CHAPTER I .sx A Jewish Childhood .sx Seventy miles south-west of Berlin , a road turns off Hitler's autobahn and heads towards the confluence of the Elbe and the Mulde .sx The road is tree-lined and straight but seems in no hurry to arrive anywhere in particular .sx Copses punctuate the meadowy landscape and marshy vegetation takes over as the sand flats left by the meandering river emerge .sx In the distance , combine harvesters , tired old war-horses of socialist agriculture , grind their way up and down the patient fields .sx The scene is tranquil - subdued rather than relaxed .sx A crude concrete bridge spans the eighty-yard-wide River Mulde .sx A sharp turn north towards the town centre and the first brutal confrontation with history :sx an immense , desolate sandy waste , carpeted with a stubble of mangy grass and scrub .sx On one side the remains of a stone gateway and a cobblestone courtyard , on the other a battered tower , bricked up and unsafe .sx Then , in sullen resentment , appears the single surviving wing of a once huge complex , sixteenth century , its roof now open to the elements , gaping wounds in its peeling walls , the grimy ground littered with the detritus of the consumer society - bottle tops , cigarette ends , condom packets , left by a generation for whom such an unreal place has an irresistible romantic attraction .sx Who , after all , can build such exciting ruins today ?sx Dessau , 1990 , population 100,000 .sx More intimately , all that remains of the great palace of the Dukes of Anhalt-Dessau .sx On a single day in March 1945 eighty per cent of the town surrendered its life in an air raid .sx The pock-scarred terrain they left has been made only the more savage by stark new housing estates and office blocks in the preferred style of the New Brutalism .sx But it once knew happier days .sx As capital of the Duchy of Anhalt , it could trace a powerful intellectual tradition back to the seventeenth century .sx It had excellent theatre and opera .sx Industrialisation had brought prosperity without destroying its leisurely pace , and it was in the vanguard of progressive German states pledged to the emancipation of the Jews .sx It is a far cry from the dismal , browbeaten dilapidation of today to the enlightened , self-assured , comfortable Dessau where , a few months into the twentieth century , Kurt Weill was born .sx Entry No .sx 292 in the municipal register of births for the year 1900 reads :sx Today appeared before the undersigned , his identity confirmed by his marriage certificate , the cantor and teacher of religious knowledge Albert Weill , resident in Dessau , Leipziger Strasse 59 , of the Hebrew faith , and stated that his wife Emma Weill , n e e Ackermann , of the Hebrew faith , resident with him , had on the 2nd of March 1900 , at four-thirty in the afternoon , given birth to a boy , and that the child had received the names Curt Julian .sx .sx The Weills had a long unbroken history to their name , and were proud of the fact .sx In 1957 an American descendant by the name of Ernest B. Weill published a genealogy that stretched back without interruption to one Judah , born in 1360 in the village of Weil der Stadt , near Stuttgart .sx When Judah's son Jacob left his birthplace , he added its name to his own , and in time this became regarded as his 'family' name .sx In itself Weil means simply 'settlement , hamlet' and , like the suffix '-weiler' , is a common element in place-names in south-west Germany , where the earliest references to the family name Weil , or Weill , occur .sx Albert Weill , Kurt's father , did full credit to the family's long cultural and intellectual heritage .sx Born in 1867 in Kippenheim , in Baden - the heart of Weill country throughout the centuries - he had been appointed in his early twenties as cantor to the synagogue at Eichst a tt in Bavaria .sx In 1893 he published a collection of chants for cantor and a cappella male voice choir .sx Intended for liturgical use , these are undistinguished pieces , contrapuntally sometimes gauche and harmonically conventional , products of the synthetic fusion of the Jewish melodic ductus with the idiom of the German Protestant chorale .sx But to have one's compositions published at all , with the blessing of one's ecclesiastical employers , represents in itself a kind of vote of confidence , and the young Kurt grew up in the knowledge that his father not only had a fine voice but could also compose music .sx Albert Weill had married Emma Ackermann in 1897 , when he was thirty and she twenty-five .sx They had four children in successive years - three sons and a daughter - all of whom made sound careers for themselves :sx Nathan , born in 1898 , became a doctor ; Hanns Jakob , born in 1899 , went into the metal business ; Kurt arrived in 1900 , and Ruth , who became a private schoolteacher , in 1901 .sx Emma Weill came from a family as pious and intellectual as her husband's .sx In particular , her brother Rabbi Aaron Ackermann , also a composer of synagogue songs , had become by the turn of the century a leading authority on the music of the Jewish rite , ascribing to this music , and indeed to all art , a metaphysical essence which led to the heart of religion itself .sx This belief in the power of art , especially of music , to raise the level of man's spiritual awareness and complement the force of religion found its place in Emma Weill's scheme of things , and had its part in the spiritual and moral atmosphere which she helped to create around her children .sx She was also a woman of firm conviction and principle .sx Years later , Nathan Weill's wife characterised her mother - in-law as " seeing things as she wants to , and of course what she thinks and does is always perfect and right " .sx In 1898 , the year after his marriage , Albert Weill was appointed cantor and schoolteacher to the Jewish community at Dessau .sx Situated in flat pasture land on a bend of the River Mulde , just before it joins the Elbe , Dessau could trace its origins back to a time between 600 and 900 A.D. , when Slavs settled the area from the east .sx But its substantive history from the modern point of view begins in the seventeenth century when the Dukes of Anhalt made it their capital , building a splendid