The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Aby felt that these rituals brought him closer to the pagan side of ancient Greece. In one ritual, the Indians switched from sacred liturgy to obscene parody and Aby saw a prototype of the chorus in Greek tragedy. “Anyone acquainted with ancient tragedy will recognize in this the dual nature of the tragic chorus and the satyr play.”24 His study showed him how magic distanced people from objects of fear, thus forming an intermediate stage on the road to a rational understanding of natural events. Yet he knew that such magic represented no final triumph over primordial fears. As he said, “there can be no assurance that the sap which nourishes it is, even to-day, not secretly drawn from the roots of bloody sacrificial cult.”25

  Before returning to the East Coast, Aby visited Pasadena and San Francisco and recoiled at the repellent scientific civilization that had gone from magic to a purely logical, hence sterile, explanation of events. It was hard for him to readjust to the banality of everyday life. Back in Hamburg, he donated native artifacts to the Ethnological Museum and gave a lecture embellished with snapshots to the Photographic Society. Max later said that Aby’s trip to the American Southwest was his life’s decisive event, and Aby agreed. “Without the study of their primitive civilization I never would have been able to find a larger basis for the Psychology of the Renaissance.”26

  Did Aby’s Indian adventure harden his resolve to jettison his religious past, just as Western civilization had tried to transcend its pagan roots? As he came to regard Judaism as just another superstitious cult, he thought it cowardly and hypocritical to abide by its rituals. Both Aby’s glory and downfall lay in his extraordinary fidelity to principle, even if it caused pain to others. Soon after returning to Hamburg in 1897, he finally summoned the courage to propose to Mary Hertz. It was the most difficult decision of his life.

  Aside from religion, Mary was an ideal match. Her father was a patrician Hamburg shipper and senator and socially superior to the Warburgs; her mother came from the aristocratic Gossler family. A beautiful young woman with a round face, pale blond hair, and deep, gentle eyes, Mary looked very fetching in the boater hats and billowing sleeves of the Gay Nineties. She was a gifted painter and sculptress and as scornful of frauds and stuffed shirts as Aby. “When anyone tries to kiss my hand,” she once said, “I get chills down my spine.”27

  Even in the hypercritical Warburg family, Mary would have no real detractors. As her son said, she had “the purest heart” he had ever known.28 Only the saintly, rather innocent Mary could have put up with the stormy Aby and acted as a buffer to his chronic moods. Feeling intellectually inadequate beside him, she admired him greatly and offered him the rare gift of unconditional love. In later years, Aby paid tribute to Mary by calling her, “My wife, my best colleague, and my comrade.”29

  Objections to the marriage came mostly—but not exclusively—from the Warburg side. Mary’s parents worried that Aby, still a gypsy scholar living off parental charity, lacked fixed career plans. The strong, loving Mary, who knew she was signing on for trouble, marched open-eyed into the marriage. On the eve of their engagement, Aby had a terrible panic attack, believing that their love had cooled. Already aware of his psychological instability, he shrank from inflicting his manic-depressive moods upon her. Mary brought him gently along with eloquent, faintly ironic reassurance: “If I want to step, with open eyes, into the trap of marrying a man whom I know will often torture me with his moods, that is my business, and none of his damn business.”30 She reminded him that despite his temporary depression, he was sound at bottom. Emotionally, Mary was deeper, purer, and more generous than Aby. In reply to her beautiful, personal letters, Aby would babble on about some Florentine fresco he had deciphered. If Aby had largeness of mind, Mary had equivalent largeness of soul.

  Aby knew that his parents, especially Moritz, would be horrified if he ever married outside the faith. As Aby told Mary’s family, Moritz had “in the sixty years of his life, against wind, weather, and passing currents, stood for the principle that Jews had their own ideals and shouldn’t give them up.”31 Moritz indeed reacted with terrible anguish and pleaded with Aby to reconsider. He even offered to double his allowance if he desisted! Then, surprisingly, Moritz produced a compromise plan. He would consent to the mixed marriage if the children were brought up Jewish and the boys were circumcised. Aby would submit to no such conditions or any abridgement of his freedom. Discussing the proposal with John Hertz, Aby said he couldn’t agree with Moritz that Jewish intellectual culture was superior to contemporary German culture.32 Even though his more pragmatic brothers argued that Moritz just wanted a sop for his conscience, Aby remained obstinate. In the end, Senator Hertz couldn’t consent to Moritz’s proposal either, and it was dropped. When the engagement was made official in July, the pain overwhelmed Charlotte and Moritz.

