My Many Lives: A Memoir

By Sigrid Kendall

Sigrid Kendall, née Baroness Rüdt von Collenberg, was born in 1930 into the rarefied world of Central European aristocracy with all that title and wealth afforded—castles, estates, and hunting lodges throughout Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, idyllic playgrounds of nature, horseback riding, carriage rides, and nights at the opera.

Her childhood, however, coincided with the rise of Hitler, and by the time she was nine years old, her country was on the march toward Russia; one of her earlier family’s houses had been destroyed in the first Allied air raid; and her beloved father, an officer with the German cavalry, had been killed. Yet through a child’s eyes, Germany was home and Hitler, with his mesmerizing radio voice, promising “a thousand years of peace,” seemed like the rightful leader.

Post-war Germany brought to her teenage self a different story, a different life—one of shame for the atrocities her country committed, and one in which the complete devastation of her country was the great equalizer among the people. The impact that those post-war years had on Kendall would have a lasting effect on her worldview: to question authority; to earn what you get; and to look out not only for others, but also for yourself.

She carried this philosophy with her into a new life in America—immigrating at age twenty-three, newly wedded—and it kept her grounded, even as she fell in love for a second time and assumed the unlikely role of “corporate wife” upon marrying one of the most powerful corporate leaders in the United States. Her life suddenly became one filled with entertaining heads of state and traveling the world over. But for Kendall, her children would always come first and Germany would keep hold of her heart.

Narrated with candor and grace, My Many Lives is a deeply moving account of a remarkable life, fractured into so many lives with its unexpected turns, and the true importance of love, loyalty, and resilience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982245474

Sigrid Kendall

SIGRID BARONESS RÜDT VON COLLENBERG-KENDALL was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1930. After getting her Baccalaureate at the English Institute in Heidelberg, she studied law at Heidelberg University, before continuing with her doctorate in law and finance at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She was a partner of Gebr. Passmann GmBH and Managing Partner of Kendall-Verwaltungs GmBH, and has served on the Boards of Americans for the Arts, The East-West Institute, the Nature Conservancy of Wyoming, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, among others. My Many Lives is her first book.

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Copyright © 2020 Sigrid Kendall.

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Front cover: Sigrid Kendall on her 30th birthday, 1960

Back cover: Sigrid Kendall in Heidelberg, 1931

All photographs herein: courtesy of the author

Grateful acknowledgments:

Martin Bernhard, Das Ende unserer Hainstadter Linie, Rhein Neckar Zeitung: Buchen, 27 September 2011.

Martin Bernhard, Schloss ist moralische Verpflichtung, Rhein Neckar Zeitung: Buchen, 29 September 2011.

Klaus Narloch, photographer of Castle Hainstadt transfer, September 2011.

Liz Merkert, Studio M FotoDesign, Sigrid Kendall and her mother, 2003.

Wu Mingren, Frederick I Barbarossa: A Megalomaniac Roman Emperor on a Crusade for Power, Ancient Origins, https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/frederick-i-barbarossa-megalomaniac-roman-emperor-crusade-power-008283, 2 June 2017.

Map data ©2020 GeoBasis-DE/BKG (©2009), Google, Inst. Geogr. Nacional.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4548-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4547-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020905802

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/09/2020

CONTENTS

The Family

Map

Preface

I. My Many Lives

1 Thicker Than Water

2 Home Is Where the Heart Is

3 Noblesse Oblige

4 Fourteen Angels Watch Do Keep

5 War Über Alles

6 Marche Funèbre

7 Metamorphosen

8 My Deepest Sympathy and Admiration

9 The Shame of the Atrocities

10 Ämmerle’s Again

11 Love Is Love

12 Thinking about America

13 Still Waters Run Deep

14 Don Don

15 The Boy You Never Knew

16 Marriage...

17 And Raising Our Boys

18 The Past Revisited

19 The Corporate Wife

20 Other Famous People in Our Lives

21 From Russia with Love

22 The Boys Grow Up

23 Finding Myself

24 The Wind in the Sage Sounds Like Heaven

25 Gebrüder Passmann Gmbh

26 Severed Ties

27 Firstborn

28 Grief

29 Sons and Mothers

30 I Am Woman

31 That I Will Bear True Faith and Allegiance

Coda

II. My Photo Album

Acknowledgments

For my three sons and their children

It is my wish to introduce you to the child you never knew, the young woman you never met,

You are my joy, my power, my glory,

and my step into eternity.

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Preface

I was born in Germany, and when I was growing up, little did I know that, at age twenty-three, I would leave my beloved place of birth and move to the United States where I would spend the rest of my life. After more than sixty-five extraordinary years here, I owe this country a great debt of thanks. America is my home…but Germany has always been and will always be my heart.

How deep are those feelings?

