Willy fought for the Kaiser in WWI.
Selma’s only brother, Louis Barth, died fighting for the Germans, as did a nephew and a cousin.
After the war ended in 1919, Willy, his parents Louis & Emma, and his brother Leo moved to Stuttgart.
A year later Willy & Selma were married.
A year after that, John (Hansel) was born.
My mother, Margaret (Gretel) was born in 1925.
Stuttgart is the capital of Baden-Württemberg, located on the Neckar River, home to the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche & Bosch.
It had a population of about 300,000 in the 1920’s.
Margaret remembered swimming across the Neckar before she was 8 years old.
As we married in the 20’s – after the war – you couldn’t get an apartment.
We lived in a furnished apartment by a piano teacher.
She needed money.
She had her living room, and we could use her living room when we get visitors.
We had our bedroom, we had a bathroom.
The kitchen we participate, she cook, I cook.
{Selma}
The family moved to a 3rd floor apartment at 28 Lerchenstrasse in the recently developed Rosenberg neighborhood.
The block was destroyed in bombing during WWII.
Blocks at the other end of the street still stand and are made up of 5 or 6 story apartment buildings, often with shops on the 1st floor & attic apartments on the top floor.
Margaret described the family as “average bourgeois”.
The apartment had one bedroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen with a balcony & a room under the roof where the maid, a young woman from Flehingen, slept.
Erna described the apartment as having beautiful oriental rugs, silver, crystal, china, oil paintings & an Arabian wall hanging.
Willy’s library was full of 19th century German writers from Goethe, Schiller & Heine to Nietzsche.
Selma went to Paris to buy designer clothes.
They went to concerts & the symphony.
Willy set up a wholesale consumer products business with his brother Leo – “hardware, household & gifts” {Erna}.
He would display the latest trends from the Düsseldorf trade fair in his showrooms and sell on to retailers or other wholesalers.
The business was located in the Mittnachtbau, on Königstrasse, opened in 1928.
Both Erna & Margaret remembered with horror the paternoster elevator: a “chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.
Passengers can step on or off at any floor they like.” {Wikipedia}
Selma also had a business – “bathrooms, insulation, stoves” {Erna} located on Seidenstrasse across from the Berliner Platz, just a few blocks from the apartment. (Footnote 2)
How did the family businesses prosper even during the hyperinflation that followed WWI in 1922 & 1923, and the worldwide stock market crash in 1929?
Many of the Barth clan were cattle- or horse-dealers, and so their assets were real goods with value, not paper money or securities.
My great-grandfather, Leopold Barth, did go out of business as a cattle dealer, but then went into business with several of his grandchildren, dealing in animal skins and liqueurs made from fruit from the orchard.
Erna’s father, Berthold Ackermann, bartered a sack of flour for a bicycle, animal hides for their first car. He reinvested in his bakery business and home.
Meanwhile in Stuttgart, Selma was sending profits from her business out of the country to Switzerland.
“She would send her husband on a skiing trip, rolling the money into a condom or putting it into a flask with tea or something.” {Erna}
The Barth clan were observant Jews but integrated into the community with mutual respect.
They observed the sabbath: no work on Saturday. Erna walked 8 km to high school in Bretten on Saturdays and could not take notes in class.
They kept kosher, tithed to charity, celebrated the holidays, bar-mitzvahed, and went to temple and religious classes.
Erna was also “sent both to Catholic & Protestant kindergartens, each for six months” so she could learn “not to criticize anyone’s religion.”
John & Margaret had both Christian & Jewish classmates in Stuttgart.
Hundreds of villagers of all faiths attended Louis Barth’s war hero funeral in Flehingen.
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