I didn't know Herbert Gutmann, my maternal grandfather. I'd have liked to very much. He died in 1942 having fled to England from Germany a few years before. He had been stripped of his considerable wealth, his home, his German citizenship, his identity. Even after he had left he was sent written demands by the Nazis for the "atonement of being Jewish". After escaping, his elder son was interned on the Isle of Man, his middle son fled to the USA and his daughter, my mother, lived with her parents in London, eking out a living. In spite of this his motto was "Money lost, nothing lost. Sense of humour lost, everything lost". He felt lucky, they had escaped.
I never thought about Herbert until I walked into the wreckage of his once-elegant house six years ago, an 80-roomed villa on the shores of the Jungfernsee Lake outside Potsdam, near Berlin. I sought out old pictures - Herbert and his wife, Daisy, Herbert playing golf, Herbert in a hat, a man with a handsome, rather heavy face and Daisy with her fine cheekbones, large blue eyes, well cut clothes. I found my grandmother's diaries and the gilt-edged visitors' books, which had somehow found their way to England.
No two people could be more different than my grandfather and me. He was the director of Dresdner Bank, founded by his father in the 19th century. He was a keen golfer and lavish socialite, throwing parties for 200 on a regular basis. He had a fabulous collection of art and antiques. I have zero interest in banking, wealth, golf, lavish parties or collecting art and antiques. He was a conservative, I am a socialist. He thought socialists of any description were out to destroy his world and all he stood for. He would have had nothing but contempt for someone I admire, his contemporary, the revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg, murdered in Berlin's Tiergarten in January 1919 by which time he was a senior figure in Dresdner Bank, founded by his father. Herbert had a coterie of influential friends - international royalty, politicians, bankers, business men, statesmen and aristocrats, people I'd avoid even if they came my way, which they don't. But as I discovered the injustices he had suffered, I felt an allegiance to this man I never knew and from whom I am so different.
According to my uncle's memoirs, one night in July 1931, Herbert returned home after a weekend of near catastrophic financial crisis for Germany, during which bankers, economists and politicians were closeted in crisis meetings. On his return my uncle recorded that Herbert said: "'There are Young Turk enemies within the bank and the government is looking for scapegoats to keep the wild men on the extreme political right at bay. They had to throw something to the wolves,' he commented." After that weekend he was forced to resign his directorship of the bank. For 74 years, the question of whether or not he was the victim of anti-semitism in backstabbing, boardroom politics remained unresolved.
An opportunity to confront this mystery arose in February last year when Dresdner Bank launched the publication of its eight-year, four-volume research into its Nazi past. I decided to address the half-dozen historians who had written the books, and their one hundred or more guests at a "symposium" to mark the occasion in the Eugen Gutmann Haus, named after my great-grandfather, near the Brandenburg Tor in Berlin - the head office of Dresdner Bank.
When my early-morning flight from Stansted was suddenly cancelled, it looked like the confrontation wouldn't happen. The only other plane that could get me to Germany in time went to an airport near Leipzig, a four-hour taxi ride from Berlin. I just made it.
The symposium took place in the well of a conical atrium with glass walls. The historians' voices boomed and vanished into the towering expanse above our heads. Sitting in the second row was Lili Collas Gutmann, now 87, Herbert's niece, whose mother Louise died in Auschwitz, her father Fritz, Herbert's brother, died in Theresenstadt. During their research, the historians discovered that the bank, already infamous for bankrolling the Nazis, had had a stake in a construction company that built some of the crematoria at Auschwitz.
After many speeches, there was a Q&A session. I said that I was there to represent my mother on behalf of her father, my grandfather. I explained that when I had asked the bank's archivist some years ago, why Herbert was forced to resign, I was told documents for the relevant years had "presumably" been pulped during the war when there was a paper shortage.
I said I found this difficult to believe. I questioned the official version of my grandfather's forced resignation - that as the bank had said, he was "naive" and made "careless comments". This is contradicted by other accounts. In one he comes out as an honest banker and a man of principle. I believe this version, not out of sentimentality but because the evidence for it is strong.
At the time I had begun to try to get to the truth, I had rung Professor Dieter Ziegler, one of the official bank historians. Ziegler said he knew little about my grandfather other than that he had been "playing poker" - implying that Herbert was a playboy and a risk-taker. His tone was offhand. I was offended on my grandfather's behalf.
"What is the truth about that weekend in July 1931?" I asked at the symposium, quoting my uncle's memoir - that his father felt he had been sacrificed to the wild men of the right.
Prof Ziegler, sitting on the podium with the other historians, told the audience that a document had been found, minutes of a meeting in September 1931 that made it clear that Herbert had been "sacrificed as a scapegoat" and that he had had to resign for "political reasons".
This little bombshell was delivered with no apology, no sense of the moment - flat. As if history shrugged its shoulders. Neither the historians nor the bank representatives spoke to me afterwards as they drank wine and ate canapes. They should have declared their intention to rehabilitate him. I felt angry, and close to this grandfather I never knew.
Why am I so fascinated by him, his life, the past? Perhaps because it was exotic and tragic, and I am attracted to the drama. Perhaps because finding out who went before, whose blood flows in your veins, gives you insights into yourself and as you get older and have less future ahead of you and more past behind, the past becomes more interesting. And so the archive, the paper trail he left behind, fascinates me. Tiny sepia-tinted snapshots of a man I never knew swinging a golf club, he and his wife and sons lying on their boat house deck in the sun laughing, a picture of them at the time of the bank crisis looking anxious, documents sent to him by the Nazis demanding money for the "atonement of being Jewish", a heartrending letter to the British authorities painstakingly typed by my mother, asking them to release his son from internment.
Had I known him, I wonder if we'd have fallen into furious disagreement. If we'd met while he was still a banker, a mover and a shaker, such a row would have been inevitable. Had we met after his loss and exile, I think he'd have laughed, cracked open a bottle of wine, sat back, lit a cigar, smiled. This, after all, was a man who lost everything and still managed to write to his son not long before he died, "I have had a wonderful, fulfilling life. You should always be happy and sing the song of life."