For a long time, I wanted to write a book about those emotions, about my life—many lives—both there and here. I’ve tried to do so several times, but one thing or another got in the way. Some of my notes were in storage in Germany, not easily accessible, and audiotapes I recorded during a trip to Tibet—thirteen of them, hours of memories—were stolen at the Madrid Airport on my way back home. When that happened I went into a shock; it was as if somebody had excised my brain because I couldn’t remember anything. That was more than twenty-five years ago. But in these past few years, a couple of things happened that finally gave me the ability, not to mention the push I needed, to return to this project.

First, my good friend, Karl von der Heyden, wrote Surviving Berlin, a book about his life. I found it fascinating and illuminating; his story happened to cover a period of German history, which is also my own. Karl and I belong to the generation that is sometimes called Kriegskinder (children of war) and sometimes also called the clean up generation.

Meanwhile, my increasing concerns about whether or not there will be a peaceful future and how our deteriorating state of affairs will affect my sons and their families have been a great motivating force for me to complete this project once and for all.

I’ve seen this country—the dream destination of multitudes from around the world—break into warring factions. I think it started with the Vietnam War, which pitted the young generation that was asked to sacrifice against the older generation that asked it of them. This was followed by the blacks against the whites, then the poor against the rich.

So, today, I want my grandchildren to have this book to read so that they may be assured that national identity and adherence to specific tribal groups are obsolete in this now global world. My message to them is a simple one: you are responsible only to yourself, and to your family. You should live wherever you choose to live. Maybe my grandchildren are already of that opinion. For me it was and is a fundamental and huge step to let go of the strict belief I grew up with: that one’s life and responsibility is anchored in the Land, the actual earth, the woods, the fields. The care of the Land is more important than taking care of one’s self. Bodensässig is an expression I cannot translate, but it is the backbone of one’s education to honor and protect the Land.

Additionally, I believe that the family structure and morality are under attack and that our planet is in dire peril.

On top of all that, I see unsettling parallels between some of what President Trump is doing and what Hitler did in the early years of Nazi Germany, the attack on institutions and the gross erosion of civility and community. This comparison may sound far-fetched, but I’ve witnessed the extraordinary cost of unchecked authoritarianism. Though I survived the apocalyptic Germany of the 1930s and 1940s that took all I had believed in with it, I have no ready-made solutions for our own future. However, I do know what is important—love, family, friends, trust, and honesty. Above all, this book is my testament to that belief.

I

My Many Lives

1

Thicker Than Water

My name is Sigrid Irmgard Gertrud Baroness Rüdt von Collenberg-Hainstadt. To Americans though, I am Bim. When I was a little girl, my grandfather and his hunting buddies had started calling me Bimbi or Bimbele, after the fictional character, the deer known as Bambi.¹ Eventually, my brother shortened it and called me Bim, and when I came to America, he suggested I just take that name instead of Sigrid. But back in the old country, my grandfather always called me Möll or the Dutch version, Mölleken, and my great-grandmother, Ämmerle, called me Schnuddel-Duddel. I loved that.

I was born on August 7, 1930, in Ämmerle’s home—a beautiful villa on a hill in Heidelberg, Germany, in a room where the ceiling was painted with the four seasons and angels in the corners. My parents had been living with my great-grandmother at the time of my birth, because of my father’s work; he had completed law school and was an assessor for the government—a required step toward becoming a licensed attorney.

My birth was en-caul; that is to say, I emerged completely inside the amniotic sac. The Germans called such a birth a Glückshaube, a lucky caul. It is very unusual and can be anything but lucky—if the membrane isn’t ripped open immediately upon birth, the baby could suffocate. But in those days, it was considered being born en-caul a sign that the baby was destined for greatness—or at the very least, would never drown. That summer day, I was indeed lucky—and, I suppose, I have been lucky most of my life.

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On my father’s side, I come from a very old aristocratic family. In the Almanach de Gotha—a German directory of royalty and higher nobility—my family, the Rüdts, appears in the chapter on barons under Uradel, a genealogical designation for nobility, which can trace its roots back to the 14th century and earlier. The Rüdts are first mentioned in the year 680, but after that my family’s name seems to disappear for a few centuries.²

The area where my ancestors lived—and my relatives are living today—is the southern German state Baden (Baden-Württemberg since 1957). It was always rife with religious conflict, especially when Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation began in 1517. (Before that, all Christians were Catholics.) His emergence led to centuries of nothing but conflict, starvation, and brutality. There were no winners. There never are.

The 16th century Deutscher Bauernkrieg, the Peasants’ War, pitting the peasants against the aristocrats, was utterly dreadful with more than 100,000 peasants killed, as was the 17th century Thirty Years’ War, which ended in eight million casualties. It began as a religious conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics, but turned into a power-grabbing campaign.

My own forefathers followed Martin Luther with everything they had. They fought and suffered for their very strong Protestant beliefs. They declared war on the Catholic Church for 120 years and lost nearly all the lands leased from the Catholic Church. But for them, freedom of thought was absolutely crucial, and they passed down the weightiness of this right, from generation to generation.

