Aunt Ursula

1937 was the year of the World's Fair in Paris. The German and Russian pavilions were facing each other. Bourdelle's gilded sculptures were sending up fountains in front of the Palais de Chaillot. I was completely fascinated by the international pavilions, especially those of the French colonies, the Musée de l'homme, and Dufy's spectacular mural, The Electricity Fairy.

My Aunt Ursula, my father's only sister, came to Paris for the occasion. She was then a choreographer at the Berlin Opera, a well known artist and former student of Loïe Fuller and Mary Wigman. In 1923, Ernst Toch composed his Suite de danse, op. 30 for the dance class she was teaching at the Music Academy in Mannheim. The work was based on her dance poem titled "The Forest". She had always been interested in my drawings. She sometimes sent me pencils or a colouring book, and later a book on the engravings of Jacques Callot and inspirational poems with illustrations by Wilhelm Busch. Ursula, taking me to the soot-blackened Louvre, introduced me to the Impressionists. She particularly loved Sisley for his treatment of light. My father, meanwhile, preferred Les Invalides and the triumphant military art of Édouard Detaille! That visit to the Louvre I remember as a real occasion, because I did not see Aunt Ursula again. She died in the ruins of Berlin, carried off by tetanus.