palace , laying out fine streets and parks , and promoting the interests of culture and education .sx Moses Mendelssohn , founder of the Enlightenment in Germany , immortalised as the hero of Lessing's drama Nathan the Wise was born here in 1729 ; so too was the Romantic poet Wilhelm M u ller in 1794 , affectionately remembered today as the poet of Schubert's Winterreise and Die sch o ne M u llerin .sx Favoured as the town was by its position on the railway line from Berlin to Leipzig and by the proximity of the Elbe , one of the great water - ways of Europe , the nineteenth century brought steadily-accelerating industrialisation , from textiles and rolling stock , to breweries and a sugar refinery .sx Hand-in-hand with industrialisation went a dramatic rise in population - 14,000 in 1850 , 27,000 in 1880 , 50,000 in 1900 , by faith overwhelmingly Protestant - and a blossoming cultural life .sx On their arrival in Dessau , the Weills moved into an apartment in a three-storey house at Leipziger Strasse 59 .sx The Leipziger Strasse lay in the south of the Jewish quarter and led in one direction to the Jewish cemetery at the southern end of the town and , in the other towards the synagogue , the Jewish school and the main concentration of the Jewish population .sx Unlike Prague , Frankfurt , Mainz and many other German cities , Dessau had no ghetto , but over the centuries the Jews had collected in this part of the town with the consent , and under the direct protection , of the ruling Dukes , who , by the standards of the time , ranked among the more progressive of rulers .sx Leipziger Strasse 59 is no more .sx Like its neighbours it survived the bombs of the Second World War but not the dogged determination of post-war planners to flatten all the buildings in the area and erect soulless , prefabricated housing in their place .sx Indeed , the whole once-proud thoroughfare that was the Leipziger Strasse , designed by Duke Leopold I in the seventeenth century , has been reduced to a few pointless yards of cobblestones leading from nowhere to nowhere - more precisely , from the middle of a housing estate to the backyard of an engineering works .sx At the turn of the century , the time when Albert Weill took up his new post in Dessau and his third son , Kurt , was born , the town had a Jewish population of some five hundred .sx The Jews had first been admitted to the town in 1672 , and in 1687 they received permission to build a synagogue and establish their own cemetery .sx The Age of Enlightenment brought Jew and Gentile closer together through a shared spirit of rational enquiry and the common pursuit of humanistic values .sx However , it was not until 1848 , the year of European revolutions , that the Jews of Anhalt-Dessau received their full political , social and educational rights as 'emancipated' citizens .sx No longer under pressure to defend their embattled minorities , wealthy Jews showed their willingness to contribute to the welfare of the community in general .sx The criticism from conservative quarters that this compromised traditional Jewish values was countered by the predication of Judaism as a rationalist religion compatible with the moral precepts of Christianity .sx In the inevitable dichotomy between the custodians of orthodoxy and the forces of reform Dessau was in the vanguard of the movement towards secularisation and assimilation .sx In 1808 its synagogue had been the first in Germany where sermons were delivered in the vernacular .sx After 1848 the Jewish children who had hitherto followed their own educational path now took their place on the school benches alongside their Gentile fellows .sx By the end of the nineteenth century the liberalism of the Dukes and the reform-conscious development of the Jewish community had brought about a happy modus vivendi , and the new thirty-year-old Cantor Albert Weill , with his young wife and the first of his children , found himself in settled circumstances .sx A triumphant occasion to celebrate this sense of well-being was the dedication a few years later of a magnificent new synagogue , with an adjoining building to house administrative offices , educational facilities and accomodation for the cantor and his family .sx The money for this cultural centre came from a five-million-mark legacy to the Jewish community from Baroness Julie von Cohn-Oppenheim , daughter of Baron Moritz von Cohn - court banker to Kaiser Wilhelm I - and heir to the family banking firm in Dessau .sx The Baroness died in 1903 , having stipulated in her will that the legacy be used for the furtherance of religious activities and education and for the foundation of charitable institutions to benefit not only the Jewish congregation but also the people of Dessau as a whole .sx Standing on a prominent thoroughfare , close to its predecessor and to the Jewish school where Albert Weill taught , the new synagogue was built in an eclectic Romanesque style , with a great central dome and an opulent interior which included a large organ .sx Its ceremonial dedication in February 1908 was led by Duke Friedrich II of Anhalt and brought all the local dignitaries to its doors - civic pride was openly shown to transcend religious differences .sx Cantor Weill , a neat , stocky figure with a clipped , dark beard , led the first part of the service , singing the antiphonal responses with the choir , while his wife , with the seven-year-old Kurt , his two brothers and his sister , watched from their pew in the gallery .sx Like synagogues and Jewish property all over Germany , the building was set on fire and plundered in the orgy of persecution and destruction unleashed by the Nazis in the night of November 9 , 1938 , the so-called Reichskristallnacht .sx It was struck by bombs in the air-raid of March 7 , 1945 , the darkest hour in Dessau's seven-hundred-year history , and the ruins were removed in the 1960s .sx A grassy area now covers the site , marked by a stone column in memory of the murdered Jews of the town and the place where they worshipped .sx One house nearby , close to the site of the old nineteenth-century synagogue , miraculously survived the Second World War and bears commemorative plaques to the town's two most famous Jewish sons - Moses Mendelssohn and Kurt Weill .sx