Dispute of Wagnerian Dimensions

CHOSSEWITZ, Germany —  This remote village, hidden on a back road near the German-Polish border, seems unremarkable on first view. But swarming beneath the tranquillity are the characters and doings of a historical thriller: land-grabbing Nazis; the century’s greatest Wagnerian tenor; Jews hiding, Anne Frank-style, in barns; bourgeois-baiting Communists; a fortune to be won or lost--all set in a fairy-tale forest.

Perhaps one day, Los Angeles novelist Ib Melchior will have a chance to churn it all into another book.

For the moment, though, he is too busy: He is one of the embattled principals in the Chossewitz story. Melchior--a successful movie and television director and the author of a dozen books--believes he is rightful owner of the most valuable property by far in Chossewitz: a three-story manor atop a hill overlooking a forested lake, with 340 woodland acres and about 30 working farms.

The acreage is especially valuable in a nation of 80 million people squeezed into a piece of Europe smaller than California.

His father, the world-renowned tenor Lauritz Melchior, bought the land before the Germans launched World War II. But the Nazis took it over in 1943. Secret Service chief Heinrich Himmler fancied it as a training camp for the Waffen SS, with the manor house as an officers’ mess.

After the war, East Germany’s new Communist regime seized the Chossewitz estate, turning it into a vacation home for national railroad workers. Today, all is in the firm grip of the government of reunited Germany, which has leased the Melchior retreat to an east German socialist-turned-entrepreneur who runs it as a country inn.

From his house in the Hollywood Hills, Ib Melchior has waged what he calls an agonizing long-distance battle with the German authorities, trying to regain the childhood idyll that was willed solely to him when his father died in 1973.

That his family has already spent 23 years on this project and is nowhere near any resolution strikes Melchior, now 78, as more than ample proof that the German government would rather perpetuate the wrongs of the Nazis than honor the will of one of the world’s most celebrated promoters of Germany’s musical heritage.

“Lauritz Melchior spent his entire life bringing German music and German culture to the world, and today the Germans repay him by refusing his wish that Chossewitz be returned to the Melchior heir,” he says. “And in the meantime, the German authorities collect rents on the Melchior property. Not a pfennig goes to the rightful owners.”

The issue--expropriated land and competing “rightful” owners--is the central source of the anxiety still dividing easterners from their compatriots in the west nearly six years after unification.

“The German law governing land claims is basically a good law. You can solve a lot of problems with it,” says Harald Rotter, head of the Interest Society for the Owners of Land in East Germany, a nonprofit group that tries to help people get back expropriated lands. “But there are some cases where, with this good law, you just don’t get a good result.”

Chossewitz may prove to be such a case. And if you multiply it by thousands, you get the essential story of eastern Germany since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. After communism collapsed, about 1.2 million claims were filed on 2.8 million tracts in the former East Germany: some by Jews whose family homes were stolen by the Nazis; some by “junkers,” as the Germans call the big, aristocratic landowners who fell victim to made-in-Moscow land reforms; still others by opponents of communism who fled the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was called.

Some parcels were subdivided, built upon or otherwise improved by East German householders who had no idea they might be squatting on someone’s ancestral home. While 1989 may have been the glorious year easterners burst through the Berlin Wall and won their freedom, come 1990, they began to see all the houses and gardens, farms and factories they had assumed were their own taken away by westerners with sharp elbows and court orders.

Some of the properties are burdened with as many as half a dozen claims. So far, sorting out this rat’s nest has taken a government staff of more than 5,000 people six years. And even today, only about 60% of the post-unification land claims have been resolved--the easy ones.

“These unsettled property questions are the main thing holding back development in the former East,” says Norbert Krause, the entrepreneur who leased the dilapidated Chossewitz estate, sank a daunting sum of borrowed money into repairs and now runs it as an inn.

He has set up a small display of Lauritz Melchior memorabilia and hung the walls of the manor house with photos and paintings of the tenor in theatrical costumes. He tries to promote the inn as a place where guests have a chance to spend a night in the great performer’s old bedroom.

And yet: “Today, I must confess that I deeply, deeply regret having invested in this house,” the new capitalist says, sitting in the sunny dining room of his venture.

“People always say: ‘Poor Ib Melchior! Expropriated by the Nazis, then by East Germany and now again by the Federal Republic. But the fact that I saved a house, created jobs, am promoting tourism in this area and have tried to honor the name of Lauritz Melchior--none of this seems to count.”

The Copenhagen-born Lauritz Melchior built his career in the period between the world wars--a golden age of musical performance, when a small group of Wagner specialists traveled in leisurely, pre-jet set style from Berlin to the German opera-mecca of Bayreuth, from Vienna to London’s Covent Garden and New York’s old Metropolitan Opera House.

Conductors gave these singers the freedom to vest their roles with an unprecedented passion and psychological insight. Many critics call Melchior the definitive heroic tenor of the 20th century, setting an enduring standard for all the great Wagnerian roles: Tristan, Siegfried, Siegmund, Parsifal, Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin.

