Memories of My Father, Werner Schmauch

MEMORIES OF MY FATHER, WERNER SCHMAUCH

By Werner-Christoph Schmauch

(Translation from the German original,

presented at the University of Greifswald, April 12, 2005

for a special observance by the theological faculty of the 100th anniversary of his birth).

It is indeed a privilege and a pleasant – if somewhat difficult task – to be able to say something about my father, whom we are honoring today on his 100th birthday (March 12, 2005) – especially since I just turned 70 myself.

Unfortunately he died already on May 24, 1964, more than 40 years ago, at age 59, so that I only knew him 29 years. Since I don’t want to engage in ancestor worship, and certainly not in veneration of a saint, I would like to deal with a number of aspects, which might not be well-known, and will tell of interpersonal relations as I have experienced them or remember them from stories others have told me.

My father wrote no autobiography, which he would certainly have done if the time had been given to him. In addition to the extensive files of The Confessing Church, which can be studied in the archives in Bielefeld, there are family papers, which have not been published. Since most publications about him and his work are listed in the detailed article by Dietfried Gewalt in the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, (Biographical-Bibliographical Church Lexicon) Band IX 1995, Spalten 320-322 and can be found in the internet, I don’t have to mention them here again. (A sometimes funny computer translation from German into English is also available).

The study of these extensive sources, especially if one includes the Yearbooks for Silesian Church History, has made one thing very clear: the many names of people, whom I knew personally or heard of, were all friends and co-workers of my father or friends of the family, who have enriched my life and accompanied me on my journey, some of whom are still in contact with me today, even though – with time – this circle of friends is becoming smaller and smaller.

Most likely the oldest of such acquaintances, whom I would like to mention as one example, is Carl Steuernagel, who was born in 1869. He had already been involuntarily retired in 1935 from the University of Breslau – the same year I was born in that city – but continued to teach at the University of Greifswald after the War. Generations have used his Hebrew grammar. As I prepared myself in Goettingen in 1955 for the exam in Hebrew, and was able to visit my parents in Greifswald during the semester break, this well-known 86-year-old Hebrew scholar tutored me in grammar and vocabulary, which would not have happened without my father’s friendship with him. He died 3 years later, in 1958, and my father gave the eulogy. Such an old and well-known teacher opens an historical perspective indeed!

Without further to-do I would like to deal with the topic by making my basic attitude clear. I do this by quoting Gudrun Otto, nee Lohmeyer (April 9, 1926 – Dec 12, 2004), who in the publication at the occasion of the 100th birthday of her father, my godfather, Ernst Lohmeyer, said the following and speaks for me:

“It has become unusual to speak positively about one’s father. It has also become uncommon to express gratitude. If one feels the need today to deal in public with one’s father, it usually amounts to settling accounts. In my case it is the other way around. I find it almost surprising that I had a father, whom I could not have imagined any better or different. (In Wolfgang Otto, Freiheit in der Gebundenheit, Goettingen 1990, Gudrun Otto, nee Lohmeyer, “Memories of My Father”, page 86).

The oldest document in the family papers is an original certificate from 1791 with a lovely seal of the Earl Hans Heinrich VI of Hochberg and Baron of Fuerstenstein, who gives permission to the daughter of his senior forester, Beate Friederike Radechen, to marry my great-great-great grandfather, Carl Christoph Schmauch (March 19, 1759 – June 18, 1837) in Sedlitz, Silesia, and for this purpose frees her from serfdom, but her freedom would be valid only in the Royal Prussian Silesian and Sudeten Lands. This establishes the Silesian identity for our family, which goes back to the Habsburg period and still exists today – at least in my generation – in spite of the change of borders in 1945.

