The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Charlotte could be overbearing. Like Sara, she took pleasure in shaping people’s lives and was an inveterate matchmaker. She would bring together young couples for dinner, push them out together for a twilight stroll, then bolt the French windows behind them until Nature’s chemistry had achieved the desired effect. Charlotte demanded clockwork precision, even in charity. If a poor ward arrived late on Friday evening to receive alms, she grumbled impatiently, “Where is that Schlemihl then?”13 As a granddaughter remarked, Charlotte had “an outlook on mankind decided by no whims, disciplined, measuring each emotion. I remember no superlatives in her speech.”14 A tidy housekeeper, she kept the cupboards locked and chided children for sitting in the wrong place. “Don’t spoil the furniture,” she would say.15 Much of this rigidity must have stemmed, as with Sara, from thwarted creativity. Charlotte was a gifted woman who spoke several languages, wrote poetry, and published stories in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Indeed, Charlotte should have been the banker and Moritz the Hausfrau.

  The constant stress on achievement produced lively but driven children with a great deal of bottled-up tension. Fortunately, Charlotte hired a warm, redheaded governess named Franziska Jahns, who had grown up in a Hamburg orphanage. This non-Jewish woman raised the children, giving her charges the uncritical love they needed—a fact Charlotte tacitly acknowledged by her jealousy. Not only was Franziska adored by the children, but her ecumenical presence would foster tolerance for almost forty years. To recite prayers with the children, she even learned Hebrew.

  Moritz and Charlotte kept a kosher household, celebrated the Sabbath every Friday evening, and wouldn’t let the children carry books on Saturday. (They hired non-Jewish servants known as “Sabbath boys” to perform this sin.) Moritz, who went to synagogue more than Charlotte, insisted that the children abide by Jewish custom. The boys hated the two dry pedants who taught them Hebrew and wouldn’t accompany their father to the stale, airless synagogue in a small Mittelweg room. As children of the new German Empire, they found Moritz’s religiosity old-fashioned and sometimes laughable. He was the last Warburg bathed in a Judaic atmosphere and they teased him with extraordinary irreverence—their way of coping with a father who seemed weak and chained to obsolete Jewish taboos. Moritz still carried pre-emancipation Germany, with all its outmoded prohibitions, in his head. Perhaps he succeeded more with his daughters. When Louise first ate ham, she was sure the skies would rebuke her with a clap of admonitory thunder.

  Eventually, the five sons would jettison most Jewish customs. But if the Warburg sons lost much of their ancestral belief system, they would remain traditional and conscientious in discharging Jewish community duties. In this generation, Jewish identity wouldn’t disappear but would be transformed into a Jewish-based philanthropy devoid of real spiritual content.

  For all the stress on duty, Mittelweg 17 was never somber. The sociable Charlotte and Moritz were called “the couple that can’t sit still” and constantly entertained people.16 The children were also in perpetual motion. In the garden they had model trains, surrounded by a little cement wall. For special occasions, they put on amateur theatricals or recited sonnets. They had their own rowboat (named after Charlotte) for Alster Lake outings and abundantly possessed the Warburgian passion for music. The three boys formed a trio, with Paul on cello, Felix on violin, and Max on piano. Felix had a fine voice and would doggedly tramp through the snow for forty minutes to take violin lessons, foreshadowing his later involvement with the opera world.

  A series of events in the 1870s introduced a touch of dread into this happy, self-assured family. In 1873, Aby, age six, contracted typhoid fever and was confined to bed. High-strung and imaginative, Aby already alternated between uproarious high spirits and fathomless gloom. As he lay in a fevered state, his mind swarmed with demonic images from an illustrated edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale—precocious matter indeed for this bookish little boy. So delicate was his condition that doctors said nothing should disturb his equanimity. This gave Aby the chance to indulge his temper, which he brazenly used to manipulate others. Charlotte favored Aby, but she had already learned to fear his towering rages and impulses, and only Franziska Jahns could deal with him in these unreasonable moments.

