“My mother was an upright, intelligent woman, with more education than the average of her generation. She was very much concerned that my sister Marianne and I should receive a good education. My mothers Czech was very good, although she was born and raised in Bavaria, and she spoke French with Aunt Martha when she did not want others to understand. She made sure that we had piano lessons, but she seldom played the grand piano, a wedding present from my grandfather Richard, out of concern that passersby might think that “this Jewess has nothing else to do than to play the piano in broad daylight.” She could imitate voices of people and of animals and knew by heart parodies of German classical poems and poems by the satirist Fritz Löhner about Jews who did not want to be known as Jews.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 5