The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Because the House of Mitsui, an ancient Japanese dynasty, had opened a Hamburg branch, family members periodically dropped in on the Warburgs. Once Baron Mitsui came to dinner and, as he rambled on about labor relations in Japanese, Max mischievously leaned over and whispered to Charlotte that the baron wanted to know if Max’s son, Eric, would marry his daughter.27 On another visit, Baron Mitsui and his partner, Takuma Dan, asked how the Warburgs kept peace in the family. They told Max and Carl Melchior about battles inside the Mitsui clan and asked how to stop them. Max replied that the Warburgs quarreled as much as any family. He and Melchior suggested that Mitsui divide its operations into separate banking, shipping, insurance, and export companies, each supervised by a different family member who then reported to a central firm. In this way, Max took credit for suggesting to the Japanese the zaibatsu or conglomerate structure that would dominate their economy. In gratitude, Mitsui sent Max a wax Japanese general in a casket.28

  At this point in Max’s career, one is struck by the influence of three older mentors: Ballin, Schiff, and Louis Fränkel, who was mentioned earlier. This last was a self-made man who started his career in a cigar factory office and ended up head of the Stockholms Handelsbank, the major rival of the Wallenbergs’ Stockholms Enskilda Bank. It was through Fränkel that M. M. Warburg raised loans in Germany for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, completing its emergence as a global financial power.

  Max brilliantly capitalized on opportunities, but also saw how much depended upon chance. He felt the full turbulence of his historic epoch and it gave him a certain saving modesty under the youthful swagger. He once advised a historian of the Warburg bank, “It should be shown—and I attach great value to this—how much the development of such a firm is governed by chance.… The description should be pervaded by a certain feeling of humility toward these forces.”29 The twilight of the Second Empire was Max’s golden time, ripe with promise and seemingly free of peril. He operated under the assumption that Jewish progress was secure and irreversible. Indeed, from the vantage point of Wilhelmine Germany, it was hard to imagine that chance would soon turn so ruthlessly capricious in meting out untold hardship to Germany and its Jews.

  CHAPTER 9

  ––

  Secret Furies

  Even as Max advised the kaiser, his older brother, Aby, remained a pariah in the Florentine exile he had occupied since his marriage to the non-Jewish Mary Hertz. Until 1904, he and Mary spent most of the year in Italy, returning to Hamburg for summers and once so that Aby could lecture on Leonardo da Vinci at the Kunsthalle. In Florence, Aby delivered speeches, studied the Renaissance, and participated in the German Art History Institute. Rejecting teaching offers at universities, he remained financially dependent upon his family. All the while, he had extended his talent for unraveling the mysterious symbolism of paintings by consulting arcane works, forgotten lore. He identified the figures on one Ghirlandajo fresco by examining contemporary coins and taxpayer rolls. Able to spot clues in the most unlikely places, he prized antiquarian books dismissed by others as heaps of worthless rubbish.

  The marriage that had caused inexpressible pain for Aby, Mary, and their families had yielded, in fact, little unalloyed pleasure. As Aby’s nephew noted, his “marriage to a charming and talented Christian patrician caused him deep and lasting grief.”1 Aby acknowledged the saintly virtues of the sweet, cheerful, self-sacrificing Mary whom he called, “My wife, my best colleague and comrade.”2 But their differences were deep and insurmountable. Where Aby was forever shut up with his books, Mary, a freer spirit, roamed through nature and painted en plein air. She especially loved to stand and sketch beautiful pastel landscapes in the heather around Hamburg. Each month, she drew upcoming events on a Kösterberg pillar and also created a marionette theater, with Alice as the resident costume designer.

