Born Vienna, December 21, 1920. Died London, March 26, 2009.
April 16, 2009 09:20Writer George Clare sprang to public attention in 1981 when he published his poignant and detailed account of his Viennese parents’ and grandparents’ lives, Last Waltz in Vienna.
Its overnight success, in Austria as well as Britain, staggered him. He had written the book to explain to his children the background that formed their lost heritage.
He had spent his first 17 years in Austria and only gradually overlaid it with the patina of an English country gentleman, acquired partly through living in Suffolk for over 20 years. But the casually studied elegance hid a painful past. The subtitle of his book was The Destruction of a Family 1842-1942.
Georg Klaar came from the upper bourgeoisie. His medical great-grandfather was the first Jew to reach high military rank as an army surgeon. His grandfather was an eminent doctor.
But rampant antisemitism was a fact of life in Austria. His grandfather would have been a court physician if he had been less obstinate about converting. But while never religious, he drew the line at becoming Catholic.
George’s grandmothers were formidable women. His father, Ernst, was a banker. His mother, Stella, was highly cultured.
Detail by painstaking detail, George painted their easy lives, then described how it was all ripped apart. A few months after the Anschluss, the Nazi takeover in March 1939, his parents went to the Irish embassy in Berlin to get visas. Friends had set up a ribbon factory in County Longford and nominated the Klaars as essential skilled workers.
Ireland did not admit Jewish refugees but a kindly secretary stamped their visas without the consul’s knowledge. George never found out her name.
He took his mother to Ireland but his father elected to go to the French branch of his bank. They never dreamed France would be unsafe. George’s mother left Ireland to join her husband.
Although he knew that both his parents died at Auschwitz, it was only in 1974 that he discovered his mother had voluntarily joined her husband.
His father’s name, but not his mother’s, was on the French border gendarmerie list of people for rounding up and deporting. They were a devoted couple.
George left Ireland for England, joined the British Army in the Pioneer Corps as an enemy alien, then switched to the Royal Artillery, where he rose to the rank of captain and anglicised his name. At the end of war he was seconded to the Allied Control Commission.
Initially used as an interpreter for interrogating Nazis, he became responsible for establishing Germany’s new independent press, under the title of British Press Controller, Intelligence Section of British Information Services Control, Berlin.
He described his experiences in his 1989 book, Berlin Days 1946-47, in which he observed that Germans felt some responsibility for their actions. Austrians, on the other hand, “mentally mislaid the Hitler years”.
One German who applied to start up a paper was the future press baron Axel Springer. Soon after George returned to England and became a journalist on the Manchester Guardian, Springer offered him a job in his expanding empire.
In 1953 he became head of the Bonn-based British Features Agency. In 1954 he set up Springer’s Feature Services in Press, Photo and Radio, and was editor-in-chief until 1963. In 1960 he co-founded the Springer Foreign News Service. He became a close friend of Springer and was a director until retiring in 1983.
The work meant that he commuted from London, often staying long periods in Germany. The situation put a strain on his marriage, as his wife, Lisl, hated the idea of living in Germany.
Lisl Beck was his childhood sweetheart. She had escaped to Britain independently and they married during the war. They divorced in 1965 and she survives him. He then married Christel Vorbringer, a Berlin-born Lutheran, who had been his Foreign News Service secretary in Britain.
George Clare’s surprise success won him the 1982 WH Smith Literary Prize. The book was serialised in translation for Austrian radio and he was interviewed on Austrian TV.
At Jewish Book Week, in which he was involved for several years, he said he did not write out of “compulsive nostalgia” but to make his children realise the length and depth of their history. The Nazis could rob the Jews of their heritage but not their past.
He also realised as he got older that he could not cut off his early years. They were an integral part of his life and identity.
He was stickler for accuracy in the use of emotive terms. He spoke of mass murder rather than Holocaust with its sacrificial overtones. To him the term war crimes was misleading. The Jews had not attacked or declared war on Germany.
He felt strongly that careless phrases belittled the enormity of the real crimes against Jews and made it easier for Hitler’s apologists to promote their views.
The epilogue to Last Waltz blames the early church for robbing Jesus of his Jewish identity, an act which he calls a sin and crime. Clare accused the church fathers of projecting their deep-felt guilt onto Jesus’s fellow-Jews, thereby creating religious antisemitism.
He is survived by his second wife and their daughter; two daughters and a son from his first marriage; four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.