Carter Bravmann
On August 10, 1941, twenty-eight-year-old Max Bravmann, an emigré German Jew, was rushing to the port of Lisbon in a desperate attempt to board the S.S. Navemar before it sailed for Cuba and New York. Max, despite having never lived in a town of more than 4,000 souls in the first twenty years of his life, had become of necessity a cosmopolitan. He had fled to France almost immediately after Hitler came to power, by 1934 had settled in Marseille, and there had met and married Isabelle. They had two sons, René (born December 1939) and Claude (born May 1941, in war-defeated France). On June 22, 1941, one year to the day after the French surrender, Max and his young family – Claude was not yet five weeks old – were in flight to Seville, Spain, and a hoped-for Atlantic crossing to the United States in a desperate attempt to elude the mass arrests of Jews in the newly established Vichy government of Marechal Philippe and the anti-Semitic legislation of 1941.
The young Bravmann Family (Isabelle holding Claude and Max holding Rene), aboard the S.S. Navemar, from Lisbon to New York, via Havana
As he raced to the port, Max knew that everything he cherished was at stake. His wife and sons were already on the Navemar, having successfully embarked in Seville two days earlier, along with hundreds of other Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. If Max now failed to join them in Lisbon, the ship’s last port of call before crossing the Atlantic, he would likely never see his family again. What he then feared quickly came to pass: The Navemar turned out to be the last ship to transport Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe to the United States. On its return voyage, it was torpedoed and sunk in the Strait of Gibraltar by an Italian submarine, the Barbarigo.
Max had been separated from his family at the Franco-Spanish border. Isabelle and the boys were French citizens, Max was not. Indeed, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws had stripped him of German citizenship. Hence the Vichy authorities detained him, sending him almost immediately to the notorious internment camp in Gurs -- located in Southwest France near the Pyrenees – a place which earlier had briefly held Hannah Arendt.
Max promised Isabelle that he would meet them in Lisbon, the second and last European port of call of the Navemar, and told her to board the ship with their two young sons. Isabelle, Rene, and Claude had continued to Madrid, and then on to Seville. They boarded the Navemar in Seville and sailed with it to Lisbon, not knowing whether they would ever see Max again.
Max was held for almost four weeks at Gurs, and finally released in late July with the aid of Spanish authorities who then escorted him through France, Spain and then Portugal to the port at Lisbon. (Whether they were moved by compassion or by cash may never be known.). He made it to the ship on August 10, 1941 -- with mere minutes to spare – as it blew its horn signaling its imminent departure from the Port of Lisbon. The family, reunited against all odds, now settled into inhospitable surroundings for a grueling journey to an unknown world across the Atlantic.
The Navemar was a cargo ship, never intended for passengers. It had been chartered by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for the sole purpose of shuttling Jewish refugees out of Europe to North America. Outfitted to accommodate just fifteen crew members, it now had, including the four Bravmanns, 1,116 aboard as it commenced its 37-day journey to the Americas.
The boat was slow (less than 22 knots, at best), dangerously overcrowded, and filthy – many on board contracted typhus, and six passengers died of it en route – but, after its intermediate stop in Havana, it landed successfully in New York on September 12. As an almost comical side note, the ship turned out also to be carrying many of the artworks that Peggy Guggenheim was smuggling out of occupied Europe. Some of the refugees later learned that they had been sleeping, albeit in squalor, on crates of Chagall paintings.
I knew almost none of his story until the fall of 2019. I know it now because Max Bravmann was my grandfather, and because I researched his odyssey in the process of reclaiming my German citizenship and, by extension, my Jewish identity.
In October of that year – 2019 -- through a friend of mine from college, I learned of the opportunity to reclaim one’s German Citizenship for the descendants of German Jews who had their own German citizenship stripped by the Nazi Party in the 1930’s. Article 116 of the post WWII German Basic Law of 1949 (in essence, the German Constitution) clearly allows for the“Reclamation of Citizenship”. This was a fascinating and exhilarating revelation from my friend, who was himself seeking his own German citizenship via this very same process.
Deeply inspired by his work, and extremely excited by this possibility, I quickly researched online the requirements, processes and procedures necessary for starting an application for German Citizenship. In true German fashion, the instructions and forms clearly, concisely and rationally outlined – in both German and English -- all of the documents necessary to thoroughly complete the application. I soon realized that I had almost none of the necessary documents: Birth certificates of my parents, my father’s father, my father’s parents wedding certificate, my own birth certificate, my great grandfather’s birth certificate, death certificates, proof of their German citizenship, proof of their Jewish faith, proof that they left Germany and made it to the United States, proof of U.S. Citizenship and the Naturalization process, proof of the continuity of the last name ‘Bravmann’, locations and dates of where my father, his father and his grandfather lived, and on and on it went.