  Hardly had Aby recovered than another trauma followed. In 1875, Charlotte and her family took a cure at the Austrian resort of Bad Ischl. One day, while they visited a scenic mountain, Charlotte grew so listless that she had to be carried to the top in a stretcher. She developed a near-fatal case of typhus and was put to bed for an extended period. A Viennese doctor named Dr. Breuer, who attended the royal family, came to supervise Charlotte. Three times he nearly gave up hope. The nearby church had to curtail its bell-ringing to calm her nerves. All the while, nuns in strange hooded costumes paced the sick room. Charlotte’s father came from Frankfurt to lead the children in Hebrew prayer, then treated them to forbidden sausages at a grocery shop. During the months that Charlotte was an invalid, the phobic, hypersensitive Aby found escape at the local library and disappeared into escapist tales of the American Indians. Never again would the world seem quite so safe or solid to him. Later, he often spoke of this childhood nightmare that had alerted him to the central fear of death and the unknown in all human societies.

  For Charlotte, illness spread a shadow over her personality, dimming her humor and making her serious side more pronounced. She had lost her wonderful thick hair, which must have been painful for this plain little woman. The sickness also seemed to create a new distance with the solicitous Moritz, who confined serious discussions with Charlotte to late at night in bed.

  Then another childbirth added to Charlotte’s strain. The year was 1879. According to one version, after the delivery of a girl, Louise, she moaned, “Oh, so much pain for so little,” only to have the doctor retort, “Don’t worry, there’s another one coming.”17 When Charlotte protested, “No thank you, I won’t have another child,” the doctor informed her, “You should have thought about that some time ago.”18 Then out popped a funny, puny twin brother, Fritz, who didn’t resemble Louise at all and seemed a comical afterthought. Both twins had health problems and were constantly weighed by wet nurses. This agonizing double birth on top of the typhus drained Charlotte of her vivacity, and it never returned. Her grandchildren would remember her as a sober, humorless woman who gave them umbrellas and other practical gifts for presents. They never knew the lively young lady from Frankfurt.

  The Mittelweg Warburg children were very unalike, yet they complemented each other so well that they collectively contained almost every conceivable talent and trait. Bound by an almost mystical sense of their destiny—what Jewish children had ever had such big dreams?—they grandly saw themselves reflected in the seven stars of the Big Dipper. When separated by travel, they gazed at the constellation and imagined that they could transmit secret messages to each other through the galaxy. Felix later used the Big Dipper as a personal emblem on gifts.

  As the oldest, most brilliant, and most volatile child, Aby was the natural leader. He was already egotistical. As soon as the twins were born, he resented that he had to cede his billiard room to these intruders. For the rest of his life, he would mesmerize his siblings even as he exasperated them with his belligerent and insatiable demands. As a student, he was surpassed only by the third son, Paul, who was as quiet, sensitive, and self-effacing as Aby was flamboyant. Aby and Paul had Charlotte’s focused ambition. The second and fourth sons, Max and Felix, inherited Moritz’s charming, lighthearted, flirtatious manner. Olga was pretty, musical, and artistic and uniformly adored by all the brothers.

  No visitor to the Mittelweg house would have guessed that the ingratiating but lackadaisical Max would someday head the bank and become a leader of the Jewish community in Germany. As the eldest son and a quicksilver wit, Aby was entitled to become the bank’s senior partner. But he was already a voracious reader and disinclined to enter banking. His typhoid fever had caused Aby to miss a yea
r in school, and for a time he attended the same grade as Max. One day, Aby, age thirteen, said to Max, age twelve, that he would renounce his bank partnership to Max if he would promise, in return, to buy him books for the rest of his life. Beneath the bantering tone, the conversation was deadly serious and Max consented after only a brief pause for reflection. “I told myself that when I was in the business I could, after all, always find the money to pay for the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing and perhaps also Klopstock, and so, unsuspecting, I gave him what I must now admit was a very large blank cheque.”19 They sealed the deal with a handshake. Later, Max said it was the only blank check he ever issued, and he had given it to one of the twentieth century’s most passionate and incorrigible bibliophiles.

