TODAY IN BERLIN: THE DEATH OF THE GOTTSCHALK FAMILY
6 November 1941: The suicide of Joachim, Meta and Michael Gottschalk
He was a star. Both on cinema screens and on stage. Joachim Friedrich Hermann Gottschalk, born in 1904 in Calau, actor, was celebrated and cherished by audiences across Germany and beyond. He lived in a beautiful house in Berlin-Grunewald, had a beautiful and talented wife, theatre actress Meta (actually Gertrud Meta) Wolff, and in February 1933, still in Leipzig, their first child, a boy they named Michael, was born.
Yet only eight years later, on this day in 1941, the UFA-star, his wife, together with their 8-year-old son, committed suicide at their Grunewald home.
Pressed by the Nazi authorities and threatened with a work-ban (which he was eventually and to a great extent put under), the non-Jewish Gottschalk refused to divorce his Jewish wife and, once she and their young son were to be deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp (Ghetto Theresienstadt), he expressed his wish to be deported with them.
The order for the deportation - which was scheduled for November 7th 1941 - was signed personally by the vengeful Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels: allegedly, during a rare event attended by Joachim Gottschalk’s wife, Meta, Joseph G. kissed her hand - clearly unaware that the hand belonged to a Jewess. For the likes of him, not so much paranoid as chillingly manipulative and calculating as well as drunk on power they had been given, this was reason enough to send a mother and a child to a dreaded ghetto in today’s Terezin.
Gottschalk’s plea to accompany them was rejected. Instead, he was enlisted for the Eastern Front. His star status did not protect them from the fate that under Nazis met millions. After saying farewell to Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre - the theatre, where he had still been occasionally performing, was forced to fire the actor - Joachim Gottschalk said: "In times like these you either become hard or you drown."
On November 4, 1941 Meta Wolff wrote to Frau Weber, a friend and her brother’s -Friedrich’s - mother-in-love:
“Liebe Mutti Weber
"Thank you a thousand times for the good news and for the valuable parcel! Your kindness and devotion shine through all of this. I know that what I must write now will be hard for you, but you will understand and forgive us. New regulations are coming out that will separate our marriage, just as everything has been tightened up in this matter, and now even these small exceptions and benefits are also to be abolished.
You can probably guess what that means.
Michael, who as yet has no idea, should not have to find out what is waiting ahead of him. The child is so happy, and we are happy with him. They should not tear the three of us apart. When you read this, we have found our peace. We are not sad at all, on the contrary, we are happy to be able to end our lives healthy and free. Don't think that we haven't considered everything, tried everything and are recklessly throwing in the towel. There is no other way, we held out until the end.
We believe that my parents and siblings don’t need to know. They think we're doing well, which is comforting and true, even if in a different sense. I ask you, with all my heart, not to be sad and above all to know that we are happy. Nothing but separation and humiliation would await us. Humiliation of all kinds - everyone who knows and loves us will grant us our beautiful peace. I am glad that you can hope for an earthly reunion with your children. How wonderful that will be.
Our very best wishes for you all! Let me thank you once again for your love and loyalty and wish you all the best with our warmest regards.
Joachim, Meta & Michael"
On November 5, 1941, having returned home late in the evening, Joachim Gottschalk and his wife gave their 8-year-old son Michael a glass of milk spiked with crushed sleeping pills. Then Meta swallowed her Veronal. Joachim Gottschalk took a mouthful as well, turned the gas on in the kitchen without lighting the flame. Before that he wrote several shorts letters himself. In the one addressed to his mother, Anna, who lived at the time in Cottbus, he wrote: “Meta and the boy are already asleep…”
Joachim, Meta and Michael Gottschalk were buried at Berlin’s Stahnsdorf Cemetery. Their grave still exists.
By 1945 nearly 2,000 Jews committed suicide in Berlin alone.
* translation of the letter from Meta Wolff to Frau Weber my own. The text from the story “Meta Wolff, aus der Kaufmannsfamilie Hanau in Dudweiler” by Hubert Schneider and Reinhard Jakobs.
On an already emotional day, this story is touching me deeply. Thank you!
This is very immediate in its impact. You tell the story with a powerful mix of the succinct and the unbearable. Of course, the events do that themselves, but you honour them in your re-telling.
The individual stories, and we know that there are six million of them, never cease to fell me emotionally. Hugo Gryn, a thoughtful and insightful rabbi, when passing on the story of his own family was always keen to make the point that these were good people. Good people living their lives as honestly and as creatively as they could. When we remember people who are died Jews say zikhronah l’vracha after saying the name of the dead. It really means ‘may their name be for a blessing’ which I always find a very poignant and beautiful construction in its rather idiosyncratic use of language: it is as if saying the name keeps the memory of the person alive and in so doing brings some form of blessing somehow into the world. I’m not a schmaltzy guy, trust me, but I do think that it is worth thinking about the language and the emotion behind it. In your re-telling the story of Joachim, Meta, and Michael and the choice they were forced to make, I think you have done just that: honoured their memory and kept them, somehow, alive in the lives of those of us who have read the piece. And, in Jewish terms, man, that’s called a mitzvah. And that’s a very good thing to do.