Farewell to Lisa Schwarz

It was a scene each morning as Lisa Schwarz entered the aufbau office at the Upper West Side. She liked to wear ladies’ suits and those small pumps which adorn only truly delicate women like her. During the winter, she’d wear the matching coat, and, of course, there was nobody who could wear hats with more grace and casualness. After touching up her lipstick and elegantly lighting up her first slim cigarette, the daily routine at the office of the emigrant newspaper aufbau in New York could begin. She organized the office events, governed at the board of the New World Club, the newspaper’s publisher, and organized the yearly group tour for the readers of the aufbau to Flims in Switzerland.
    Lisa Schwarz now has died in New York at the age of 90, and what she herself, without being sentimental, always stated has occurred: “Once we are gone, there’s nobody left for you to ask.” At the same time, Lisa Schwarz was not the kind of person to discuss her life in depth, and if she did, it’d be only with people she trusted: About her extremely happy childhood in Berlin as the only daughter of a liberal, Jewish home - Julius, the father, was a banker and a member of the board of directors of Ufa; Elisabeth, the mother, was “the best dressed woman” in Berlin. The delicate girl practices figure skating and attends an academic high school (Gymnasium). In 1934 her father dies, the mother remarries, and thanks to that marriage to a Swiss national Lisa is able to leave Berlin half a year before the start of war.
    Difficult years in Switzerland are followed by a new start in Manhattan with her mom. Lisa Schwarz makes her entry into the fashion industry, selling at the men’s outfitter Knize, decorating at Bergdorf Goodman, and presenting as a hat model before Marlene Dietrich. In 1971, the New World Club is looking for an office manager, and after a two day trial period she gets the job. She and her mother belonged to the ones who had subscribed to the newspaper right after their arrival, and the aufbau is how they learned which relatives had been murdered during the Holocaust. Up until the closing of the New York office in 2004, the only time she stays away from the office is when there’s a blizzard raging.
    Every now and then when Lisa Schwarz would go out to eat at the no longer existing Schweizer Restaurant, the French restaurant, or the nearby diner she always carried a small can filled with instant coffee on her. That’s what she used to make the weak American coffee stronger. However, that didn’t mean that that she was struggling with America. All that meant was that she accepted life’s reality and carried on. The wounds were too deep to go back to Germany. She therefore organized trips to Switzerland and satisfied her longing over there as best she could – however, all that with poise. When young German interns came to the aufbau, it was always Lisa who would introduce them to the job and to the world which was new to them, and there was no one that didn’t admire her for her humor, linguistic jokes, style, and her impartiality. Lisa Schwarz was the one who taught many of these young Germans for the first time in their lives the true meaning of emigration.
    Somewhere along the line Lisa Schwarz suddenly became a well known face for emigration; she was photographed and portrayed. And it was as if all the years during which she wrested European life from Manhattan, classic chic from her environment, and the Prussian discipline from herself had paid off – even if the beloved and vital aufbau in its original form as a bi-monthly German newspaper had no future.
    By then, toward the end, even the most untiring readers were too old to go to Switzerland. Every summer, up until three years ago, she continued to stay at the same hotel. Berlin was the place for a fleeting visit – that’s all she could manage. She was very pleased by the fact that she would suddenly know young people in her hometown again. All the same she wanted to stay in New York, the city in which, behind her desk at the aufbau office, she had hung the photos of the Swiss tourist office (Schweizer Fremdenverkehrsbüro), reopening the door to Germany. ●
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Irene Armbruster was the office manager of the aufbau office in Berlin. She now lives in Stuttgart, working as a permanent author for the paper.