Hutchinson

It was crowded. I shared a bed with this boy, and - and two other men. So there were two boys, me and another boy, and two adults. Two boys, two adults. Four people were in the room. I was in an office of my own. I handled all the books. We collected books. A sort of library. Basically that’s all I did! And I sat there waiting for people to come. And to bring in the books and take new books away. We had, each house, each house had a cook. And we had a cook as well. He came from Hamburg. If you wanted kosher, you could have what they called ‘a kosher house’. Normally there wasn’t any. But there was for special reasons. Special occasions. Then we had Doctor Schonfeld coming over there; Rabbi Doctor Schonfeld came over. Made sure we got all the right food for the – for the High holidays.

The Isle of Man was really very good, we were 29 people in our house. We were left in peace. There was no shortage of food, Isle of Man kippers were very good. We got sick of them because we had them every day. Smoked kippers, you know what they are? And there was nothing wrong, the sun was shining and really … if we wouldn’t have been parted from our family it was almost like a holiday camp. Well, we cooked ourselves. We got flour and eggs and so on and we had to cook ourselves. I don’t mean each person, but one was cooking for the whole household, for everybody, we had 29 people in the house, we sat together, ate together. There were no complaints whatsoever, in actual fact I think, people were taken out to pictures once in four weeks. I learnt here tailoring to make ladies coats and costumes.

The windows were painted blue & the bulbs painted red. Some boffin had worked out that blue & red would be perfect blackout so we didn’t need any curtains. During the day we were sitting in an aquarium, at night in a brothel. Within minutes people started scratching the red paint off the bulbs, so there was no blackout whatsoever. And murder outside with the Manx population, who didn’t like it at all. We were already greeted with newspaper headlines: ‘The Huns steal our landladies’ houses!’. We were neither Huns nor was it our intention to steal anybody’s houses whatsoever. But these houses had all been relatively cheap boarding houses, they prided themselves to be continental, which means you didn’t have to be married to sign in. Well-equipped kitchens. It must have been the same boffin, who worked out that 3 people can sleep very well in 2 double beds. This being Germans, the first great battle was that somebody said, ‘I was an Officer in the German army. I cannot possibly share a bed with a Private’! All the Germans kept their titles, you were Herr Professor or Herr Doktor, you were Herr Kommerzienrat, this went on & on. Everybody was wearing hats, it was incredibly formal. Up to the bitter end I don’t think anyone ever called me Klaus - I was Herr Doktor Hinrichsen. Ja!

One morning Kurt Schwitters arrived in Hutchinson and Richard Friedenthal, the editor of the Knaurs, the Knaur Lexikon, he recognised him, and because I was in charge of the artists, he called me over and he said, ‘That is the notorious Kurt Schwitters’ and I knew of him, because of the degenerate art exhibition, there was…his abstracts, collages, were deliberately hung like this and they were in the section ‘Total Verrückt’. And there’s a photo of Hitler standing in front of them, grinning inanely at this particular picture. That picture has disappeared, as a matter of fact, that doesn’t exist. But Schwitters had then, you know he wasn’t Jewish or anything, he wasn’t political or anything, and he had always gone to Norway over summer for some months, so he went to Norway and stayed, after the degenerate art exhibition, together with his son. And his wife stayed on in Germany, in Hanover, and came occasionally, his mother too, to visit him and then his permit had expired, resident, in Holland, in Norway, and he after quite some extraordinary experiences on his travels, he travelled with two white mice always in his pocket, and the Norwegian partisans caught him and said that he was a Nazi spreading bacterial warfare (laughs) – these two white mice. And then he declaimed one of his poems, he said it’s so mad, it can’t have been him. But he was detained in northern Norway in a school, the school had a workshop. There were various others, Ernst Blensdorf, who was a sculptor, who came also to Hutchinson, and they thought one of them was a German Nazi spy – he didn’t talk and so – and suddenly, Schwitters was in the workshop and this man was there too and he killed himself, committed suicide with a chainsaw. Now that is really a very nasty way to kill yourself. In two halves or God knows what, and this French poet, who was here, he says Schwitters’ whole aspect of life was changed by this experience. I’m not sure this is true, but in any case it’s not a very nice experience, with a chainsaw. Anyway, they arrived then, he arrived then in Hutchinson and I showed him around and then he talked about the many interesting faces and about the landscape and I said, ‘Look, he’s a Dadaist, you know, what’s going on?’ and then very soon he said – he was a very good business man as a matter of fact – he found very eminent people, Rudolf Olden for instance, and painted their portraits free of charge and did an exhibition, and of course all the minor mortals wanted to be painted by him as well. So, contrary to all other artists, who said, if they did your portrait, ‘Look try to give me something else’ or something like it, he had a range of charges – five pounds, head and shoulders and hands; four pounds, head and shoulders, arms but no hands and three pounds, head and shoulders only. My portrait is head and shoulders only, but three pounds at the time was an awful lot of money and five pounds was really like a couple of hundred pounds nowadays. I didn’t pay for mine, because I had an office in the camp administrative building and I let him have it occasionally over lunch, so that he could do some portraits there and one day I came back from lunch and on my desk, amongst all my papers, stood a naked man and he was – completely blue legs and a very red face where he was standing next to the electric fire and in the corner Schwitters was sitting painting him in red and in blue. And I said, ‘Look, Schwitters, that I really can’t have, you know. I don’t like people standing naked in the middle of all my papers’. So he said, ‘I’ll paint your portrait’. This way I got my portrait.