EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER
re DR KURT CASSIRER
2008

Dear Kit

Delighted to hear from you and that you knew Dr. and Mrs Cassirer.

I kept in touch; he showed me picture frames he had exported from Italy, which Sir Kenneth Clark had bought for Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery. He had been a dealer’s man in Italy, and was able to evade Mussolini, and came to GB. He was interned on the Isle of Man – for checking his ‘Enemy Alien’ status. There were many famous German Jews and socialists there. A recent exhibition in the Barber Institute had a booklet about them. He took me to meet Katerina Wilczynski – who had worked in Italy. He visited us in our pad in Notting Hill too. He had visited his son in the US and disapproved of ‘the Youth’s’ adoption of Fan personalities.

He had been influenced by the beliefs of Paul GEHEEB – who ran, first, the Odenwald schule in the Black Forest – an early progressive school, and later, after the Nazis closed it – the ECOLE D’HUMANITE in Switzerland.

Kurt C. was a key figure in Old W.H. He led his French pupils into the woods to pick edible fungi and cooked them on a stove in the ‘French room’. He played the fiddle with emotion I would guess, because he knew of the fate of the ‘disappeared’. Though no word of camps was divulged in the British Media then, I was conscious that all the Jewish staff and pupils bore a secret mental wound, however.

I believe ‘Odenwald’ revived, and a famous or infamous Danny Cohn-Bendit, was a product in the ’68 Paris scene. (NOT a Pacifist.)

For me, ideas of social progress in Post War Government, made it attractive – after doing kitchen work in the Royal Festival Hall in 1951 exhibition, to be alert to ideals of New towns. Meeting my wife and her friend from Coventry, made us re-locate to the Phoenix City – and I began to teach Art, emulating Louis Jones.

I stayed for 14 years in a big Boys’ Comprehensive school just built. Identified myself with the local education and cultural life. I had studied at St Martins – and also done RAF for two years. Our children grew up in ‘Cov’. We are now approaching 80 – and a bit dodgy on our ‘pins’.

Edith (Geheeb) Cassirer (sister to Kurt) was a more damaged soul. She had been, and was, a Child Psychologist. Kurt had an academic youth – and once wore the Deaths Head of the German Cavalry – he said. Eva (Kurt’s wife) knew RILKE the poet and was secretary to RODIN (in Paris). They were kind and consoling people in the Blitz years.

Fraternally

Colin