Among Shanti Uncle’s papers is a document issued in June 1933, not by the Ministry of Education but by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, which presumably dealt with matters concerning foreigners in Berlin. It states, in response to a petition made about two weeks earlier by Shanti Behari Seth, residing in Charlottenburg, born in Biswan, Indian by citizenship, that on the basis of his Physics and Chemistry exams and his Matriculation certificate from the Benares Hindu University and his supplementary exam in Latin certified by the German Institute for Foreigners, he would, exceptionally, be allowed to appear for the preliminary examination in dentistry (zahnärztliche Vorprüfung, presumably the preclinicals) at the end of the summer semester 1933 or thereafter. This permission, however, was granted with the express reservation that by passing this examination he would not acquire the right to sit further examinations or to receive a certificate enabling him to practise as a dentist in the territory of the German Reich.
Was all this part of a specific understanding to do with the Latin exam that Shanti had taken in April, a sort of quid pro quo under whose terms he agreed to curtail his further career or at least subject it to review? Was the petition referred to in the document a more general one, one that would have to be made by any foreign student, or at least any non-white foreign student like Shanti who, however self-contradictory it might seem, considering the Sanskrit origin of the word, might be considered non-Aryan? Less than three months after Hitler became Chancellor, a sheaf of laws aimed mainly at Jews had been passed, but some of these were also intended to act against ”non-Aryans” in general and to some extent against foreigners. One such was the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities passed on 25 April.
Hitler had become Chancellor on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag was set on fire less than a month later, on 27 February; the next day Hitler assumed emergency powers. Thousands of Communists were arrested in the weeks that followed and imprisoned in concentration camps. At the parliamentary elections that took place on 5 March, the Nazi Party did not get an absolute majority, but before the month was out, the Reichstag had passed the so-called Enabling Act, which gave dictatorial powers to Hitler both to make laws and to parry them out; from then on, the Reichstag itself was merely a rubber stamp.
Throughout this period, there was an increase in the vehemence of the assaults against Jews which were such a hallmark of the Nazi activists, and in the persecution, beating and indeed murder of Jews in different parts of the country. When the foreign press reported and condemned these events and a boycott of German businesses was suggested, it was decided to retaliate with an official boycott against Jewish businesses on 1 April. That same month saw a new set of laws, decrees and orders: one expelled Jews from the Civil Service, another forbade Jewish lawyers from practising at the bar, another aimed to exclude Jewish doctors from many hospitals and clinics; yet another, the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities just mentioned, though aimed at non-Aryans in general, restricted both the enrolment and the overall membership of Jews in educational institutions.
These were the first of many laws passed not with any regularity but in fits and starts over the following years. All this was accompanied by propaganda comparing Jews to germs or vermin, dangerous to the health of the resurgent nation — or indeed any nation. The Nazi Party and those who helped them sought to separate Jews from their fellow Germans in every possible sphere — work, friendship, marriage, cultural life, leisure — in order both to immiserise them financially and to exclude them socially. It was thus hoped to force them to emigrate or to kill themselves: at any rate, to reduce their presence in Germany. The pressure was to be increased until eventually Germany was Jew-free and blood-pure. This rhetoric and these measures were directed against a people who in 1933 numbered half a million out of a population of more than sixty million.
When I asked Shanti Uncle what had happened during his years in Berlin to the circle of friends which included Lola and Henny, he said that some of the Christian Germans had detached themselves from the Caros. Others had been afraid to come to the house on Mommsenstrasse, but kept in touch on the telephone. Yet others visited as usual, ate and sang and celebrated birthdays and Christmas in the usual way, tried to keep up their own spirits and those of their friends, and hoped that in time the madness would pass.
Whenever Shanti Uncle talked about the historical situation in Germany, he lapsed into generalities.
‘I was never interested in politics. When I first got to Germany, Hindenburg was in power. It was the Weimar Republic. There was a great deal of unemployment. Hitler became very popular by opening soup kitchens and giving people work making roads, which were to be useful to him in wartime.’
On one occasion, out of curiosity, he followed an agitated crowd of students. But there was some shooting going on in a large hall in the university, apparently owing to a fracas between the Communist and the Nazi students, and Shanti quickly left. That was the last political party meeting he attended.
