, I worked at other companies in the grain trade, until I started at the statistics bureau of the tax deputation as assistant worker on December 1st, 1900. From 1902, I have been working at the tax deputation, where I was promoted to bureau assistant on April 16th, 1905. On September 15th, 1906, I passed the examination for the lower administrative service.

After Gustav had also passed the examinations for the middle administrative service, he was promoted to first tax inspector in 1921 – the highest post he could achieve with his level of education. Minna and Gustav took the education of their children very seriously, as they themselves had not had the chance to study and were convinced that a good education was the key to a good future for their boys. Michaël Wächter, alias Walter Wächter, describes his father as a pillar of society. Gustav’s interest focused on his family, he was a mixture of gentle family father and domestic tyrant. A man who took Sunday Afternoon walks through Eimsbüttel and on these occasions always bought a bar of chocolate which he almost ceremoniously divided into five equal pieces. If he found a scrap of paper someone had thrown away on the street, Gustav picked it up and put it in his pocket "so it won’t be cold”, or put it in a wastebasket "so it won’t feel alone.”

In his memoirs, my father gives the account of an episode from his years at the Stiftungsschule von 1815 (the school was later named Anton Rée Realschule). It was the same school that uncle John and uncle Max had gone to and before them Gustav and his brother and earlier still Gustav’s father and his brother.

"Classes at school were very boring, conventional and hardly stimulating; the only exception was my German teacher. He had been a soldier in the war, an experience that decisively formed his character. Also, his basic attitude was very nationalistic, but his experiences at the front had caused him to reconsider his positions. He was a reflective, sensitive and benevolent person. I was very attached to him, and he Also liked me. His great and true love of German literature stimulated me and led me to discover the pearls of German poetry on my own.

I was totally educated in the tradition that German philosophy and literature were definitely superior to other philosophies and literatures. Thus, without having given the issue much thought, we saw Strindberg, who indeed had spent many years in Germany, as part of our literature. I am not sure if I even knew he actually was Swedish. Before I landed in Sweden. Likewise, we had adopted Shakespeare as a German author. We did know that he was an Englishman, but Ludwig Tieck’s famous translations made him to a German. Above all, his rooting in the Germanic body of thought was not to be questioned. It took many years for me to discover that a lot of stuff worth reading had also been written in other countries. And it took me still more time to realize the deficiencies and mannerisms in literary Germanomania.

A conflict I got into with, of all people, my German teacher, may show how rigid German education was in those days. As up to date as my German teacher was in many respects, he had nonetheless established the rule that any pupil who had gathered three entries in the class logbook had to report to him so that he should decide when the delinquent was to report to the principal and ask for the cane and bring it to the classroom and submit to the punishment before the rest of the class. A cane was only allowed to be kept at the principal’s office, and if there was to be corporal punishment, it had to be approved by the principal. Well, I once again had three entries in the class logbook and dutifully reported this to ma German teacher, who said: "Then you will go to get the cane from the principal in the second recess tomorrow.” Thus, I had 24 hours to prepare for my part in the public execution of my punishment. This did not make me especially but rather depressed. When I got home, my mother noticed me being unusually silent, and she began "drilling” me to find out what was wrong. And finally found out what was worrying me. Mother spoke about it with father, who, as always ins such cases, got beside himself with rage. He told me that I shouldn’t got to get the cane, but tell my teacher that my father had forbidden me to get it. And that my father thought that a teacher who was unable to give his classes without beating up his pupils had failed at his duty.

When my teacher entered the classroom after the second recess, I stood up, nervous, but composed. I told him why I had not got the cane and what my father had admonished me to say. The class fell completely silent, the teacher stood at his desk, motionless, and became white with rage. Then, he gathered himself and said: "Well, as you like it. So I will give you an "unsatisfactory” in behavior on your next report card.” Which duly happened; this was most unusual, but not really bad, because my parents didn’t care. Instead, my father wrote the teacher a letter, whose contents I don’t know, and my teacher never even mentioned it.

An "unsatisfactory” in behavior did not bother my father, but otherwise, he was very keen about my grades. Mother and he were very liberal in their education methods. We were hardly ever punished, and there was no beating. Neither did the other types of punishment common at the time occur, like the ban on going out being locked up in your room, banned from meals or the like. But when I came home with bad grades, my father reacted very sternly. After blasting me, he no longer spoke to me and completely ignored me. A "bad” grade was anything poorer than the equivalent of a "B” in the US grading system.

On one hand, my father had been spoiled by my elder brothers’ grades, who were always at the top of the class or at least near to it, and then, he held an almost exaggerated ambition for us. The worst case was when I came home with a bad grade for a class test. It then could happen that he wouldn’t speak to me for a whole week, I remember holing up in my bed after coming home with a bad grade, and asking my mother to give him the bad news. That had to be done after my father had eaten. Otherwise, he would stop eating.

The Wächter family spent their summer vacations in Bispingen in the Lüneburg Heath, where thy met with relatives and other German families. From today’s point of view, you might be misled to think that such a prolific union of the German and the Jewish had never existed, that this communal life had not been genuine, so it just had to come about as it did in the end and thus everything had been futile. But that would be wrong, because there is an affinity between the German and the Jewish that already Heinrich Heine had seen. H called Jews and Germans the two ethical peoples of Europe, and even went so far as to call the Jews the Germans of the Orient. Goethe expressed the wish that the Germans be dispersed all over the world like the Jews so they could strive to improve the world, as the Jews did. And Stefan George said the blonde and black come from the same womb. Walter Benjamin, too, saw Germans and Jews as relatives, but as opposite poles. And Franz Kafka opinioned that Jews and Germans have much in common; they are ambitious, efficient and assiduous – and thoroughly hated by each other.

