A saga of Sievekings
Phil Baker explores an embarrassment of riches in our former editor’s ancestral story
From Hamburg To London
A Sieveking Family History Paul Sieveking
Privately published 2021
Hb, 200pp, £25 inc p&p from sieveking@forteantimes. com
The magnificent if notoriously snobbish novelist Anthony Powell was so obsessed by family trees and breeding that he even took a keen interest in the work of Professor Steve Jones, a snail geneticist. He’d have been fascinated by the present book, which inevitably makes you think of the natureversus-nurture debate as it follows the almost embarrassingly talented Sieveking family over 500 years or more; they are also of interest to readers of this magazine because they produced former editor Paul Sieveking himself, a seminal figure in the history of Fortean Times alongside founding editor Bob Rickard.
Georg Heinrich Sieveking, born in Hamburg in 1751, was a merchant, maths prodigy, polymath and Freemason who wrote a paean to freedom that was still used in anti-Nazi broadcasting in 1939. Karl Sieveking became “Ambassador Extraordinary to Brazil”, while Amalie Sieveking distinguished herself as a teacher and a pioneering cholera nurse, and Edward Sieveking, also medically inclined, became a doctor and in due course physician to the British royal family.
There seems to be nothing these Sievekings can’t do: Martinus Sieveking was noted both as a pianist and circus-style strong man, while Alejandro Sieveking was an eminent Chilean playwright, driven into exile during the Pinochet years, who returned to become vice-president of the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts.
One of the fascinations of the book is watching the family interact with history, with Gustav Sieveking at the Battle of Waterloo and Edward Sieveking (a different one) caught up in what is said to be the world’s first global financial crash, in 1857, after the paddle steamer the SS Central America sank with 10 tons of gold on board. Meanwhile Luise Sieveking was in Hamburg during the Napoleonic War, when the city was occupied by the French, and recorded in her journal that cats were a favourite dish of the soldiery, cooked in oil taken from street lamps.
Paul’s father Lance Sieveking was a wartime aviator, novelist, and early avant-garde radio producer for the BBC, and he has already been the subject of a biography by Paul (reviewed in
FT313:61-62).
Although Paul doesn’t emphasise it, this book brings home the tragedy of the First and Second World Wars, with its multitude of more than decent Germans, and in recent years Paul has been reunited with the German side of the family.
This is an exemplary model of a family history – even if Paul did have extraordinary material to work from, he’s done a terrific job with it, with 133 illustrations and an index.
What we want now, of course, is his own autobiography... ★★★★