  Max’s partner in the bank would turn out to be the ugly, goggle-eyed little Fritz, who would always look like some strange foundling abandoned on the Warburg doorstep. He was mostly ignored by his four dashing older brothers. But his twin sister, Louise, retained a warm, motherly feeling toward him. Fritz was such a delicate child that on walks with Franziska Jahns, Louise would carry Fritz’s coat. Charlotte never had much time for this often mischievous son, telling the other four, “Go see what Fritz is doing and tell him to stop it.”20

  One might note here, in passing, the extraordinary catalogue of psychosomatic ailments suffered by the Warburg children, from Paul’s ulcers to Fritz’s ear, nose, and throat problems. The strict upbringing and drive for success took their toll.

  In vying with Théophilie, Charlotte wisely shifted the arena of competition from their husbands, where she could never win, to their sons, where she could never lose. The soft, indolent Moritz had fathered five prodigious sons and two sensitive daughters, while the aggressive, dynamic Siegmund brought forth two delicate, sickly boys and five strong daughters. His older son, Aby S. (not to be confused with Sara’s husband or Moritz’s oldest boy, Aby M.), was born two months prematurely and weighed only three pounds. Théophilie created an ersatz incubator. As Aby’s sister recalled, Théophilie “wrapped him in cotton wool and made a small nestlike box for her tiny son on the warmest part of the stovepipe.”21 Because Aby S. lacked flexibility in his fingers, Théophilie had difficulty teaching him to write. Aby S. was handsome, but small, frail, and sickly. After boarding school in Karlsruhe, he apprenticed with Samuel Montagu in London and then returned to Hamburg to work in the family bank.

  The younger brother was the thin, nervous Georges. Tormented by headaches, he was hard to educate and stuttered badly. At one point, doctors recommended a high-calorie diet, but Georges lacked the appetite and grew more dejected. Although good-natured and warm-hearted, Georges was high-strung and often difficult. As his sister Elsa recalled, Georges “had a temper too and was so furious that he threatened [once] to jump out of the window and was about to do so had I not been there to prevent it.”22 As a poor student who excelled only in history, Georges was sent to an agricultural school because it was less likely to tax his nervous system.

  According to Théophilie’s descendants, Charlotte gloated over her hard-charging team of superior sons. As Théophilie’s granddaughter recalled, “In opposition to her own children who are very talented and whom she can’t praise enough, she ridicules her nieces and especially the weakness and sickliness of Aby and Georges.”23 Clearly, in the next generation, the power balance would tilt rather drastically to the biologically blessed Mittelweg Warburgs, which caused consternation in the Alsterufer household.

  While these children were growing up, Sara was still an unquestioned monarch who chaired many charities for the sick and poor. Even in her seventies, she fussed about her grooming and told Charlotte, “The older one gets the more importance one should attach to one’s outward appearance.”24 Every afternoon, attended by driver and footman, she rode with her favorite daughter, the homely, divorced Marianne, and assorted grandchildren by the lake. One granddaughter recalled how Sara always exhorted her to “Sit straight child”—which was no easy matter, since the child’s feet didn’t touch the ground.25 Sara’s caustic tongue was still a widely feared instrument. When a taciturn bachelor joined her during a long, speechless ride, Sara bent over and whispered to him in parting, “What we’ve talked about is just between us.”26

  Ever since the Samuel Zagury scandal, Marianne had remained the self-effacing daughter, afraid to upset her neurotic and demanding mother. When she developed pains in the early 1880s, she kept the information to herself. By the time she spoke up, her illness was mortal, and she died in December 1882. Sara had never stopped blaming herself for the disastrous marriage of almost thirty years before. Now her grief was boundless and guilt ridden. Everybody would remember Sara’s extraordinary dignity at this moment. That Friday evening, she refused to alter her weekly ritual or even refer to Marianne’s death while the Sabbath lasted; she had to discharge her sacred duty. Gathering up her strength, she lit the candles and sang the psalms in her lovely soprano voice. All day Saturday, nobody mentioned Marianne. As Max recalled, “Grandmother lived with her God.”27 When the sun set on Saturday, Sara broke down and again gave way to inconsolable grief.