But in 1931, Melchior withdrew from the German opera scene, disgusted with the artistic pretensions of the Nazis. Though not yet in power, they were strutting around Bayreuth and threatening to turn the music of his beloved Wagner to their own megalomaniacal ends.

He turned to far-flung Chossewitz, where a friend had told him there was a hunting ground on the market, leased the estate for a few years and then bought it. Villagers remember him today as a huge, flamboyant figure who went about in traditional Bavarian lederhosen, threw enormous hunting parties, flew the Danish flag and--as the Nazi persecution of the Jews intensified--hid about a dozen Jewish friends from the Gestapo in his outbuildings.

Because he was a Danish subject and a celebrity, Melchior had little fear of the Nazis, at least at first: At one point, the Gestapo came to arrest him and he just laughed, waved his diplomatic passport at them and--as they withdrew through the main gate--sicced his hunting dogs on them.

The Nazis were not long in taking their revenge: Although Melchior was a Lutheran, they saw to it that he was listed as a Jew in “Sigilla Veri,” a handbook that tried to “out” all German Jews and thereby ensure that no one did business with them. Joseph Goebbels’ Chamber of Culture also banned further distribution of his recordings, and the German labels complied, destroying their original wax impressions of the great voice. (Some original waxes still exist, however, in Denmark and other countries.)

In late August 1939, two days before Hitler lighted the fuse of World War II by invading Poland, Melchior got word from the Danish Embassy that he no longer was safe in Germany. He and his wife packed what they could in a few hours, closed up the house and caught the last ferry to Denmark, where Ib already was living.

The Melchiors later moved to the U.S., where Lauritz continued as the principal Wagnerian tenor at the Met until 1950. He also bought a house in Beverly Hills, on Mulholland Drive, and named it “The Viking.” Ib served as an intelligence agent in Europe during the war, then returned to America, where he went into the new business of television. He set about the writing and publication of 10 novels based on his wartime experiences. He wrote the 1964 sci-fi picture “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” and his directing credits include “The Perry Como Show.” He also married and had two sons.

Back in Germany after the Melchiors fled, Himmler had a sales contract for the Chossewitz estate drawn up, but Lauritz Melchior refused to sell, so the SS simply moved in. Later, the East German government confiscated Chossewitz. The Communists found Himmler’s document and assumed the sale had gone through; they routinely turned over all Nazi holdings to “the people,” and that’s how Chossewitz became a vacation playground for railroad workers.

And that was that--until Melchior died two days short of his 83rd birthday, in Santa Monica in 1973. Although he also had a daughter--Birthe, who stayed on in Denmark after the war--he named his son Ib as the sole heir to Chossewitz. Now Ib wants to get the place back.

East Germany wouldn’t budge, pointing to Himmler’s sales contract and arguing that the elder Melchior must have cut a deal with the SS chief.

Years went by. Then, in 1990, East Germany collapsed and was merged into the Federal Republic. Ib Melchior watched in excitement from his house in the Hollywood Hills. After all those years of dealing with dictators and Communists, he thought, now he would have the chance to negotiate with one of America’s bosom allies. Surely Chossewitz was as good as his, and real-estate types were saying the place was worth between $1 million and $6 million.

But what Melchior didn’t reckon on was the law’s apparent ability to trump justice. Melchior may want more than anything else to right an old Nazi wrong, but the German government has to weigh that wish against the pressing need to get its new eastern lands up and running after nearly 50 years of neglect. Inconsistent decisions on land claims, thousands of clouded titles--these would only thwart that end, dampening investor confidence.

And so the German government is basing its decisions on those 1.2 million claims not on purely moral arguments, like Melchior’s, or on the cultural contributions of the claimants, but on often-dry, technical criteria, drawn up when the unification treaty was drafted.

These can be enforced with breathtaking coldbloodedness. It is possible to find cases in which prewar landowners were thrown into concentration camps by the Nazis but their heirs are unable to get the family holdings back--simply because of the date when the lands were seized. Properties taken between 1945 and 1949--when the Soviet Union administered eastern Germany--are specifically excluded, for instance, much to the anguish of affected families.

“In Germany, we often say there is a difference between whether you have the law or whether you have justice,” says Rotter, the land-claims activist. “And in this area, the difference is particularly great.”

Melchior says it is his dream to improve the inn at Chossewitz, greatly expanding the display of his father’s professional effects and creating a cultural haven for opera lovers. “I’ve talked to all of the Wagner societies in the United States, and they say this would be great,” he says. “It would be a minor Bayreuth.”

But these visions send chills down the spine of innkeeper Krause, who is afraid there will be no place in such grand plans for him. “If I hadn’t taken over the house in 1991, another winter and it would have been ruined,” he says. “Water was coming in. Stupid old Krause!--repairs everything, and now it seems to be getting less and less secure.”

The bitterness in his voice contrasts oddly with the charm of his surroundings: the sunshine, the spring flowers in bloom, the contented tourists drinking coffee and eating cake, the song of a cuckoo echoing across the lake.

“I put a lot of work, a lot of money and also some of my heart into this house,” he says. “Through this, I can understand the Melchiors.”