Paulo Roberto de Almeida
http://www.casastefanzweig.org.br/agenda_en/s26.html
Ujscie, Poland, 1880 — São Paulo, 1950
Banker, social-democrat activist, pacifist, Maecenas, founder of a silkworm farm.
His and Stefan Zweig’s paths crossed five times: in the group around the businessman-philosopher-statesman Walter Rathenau; after the Great War in the Weimar Republic; in Paris, in the circle of German émigrés after the Nazis came to power; in 1940, in Brazil, when they stayed in the same hotel on Flamengo beach; and in early 1942 in Barbacena, during a meeting with another refugee writer, the Frenchman George Bernanos.
From a Jewish family and interested in agricultural and social issues, influenced by the German utopist Adalbert Stifter, and thanks to his adherence to social-democratic ideals, Simon worked a small property he inherited from his father in Kahlstadt, near the Polish border, a model grange. He was forced to abandon it due to the Germanist and reactionary wave stimulated by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in Prussia.
In Berlin, he helped found the bank Bett, Carsh, Simon & Co and with his wife, Gertrud, he turned the house on Drakestrasse into a centre for art and culture frequented by writers, intellectuals and artists such as Albert Einstein, the Mann brothers Heinrich and Thomas, René Schikele, Stefan Zweig, the “red” count Harry Kessler, Walter Rathenau, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wasserman, maestro Bruno Walter, Walter Benjamin and artists of the Expressionist avant-guard.
The German defeat in the Great War, the end of the empire, the creation of the Weimar Republic and Rathenau’s political star, which twice elevated him to the post of minister, resulted in Simon becoming Finance minister of the Prussian cabinet. Rathenau’s assassination (1922) crushed all further hope. The economic and political instability of Germany lead him to create a banking house in Paris and he bought a house on Rue de Grenelle, 182. When the Nazis took power and his friends warned him to flee immediately, a small portion of his assets and art collection were safe in France. The mansion and the bank were confiscated soon afterwards. The French government received the couple, their daughters and sons-in-law as political refugees, thus they avoided internment in prisoner of war camps.
In the Paris apartment the cream of the intelligentsia in exile gathered: the Mann brothers, Franz Werfel and his wife, Ernst Toller, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, Friderike Zweig (after the annexation of Austria), the Berlin journalist Ernst Feder, the French who support the Popular Front – Jews, atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Aristocrats, Communists, Socialists, Anarchists. Simon lead several operations to help refugees, such as removing those in danger from the occupied zones, financing newspapers, buying visas and liaising with the foreign diplomatic corps.
To finance these operation Simon began to shed part of his art collection that he’d salvaged from Germany. In Switzerland in 1937, through his friend and marchand Bruno Cassirer, he sold one of the versions (the fourth) of the famous Expressionist work by Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944) “The Scream”.
The anti-Nazi trenches quickly emptied out as German troops approached Paris. Hugo and Gertrud were told that at the American consulate in Marseille there were visas for non-immigrants, valid for six months. However, with the capitulation, the puppet Vichy government annulled them along with all safe-conduct documents, asylum certificates and foreign exit visas.
The Simons joined the hoards heading for Marseille, where the Czech consul obtained the passports of a recently deceased couple. From the list of the living the names Hugo and Gertrud Simon disappeared and, in their place, emerged Hubert Studenic and Garina Studenicova, soon to be incorporated into the legion of people protected by the American journalist Varian Fry, sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee to rescue intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis and hemmed in the South of France.
The daughter Ursula and husband Wolf Demeter, and the other daughter, Annete Simon, got passports from the French Resistance with the names Leonie Renée Denis, André Denis and Marie Luise Pecherman. Wolf Demeter, a well-known sculptor, as well as changing his name, had to disguise himself to look 15 years older.
They reached the Spanish border by train, crossed the Pyrenees on foot (the same route taken by Friderike, her daughters and sons-in-law; see entry) and with visas secretly supplied by the Brazilian ambassador in Vichy, Luís Martins de Souza Dantas, they entered Spain, buying tickets to Rio and embarking on the “Cabo Hornos”, which was sailing from Vigo, on the Atlantic coast. The daughters, son-in-law and grandson travelled on another ship to Argentina, where they remained a short time.
They arrived in what was then the capital of Brazil on March 3rd, 1941 and stayed first at Hotel Central, where they were met up with Stefan and Lotte Zweig (arriving from New York on August 27th, 1941). Without financial resources, they later shared the apartment of Ernst Feder and his wife, in Laranjeiras.
Thanks to his international connections, the money Simon had in England and the USA started arriving small amounts addressed to the São Bento monastery, which had a tradition of sheltering the persecuted and pilgrims. The monk Paulus Gordan, (a converted Jew who was to become abbot of the monastery), helped them with initial arrangements.
Fearful of being recognized in such a cosmopolitan atmosphere and rekindling old rural dreams, the Studenics moved to the interior of Minas Gerais, where they bought a small property in Barbacena to farm silkworms.
They became close to other refugees: the famous French Catholic writer George Bernanos, who was hidden away in a ranch called Cruz das Almas while he wrote his books and articles for O Jornal, and the young Jewish Romanian painter, Emeric Marcier, who had bought a house there to turn into a studio.
On the initiative of Ernst Feder, who in early 1942 went to spend the summer in a pension in Petrópolis, thereby becoming Stefan Zweig’s closest friend, Studenic arranged an invitation from Bernanos for Zweig to visit in mid-January. He thought it might help him overcome his solitude and depression.
The moving encounter in remote Barbacena between those Europeans who were so different yet so similar, was included in both their biographies. But it wasn’t enough to prevent Stefan Zweig’s tragic end.
With the end of the war, Hubert Studenic began the operation of resuscitating Hugo Simon. Thanks to the intervention of his old friends Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, he managed to recover his name and part of his assets. He went to live in Penedo, a picturesque Finnish colony in the mountains of Rio state, not far from Resende, where his daughter lived with her husband and son, all still using the surname from the war, Denis.
There he began writing a novelistic autobiography called Seidenraupen, (Silkworms; or silk threads), a voluminous manuscript of around 1,500 pages, which the post-war German publishers weren’t interested in publishing because they hardly even knew who Hugo Simon was. The researcher Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler, a pioneer in Brazil in the field of Exilliteratur, Exile Literature, located the manuscript and published an extract.
Inspired by his valiant forefather, Simon’s great-grandson, Rafael Cardoso Denis, a professor of art history in Rio de Janeiro, and therefore skilled in the art of links and connections, is trying to edit his valuable testimonial.
Address listed: 5 Av. Apparicio Borges, Ap. 4R, Rio. Tel. 42-1265.
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