  That Mary revered Aby was comically illustrated in March, 1903, when Max and Alice celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. They asked guests to produce skits of how family couples might appear twenty-five years later. Aby portrayed a bald, pot-bellied Max in Hamburg, talking to Paul in New York through a futuristic instrument that transmitted their voices and images. Then Malice played the future Mary and Aby. Mocking Aby’s deep pedantry, Max sat at a desk, drafting an essay on why the Medici had blue spots in their white socks; he found the answer, of course, in the Flemish influence. Meanwhile, Alice, as Mary, fluttered adoringly around him, cooing at whatever inanity he mouthed. In closing, Max said he must make his essay so dense and convoluted that nobody would ever understand it.3

  The main problem with the marriage lay in Aby’s extreme self-absorption and mental instability. Already during the Florentine years (1897–1904), he felt tormented by chronic fears. One female visitor to Florence left a vivid, harrowing picture of his early marriage. When the woman and her fiancé first arrived, Aby and Mary seemed happy and united by shared artistic purpose. Aby studied while Mary painted, drew, embroidered. Then the high-strung Aby worked himself into a state of nervous exhaustion and grew distraught. Mary read to him and took dictation and this cheered and tranquilized him for a time. Then he plunged into even deeper despondency. Finally, like some wandering, restless apparition, he approached his startled visitors and said that if he were institutionalized, he hoped they would care for Mary. Aby was then thirty-three. Already, his mind alternated between delirium and lucidity. As he once noted in his diary, “Two days out of the carnival of my life—one merry, then fever attack, inclination to day-dreaming.”4 After he snapped out of the depression, the visitors were amazed that he could step back and analyze his behavior so clinically. He told the couple he planned to check into a Swiss clinic that spring—perhaps Kreuzlingen, to which he was later confined.5 Among other things, he worried inconsolably about the damage he was doing to his young family.

  The three children—Marietta, Max Adolph, and Frede—were never baptized, but they were brought up Protestant and sometimes attended church. In one diary entry, Aby noted with dismay that Marietta was considered a Jewess in school despite her vigorous protests. While his parents were alive, Aby, in a rare religious compromise, took the children to their Passover Seder each year. To salve his conscience, Aby would substitute German nursery rhymes or doggerel lyrics for the customary Hebrew songs. Ironically, it was the Protestant Mary who was appalled at this sacrilege committed against Jewish ritual.

  ——

  Mary and Aby Warburg at the time of their controversial wedding, 1897.

  (Warburg Institute)

  For other Warburg children, Aby would be a magical little man who bubbled with jokes and dreamed up fabulous names for them. He would get down on his knees and enter their fantasy world. Sometimes, he could also be an angry authority figure who shook his cane at them for throwing stones at the chestnut trees. Aby’s children would mostly see this disciplinarian side, the tough, demanding father, and he set for them the same inflexible standards as for himself. If they did something well, he gave them a backhanded compliment. “In the realm of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”6 Prone to anxiety, he would stand fretfully by the window, flying into a tantrum if the children returned late from school. This compulsive man threw a fit if they wore the wrong color stockings. Mary wasn’t a meticulously neat person and Aby constantly berated her for being such a poor housekeeper.

  Immersed in his studies, Aby worked from morning to night and made time for the children only in passing. “While Aby is preparing his lectures,” Max said with pardonable exaggeration, “the children aren’t even allowed to pull the chain!”7 Luckily, Mary loved children and shielded them from her husband’s often mad and dictatorial whims. While Aby opposed Max Adolph’s desire to be an artist, Mary encouraged it. Aby’s thoughts were revolutionary, but his style would remain fiercely bourgeois.

  In 1904, Mary and Aby returned to Hamburg, partly so Aby could gain some critical detachment for his study of Flemish influence in Florentine art. Aby said he was a Jew by birth, a Hamburger in
his heart, a Florentine in spirit.8 If he found family tradition burdensome, he also identified with it and told historian Percy Schramm, “Between the Prussian nobility and us old Jewish families, there is an underground connection. We don’t live as we want, but as we should.”9 He was as proud of Hamburg’s democratic merchant culture as he was dismayed by its thoroughgoing provinciality. As he investigated relations between Florentine artists and their rich patrons, the milieu reminded him of his own upbringing. As his assistant Gertrud Bing wrote, “One can almost say that in his works on Florence, Warburg wrote his own Buddenbrooks.”10 Aby hoped the Warburgs would recreate the glory of Quattrocento merchants, such as Francesco Sassetti, whose last will and testament he studied.