In spite of such a prodigious family history, I never knew my paternal grandfather, Friedrich Otto Karl Baron Rüdt von Collenberg. He died when my father was just six years old. I was told he was a gifted musician and a Wagnerian heldentenor—an opera singer with a very powerful tenor voice. Additionally, he played four instruments. He had to perform under an assumed name because, as the son of a German aristocrat he would not have been allowed to perform any other way. I assume his own parents were not too thrilled with him—they had already kicked their daughter—his sister—out of the family for divorcing her husband; his father had a reputation to uphold being the President of Baden. (For me, my great-grandfather’s real claim to fame was his giving Jews the right to vote; in the early 1860s, Baden was one of the first German states to do so.)

As for my paternal grandmother, Sybille Baroness Rüdt von Collenberg (née von Nostiz), Oma, was not only formal, but also arrogant. She was incredibly well educated in literature, philosophy, and politics. Her family was from Weimar, the intellectual capital of Germany.

On Sunday mornings, precisely at eleven o’clock, whenever we were home in Hainstadt, my brother, Manfred, and I would have to visit her as she lived right next door—her house was part of my father’s family’s estate. The moment I saw her, I had to make a deep curtsy and kiss her hand. In return, she would barely brush her lips across my cheek—as opposed to the huge kiss to the forehead she would give my brother; he was always her favorite.

Oma was an expert gardener and sold her produce herself at the market. She would imperiously stand in the marketplace, together with her lady in waiting. Quite a figure she must have cut. However, her main passion was beekeeping. At one point she had fifty to sixty hives—she would get the Queens via the mail, sometimes from different countries worldwide. She even built a house in the park on the estate, solely for the purpose of housing her bees. It had a glassed-in observation room for visitors—although Manfred and I were usually the only ones to stop by. We loved watching her while she worked. She would be shrouded in black veils and smoking a pipe. I once saw her with seven bee stings on her face, just little red marks. She no longer swelled up; she had become completely immune to the bees’ venom.

Later, after the war began, she used to call Hitler an upstart because the war interfered with the established order of life, starting the rule of the mob! She was dangerously outspoken as far as Hitler and the Nazis were concerned.

Perhaps Oma was interesting to others, but I think she was a difficult lady. She was very opinionated, and strong-willed, and conscious of her aristocratic upbringing. I remember her saying, In our class we do not marry for love. We form alliances. That was a horror for my schoolgirl’s romantic notions. When I got older, Oma told me that she would help to arrange a marriage for me. Oma selected two possible candidates, two princes. I knew them both and they were dreadful.

She didn’t give up though. She, along with the rest of my family, wanted me to marry a cousin, five generations removed. We did like each other a lot, and when he proposed to me, he thought he was making it enticing by saying that all the monograms on the napkins and glasses wouldn’t have to be changed. Not very romantic, but funny. The whole proposal was actually sort of a family joke. He would have been horrified had I taken it seriously! Unlike the princes, he became a great friend; ours was and is a wonderful and lasting friendship.

Oma’s own family tree goes back to Charlemagne (742 - 814)—Charles the Great, the medieval Emperor and founder of the Holy Roman Empire—via one of his daughters. He was one of the greatest men in European history and said to have inspired leaders as varied as Napoleon and Hitler. And, it is said he was born en-caul too!

Dynastic ties on Oma’s side, however, aren’t limited to Charlemagne. We are related to German-born Friedrich I (Frederick) as well. Also called Barbarossa (which means ‘Red Beard’ in Italian), he was crowned the Holy Roman Emperor in 1155. According to the historian Wu Mingren:

Some people believe they were born for greatness but fall short and some go on to exceed all expectations. Frederick I Barbarossa falls into the second category. His ambition for power was limitless and it seems he believed his authority second only to God. Certainly, he thought the Pope his inferior, and, although a fearless supporter of the religious crusades of the Latin Church, he could not accept the authority of the Papacy over his own.

During his lifetime, Barbarossa was a popular ruler, and was well loved by his subjects. To future generations, he is often regarded to be one of the most prominent Holy Roman emperors during the Middle Ages. Amongst other things, Barbarossa is remembered for his challenges to papal authority in his empire, his administrative and organizational skills, his military campaigns in Europe, and his participation in the Crusades.³

I was a passionate reader of historical novels and I guess it was only natural that Barbarossa was one of my favorites. I read everything I could find about him. I used to tell my sons, You carry the blood of emperors in your veins. This prompted total disbelief on their behalf.

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Inasmuch as I found my paternal grandmother formidable, my maternal grandmother, Irmgard Caroline Passmann née Henning, or Münne as I called her, was fabulous. She was stately. She was gorgeous. A Victorian lady with auburn red hair and snowy white skin. Münne was the veritable Grand Dame, always put together, always dressed in the latest styles. She entertained constantly on a grand scale—and did so very successfully, surrounding herself with prominent musicians, theatre directors, and university professors. Yet, for all her social prowess, she devoted her life to our