  Aby told his mother that Mary fit the pattern of ideal womanhood he had derived from Charlotte herself. Perhaps this helped reconcile Charlotte to the marriage. Taking a cure at Bad Homburg, she wrote to him saying that she had always had a large place in her heart for him—big enough for two children—and that Mary had now become her loving daughter. Moritz, however, was suffering unspeakably.33

  Aby wrote to his father, saying he was gnawed by remorse every second, but had to stick to his principles. He promised his father that he would never convert away from Judaism, but could offer no guarantee for the children.34 If hurtful, Aby’s attitude was also pioneering and courageous, especially since he depended upon his father’s largesse. Moritz sent Aby an elegiac reply, more in sorrow than in anger. “The thought that it was always the greatest joy for me to hold high the flag of noble Jewry and that I must see it, in time, at half mast from afar, is temporarily so overpowering that I can’t describe it.”35

  For a time, Aby wasn’t spoken of at the Alsterufer, as if he had ignobly died. In the end, Moritz and Charlotte accepted the match, but refused to attend the wedding of their apostate son. Out of respect for the Jewish community, Moritz asked that it not be held in Hamburg and it took place on October 8, 1897, at the suburban home of Mary’s parents. Max and Olga attended for the Warburgs, suggesting that Aby’s siblings had definite sympathy for his plight. In a conciliatory gesture, Moritz and Charlotte visited Mary and Aby on their honeymoon in Wiesbaden and then formally called on the Hertzes. Within a few weeks, Moritz had come around and was referring to Mary as his dear daughter. Indeed, her loving, patient attention to Aby for several decades would be prized by everyone in the Warburg family. Significantly, Aby and Mary installed themselves in Florence, not in Hamburg, and ended up staying there intermittently for the next five years. Like the Prodigal Son, Aby would always return home, but would never find it easy to stay for long or make his peace with its prosperous, mercantile culture.

  CHAPTER 6

  ––

  Magic Mountain

  As if to compensate the Warburgs for losing Felix to America, Paul and Nina set up house in Hamburg and stayed for seven years. They lived on a street called Grosse Fontenay near the Outer Alster Lake, a short walk from other family members. Their two children, James and Bettina, were born in Hamburg and had a bilingual, German-American upbringing, complete with English nanny and many transatlantic crossings. Though the most Spartan brother, Paul quickly catered to Nina’s wishes. When he bought a fine horse and carriage to take his crippled bride around town, Charlotte accused him of being showy. The seven years spent under her mother-in-law’s stern, cavilling eye must have been a trial for Nina, who was accustomed to being indulged.

  Moritz did reserve the right to veto decisions and offer advice, but Max and Paul, still in their twenties, ran the Hamburg bank after 1895. With his manly gusto and luminous, engaging eyes, Max was a natural leader with a gift of easy command. Each morning, perched on a high stool before a slanting Victorian desk, he pored over newspapers and letters and shared incoming mail with partners. Then he made the rounds with a buoyant step, chatting with employees and quizzing them. He wanted the information fast and st
raight and he once asked to have a single word engraved on his tombstone: “Simplificator.”1 Born to rule, Max dominated the ten o’clock partners’ meetings at the green baize table.

  Max had a talent for attracting clients, and entertained a steady parade of visitors—businessmen, politicians, foreign bankers—as he branched out into a wider world of society than the cautious Moritz thought wise for a Jew. In 1897, Max, thirty, became a commercial judge, beginning his remarkable rise in the Hamburg power structure. Prone to sudden, sometimes fanciful, brainstorms, he needed a restraining influence and found it in Paul’s prudence. If Paul idolized Max, he was also smarter and stubbornly asserted his judgment. Together, they would make M. M. Warburg & Co. the top private bank in Hamburg, a leader in acceptance credits, foreign exchange, and securities work.