  In his writings on art patrons, one can see Aby’s conflicted attitude toward his family. He faulted those vain bourgeois benefactors who wanted painters to glorify their wealth and reproduce their magnificent jewels and robes. For Aby, such realism led to a static art that smothered passion and prevented the artist from creating symbolic, distanced forms. As he said of a Ghirlandaio fresco of the Tornabuoni family: “This is the kind of art a Renaissance banker’s family likes, because they get a much better deal than do either religion or art.”11

  The practical reason behind Aby’s return to Hamburg was that his growing library needed a permanent setting. Books were now the sum and substance of his life. If he traveled for a few days, he carried a suitcase crammed with obscure books. Even at the university, he had purchased books in a systematic way that suggested something more than a rich boy’s hobby. As if on the family payroll, he asked his parents for a “raise.” By 1900, his collecting went far beyond anything strictly required by his work.

  That June, he broached the idea of a library to Max, shrewdly pitching it as a solid, blue-chip business investment: “I would not hesitate for a moment to enter my library as a financial asset in the accounts of the firm.” Later, he exhorted Max to support his collecting as a form of family advertising no less laudable than Warburg support of the local Talmud Torah School.12 In a favorite refrain, he would say that other rich families had their racing stables, while the Warburgs would have their library. Sensitive to the charge that capitalism was crassly destructive of German culture, Aby told Max, “we should demonstrate by our example that capitalism is also capable of intellectual achievements of a scope which would not be possible otherwise.”13

  In August 1901, Max and Aby vacationed together on the North Sea island of Helgoland, and Aby secured grudging assent for his library. When he asked Moritz the next year for money to buy two luxurious sets of books, Aby acknowledged that he was now preparing a library for posterity.14 Moderation was foreign to Aby’s passionate nature and the tempo of his collecting grew feverish. In 1903 alone he “increased his scholarly apparatus” by an astounding 516 books.15 This scale of acquisition made it impossible to be a gypsy scholar, and in 1904 Aby hired a librarian to catalogue the growing mountain of books. Aby’s brothers were apprehensive about bankrolling the library, and indeed it would be an oppressive and inescapable burden in their lives. By the time Aby and Mary moved into their first house on the Benediktstrasse, the books already covered a significant fraction of the living space, crowding out the inhabitants.

  Whatever Aby’s hopes for turning Hamburg into a model town for the rest of the Reich, it was still a cultural backwater. It had an art museum, three theaters, two large libraries, an opera, and a tradition of adult education. But most artists flocked to the rich imperial metropolis, Berlin, or the more avant-garde Munich, which was brimming with Jugendstil fervor, not to Hamburg. The Hanseatic City had no university, and its art museum lacked an outstanding collection of Old Masters.

  Aby felt trapped among the dilettantes. As a lonely private scholar, he was pigeonholed as a brilliant oddball by most people, but he had resolute confidence in his own importance and originality. As he told a friend in 1907, “One day or other I shall send you a specimen of my method, which, I dare say, is new and therefore, perhaps, not as far acknowledged as I could expect.”16 Far from being monkish, however, he threw himself enthusiastically into civic activities, giving lectures on Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Dürer that drew capacity crowds of more than four hundred people. He organized a meeting on folklore, joined the board of the Ethnological Museum, and became active in the historical society. A staunch supporter of contemporary artists, he fought in 1906 for Hugo Lederer’s controversial Bismarck monument, an enormous figure of stylized Viking solemnity that offended conventional local canons of realism.

  To enrich Hamburg culture, Aby spearheaded a movement to found a local university. The issue generated heated debate, for merchants feared it would breed subversion and challenge the prevailing business ethic; perhaps for that very reason progressives and social democrats endorsed it. Aby converted Max into a partisan of the plan, and they participated in the 1907 creation of the Wissenschaftliche Stiftung or Academic Foundation, a university forerunner. The foundation brought scholars to Hamburg, offered lectures, and tried to forge links between scholarship and business. Max hoped Hamburg shipping lines would send scholars around the world, armed with introductory letters, to enhance the city’s standing in world trade. The kaiser always opposed the university and associated the idea with Max.