Unfortunately we know very little about the childhood and teenage years of my father. When he was born on March 12, 1905, in Herischdorf, between Hirschberg and Bad Warmbrunn (today – Jelenia Gora and Ceplice, Poland), in Riesengebirge (Karkonosze Mts) in the apartment of his parents, his father, Richard (July 20, 1871 - October 21, 1945), had a position as postmaster’s assistant, that means a Prussian civil servant, and advanced to postmaster, a job which he held until his retirement in Bad Warmbrunn (Ceplice). The post office is still there today. His mother, Emma Kotschate, (November 2, 1871 – August 20, 1948), grew up on a farm near Trebnitz/Trzebnica, north of Breslau (today – Wroclaw, Poland).

Werner Schmauch was baptized in the church in Bad Warmbrunn in 1905 and confirmed there on March 30, 1919. According to my mother, the marriage of his parents was not a happy one, and as an only child, little Werner had to learn early to mediate between them. My father never talked about this.

After elementary school, he attended high school in Hirschberg, where he graduated on March 12, 1924 on his 19th birthday. As far as we know he was the first in his family to graduate from high school. Why he decided to study theology I do not know. We only know that his pastor (Martin Kuske) influenced him greatly and that his mother found comfort in an evangelical pietistic Christian community, in which she was very active.

It goes without saying that World War I, the collapse of the economy, and the founding of the Weimar Republic, did not make his years in school any easier. Manfred Punge, a PhD candidate, who studied with my father in the 1950’s in Greifwald, mentions in his publication, (Werner Schmauch, Prophetie und Pro-existenz, Unionsverlag Berlin 1981), father’s difficult years as a student, when he occasionally collapsed from hunger. An anecdote was passed down in the family, where father – after such a period of hunger – ate a quarter pound of butter and half a pound of cheese, without bread, after which he promptly landed in the hospital.

Since during his high school years the classical languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which were required for the study of theology, were not offered, he had to make up these languages in the first semesters at the university. He must have been under terrible stress and never far from a nervous breakdown.

There is an important fact which was never mentioned publicly out of consideration for the family: Werner Schmauch, already as a child, had developed a curvature of the spine, known today as a hunchback, and probably had to suffer from the teasing of his classmates. But most likely it was more difficult for him to hear the arguments of his parents over the question of whether this physical handicap was hereditary or the result of an accident. While still a baby he must have fallen once from a table, and it is likely that his father blamed his mother for negligence. From my mother I know how shocked she was when a friend of father’s introduced her to the 20-year-old Werner on a blind-date. That they got married on September 20, 1932 after a seven-year-long engagement, following his earning his doctorate in 1931 in Breslau with Ernst Lohmeyer and his ordination on July 5, 1932 in Breslau, makes clear how much my mother had learned to appreciate and love her fiancé. On the other hand I cannot think of my father without the self-sacrificing support which my mother gave him. On his deathbed here in Greifswald he expressed his gratitude to her for their 32 years of marriage, with the memorable words: “It was so wonderful!” (“Es war doch so schön”). That she outlived him here in Greifswald as a widow for 34 years is another chapter (Charlotte Schmauch, nee Koeppe, December 25, 1904 – October 3, 1998).

It is well-known that Ernst Lohmeyer, who was 15 years older than my father, had the greatest theological influence on him. It was not only a relationship between teacher and student, but a friendship which included both families. I mentioned already that Ernst Lohmeyer was my godfather. After the War his widow returned a photo on which I am sitting on my mother’s lap, together with my sister, Isa, and on the back of the picture is written in the very recognizable handwriting of my father, “To Professor Lohmeyer, July 8, 1935, Werner-Christoph Schmauch”. That was Lohmeyer’s 45th birthday. No one could have guessed at that time that only 11 years later he would no longer be among the living. As a prominent theologian, Lohmeyer had been appointed president of the University of Greifswald, immediately at the end of WWII, and on the evening of February 14, 1946, he was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police and disappeared. Much later it became known that he was executed already on September 19th of the same year. According to the files, discovered in Moscow in the 1990’s, no punishable offence had been proven and he was rehabilitated.