  In a family bedeviled by mental illness and psychosomatic maladies, Max had colossal energy, confident humor, and a hardy constitution. He could skewer people with a phrase, faintly praising one mediocre diplomat by saying, “But he sits so well at the table.”2 He was quick witted and inventive. Once a distraught employee telephoned Max on his wedding day to report that the bride’s father, to block the event, had locked his daughter in the bathroom. Max telephoned the local fire department, which rescued the bride on a false alarm. He then informed the grateful young man that the one-hundred-mark fine for this abuse was his wedding gift.3

  Only once did Max’s robust metabolism falter. In 1896, he was exhausted from his early responsibility, and his doctors recommended a long sea voyage, which proved less than restorative. He journeyed to Capetown, contracted dysentery, lost forty pounds, and nearly died. In South Africa, he inspected tin mines and received a memorable audience with the queen of Swaziland. They sat on mattresses while the queen drank Max’s gift of German beer and whooped uproariously at his remarks. He was puzzled by her uncontrollable mirth until his interpreter admitted he had invented Max’s entire conversation.

  While his son was in Africa, Moritz bought a country house that would turn into the Warburgs’ ancestral home. Max and Paul had decided they would like to spend summers in the country. Often Max rode out on horseback to the fishing village of Blankenese, a charming place with dirt roads, houses clinging to the steep hillsides, and irregular lanes running down forested bluffs to the Elbe. This elevated land outside Hamburg provided spectacular views of the river and flat, distant orchards. One spot in Blankenese especially enchanted Max, a cool, shaded mountaintop glade of ancient forest and plunging ravines three hundred feet above the river. Moritz also fell in love with it, insisting that if the Warburgs ever got a summer house, it had to be there.

  ——

  Olga and Paid Kohn-Speyer strolling at the turn of the century.

  (Warburg family, Hamburg)

  The place was named Kösterberg, or Roster’s Mountain, after the Hamburg auctioneer, H. J. Köster, who had built a house there in 1796. It had passed through several incarnations, first as a popular inn for Hamburg day-trippers, then as a residence for a wool merchant, Semper, and a banker, Bromberg. When Bromberg offered it to Moritz for an exorbitant one million marks, Moritz laughed at him. Then, while Max was in Africa, a suddenly chastened Bromberg approached Moritz at the stock exchange and anxiously asked for a bid. Evidently, he had returned early from a business trip to discover his wife in a tryst at Kösterberg. He couldn’t bear the place a second longer and had to sell at once. Moritz paid just 240,000 marks, wiring Max in Madeira, “Kösterberg bought.”4

  With Felix in America and Paul destined to join him someday—Nina had only signed on for temporary duty in Hamburg—Moritz wanted a sprawling, comfortable place where the family could gather yearly. Kösterberg was a vast estate, with a coachhouse, stable, and gardens. One could wander for hours beneath its shady forest canopy in a magical stillness. In time, the children and twenty-one grandchildren of Moritz and Charlotte would assemble there each summer. For the Warburgs, Kösterberg would be their fortress, their shrine, their repository of memory.

  Moritz and Charlotte occupied the former inn, an old eighteenth-century thatched-roof house. (In the early days, strangers would suddenly drift in and order beers.) From the way the long, steep-roofed building sat poised on the hilltop, it suggested a boat stranded by receding floodwaters and was dubbed Noah’s Ark. Its balconies looked out on a broad, lovely bend in the Elbe, affording a view of ships steaming into Hamburg port. For all its magnificence, Kösterberg had a rough-hewn country grit. Because it had no lightning rods, the family had to sleep in blankets by the door during electrical storms. Tante Malchen’s room was so leaky that she sometimes sat under an umbrella in bed. To go downtown, the men took a jangling, yellow carriage to the train station, pulled along sleepily by a fat black mare named Lola.

  The Warburgs would all rotate through Noah’s Ark. When Moritz and Charlotte constructed a large white house below it, Paul and Nina took up residence in the shiplike structure. Then they added a colonial-style house down the hill, yielding the Ark to Max; after Max came brother Fritz, then Max’s son, Eric. It is the one house that has remained in Warburg hands for a century and has represented continuity for them.