At their home at Eppendorfer Weg 40, the Wächters regularly held a salon, merry evenings full of fun with lectures, violin and piano concerts, sketches and little theater acts, staged by the three brothers and their friends. The family also cultivated their like of the theater with their membership of the Hamburger Gesellschaftsverein von 1906 e.V. For uncle Max, the theater was to become his profession after he had quit his apprenticeship at a private bank. Uncle John, like Gustav, aimed at a career in the civil service, and Walter, the youngest son, was just about to begin his studies at the university when everything changed.

In a letter of March 28th, 1933, the National Socialist Association of Civil Servants, Finance Agency Department, filed a complaint to the police Against Gustav: he was a Jew who intentionally fought against the state and nationally thinking civil servants.

It was the beginning g of proceedings that were to go on for more than half a year; all of Gustav’s colleagues were questioned, and Gustav himself wrote countless commentaries in his defense. The complete documentation is preserved at the Hamburg State Archive; it reads like a novel by Franz Kafka. In his memoirs, Michaël Wächter, alias Walter Wächter, remembers fifty years later:
‘I still see him before me, going back and forth at home, contriving devastating wordings. When he had completed a letter, he read it to us. We sometimes had trouble not to break character. May brothers and I had rather quickly realized that it made no difference what the facts were or how eloquently our father argued. His optimism and his faith in the system he had loyally served all his life were unshakeable, and he reacted irately to the slightest hint that it no longer mattered what he did. His unbroken fighting spirit and his naïve belief that one had to fight for justice and that justice at the end would prevail had at once something great and something tragi comical.

In 1933, all members of the family lost their jobs, and Gustav’s beloved stepmother Lea Wächter, who lived with the family at Eppendorfer Weg 40, died of a stroke. Minna fell ill from worry, got stomach trouble and in fall had to be operated for an anal prolapse by Doctor Paul Bonheim. Max, who had gained a foothold in the film industry in Berlin, had to return to Hamburg with his wife Dora, he depended on the Jewish Cultural Association. John, who had been an active member of the SPD, and his wife Else changed residences several times to avoid getting arrested. His younger brother Walter, who had also been politically active, was imprisoned in summer of 1933, but released after a few days. To avoid Walter getting arrested again, Minna, Gustav and Walter moved from Eimsbüttel to Barmbek in fall of 1933. A year later, they moved again, and when uncle Max fled to Buenos Aires head over heels in summer 1938, Mina and Gustav moved into his apartment at Scheideweg 35 (where Dora still lived with her and Max’ daughter) to help care for their grandchild. It was Minna’s and Gustav’s last address in Hamburg, and the Stumbling Stones in memory of Minna and Gustav Wächter lie there.

In spring of 1935, first Walter and shortly after John were arrested. Both were locked in isolation cells in the cellar of the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp and later in the prison, respectively jail. When World War II broke out, the three brothers were in relative safety, on their way to Argentina, Brazil and Sweden. All of them had been deprived of their German citizenship. Minna and Gustav remained in Hamburg and were deported on December 6th, 1941.

One could say that the story that had begun when Tobias Elias took the family name Wächter ended when the train carrying Minna and Gustav Wächter left Hamburg. Minna and Gustave been deprived of all their belongings, their dignity and their German citizenship. Then Wächter family from Hamburg no longer exists. But the story of Minna and Gustav and their German-Jewish family goes on. I’m not thinking of what happened when that train arrived in Riga, because that has nothing to do with the persons who were my grandmother and grandfather. Rather, I think of my children, Minna’s and Gustav’s great-grandchildren. They have inherited Minna’s eyes and Gustav’s optimism, and they were given back the German citizenship that had been taken away from their forebears. When walk the pedestrian path in the middle of Karlavägen on our way to the German school in Stockholm, we often speak about my grandmother and my grandfather. For me, the story of Minna and Gustav Wächter goes on under the lindens of Karlavägen. It goes on with the Hebrew word zachor, the exhortation to remember that occurs in the Hebrew Bible 169 times. Zachor does not point to the past, but to the present and the future. Remembering is an activity that you engage in in the present, and it points to the future. By remembering, we keep the past alive.


Translated by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: May 2019
© Torkel Wächter

Quellen: 1; 4; 8; Landgericht Hamburg Wg- und R-Akten, Sign 24 09 02, 19 06 04 und 26 05 13; StaH 313-5 Steuerverwaltung-Personalakten A W 1 Band 1; StaH 313-5 Steuervewaltung-Personalakten A W 1 Band 2; StaH 313-5 Steuerverwaltung-Personalakten A W 1 Anlageheft; StaH 214-1 Gerichtsvollzieherwesen 691; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinden, Sign. 487 Fasc. 1 Korrespondenz mit dem Paulinen-Stift 1856-1913; StaH 522-1, Sign. 487 Fasc. 3 Mädchen-Waisenhaus (Paulinenstift) 1900–1936; StaH 232-1 / Vormundschaftsbehörde Hamburg/Abteilung II 4106; StaH 362-2/13 Aufbauschule Hohe Weide; Zentrum für Theaterforschung an der Universität Hamburg, wo Dr. Barbara Müller-Wesemann einige Tagebücher von Max Wächter archiviert hat; www.32postkarten.com; Hamburger Abendblatt vom 19./20.11.2011, S. 17; Hinz & Kunzt Nr. 232/2012, S. 32ff.

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