When an Indian freedom-fighter — Shanti Uncle was somewhat uncertain about his name, though at first he claimed it was Subhas Chandra Bose — came to Berlin and spoke to the students, Shanti went to hear him. Years later, he was to discover that his movements and those of other Indian students in Germany had been monitored by the British Embassy with the help of informants in order to chart and, if possible, suppress, Indian nationalist currents abroad. In India, meanwhile, though there was no prospect of the complete independence from the British demanded by the Congress Party in 1930, a limited form of provincial government by elected representatives would be instituted after the passage of the Government of India Act of 1935.
As for the larger questions in Germany — unemployment, militarisation, warmongering, anti-Semitism Shanti Uncle held strong opinions, but they were based more on impression and anecdote than on historical or social analysis. During one of our interviews, a propos of nothing in particular, he said:
”To my great surprise, I found that on Ku’damm, the main street of Charlottenburg, lots of businesses were in the hands of Jewish people, and also that most of the doctors and dentists were Jewish. In Germany, all of them had concentrated in Berlin, especially the professionals. And professors too.”
But this remark was quickly followed by other subjects entirely: the sexual peccadilloes of his professor and a visit to the Krupp works. I should perhaps have stopped him and asked him to develop the thought, but this was one of my first interviews with him, and at that time I thought it best to follow, as far as I could, his free association of ideas and memories.
In the interview that followed, between describing the dental use of vitamin K and advising me on my back problems, Shanti Uncle talked about a Jewish friend of his:
”One of my friends, Mr Hausdorf, was sent to Buchenwald quite early on. I knew him so well; he used to take me to the best restaurants in Berlin. He was an engineer. In the First World War he made a contraption for both ears so that when one was using the telephone, the message was clearer. The Wehrmacht took it over, and so did other countries, and he naturally did very well. Although he fought in the war and got an Iron Cross for great courage, they sent him to Buchenwald and beat him up. About his Iron Cross, they said: ”You dirty old Jew, you must have stolen it.” He was such a nice man. He said to his wife, she being an Aryan Christian, that she should divorce him so that she could stay in Germany. Unfortunately, I could not help him. But then his daughter got married to the Military Attaché of Santo Domingo, and so he got a visa and got out.”
Shanti said that during his years in Berlin he never felt excluded as a foreigner: his teachers treated him well and he was invited to the homes of some of his German fellow students. Quite a few of these students became politicised. The professors were expected to join the Nazi Party and did so, as indeed did many of the petty officials; even the janitor of the Dental Institute was a Party member. People were always being asked to contribute to charities run by the Party, which were usually a front for the Party coffers. Shanti was advised by the student leader, who was friendly towards him, to contribute a bit himself, and he gave them four or five marks. ‘Indirectly, it said that I was not against them,’ was his explanation.
This same student leader enabled him to get an insight into the vast industrial (and potentially military) power that Germany was building up. A dental clinic had been started up at the huge Krupp steelworks at Essen and a hundred or so students from Berlin were invited to see it. As a foreigner, it was very difficult to get to go on the trip, but Shanti spoke to the Nazi Studenten führer, who said, Sethy, I’ll manage to get you in somehow.’ At the last moment he claimed that some German students could not go, and put down Shanti’s name.
”When we arrived, the man who was running the whole show, Herr von Bohlen, gave us a very big dinner. Krupp didn’t have any Sons; von Bohlen was married to his daughter. I learned while talking to others at the table that as a foreign student I would not be allowed to go the next day to visit the steelworks, which had a huge and impressive press. Nor were the women students, as their skirts could catch fire if they touched the running stream of steel — so I would have to accompany the girls to a museum. I was not at all happy with this and I approached Herr von Bohlen at his dinner party. I was stopped by his secretary. I gave him to understand that I had come thousands of miles from India and that it would be a shame if I had to go back and say that I was not allowed to see the famous steelworks. And I asked him if I looked like a spy. Herr von Bohlen, who had overheard our conversation, told his secretary that I should be allowed to go. It was a remarkable sight to see — the red stream of steel flowing on and on. And a press that could hammer a huge thick sheet of steel. Naturally, there were drinks afterwards, free drinks, and we students drank so much that some of us got alcohol poisoning. Everything was free there — the best of food, the best of wine in those very hard times.”