  Perhaps Kösterberg encouraged Max to think of marriage. The most virile, dashing Warburg boy, he attracted many young ladies. He was no crusader in terms of sexual equality. Taking a self-knowledge quiz as a teenager, he was asked to list his favorite historical heroines. “As soon as a woman emerges in history,” he said, “I don’t like her.”5 One might have predicted Max would spend a lifetime philandering. Instead, he chose a young woman named Alice Magnus who faithfully served his royal splendor, and he repaid her with equal loyalty. As Frieda noted, “flirtatious Max, after he was married, never so much as took another woman out to lunch.”6

  Alice and Max became engaged in December 1898. Descended from the Altona Warburgs, Alice had grown up in Leipzig and Hamburg. Her mother, Lola—blond-haired, blue-eyed—was born in Odessa and served as a nurse in the Crimean War; her father, Hermann Magnus, was a furrier who died young. Lola and her nine children grew up as wards of the Altona Warburgs, receiving a monthly check from Pius Warburg. Alice’s bitter childhood made her tense, insecure, and status conscious. Her favorite brother and sister died of diphtheria, to which she nearly succumbed, and an elder sister raised them strictly.

  Alice was pretty and petite with thick wavy hair and a round, open face. She was very cultured. In her early twenties, she had lived in Vienna for three years with her relatives, the von Hornbostels. Aunt Helene was an opera singer and Alice got to know Brahms as a Sunday guest. She studied painting and drawing and savored Imperial Vienna. She developed such a talent for portraiture that in later years her superb rendering of Tante Malchen was praised by no less than Oskar Kokoschka on a Kösterberg visit.

  She suppressed her early traumas and seldom referred to them. This made her tough and stoical in her habits, frugal behind her aristocratic air. She was smart but very rigid, quite unlike the more free-wheeling Max, whom she always chided for eating too much and smoking too many cigars. Her childhood status as poor relation made her a slave of fashion, and she was preoccupied with having faultless taste in furniture, clothes, and floral arrangements. She needed spotless elegance, wall-to-wall refinement. The early brush with diphtheria also left behind a notable obsession with cleanliness.

  Max and Alice married after a three-month courtship and then honeymooned in Italy. In Warburg jargon, they took on the splendid composite name of “Malice,” just as Paul and Nina became “Panina” and Felix and Frieda “Friedaflix.” The success of the Malice match would mystify the Warburgs. Max was so charming and easygoing, Alice so stern and fastidious. The success probably derived from a perfect division of labor: Max ran the bank, Alice the household. He brought home the bread, she brought up the children and fed the guests. If the marriage was a bargain, each amply fulfilled the contract. In the early years, Alice had wit and laughter also and wasn’t the cool customer she later became. Her discipli
ned, iron nature would, in fact, see Max through many crises.

  Max married Alice just as he assumed responsibility in the larger community. He would be torn between his Jewish antecedents and the wider Christian sphere of politics and business he now entered. With more opportunities available to them, the Warburgs would feel more acutely the contradictory strains of being German and Jewish. As one historian said, “the Warburgs enjoyed a position in Hanseatic society markedly different from that of other members of the [Jewish] community. They were almost accepted as belonging to the ruling stratum of lawyers and merchants and had adapted the external circumstances of their life accordingly.”7

  For Max, Jewish leadership would be largely a matter of noblesse oblige. Alice never went to synagogue and used Yom Kippur to tidy up the linen closet. Only marginally more religious, Max attended synagogue on High Holy Days, but with a book secreted in his lap to pass the time during services. From respect for Moritz, Max and Alice kept a curious, dual household: a kosher one for Moritz’s visits, a nonkosher one for daily use. If Moritz dropped by for breakfast, the servant girl was instructed to whisk away the ham before he could spot it.

  Unlike the Bleichröders, Mendelssohns, and other august Jewish banking families, the Warburgs spurned titles or baptism, but still lived grandly. Max presided over so many charities that he was dubbed the “uncrowned King of Hamburg.” Alice, meanwhile, orchestrated an elaborate social whirl flashier than anything Moritz and Charlotte would have tolerated as decent. In 1907, Malice moved to a large town house on Neue Rabenstrasse, where they had black-tie family dinners every night. Socially ambitious, they threw masked balls and elegant dinners and Alice dramatically advanced Max’s career.