It must have been in the summer of 1939 that the whole family Schmauch was invited to Lohmeyer’s summer house in Glasegrund near Habelschwert/Bystrzyca in the Glatz Mountains (Klodzko, Poland today). The famous letter by Lohmeyer to Martin Buber, in which he apologizes for the anti-Jewish attitude of his colleague, Gerhart Kittel, was written in this oasis of peace, already on August 19, 1933. I vaguely remember taking small hikes on the hand of my father and godfather. I was 4 ½ and this was my first and last meeting with Ernst Lohmeyer, but through his wife and daughter and my father’s unending devotion to him, he remained a life-long presence for me.

In spite of their common attitude toward the Nazi regime – my father was arrested on March 16, 1935, and Ernst Lohmeyer was transferred the same year from Breslau to Greifswald, a disciplinary action because of his support for his Jewish colleagues – the biographies of the two theologians were quite different:

Lohmeyer spent nine of the 56 years of his life as an officer in the First and Second World Wars, while my father, because of his physical disability, received a document (with three stamps and two signatures), that he was “totally unfit” for military service, and was dropped from the Selective Service system. We children knew already during the War why our father was not drafted, unlike many other pastors, and especially our assistant pastors, of whom many did not return.

Shortly before the Nazi attack on Poland, September 1, 1939, Ernst Lohmeyer was called up as a reserve officer, and only after his discharge on April 28, 1943 was he again in Breslau giving a lecture on behalf of the Confessing Church. In the meantime Katharina Staritz, who was a godmother of my youngest brother, and also a student of Lohmeyer’s, and my father’s fellow student, had been released from the concentration camp at Ravensbrueck. As representative of the “Grueber Office of The Confessing Church” which had special responsibility for Jewish Christians in Breslau, she had been arrested in Marburg on March 4, 1942. Gerlind Schwoebel describes how Lohmeyer hugged his former student whom he had not seen for a long time, “as an older brother might do, when his little sister has returned after a long and dangerous trip.” (Gerlind Schwoebel, Ich Aber Vertraue, Katharina Staritz, Eine Theologin im Wiederstand (But I Trust, Katharina Staritz, a Theologin in the Resistance), Frankfurt-Main 1990, p. 71).

In the documentation, Katharina Staritz 1903-1953, Neukirchener Verlag 1990, my father’s correspondence with Silesian Church president, Hosemann, is reprinted in detail. The authors comment:

“Katharina Staritz joined first the Christophori Synod (the less radical synod of The Confessing Church” named after the church they met in in Breslau/Wroclaw), but in the conflict over her circular letter to pastors concerning the treatment of Jewish Christians, only members of the Synod of Naumburg supported her. One of the most active members of the Naumburg Synod was Lic. Werner Schmauch, pastor in Gross Weigelsdorf. Even before he knew the details of the pronouncement of the church hierarchy in Breslau/Wroclaw of October 18, 1941, in which the church hierarchy distanced itself from Katharina Staritz, (which led to her imprisonment in Ravensbrueck), he intervened on her behalf in a letter of October 22, 1941 to church president Hosemann….”p. 404.

But even more interesting in this connection is a letter, which Lic. Schmauch wrote to the Protestant church office of the Silesian Church in Breslau/Wroclaw. In my possession is the original, which he found after the War in the files of the church office which had been abandoned by the church executives as the Russian front moved closer in January 1945. Church president Hosemann congratulated my parents in the name of the church at the occasion of the birth of my youngest brother, Traugott, who was born June 27, 1943. My father answered on September 3, 1943:

“Herewith I acknowledge the receipt of your congratulations, sent under the official identification number above, and signed by D. Hosemann, at the occasion of the birth of our fourth child. We are greatly embarrassed that the Protestant Consistory as administrative bureaucracy is trying to give itself a spiritual image by using religious terminology and Bible verses, while in other official positions it is consistently ignoring church and Christian standards. The treatment, which the godmother of our Traugott, Pastor Lic. Staritz, received from the Evangelical Consistory and continues to experience, is only one painful example in a number of recent incidents.”