Apparently, in order to even have a chance of obtaining German citizenship, I would necessarily have to delve very deeply into the significant Jewish history of my father, and his father, and by necessity, an entire unspoken aspect of my own family history about which I knew next to nothing. This might not be so easy, for the past can draw you in -- and I was uncertain that I would, could or even should so easily acquiesce. Would I be acting as an “opportunist” by reclaiming my German citizenship on the backs of my Jewish ancestors, people about whom I knew very little and for whom Judaism was central to their lives – but not mine? Would I therefore be acting immorally by pursing this path? My husband, Jack Koll, and I have long dreamed of the possibility of perhaps moving to Europe, for it is the calmer, quieter and less car-centric (we currently live in Los Angeles) lifestyle among the numerous qualities that are inherently our preferred way of living and of being.
The enormous excitement I felt from the potentially very real and very appealing aspect of becoming a German and a citizen of the European Union was counterbalanced by my emotional ambivalence of the task at hand.
As a starting point, I spoke at length to my uncle Rene, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – and the older brother to my dad, who was that two-year-old toddler when they left Europe in 1941 – for he was reasonably well-versed in his family’s general history. We spoke for hours, and I took diligent notes. This conversation was enormously helpful, enabling me to begin to piece together a timeline of places, people and events.
During one of my conversations with Rene, over the course of my research phase of my family’s history, he mentioned a researcher of Jewish history in the German town of my ancestors – Weilburg – whom he communicated with several times. His name is Joachim Warlies, and my uncle happened to have his email address. I quickly emailed Joachim. What a font of information, documents and history was – and is – this Joachim Warlies! With his help, patience and persistence and my perseverance, I slowly began to check off the list of necessary items for the Application. Over the past several years, my husband and I have become fast friends with both Joachim and his wife, Anna, having to date visited them twice in Germany and intend to do so again in the Summer of 2024.
With considerable assistance from Rene, Joachim and my husband, Jack, I began to piece together the large gaps and the specific details and record of my paternal familial past. All of the dates, names, events and historical accounts allowed me to create a detailed time-line, dating from the 1880’s through to the present. Like the assembling of a vast jig-saw puzzle, I at last understood and was now remarkably well-versed in the events and people of my Jewish father’s family history. I now knew the role that Judaism played in their lives, spanning more than a century in Germany, France and the United States.
Quite independent of my decision to obtain German citizenship, my deep appreciation of Germany started in college. Consequently, I have visited Germany over thirty times in my life, starting in college and most recently in the summer of 2023. I will do so again in 2024. I have studied and understand reasonably well Germany’s history, the culture as it developed over the centuries, its people, its architecture and art, its music, its cars, airlines and cuisine as well as the distinctions between the various cities and the seven major regions (or states). I am quite fond of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, and also the smaller cities. Garmisch-Partenkirchen is also a favorite Alp’s location. When I first toured Mercedes-Benz factory in Stuttgart, as a young Architect, I was quite intrigued by the obsessive attention to design, detail and their manufacturing techniques of the cars – even the taillights, which are purposedly designed to shed water to maximize nighttime visibility.
When in Germany, I always speak to – at this point, still in English -- and engage with the people. Most interestingly, about a decade ago, I started noticing with German people an overt “owning” of the atrocities of WWII, and a willingness to discuss it. This process has been gradual and certainly uneven, geographically, and yet by owning their history of the 1930’s and 40’s, there has been, from my perspective, and in my experience, a gradual alleviating of the collective burden that has been ever so gradually lifted from the German people.
Although the far-right in Germany has established an unfortunate presence in the country, the existence of this element is not sufficient for me to broadly judge the whole of Germany negatively. Personally, I do not harbor any ill-will nor dismissive feelings toward Germany nor the German people. To the contrary, I continue to find the place utterly fascinating. This is why I continue to revisit the country – I simply want to deepen my understanding and appreciation of all things German. I desired to obtain German Citizenship (while retaining my U.S. Citizenship) as a way to continue the healing process for my family and my ancestors. If not for the atrocities of Nazism and WWII, I – or my stand-in -- would very likely have been born a German Jew.
That it is even possible for someone like me to obtain German citizenship is a tremendous gift from Germany and the German people. Germany has shown me, shown the world, what is truly possible by apologizing, and doing so deeply and sincerely. My German citizenship is proof of this gift. Apology accepted. The tragic rise of antisemitism is significant in the United States, as it is in Germany and throughout the World. It is especially acute on America’s college campuses, and anti-Jewish sentiment is now at its highest level in nearly a century in the U.S. What Germany is doing – continuing the long, hard work of furthering and continuing to bestow German citizenship upon the Jewish ancestors of once German Jewish citizens – is a shining beacon for the rest of the world. It is not easy, in the face of political opposition, to push forward along this path. But it has to be done and must continue so that everyone will, ultimately, appreciate Germany’s bold leadership for good, reconciliation and peace.