The Queen's College Record 2023

KARL LEHMANN
My husband Karl Lehmann died in September 2022 at the
age of 101 and a half. Going through Karl’s effects, I found
a stack of his Oxford essays written between 1939 and
1942 and still held together by 1940s paper clips, now
badly rusted. Also preserved are the dreams he recorded
for a few months in 1942: during internment Karl had
developed an interest in the theories of Carl Jung inspired
by the late-night discussions of two psychiatrists who had their mattresses close
to his. Karl was classed as an enemy alien and here is how he described the start
of his internment: “Early on the 25 th of June 1940, a policeman called at Queen’s
College and told me to accompany him to Oxford police station. He gave me half an
hour to pack some clothes and a few books. At the station, other category C aliens
were assembling during the morning – about 150 in all – and at lunchtime we were
put onto coaches going to an unknown destination.” Released and back at Queen’s
early in 1941, he and his fellow students received a note from the Bursar alerting them
to the bedmaker crisis. Only two regular bedmakers were left and, because of this,
they should help “by tidying your rooms…putting your clothes away in cupboards
or drawers and, if you can, by making your beds.”
Obituaries
Karl was born in Cologne in 1921. In 1936, as conditions in Germany worsened,
his parents sent him to school in England – Leighton Park in Reading. The school
helped him to adapt quickly to a new language and new customs, and the bond
with LP lasted a lifetime with regular visits to view new facilities or discuss school
history with the archivist.
Karl made his career at the BBC Monitoring Service in Reading. This was set up
as a wartime operation where teams of linguists, many of them refugees, listened to
foreign broadcasts in order to extract useful information for the government. Karl’s
time at Monitoring covered World War Two and the subsequent cold war. Two of the
high points he used to talk about were the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the death
of Hitler. He was on duty in the evening of 1 May 1945 when German radio listeners
were told to stand by for an important announcement. Preceded by solemn music, the
announcement, when it came, said that Hitler was dead. As Karl recalled: “They said he
had fallen fighting Bolshevism. I felt total relief because Hitler had ruined my life. We were
the first people in Britain to hear the announcement and the entire building cheered.”
Karl retired as Editor of News and Publications in 1981 and subsequently devoted
himself to his two main hobbies – tennis and horseracing. He played tennis into his
nineties – doubles of course – while the horses led to regular outings to Cheltenham,
Ascot, Newbury. He was not unsuccessful. One of his triumphs was last year’s Grand
National in which he picked the winner – Noble Yeats – and backed it at 66 to 1.
Helga Lehmann
College Record 2023 | The Queen’s College 113