Sybille Bedford

One

Lisa and “le beau Max”

Although Sybille Bedford wrote always in English, in fact she was German. Born in Berlin on 16 March 1911, Sybille was the child of a hopelessly incompatible couple. Her father was an eccentric Bavarian baron, passive and remote, who much preferred the company of animals to people, while her mother, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Hamburg, was energetic, fiercely intelligent and very beautiful, always avid for masculine attention. Maximilian von Schoenebeck and Elisabeth (“Lisa”) Bernhardt met in Berlin; Schoenebeck, recently widowed and in search of a new wife, proposed, and Lisa, recovering from a failed affair, unwisely accepted. They were married in April 1910, and less than a year later their only child was born. For both parents Sybille’s arrival was regarded as a serious disappointment, for Maximilian because he had hoped for a son, and for Lisa because it barred the way out from a marriage she was by now desperate to escape.

Sybille’s memories of her early childhood were of an almost idyllic period, living with her parents in a fine country house with garden and orchard, days spent playing in a sunny nursery or outside romping with a large pack of good-natured dogs. It was not long, however, before she began to sense the tensions that existed between her parents, and over time to learn of the dramas, and in her father’s case, the scandals and tragedies of his earlier life. The age difference between her parents was considerable, Maximilian forty-six when he married, Lisa twenty years younger, and although Lisa knew something of her husband’s history there were certain episodes of which he never spoke, one scandal in particular only discovered by his horrified daughter in her extreme old age.

The Schoenebecks, Roman Catholic and members of the minor aristocracy, were originally from Westphalia, but since the early nineteenth century had been settled at Neuburg am Rhein, close to the border with France in what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria. A family of local bureaucrats and officials, they had been ennobled in 1825, granted the title of Freiherr, or baron. By inclination the family had looked always towards France, and when among themselves preferred to speak French rather than German. As the century progressed they did their best to ignore the increasing power of Prussia, which they regarded as a barbarous menace, appalled when in 1871, after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany was ratified at Versailles and Wilhelm I of Prussia declared the German emperor.

Sybille’s father was the second of five boys. His father, Daniel August von Schoenebeck, was a district judge in the city of Karlsruhe, only a few kilometres from the family’s small estate at Neuburg. His mother, Ida Johanna Himbsel, was the daughter of a famous engineer, Ulrich Himbsel, who built one of the earliest railways, from Munich to Starnberg, and established the first steamship service on the Starnberger See.

Maximilian was born on 22 July 1863. His was by all accounts a happy childhood. At Neuburg the family inhabited a pleasant manor house set in a sheltered valley and surrounded by farmland. Max’s boyhood memories were of a rural idyll, of apricots ripening on the wall, of dogs and ducks and horses, “and the smell of seasons . . . ​of winter honey, walnuts and March wool, of the pig killed at Michaelmas and Easter, and the hams baked whole inside a loaf of bread.” Daniel August, Max’s father, was good-natured, easy-going and allowed his sons to do very much as they pleased. He was also a notable gourmet, author of a slim brochure entitled Quelques Remarques sur la Théorie du Braisage des Mets (“Some Remarks on the Theory of Braising”), dedicated to the great French chef Carême. As might be expected, the family cuisine was of an unusually high standard, with plentiful supplies of fruit and vegetables, mutton and beef from the home farm, freshwater fish, and during the shooting season generous supplies of game.

Maximilian was a handsome boy, tall and dark-haired, with a gentle, dreamy nature. He and his four brothers were tutored at home before being sent for a short period to a Jesuit seminary. Uninterested in either books or music, Max preferred his own company to that of others; he loved animals, and kept not only dogs and cats but geese and a tame raven. As a very young man he discovered a passion for antique furniture and objets d’art, and true to family tradition he developed a profound love for France and in particular for French wines and cuisine. Under his father’s tutelage he learned how to cook, creating exquisite little dishes over a small spirit lamp purchased for the purpose. As he grew older and began to travel Max indulged in a rather less harmless pursuit, gambling, a hobby extensively pursued in the casinos of Paris and Monte Carlo. Although he had few close men friends, Max had a weakness for beautiful women, whom he effortlessly beguiled with his elegance, good looks and courteous manner; when in their company he appeared happy and animated, and during his twenties and thirties he had many liaisons, which he conducted with refinement and politesse, frequently infatuated, never in love.

