Hermann and Erna Nonnenmacher

When my mother died, I inherited a large collection of family photos, some dating back to the 19th century. Large numbers of the photos were loose in plastic bags, others sorted away in albums. Among one album, carefully, if sometimes illegibly, annotated in my mother's handwriting, I found this picture of the German artists Hermann and Erna Nonnenmacher.

Renate Pniower, as she was then, grew up in Berlin during the Nazi years; her parents, Georg and Ruth Pniower, were friends of the Nonnenmachers. A quarter Jewish herself, my mother was no stranger to the anti-semitism of that time, but Erna Nonnenmacher was fully Jewish. The Nazis classified their work as entartete Kunst (degenerate art), and destroyed much of it. Thankfully Erna and Hermann managed to emigrate to London in 1938.

The photo is undated, but I presume it dates from around the time of their departure from Berlin. Hermann Nonnenmacher is holding up a bunch of flowers, as if waving farewell. Yet their cart is loaded with artworks rather than personal possessions. Also, several pieces are still standing around the laden cart, so at least one more journey will be required. And whose are the coats hanging on the railings?

One interesting feature: the sculpture of a hugging couple that stands prominently in front of the wagon is Hermann's Abschied (Farewell), now on display at the Berlinische Galerie. Whether any of the other works survive I haven't been able to establish.

Oddly, when I first learned the term entartete Musik and mentioned it to her, my mother was unfamiliar with the phrase. She certainly knew the concept though. An anecdote she told me on more than one occasion was of how she and a group of friends would huddle in one of their basements and listen to forbidden jazz records, imported clandestinely from Sweden.

For the rest of her life, Jazz was always the Sound of Freedom.

For the archives

Going through my grandmother's photo albums I came across this photo of my grandfather, Georg Bela Pniower, with my mother, Renate. Something about it made me want to give it a wider audience. It's probably from 1934.

A Pniower Map

This map hung on my mother's wall for as long as I can remember. It was drawn by her father, the landscape architect Georg Pniower, and I always assumed it was a map of gardens he'd designed, as indicated by the 'P' shaped spade handles.

Looking at it again yesterday I noticed for the first time that the writing on the left is in verse. Now I wonder if it was some sort of puzzle ('for 1939'). My German isn't good enough for me to be able to transcribe the writing accurately without considerable effort, and even then I've noticed that Google Translate can be very poor when given poetry to work on. I'm posting it here in the hope that someone can one day shed light on it.

In 1939 my grandfather was no longer officially designing parks and gardens, the Nazi regime having long since decided that his Jewish ancestry made him unsuitable for this role. After the war though he became a Professor of Horticulture at Berlin University.

Stumbling Across My Mother

Last year I uploaded two photos of my maternal grandfather to this blog. I did it because, although he was slightly famous in his field, Google Image Search can't find a single photo of him.

It took a few weeks, but Google did eventually index the photos--but only for a few days. Since then a search for 'Georg Pniower' will bring up numerous images, including just about every other image on this blog of mine, even screen shots, but not those. I really have no idea of what algorithm Google uses that could exclude photos labelled 'Georg Pniower', while including one of me on the grounds that it lives in the same blog as a post mentioning Pniower.

I tried the search again last week. Still no photos of my grandfather, but imagine my surprise to see my mother, Renate, staring out at me, aged 12: a photo I'd never seen before.

Georg Pniower was half-Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power he and his family came under increasing threat of persecution. For safety he sent his daughter to a boarding school in Surrey set up for the children of refugees from Nazism. Stoatley Rough was a name I remember my mother mentioning often, though I don't think she ever visited it again, even though we only lived in Kent. Someone has created a web site about the school, with photos of the pupils, and so Google have included it in the results for 'Georg Pniower'.

Despite my grandfather's efforts to protect my mother, war broke out during the summer holidays in 1939 when she was back in Germany. Pniower thought twice about bringing her home, but the British Foreign Office reassured him that it would be safe. As we saw in Libya this week, competence is still something the FO aims for.

Georg Pniower

This is just a thought that crossed my mind while I was writing my last post. My mother's father was Georg Bela Pniower, the landscape architect. If anyone's out there doing research on his life, I have some items in my loft that might be of interest to you. Please feel free to contact me.

Here are a couple of photos of him, newly scanned into the digital world. As he died in 1960 and I found these in my family collection, I am assuming that either the copyright has expired or I've inherited it.

The portrait is undated, but the other is dated 24th May 1957. Pniower is third from the left.