  For all his familial dependence, the dyspeptic Aby remained the dominant older brother. He had a hypnotic hold over his brothers, who were proud but also somewhat frightened and awed by him. Max said Aby could have been a fine banker, a view Aby himself shared. (One should note that Aby’s library, with interminable bills and catalogues, was an elaborate business operation and that he used the same copybook method for letters as did M. M. Warburg & Co.) At least once weekly, he telephoned Max with a running commentary on events and frequently took a snooze on a sofa in Max’s office. With seemingly psychic powers, he knew just when a client had upset his brother and often had eerily exact presentiments about stock market crashes and bankruptcies. “I hear the wings of the bankruptcy vultures rustling,” he would inform Max.17

  Max saw Aby as a walking encyclopedia who could never commit his ideas to paper. For years, Aby kept a bronze snail on his desk—his heraldic animal. He would scribble numberless tidbits and pithy, inscrutable fragments and never threw anything away. Between 1888 and 1903, he jotted down four hundred aphorisms. Max tried to wean Aby from this perfectionist madness and get him to publish. “If more books were read,” Aby bridled, “then fewer would be written.”18 As a private scholar, he had the luxury of scoffing at those who had to rush into print prematurely. In his lifetime, he said, he cared only to be acknowledged by a small cluster of colleagues.

  Aby was fantastically sensitive to any pressures to rush. Once, Max asked if he could receive visitors on short notice and Aby retorted that if people wanted to hear him, they had to wait weeks for him to prepare. He fulminated, “I am not one for improvisations.”19 Because of his lofty standards and self-indulgence, Aby would publish only a small handful of short studies in his lifetime and no masterwork. Such was the force of these writings, however, not to mention his extraordinary personal magnetism and the library’s influence, that he left behind a cultural legacy wholly out of proportion to his skimpy corpus of published work.

  It seems unlikely that Aby could have held a steady job. He was capable of brilliant, fitful bursts of energy, but not of steady, sustained work. In 1905, he tried without success to secure a position as lecturer at the University of Bonn. The next year, Bonn reversed itself and offered him a lectureship along with a post at the German Art History Institute in Florence. Aby agonized over the offer and spent two years in fruitless wrangling with the university. In the end, when Bonn gave him one last chance to submit his application, Aby thundered that he didn’t want to be hurried. He remained a solitary scholar for life, complaining of the discrimination he suffered from the academic world, but also proudly defiant. As he told Max, “I am a scholarly private banker, whose credit is as good as that of
the Reichsbank.”20

  Aby’s physical and emotional health apparently deteriorated during this period. By 1905, he was suffering from diabetes and hay fever so debilitating that he had to cancel appointments during ragweed season. In 1907, he admitted to a physician that if people pressured him, he got nervous and couldn’t produce; only in solitude could he develop his insights. Aby now slept just one to five hours a night, and his worried Dr. Wulff nearly forbid him to write at all.21 The next month, Aby checked into a Rome hotel room, describing it as a surrogate sanatorium.22

  Everything he studied ended up as another thinly veiled installment of his own continuing spiritual autobiography. His inner torment gave him a special purchase on the secret, clashing furies of Western art, because he felt them swirling around within himself. A great admirer of Nietzsche, he saw suffering and pain beneath classical beauty, the irrational elements that lurked, in disguised form, in classical, medieval, and Renaissance art. Aby became an apostle of reason, not because he thought people behaved rationally—he himself belied that notion—but because he feared they didn’t. Yet in one fascinating letter of 1909 he showed some sympathy with the Dionysian side of life and even wondered whether Nietzsche’s madness could have been cured had he submitted to pagan impulses. “I always regret—you may laugh at me—that the practice of the ancient, orgiastic ecstasy has been lost to us: if N. had been able, each quarter year, to be able to rave in an orderly, mysterious fashion—perhaps he might have become healthy and lived to a ripe old age, full of children, as a peaceful old merchant and paterfamilias. But where is my imagination leading me?”23