This is taken from The Times, October 19, 2006:

Fritz Beer
August 25, 1911 - September 2, 2006
Jewish, German-speaking Czech refugee who explored the themes of exile and dislocation in his writing and his BBC broadcasts

THE author and BBC broadcaster Fritz Beer wrote eloquently and movingly of the fate of the 20th-century Central European Jewish intellectual, which was to never quite belong anywhere.

As a Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire he was born an outsider. As a German-speaker in what became Czechoslovakia he suffered another form of detachment, and his communist activities as a young man caused yet further alienation. Forced into exile by the German invasion of his homeland in 1939 he then fought, in sometimes uneasy alliance with exiled Czechs, against Hitler. The end of the war brought a new rejection as Czechoslovakia expelled its German-speakers — and Germany itself hardly seemed like home for someone such as Beer.

He settled as a naturalised foreigner in Britain, where he had spent much of the war, becoming a broadcaster for the BBC German Service. But he never felt that he fully belonged in Britain either, and he continued to write and reflect in German. He published a wide range of essays, short stories and longer works. Some of his most impressive work, drawing on his wartime experiences, came late in life, in particular an autobiography and a collection of essays and stories entitled Kaddisch für meinen Vater (2002, A Kaddish for my Father), with its centrepiece a poignant reflection on the memory of his father, who died in the Holocaust.

Beer was born in 1911 into a middle-class Jewish family in Brünn (now Brno) in Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1918 he became a citizen of the new Czechoslovak state whose population included ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews among larger groups of Czech and Slovak- speakers as well as Hungarians, Poles, Ruthenians and Roma.

Beer found this ethnic mix attractive. He would always declare that Czechoslovakia had been nearest to his homeland: “I had German, Jewish and Czech friends,” he wrote. “It didn’t bother me at the time that the Germans looked on me as a Jew while the Czechs saw me as a German.”

But he was pulled in other directions too. He joined a Zionist youth organisation, and then responded to the 1929 global economic depression by joining the Czechoslovak Communist Party, for which he worked as an organiser and journalist.

Initially he felt he had through Marxism “discovered the key to the mysteries of the world”. But in the late 1930s he grew disillusioned at the rigidly pro-Moscow and Stalinist stance adopted by many of his comrades, and with the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 he severed his links with the party.

Faced with the more immediate peril of the German invasion in 1939, he escaped from the Gestapo to Poland and thence to Britain, where he contacted exiled literary groups. He volunteered for the exile Czechoslovak Army, saw active service in France in 1939 and 1940, and joined the Allied forces entering France and Germany after D-Day.

Beer’s relationship with other Czech exiles was not always easy. He had sided with the fledgeling state in the 1930s when many of its German- speakers had sought to undermine it. He had even begun to write in Czech as well as German as an act of solidarity, condemning the way in which Nazism had perverted his mother tongue. But he challenged claims like those made by an officer in the exile army as it retreated by ship from France in 1940 that “anyone speaking German here is bound to be a Gestapo agent, and we should throw him overboard”.

In his writings Beer often explored the ability of language to corrupt but he championed too the survival of “another German”, which could articulate an alternative to Nazi or communist barbarism. “Language itself is innocent,” he once declared, “the only guilty ones can be us, the writers and speakers.” He waged his campaign for another German from 1946 in broadcasts on the BBC German Service to the part of Germany now under communist rule.

The cosmopolitan, intellectual atmosphere of the BBC External Services at Bush House suited Beer well. He was a prominent member of the PEN organisation of exiled German authors and he maintained his close interest in Czechoslovakia, especially in the 1960s, visiting before and after the Soviet invasion of the country in 1968 and writing books on his findings.

After his retirement from the BBC Beer’s literary work flourished — in particular his personal reckoning with the past. His autobiography Hast Du auf Deutsche geschossen, Grandpa? (1992, Did you shoot at Germans, Grandad?) was prompted by his grandchildren’s questions about his past. For too long, he admitted, many of his generation had remained silent in response to such questions.

His most troubling literary reckoning was with the memory of his father. Beer knew little of his fate until an unknown cousin visited him in London after the war. One of the few members of the family to survive the Holocaust, she told how his father had worked as an administrator in the Jewish ghetto in Brünn. After he and his fellow Jews had been deported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt some of the others had accused his father of having collaborated with the Nazis. Distraught, his father had volunteered for one of the first transports to Treblinka — known to be a death camp — as an act of suicide.

The cousin advised him to say kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead that sons say for their fathers in order that their souls may find peace. Beer was not a religious believer, but in the essay Kaddisch für meinen Vater he explored with great honesty his reactions to his father’s actions, and his own guilt feelings as a survivor: “In quiet moments I was sometimes tormented by the picture of my father on his way into the gas chamber.”

Trying to understand his father taught Beer much about how complex issues of guilt and collaboration could be in relation to a totalitarian society. But, he admitted, the episode had also exposed his reluctance — in contrast to his normal journalistic energy — to face his own family’s past for fear of the cruel truths it might reveal.

In the end, thanks to a later contact with his cousin, Beer realised that his father had not been a collaborator but had simply been attempting to serve his community as he always had.

The process, he added, had reinforced his belief that remembering was the greatest of duties later generations owed to those who faced death so broken and humiliated. “If we don’t forget them, they live on in honour and in our love.”

Beer was appointed OBE in 1976. But even after several decades in London he did not fully settle, still finding himself reaching for German words even if an English word occurred first, still trying to make sense of his place in a world which had never allowed him to belong.

Fritz Beer, OBE, writer and broadcaster, was born on August 25, 1911. He died on September 2, 2006, aged 95.