Solitary by nature, indifferent to current affairs and lacking in any kind of professional ambition, Max was nonetheless obliged to earn his living. His father’s estate was not large, there were five sons to support, and thus as a young man Max found himself following two of his brothers into the army. By temperament wholly unsuited to such a career, he nonetheless remained with the military until well into middle age, during which time he was severely damaged by two appalling experiences. One escalated into a notorious scandal, widely reported both in Germany and abroad, while the other remained almost completely buried until many years after his death.

Despite the Schoenebecks’ entrenched hostility to Prussia, it was a Prussian cavalry regiment, the 9th Hannover Dragoon Guards, that Max aged twenty joined as a second lieutenant in 1883. At the period when Max enlisted, the Hannover Dragoons were stationed at Metz on the French border, and a photograph taken at this period shows Max standing very upright, immaculate in his uniform, yet despite the gold braid and bristling, bushy moustache, he has a look of apprehension in his eyes, the expression of a man who is lost.

Unlike his brothers, Max had no wish to make the army a full-time career, electing instead to join the reserves. In peacetime, reserve officers were required to spend only twelve months with their regiment every three years, and later every four or five years. After his service with the Dragoon Guards, Max transferred to the 10th Magdeburg Hussars, then to the 3rd Baden Dragoons, from which he finally retired in 1909 at the age of forty-six with an army pension and the rank of major.

The long intervals between periods of military duty Max spent mainly abroad. In 1886, when he was twenty-three, his father died, leaving him a modest legacy, which at first appeared sufficient to support his somewhat aimless peregrinations. This rather withdrawn young man, given to periods of depression, “an innocent eccentric,” as his daughter later described him, spent months at a time in Spain, lived for a while on Corsica, and rented remote villas in unfashionable parts of the Côte d’Azur. He soon assembled a menagerie that included a lemur and a family of chimpanzees which he treated almost as his children. He loved to draw and to paint, and indulged his long-standing passion for collecting porcelain and antique furniture, spending hours wandering through antiques shops in little towns, talking to dealers and buying quantities of ancient bric-a-brac. By now a sophisticated gourmet, he took pleasure in exploring the local markets, examining with great concentration the displays of fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, game and country cheeses. Unfortunately, however, this agreeable existence was not to last. Impractical and naive, wholly ignorant of the value of money, Max soon found he had spent almost his entire inheritance, leaving him with no choice but to find a rich wife.

Baron Maximilian von Schoenebeck, “le beau Max,” soon became a familiar figure in fashionable Paris restaurants as well as at the gaming tables of Nice, Menton, Cannes and Monte Carlo, where he regularly lost large sums at baccarat and roulette. France was always the country he loved above any other, and it was in the French demi-monde where he felt most at home. Of his many mistresses Max asked only that they be chic, placid in temperament and well mannered; intelligence was never a requirement. Generous with presents and unfailingly polite, he always maintained amicable relations with the old mistress even as he was beginning negotiations with the new.

In 1893 Max, now aged thirty, was again on leave from the army, currently in pursuit of an English heiress. This was a period when relations between France and Germany were dangerously strained, with intense resentment on the part of France over the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, while the Germans had been seriously alarmed by the recent Franco-Russian rapprochement. A new military attaché, Colonel Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen, had been sent to Paris from Berlin, and under his regime an extensive intelligence network had been established. Numerous purloined letters, military documents and maps of French fortifications were regularly delivered to Schwarzkoppen’s office, supplied both by French and German agents, including civil servants and members of both countries’ armed forces. Max was one of the serving officers involved, and his activities were shortly to lead him into serious trouble.

