Tag Archive | Thannhauser

My Grandfather’s Letter

Try to imagine starting over in a different county whose language you barely speak at the age of 50 when at the height of a successful career. That is what my grandfather, my “Opa,” had to do. He was a distinguished German medical doctor and scientist, a university professor and famed diagnostician. The University at Freiburg had constructed a clinic for him to entice him to head up their internal medicine department at their Medical School. But only a few years after his move to Freiburg came the dismissal of all jewish professors as part of Hitler’s new policies.

Opa teaching during rounds in the clinic in Frieburg, he is all the way to the left

My Catholic grandmother “Oma” urged him to leave Germany and accept one of the offers he had from various universities in America and Turkey. My Opa thought the antisemitism would pass as it had in the past, after all he had an iron cross for his bravery in World War I and a flourishing private practice. She eventually convinced him it would be better for their three daughters if they left until it blew over. They never returned.

Oma and Opa on the boat to America

I had not realized how difficult this move must have been for him nor understood why he never went back to Germany even for a visit. However recently I read a translation of a letter he wrote in 1946 to his former colleagues when he was invited to return. This is thanks to my cousin’s son Sam Sherman, an artist living in New York City, who has been travelling in Germany doing research as part of his MFA graduate studies at CUNY Hunter College. When in Freiburg he found much of interest in the University archives, including this letter.

These words my Opa wrote really struck me:I cannot return, the wound is too deep, it will never heal. The disappointment of my trust in the good in German people, in the honesty of my friends was too great. The years that I can still work productively belong to the country that took me in during my deepest anguish and supported me.”

The letter includes poignant descriptions of leaving Germany and of learning new ways of teaching and approaching medical research in America.

All of the following italicized words are from his letter of 1946:

Leaving Germany

“ The train that my family and I would take to the ship gasped in the Freiburg train station. Hundreds of schoolchildren surrounded my three girls, and women, including wives of my former faculty colleagues, brought my wife to the car compartment. Few men were present. They had avoided seeing and greeting me for months. I was alone. “Must I leave, must I then leave the city,” the schoolchildren sang. I believed the world was sinking under my feet. Everything I did, what I loved, my wonderful clinic that I was allowed to build, my friends – everything was lost.”

[UPDATE from my brother] In those days it took 15 minutes for a steam engine to get ready to go (build up a head of steam) so it was customary to see important people or loved ones off at the train station. Thus the fact that the men were not there was a big snub. Also the folk song Muss i’denn is about a young man leaving his beloved one home forever due to larger events in the world beyond his control. So the choice of the women to sing this harmless folk song is perhaps a veiled criticism of the Nazi regime.
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Ashkenazi DNA: we are all descended from 350 people in medieval times

Most of my DNA explorations have centered around my Dad’s Norwegian DNA because so many Norwegians have tested and the populations of those ancestors are only mildly endogamous; so it is easy to find new cousins and fun to work with those results.

My grandfather and me 1955

My grandfather and me, summer 1955

My mother’s father was a German Jew. The number of DNA matches this gives me, my brother, and my two maternal aunts is astronomical. Frequently I will match someone from Eastern Europe for five or six large segments who cannot share an ancestor with us for the last 200-300 years and is even listed as a “distant cousin.”  If they were Norwegian, that amount of shared DNA would make them my 2nd cousin.

This has been so frustrating that I just about stopped working on my Jewish DNA. A fellow Jewish researcher told me to ignore matches who did not have at least one 23cM shared segment!

Today there were dozens of news articles about the European Jewish founder effect suggesting that all Ashkenazim are descended from about 350 people who lived in about 1300 A.D. or so. This, combined with a fair amount of endogamy, would explain the large amount of shared DNA among European Jews.
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Celebrating the birthday of the country that took us in

None of my great-grandparents were born in the USA and only one of my grandparents was. Why did my ancestors come here? What does this day mean to us? Does the next generation take the freedoms here for granted? I think I often do, but today I want to celebrate this great country that my immigrant ancestors came to with this blog post about my grandparents and how it happened that they became Americans.

OpaMeetsOma1908smllMy mother was born in Munich, Bavaria (Germany) to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. I was always told that they met at the 1909 automobile club ball in Munich, but I found this picture with the caption 1908 costume ball so I guess they met a year earlier than I had realized.

At the time they met, my grandfather Siegfried was 23 and a medical student from an extremely wealthy Jewish family. My grandmother Fanny was 19, from a middle class family. Her father was a contractor/brick layer who had run away from the seminary he had been sent to in his youth. He read Latin and Greek in his spare time for pleasure and had sent his only daughter to a convent school. She made the dress and headdress that she is wearing in this picture

For my Opa it was love at first sight, but neither family approved. Siggy and Fanny went to concerts, the opera, and hiked together in the Bavarian Alps. The courtship lasted for over nine years. First my Opa had to get his doctorate since his father refused to support a wife and family for him. Then there was World War I where he served as a medical doctor. Additionally Fanny had a small TB spot on her lung so she was sent to a sanitarium and then, before the war, au paired in France and the Isle of Wight, since she was advised not to winter in Munich. Her resulting fluent English (and French) was most useful later on.

When Siegfried’s father, my g-grandfather Josef, was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1917, he finally gave his approval for them to marry, which they did in a civil ceremony a year later. Her parents did not attend. By the way, Josef died from the anesthesia during his operation in 1917, not the cancer.

Because my Opa was Jewish, he was dismissed or rather pensioned off from his Freiberg University professorship in 1933/1934. My grandmother was the one who insisted that they leave Germany; Opa, like many German Jews, thought it would all blow over. My Oma was not willing to risk the lives of her three lovely daughters when the family had many offers from overseas universities.

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100 years ago … my grandfather and World War I

On June 28, 1914 my grandfather Siegfried Joseph Thannhauser was celebrating his 29th birthday when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated commencing the countdown to World War I. What were your ancestors doing on that day?

S J Thannhauser on right, World War I

S J Thannhauser on right, World War I

When you are American and you have a German grandfather then you may have the feeling that he fought on the wrong side in World War I. My Opa was a medical doctor and he demonstrated his bravery by picking up the wounded under fire after his driver was killed; for this he received the Iron Cross. Funny how that was forgotten when he was dismissed from his professorship in 1933 for being Jewish.

He also had a hobby, photography, and took many photos during his time at the front. He made two albums of his war years which the family still has. One of his great grandsons showed them to a friend who was studying WWI. She had them digitized and then posted them on her blog, with the family’s enthusiastic permission. The picture on the left is from those albums.

So to honor this day and my Opa, I added a page on our family history site about his war service with links to those photographs on her blog.

I miss you my beloved Opa! Growlie, growlie … (what I used to say when I scratched the bald spot on his head for him for which I would be rewarded with a quarter!)

 

My Double 3rd cousin versus my brother and my Aunts as shown with my segment mapper

The results came in for my other maternal Aunt so now there are four of us to compare to my double third cousin and still no match on the X! In order to show the comparisons I used my new nifty chromosome segment mapping tool and also added in a bunch of known 5th and 7th cousins to the diagram.

Dbl3rdCOusin

Click on the diagram to go to the full size html page made from the segment mapper. Note that Shipley Munson is my brother.

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