Escape Into the Unknown

In researching the lives and careers of the musicians who fled the Nazi regime and settled in Iceland in the 1930s, I have been fortunate enough to have an abundance of material to work with: interviews, concert reviews, letters, recollections of students and friends. But there are other, related, stories that have not yet been told. For example, their wives, although highly educated, were unable to find suitable work in Iceland and spent most of their time as housewives, far removed from the spotlight that their husbands enjoyed.

One of them was Charlotte Edelstein, who was born in Lauban, Silesia in 1904. She met her future husband, the cellist Heinz Edelstein, while they were both working on their doctorates in Freiburg in the 1920s—he in music, she in economics. They married and had two sons, but they were both Jewish and thus found themselves in dire straits once the Nazis took power. This was a time of great frustration and hardship for Charlotte, who sought refuge in religion; she was baptized into the Catholic faith in 1935. Heinz was only allowed to perform in the all-Jewish orchestra of the Jewish Culture League (Jüdischer Kulturbund), and was fortunate enough to find a job as cellist and music teacher in Iceland in 1937. A year later, Charlotte and their sons joined him there.

Not many documents have survived to tell the story of their escape from Nazi Germany, but a remarkable one is a previously unpublished essay by Charlotte titled “Escape Into the Unknown,” written in 1980. There, she tells of their voyage to Iceland in September 1938, and the difficulties they faced upon arrival. On board the ship from Hamburg she made the rather awkward acquaintance of a young German scholar, W.H. Wolf-Rottkay, a devoted Nazi who was on his way to Reykjavík to take up a post as visiting lecturer in German at the University. He and his wife were particularly impressed by the young Stefan, whose blonde hair and blue eyes had already been a source of some fascination in Nazi Germany; many of the Edelsteins’ acquaintances and even complete strangers had remarked: “All German children should look just like this!” Her recollection of Wolf-Rottkay continues:

“Through their fondness for little Stefan, this man and his wife had now become friendly towards me, and he even called me onto the deck at the first display of northern lights. “You mustn’t miss this magnificent show of nature!” he exclaimed in an affable voice. Later, when our paths would cross on the streets of Reykjavík, he would always look the other way, embarrassed, for he had in the meantime learned to distinguish the despicable exiles from the staunch Nazis—and realized what a dreadful mistake he had made!”

Charlotte Edelstein also described her first sight of what was about to become her new homeland, as the ship landed in the small island of Vestmannaeyjar, off Iceland’s southern shore, early in the morning. She quickly put on a coat and ran onto the deck, but the vision was hardly what she had expected:

“The huge cliff and the port’s murky setting seemed eerie in the autumn twilight; I felt as though I had arrived in a completely foreign part of the world. I would also feel this same sense of discomfort later, when the Icelandic lava landscape spread all around us, as if we were on the moon. I shrugged and tip-toed back into the cabin, silently deploring that my children should have to live in such an inhospitable land, so remote at the edge of the world, and—it seemed to me then—so far away from all the culture to which we were accustomed. What conditions would await us there? Wouldn’t my life be just as miserable as it had been in Germany—only in a different way?”

This is a remarkable confession by a woman who was, despite everything, fortunate in that she was able to escape Germany at all. And although Reykjavík was in many ways a strange place, the exiles who arrived there were certainly relieved to be free again, and enjoyed the opportunity to do things that were unthinkable for Jews in the Third Reich. Among them was an elegant ball (árshátíð, or annual celebration) organized by the Reykjavík Music Society at the town’s most elegant hotel, Hótel Borg, in May 1939. Charlotte Edelstein attended along with her husband, and in her essay she describes how the very idea of going to a lavish social event seemed inconceivable at first. In a way, her presence there became a personal victory. “That evening, I enjoyed my own “triumph” over Hitler by dancing with so many handsome, “Germanic”-looking men,” she wrote. But darker emotions resurfaced as well. Charlotte didn’t own an evening gown and thus she wore a short skirt that, having arrived at the ball, she found woefully inappropriate. “From where should I have been able to obtain a ball gown? After all, we had been excluded from all social life for years. Yet again, I felt that I didn’t belong, that I was an outsider—the old, acute fears resurfaced once more.”

For the Jewish-born refugees of the 1930s, Iceland could be a cold and inhospitable place. While her husband quickly became one of the leading figures of the Icelandic music scene, both as cellist and teacher, Charlotte Edelstein largely kept to herself, spending long hours praying in the Catholic church. Her mother and sister both died in Nazi concentration camps, which caused Charlotte unspeakable grief for years to come. When Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, a family friend in Reykjavík who later became president of the Republic, recalled her childhood memories of Frau Edelstein, her demeanor was fixed in her mind: “She sometimes looked so desperately sad,” she said. Charlotte Edelstein lived in Reykjavík until 1951, when she returned to Germany, and remained there until her death in 1997.

It is a privilege to be able to tell her story and keep her memory alive.