While in Paris at the end of the summer, Max was befriended by a French journalist, M. P. Durville. Durville was an expert on military affairs, having served in the French army and survived the terrible siege of Metz in 1870, which had left him with a profound loathing for Germans and Germany. Now, during this period of increasingly strained relations between the two countries, he was on the alert for any sign of espionage and double-dealing, and during his conversations with Schoenebeck began to see an irresistible opportunity. As Max began to confide his anxieties—his desperate need of money to finance the wooing of his wealthy heiress—Durville appeared sympathetic, promoting himself as pro-German and promising to do what he could to help. Before long Durville had persuaded Max to take part in a fake operation, passing on to German intelligence detailed maps and drawings of French fortifications near the eastern frontier. It was arranged that Max should collect these documents from Durville’s office on 7 November. Six days later he was arrested and brought to trial the following month. Found guilty, Max was sentenced to five years, later reduced to three, in the Conciergerie, the infamous dungeon on the Île-de-la-Cité, where during the Reign of Terror Marie Antoinette, among thousands of others, had been incarcerated.

As Max was neither a high-ranking officer nor a notable society figure the story attracted little attention at the time. A year later, however, with the sudden explosive impact of the Dreyfus case—Dreyfus also accused, wrongly as it turned out, of spying for the Germans—Max’s treachery briefly became front-page news. The Paris paper La Presse triumphantly headlined the story—“Un Espion Allemand en Correctionnelle. Comment Schoenebeck a été arrêté—Révélations sensationnelles” (“A German spy in court. How Schoenebeck was arrested—Sensational revelations”), running a lengthy interview with Durville, who provided a detailed account of Schoenebeck’s duplicity.

Fortunately, the case made little impact in Germany. Apart from his immediate family, and of course the German military, few were aware of Schoenebeck’s fate. In later life he himself never spoke of it, and Sybille knew nothing about it until at the age of eighty-seven she was contacted by a historian in Freiburg who had been researching the story. The information shocked and appalled her. “Your letter has distressed me very much,” she wrote. “My father a prisoner of France? Three years in the Conciergerie? To me, it comes like a delayed bombshell.” No one in the family had ever mentioned such an event, she continued. “The idea that my father should have been as much as suspected of having spied against France, is very painful to me . . . ​My father, as I see him, as I remember him, loved France, was, as I became, an extreme Francophile.”

At first she was mystified, but gradually certain memories from her distant childhood began to surface. One day, Sybille recalled, Max had been showing her some drawings he had made. “We leafed through an old sketchbook of his—which may have contained a sketch of barred windows and sketches of a turreted building: ‘That was when I was in the Conciergerie.’ Or words to that effect. No comment. No show of feeling. No narrative. To me, it felt gloomy if romantic, and as real or unreal as his other tales . . . ​I just took them in as a child will: tales in books, tales of life.”

Immediately after his release from prison Max left for Germany, where his return was welcomed by his regiment. Far from a disgrace, his sentence was regarded simply as an unfortunate consequence of his honourable activities in the service of his country, and shortly after his return to the Dragoons he was rewarded with promotion to first lieutenant. In July 1898 he retired from active service, after which he moved to Berlin. Three months later he was married.

Berlin at the turn of the century was a rapidly spreading metropolis, with a population growing at a greater rate than anywhere else in Europe. From Prussian capital to the capital of the German Empire, Berlin had expanded into a great modern city, flourishing, in Sybille’s words, on “a tide of big money, big enterprise, big building, big ideas.” Now there was an extensive network of broad streets, with handsome department stores, modern theatres and fashionable restaurants. There was a transport system with not only horse-drawn trams but an elevated railway, the Ringbahn, and throughout the city a number of spacious public gardens—the Tiergarten, the Charlottenburg gardens, the Bellevuepark. There was a thriving financial and industrial centre, with new offices, public buildings and apartment blocks rising in almost every district. Most impressive was the wide and magnificent avenue of Unter den Linden, down which the resplendently uniformed Kaiser could often be seen riding at the head of a glitteringly accoutred troop of guards.

One of the fastest-growing sections of society in Berlin was Jewish, with a population four times larger than anywhere else in the country. Due to the current period of prosperity much of the previously pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitism had subsided. This wealthy and rapidly expanding Jewish community included a large number of assimilationist families, either with no religious faith or who were converts to Christianity, many of them regarded as an influential if slightly ambiguous elite, “ni Gotha, ni ghetto” (“neither from the Gotha [the directory of European princely and ducal families] nor from the ghetto”). There was a strong Jewish presence not only in banking and commerce but also in journalism, publishing, medicine and the law; and it was during this period that many of the most affluent Jewish families began marrying into the Christian aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie.