The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  An exacting hostess, Alice kept a book in the kitchen that showed precisely what guests had eaten on previous visits, so they wouldn’t be subjected to repeat menus. She designed an opulent setting of blue and yellow carpets, mirrored doors, a marble dining room, and chrome banisters. Butlers with white gloves and silver buttons greeted guests. In a salon furnished with Louis XVI pieces, Alice held teas for the ladies and poured from an exquisite gold and silver samovar. In her realm, Alice was imperious and omnipotent and Max couldn’t touch her. Once, Albert Ballin, the shipping magnate, asked Malice’s five-year-old daughter, Lola, who had the last word at home. “Father usually sees her point,” was how Lola put it.8

  On Easter Sunday, 1900, Alice gave birth to a son, Eric. In Max’s quest for a second son, Alice then produced four daughters: Lola, Renate, Anita, and Gisela. After this last birth, Max cabled Friedaflix: “Alice has surprised the whole world and herself by producing another girl. Please begin to look for sons-in-law.”9 With comical symmetry Frieda and Felix had a daughter, followed by four sons.

  The children were prisoners of Alice’s immaculate settings. They couldn’t use the front entrance, for Alice feared they would leave fingerprints on the polished banisters. With her usual rigor, she selected their clothes. In general, they lived apart from their parents. They breakfasted alone, lunched with mother, and had supper with nanny. They were not allowed to enter the kitchen, talk with servants, or dine with their parents until age sixteen. Among many rules governing their confined, regimented lives, they couldn’t discuss food—this was impolite—and paid a fine into a box if they erred. Once when little Eric was asked for his birthday wish, he replied, “I would like this black vegetable again,” because he had never heard the word “caviar” openly pronounced.10 Believing water destroyed children’s appetites, Alice allowed them one small glass in the morning and one at night. These extremely thirsty children would recall their childhood as a sub-Saharan drought.

  No less than Betty Loeb, Alice packed her children full of costly lessons: gymnastics on Monday, violin on Thursday, French and English every day. These bankers’ children had to record in a book every penny they spent. Amid plenty, they felt like orphans trapped in a Dickens novel. Each morning, emerging from their dark gray bedrooms with iron bedsteads, they had to bring milk to their two grandmothers.

  Alice didn’t bolster the children’s confidence. She would tell them, “If people are nice to you, it’s only because of your father.”11 At night Max would come home with a thick stack of correspondence and briefly stop by to visit the children in the nursery. “Did you do your good deed today?” he would ask, then fall asleep on the sofa.12 These emotionally starved offspring received his love in small doses and lived for his fleeting visits or morning walks with them. Max could be a severe disciplinarian. When two of the children got poor grades, he sold off their beloved Swedish ponies. As a rule, however, he provided more affection than Alice, especially with his four adoring daughters.

  The Warburgs expertly stimulated their children to achievement yet remained abysmally ignorant of child psychology. Basic childhood anxieties were alien territory. Every day, Alice picked up Eric at the Heinrich Hertz Realgymnasium. One day, he complained that other boys teased him about his American plus fours—fashionable knickerbockers of the time. The stoic Alice was perplexed. “Why should the comments of the other children concern you?” she inquired.13 Eric was a delicate, blond boy, not terribly independent, and Malice did little to buck up his courage. He was drilled in the social graces and attended dance classes run by a man named Knoll who would appear as Knaack in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. At age nine, Eric wore white gloves and asked little girls to dance in French. “Madame,” he would say, “je me présente—mon nom est Eric Warburg.”14 As had happened with the children of Moritz and Charlotte, the nanny, Louise Kummerfeld, provided compensatory warmth to the orphaned children.

  The children received confusing messages about religion. At school, Eric enjoyed the morning hymns and readings, especially from the New Testament. When he was seven or eight, Max took him one day, not to school, but to a large ugly brick building. “You see, we are Jews, and we are on our way to the synagogue,” he told Eric en route. “The synagogue is for us what church is for the Christians.”15 The mystified Eric then entered a weird room full of men in shawls and skullcaps, swaying and mumbling indistinctly. He and Max stood behind Moritz and the chief rabbi as Eric tried to make sense of this buzzing, writhing congregation. He asked his father if these people were Arabs. Then, in a loud voice, he asked, “Do Jews really believe in Jesus Christ?”16 Max removed Eric before he could cause further embarrassment. He decided the time had come for religious instruction. Eric was bar mitvahed in Hamburg in 1913, and Jacob Schiff came for the ceremony. Predictably, Eric’s Jewish identity would always be rather vague and tentative.

  The daughter who suffered most from Alice’s parenting was the eldest, Lola. Small-boned and exquisite, she was Max’s favorite, which probably aroused strong jealousy in Alice, who liked to pin labels on the children. Her nickname for Lola became “dumme Lola”—“stupid Lola.”17 Lola wasn’t dumb, yet she spent her life trying to live down the stigmatizing name. Headstrong, she chafed under parental discipline and loathed having her hair curled nightly. Alice promised Lola this torment would end on her thirteenth birthday. But when Lola came downstairs on that day, with uncurled hair—before Alice had given permission—she was marched back upstairs and had them curled again. The other daughters received an adequate education. Renate and Gisela took their Abitur, while Anita attended the prestigious Salem school, but Lola had to make do with private tutors. The only books she received as a child were from shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who once gave her six volumes when she was sick.

  None of the children had much conception of their wealth. They were schooled in humility and told never to give the impression of being rich. Once asked at a birthday party whether she was Jewish, Gisela refused to answer. When Alice asked why, Gisi stammered confusedly, “You always told us not to boast.”18 The Warburg children ventured into worlds sealed off to other Jews and always feared tokenism. Eric, Anita, and Gisi played hockey at the same sports club and tried to enroll their cousin. Told that the club wouldn’t accept more Jews, they quit. Both in Hamburg and New York, the Warburgs were uniquely palatable to the Protestant elite, and this sometimes created an uncomfortable ambiguity about their place in the larger scheme of things.

  —

  The matchmaker for Max and Alice was apparently Max’s sister Olga. Shy, gentle, and slightly downcast, Olga had Paul’s sensitivity and looked like him. In photos of Olga as a teenager, she gazes into the camera, wan and pensive, with a doomed, far-off look. A gifted pianist, she was adored by all her brothers. “Olga was strikingly sensitive, intelligent, witty, and had already distinguished herself through her good works as a 17-year-old girl,” Max later wrote. “She was quite close to me later and finally became a confidante for the over-ambitious plans that I—especially after I returned from abroad—thoroughly discussed with her. I have met few women, who listened as well as Olga and with such intuitive female judgment.”19

  When Olga accompanied Paul to New York for Felix’s wedding, she fell in love with Nina’s brother, Jim Loeb. This passion would have tragic ramifications. The story would remain a dark family secret. As the nonconformist son of a banking dynasty, an aesthete devoted to art, archeology, and classical civilization, Jim found himself in the same situation as Aby Warburg but with a less accommodating family. After graduating from Harvard with Bernard Berenson in 1888, Jim wanted to accept an offer to teach at Harvard, work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and study Egyptology in Europe. But even though Jim had no interest in banking and couldn’t stand Jacob Schiff, Solomon Loeb insisted that he enter Kuhn, Loeb. Jim always assumed that Morti Schiff would inherit the firm’s leadership.

  Jim might have escaped Kuhn, Loeb if Solomon Loeb hadn’t been rebuffed by his older son, M
orris. As portrayed by Stephen Birmingham, Morris was an odd bird with a pathological tendency to hoard money. He stuffed thousand-dollar bills into his room’s wallpaper—a habit that didn’t augur especially well for a banking career. Morris also had phobias about mirrors and feared food poisoning. Although he became a distinguished chemistry professor at New York University, fate played a cruel prank on him. In 1912, he died of food poisoning, after eating a bad oyster at a chemical society convention. The fourth Loeb child, Guta, also led an unstable life. She married Isaac Newton Seligman, went through several nervous breakdowns, and spent much of her married life in sanatoriums.20 Their daughter married Samuel Lewisohn, thus giving the Warburgs business ties to the influential Seligman and Lewisohn families.

  As a young man, Jim Loeb had great charm and charisma. Handsome and heavyset, with a round, open face, he was funny and articulate, a fiery writer with fervent opinions. As a Kuhn, Loeb partner until 1901, he was so miserable he could scarcely function and his anguish aggravated his nervous ailments and severe depressions. He compensated by playing the cello and collecting Greek statues. In 1905, in his mother’s memory, Jim, Panina, and Frank Damrosch founded the Institute of Musical Art, which later merged with the Juilliard Foundation to become the Juilliard School of Music.

  The Loebs and Warburgs reacted vehemently against a match between Jim and Olga. It’s unclear why. Perhaps Moritz and Charlotte didn’t want to sacrifice a third child to New York. Perhaps they were disturbed by incipient signs of mental illness in Jim. Or maybe they suspected Jim would forego banking and they would have another expensive, acquisitive Aby on their hands. In her memoirs, Olga’s cousin, Elsa, suggests that Jim didn’t reciprocate Olga’s love.21 Family lore speculates that Olga and Jim were too closely related to marry—which isn’t entirely convincing since they were no more blood relations than Paul and Nina.

  One explanation is that Nina was profoundly alarmed by the proposed marriage. If Olga moved to New York, it became more likely that she and Paul would end up in Hamburg—a horrifying thought for her. The psychic repercussions went deeper, for Nina was infatuated with her brother, an adoration so intense that it struck people as unhealthy, even incestuous. Nina’s daughter noted, “So deep was the love of these two for each other that most of their friends rather expected that neither of them would marry, so long as they had each other.”22 Nina never hid her extreme affection for Jim and automatically found fault with the women in his life. When Paul and Nina named their first child Jim, Nina wrote her brother that Paul had given her “a little Jim to make up for the big Jim I left behind me.…” She ended the letter by saying that her brother’s beautiful head was “the pride of my life.…”23 Where did that leave Paul?

  Whatever the reasons for the stifled romance, it had extremely unfortunate consequences. The Warburgs encouraged Olga to marry Paul Kohn-Speyer, who had accompanied Paul around the world and headed the London firm of Brandeis, Goldschmidt, a major metal trading house. Olga acceded. Max knew the business advantages of such a match and later cited Paul Kohn-Speyer as the Hamburg bank’s most important family member next to Paul and Felix.24 After a Hamburg wedding in August 1898, Olga and her husband lived in a big corner house in Lennox Gardens in London. The following September they had their first child, Alfred.

  For a person of Olga’s pale delicacy, it is hard to imagine a less suitable husband than Paul Kohn-Speyer. Plain and balding with a little goatee and small round spectacles, he was cold, stern, humorless, and consumed by business. Born in Liverpool but educated in Frankfurt, he had left Germany to avoid military service. He tended to inspire more respect than affection in people. His fairness with friends was counterbalanced by a certain severity with his family. At work, he was a tyrant who brooked no opposition from his partner, Ernest Goldschmidt.

  If Olga was pure poetry, Paul was all prose. The marriage must have magnified Jim Loeb’s image to glowing, heroic proportions in Olga’s mind, and she grew desperately unhappy in London. She poured out her heart in letters to her younger sister, Louise, in which the dark, rainy London weather became symbolic of her oppressive misery. The marriage was irremediably poisoned when Olga and her husband visited Germany in 1902. Pregnant for the third time, Olga suggested they leave their firstborn, Alfred, at Kösterberg and travel to Frankfurt. Paul agreed reluctantly. While they were away, little Alfred died of a sudden stomach illness and Max had the sad duty of going to inform them of this horrifying event.

  Olga never recovered from the shock. To worsen matters, Paul Kohn-Speyer blamed her for the death. He would come home, march past her, then sullenly play with his model trains upstairs. After their fourth child, Edmund, was born in March 1904, Olga, exhausted from four births, slid into a deep postpartum depression. Paul Kohn-Speyer had little sensitivity to disturbed people.

  Olga’s close friend, Alice Hallgarten Franchetti, the daughter of a New York financier, came to tend her. Alice had been in love with both Paul and Max Warburg, but in the end she married a government official in Rome. Because her own mother had been mentally ill, Alice knew how to care for Olga and suggested that she consult a famous neurologist in Berne, Switzerland. In August 1904, they all went to see the doctor, staying at a luxurious hotel. The night before their appointment, Alice slept in one room with Olga, and Paul Kohn-Speyer stayed in an adjoining room—an arrangement that suggests the tense, uncertain state of their marriage.

  During the night, Olga grew suicidal and tried to jump from the window. She struggled with Alice and finally managed to overpower her friend and leap from their third-story window into the river below.

  A profound silence would surround Olga’s suicide, deepened by guilt and sadness. When Max and Alice had a second daughter that December, they named her Olga Renate or “Olga reborn.” The Warburgs felt they hadn’t done enough to help Olga and would always welcome her children at Kösterberg. The episode darkened Charlotte’s personality, so that her grandchildren would see only her somber sense of duty and not the joy that was eclipsed with Olga. It was all eerily analogous to Sara’s reaction to Marianne’s London misadventure with Samuel Zagury.

  Paul Kohn-Speyer wouldn’t talk about Olga or tell their three children what had happened, but he never went back to Lennox Gardens. Even the housekeeper was sworn to secrecy. For three years, Paul struggled to raise the children alone, before marrying Anna Leo-Wolf of Frankfurt, a cool, fashionable, rather standoffish woman. They had four more children. As we shall see, Olga’s suicide would have ramifications decades later, when it would greatly embitter a major business dispute among the Warburgs.

  Olga’s death must have weighed on Jim Loeb’s mind. With his parents’ death, he came into a fortune and no longer had to endure the purgatory of Kuhn, Loeb. Yet this didn’t free him. In 1905, he began treatment in a German sanatorium. As a student, Fritz Warburg, the youngest of the five brothers, had suffered from a hyperacid stomach and recuperated in the Binswanger Sanatorium in Jena. When Fritz steered Jim to Dr. Otto Binswanger, Jim didn’t actually stay in the institute, but rented a nearby villa. When his depression lifted, Jim wanted to return to the United States, but was still tormented by epilepsy. The family sent Fritz to persuade him to try a Dr. Kroepelin in Munich, who had a special dietary treatment for epilepsy. It proved successful and Jim sent Fritz a beautiful black pearl in appreciation. Fritz always had qualms about the wisdom of his mission, for he believed that Dr. Kroepelin’s cure had dulled Jim’s flashing intelligence and created a truncated man. As Fritz said, “his mind became blunted, so that he really only thought of eating and drinking. He was still very amiable, but the entire quick-witted man was no longer there.”25

  Jim became increasingly introspective and never returned to New York; he remained a German expatriate for life. Recovering from the epilepsy treatment, he was tended by a redheaded nurse named Marie Antonie “Toni” Hambüchen, a doctor’s widow. Unlike Olga, Jim found consolation for earlier romantic disappointments. In 1911, he moved to a vast, wooded estate c
alled Hochried in the Bavarian town of Murnau, where he and Toni led a strange, reclusive existence. As Fritz recalled, “She nursed James Loeb and he then married her, to the great horror of my sister-in-law Nina, who was simply jealous. She Idolized her brother. We always called them the Mutual Admiration Company. But she grinned and bore it.”26

  As a philanthropist and collector, Jim accomplished noteworthy deeds in his hermetic, self-imposed German exile. In 1910, he endowed the Loeb Classical Library, which during his lifetime produced 200 volumes of Greek and Latin literature in handy pocket editions, with English translations on the facing page. The next year, he financed the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich. An avid collector of Greek antiquities, he also set up a ground-floor museum in his Munich town house and presided over musical performances there, with the audience seated on furniture from Versailles. He was the only family member who reversed the one-way migration from Germany to America, and he became a steadfast German patriot.

  —

  It was typical of the easygoing Fritz Warburg that he fondly recalled his stay in the Binswanger clinic as a happy Interlude In which he gardened, puttered, and was spoiled rotten by nurses. He remained true to his motto, “One must suck honey from every blossom.”27 Although Fritz was always overshadowed by his four dazzling brothers, he savored life, treasuring small everyday transactions, the pleasures of a crowded tavern or café. His plodding pace gave him time to see and enjoy things that his busy, dynamic brothers missed. Earthy, warmhearted, and unpretentious, he evinced little of the snobbery of other Warburgs.

  A funny-looking, goggle-eyed boy, Fritz seemed set apart from birth. Even his twin sister, Louise, who didn’t resemble him, seemed stamped from another mold. Fritz’s comical appearance, which cried out for a cartoonist’s pen, only grew accentuated with time. He developed into a portly, lumbering gentleman with an unruly walrus mustache, protruding teeth, and eyes that bulged behind thick glasses. As torpid and sedentary as Max was brisk, Fritz was self-conscious about his appearance: Small children shrieked and fled in terror when they encountered him in a wood. Yet however painful these episodes must have been, he would throw back his head and laugh good-naturedly.