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Bernhard Herzberg |
Life of an activist, legacy of a scholar
Campaigning socialist dies at 98, three months before finishing a second masters degree
WHEN my father Bernhard Herzberg, who has died a month before his 98th birthday, was asked if his name could be inscribed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest-ever recipient of a Masters degree, he declined with a rhetorical shrug: “What purpose will it serve?”
Bernhard’s BA in German literature, at 92, was followed three years later by the MA in refugee studies at the University of East London. In September he was due to hand in his dissertation for a second MA, this time at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS).
Bernhard’s experience covers the deep-seated struggles of the 20th century – Hitler’s Germany, apartheid in South Africa and Stalinism.
He belonged to the Socialist Workers Party, though his public life ended last year when he retired from the Stop the War Coalition picket in Muswell Hill, which he attended come rain or shine.
His father, a wealthy leather merchant and a doyen of Hanover’s Jewish community, had won the Iron Cross in the First World War. “I am a German first and a Jew second,” he announced on his return from the Front. Bernhard, still under 10, had other ideas. The war, he said, “turned me into a convinced anti-militarist because I held the emperor and his entourage responsible”.
Estrangement from his father drove him to North America but with the economic collapse of the Depression he returned home. When Hitler became chancellor, Bernhard pleaded with his father to sell up and emigrate but was told the holder of an Iron Cross would not be touched.
Following a disagreement with his father, Bernhard was disinherited.
He left Germany for South Africa, at the time one of the few countries still willing to accept Jews.
He recalled steaming out of Hanover’s glass-domed railway station, whence most of the city’s 8,000 Jews would be transported to the death camps. But the irony of moving from one racist society to another was quickly brought home to him. His ship was greeted by a demonstration of Cape Town’s Nazis.
See, he joked to a fellow refugee, “they want us to feel at home”.
After fighting with the South African army in north Africa and Italy, Bernhard made good in South Africa, founding a large industrial chemical company. But, unusually, he also doubled as an unpaid trade unionist.
He founded the Cape Town branch of the jewellers and goldsmiths union, but was forced to run two offices, one for whites, the other for those of mixed race. So he hired adjoining rooms with interleading doors and ran them virtually as one union.
In 1985, Bernhard emigrated to Britain, and from his modest living room in north London founded Biachem, a chemical distributor that thrives to this day.
When he retired at 81 he set out to assuage his appetite for education. His BA in German at the University of East London was followed by an MA in refugee studies – as a refugee himself he understood what it was like to face prejudice and hypocrisy.
Once, when protesting outside Sainsbury’s about Blairite policy on refugees, a woman asked him why he wasted his time “trying to educate these vermin”. Hearing her foreign accent, Bernard, not a taker of prisoners, replied: “When did you come here? And who let you in?”
It is uncertain whether SOAS will grant him a second, posthumous MA for his completed dissertation on African history.
His second wife, Lily, was a puppeteer and, tagging along at a conference with her, he met a German schoolteacher who invited him to talk to her pupils in Schleswig-Holstein. For many of them, he was the first Jew they had met. They wondered at his pure German, the absence of Americanisms, his love for the language. One wrote later: “You spoke about your life without sentimentality, without reproaching Germans.”
He told them of a literature lesson 70 years earlier, at Leibniz Schule, where he was one of a handful of Jewish boys. His teacher had declared that Lorelei by Heinreich Heine was the most beautiful poem in the German language, “even though he was a Jew”. Up went Bernard’s hand. Why “in this context, did you use the word ‘although’?” The “cheeky boy” was told to belt up. He never did.
Bernhard wrote two memoirs, Lessons in History and Otherness: the Story of a Very Long Life.
Lily, his wife of 60 years, died last year. Bernhard is survived by myself and my sister Wendy, a journalist.
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