  Like anything that she couldn’t control, Sara feared death. In 1884, age seventy-nine, she died abruptly one morning—of a heart attack by one account, of a stroke while buttoning a shoe by another. The Hamburg papers said they had never seen so many mourners at a funeral. From Frankfurt, Baron Rothschild sent a special courier to lay floral decorations on Sara’s casket. Afterward, Siegmund said Kaddish each morning in his synagogue at the Alsterufer. Refusing to disrupt his daily schedule, he wore his riding boots and spurs along with his prayer shawl—a fitting hybrid image of the German Jews in the early Empire. The second he was finished with his devotions, Siegmund flew out the door and went for his morning horseback ride.

  Siegmund’s robust constitution proved illusory. A few years after Sara’s death, only in his early fifties, he grew ill. He and Théophilie began making constant trips to consult medical specialists, spending a year in Torquay, England, because of its mild climate, then the following year in Nice. Siegmund pondered his own mortality with equanimity. “I need not fear death,” he said. “I have always obeyed the laws of the Jewish religion and when I die my children will have a safe future because my estate will be sufficient for all of them.”28 On May 13, 1889, he died of a heart attack at age fifty-four while staying at the Hotel Bellevue in Baden-Baden. He was buried in the eternal cemetery near Hamburg that he had helped to secure from Bismarck. The sturdy Théophilie would outlive Siegmund by sixteen years.

  So at age fifty-one, the phlegmatic Moritz suddenly and implausibly headed M. M. Warburg & Co., assisted by his son Max, twenty-two, and his nephew Aby S., twenty-five. The bank was still a fairly modest affair, with twenty-three employees working by oil lamps, eating out of a kosher kitchen, and haggling over access to just one telephone. Far from creating a crisis, Siegmund’s death would provide room for Moritz’s exceptional sons to exercise their manifold talents. They would eclipse their father and surpass everything the Warburgs had accomplished up until that time. Born about the same time as the German Reich, they seemed to share its restless vigor and blind optimism. The Mittelweg Warburgs also flourished at a transitional moment in economic history, as regional firms expanded into national companies and increasingly exported or produced overseas. They would rise along with the explosive growth of the new global economy, as imperial governments and industrial titans required large-scale financing that only the private bankers of the day could provide. From the outset, the sons of Moritz Warburg seemed to have been born under a favorable combination of stars. How could they not be deeply, even perilously, endowed with hope?

  Part two

  THE RISE OF THE MITTELWEG WARBURGS

  ——

  A strapping Max Warburg in the uniform of his Bavarian light cavalry regiment.

  (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

  CHAPTER 3

  ––

  Meschugge Max

/>   The Warburgs’ fate was always intertwined with that of Hamburg, and they soared in tandem during the reign of the bombastic Kaiser Wilhelm II. When the first Wilhelm died in March 1888, his successor, Frederick III, was already afflicted with terminal throat cancer. During a ghastly three-month reign, the voiceless kaiser sucked on soothing ice cubes and communicated by notes. After he died in June, Wilhelm II, the twenty-nine-year-old grandson of Queen Victoria, became emperor. With his left arm shriveled from a difficult birth, this swaggering young man couldn’t slice dinner meat and had trouble riding, a disability that likely fed his love of pomp and manly pursuits and produced a strong preference for the sea over land. In 1891, he declared, “our future is on the water,” and Germany obligingly mobilized to build a massive fleet of battleships, reversing the traditional Prussian stress on infantry.

  This was all extremely auspicious for seafaring Hamburg. In October 1888, in an early official act, Wilhelm II indicated his affections for the vibrant port when he laid the foundation stone for a new duty-free port in Hamburg, certifying the city’s entry into the German Customs Union. As Germany’s second biggest city, with more than half a million people, Hamburg was the gateway to the world. Its shippers, bankers, and brokers imported food while also spearheading a drive to conquer export markets. It was a marvelous decade for M. M. Warburg, which increasingly shared underwritings with the European banking aristocracy. It joined the Paris Rothschilds on a Dutch loan and Hambros of London on a Norwegian state loan.