The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  CHAPTER 29

  ––

  Unseen Menace

  Of Malice’s four daughters, only Lola and Gisela stayed in Germany throughout the terror of the 1930s, and both showed their father’s tough, pugnacious spirit in fighting for the Jewish community. During the Weimar years, the four daughters with the Italianate names—Lola, Renate, Anita, Gisela—made an impressive transition from conventional female roles to political and social activism. The tremendous energy channeled into family and firm by Sara and Charlotte now burst out in a dozen new directions, as Warburg women experimented with new forms of freedom in the 1920s. The strict, puritanical upbringing of the Warburg daughters produced a devotion to good causes, but also a taste for the romantic, the taboo, and the unorthodox.

  The oldest and youngest daughters, Lola and Gisela, shared Max’s view that cutting and running from Germany was cowardice. The Third Reich hastened Lola’s metamorphosis from society hostess to ardent Zionist and activist. Frieda chided the exquisite, blue-eyed Lola as a vain hypochondriac, a “ ‘glamour girl,’ very conscious of her charm” in the Berlin salons of the 1920s. But with Hitler’s rise, Frieda said, “when [Lola] could no longer indulge in expensive cures, she took up social work in the Zionist field.”1 Lola took up social causes in the 1930s when she was still a magnetic figure of delicate beauty and alluring manner, with a deep theatrical voice. She and her industrialist husband, Rudolf Hahn, lived in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the Final Solution would be plotted years later. The turbulent times brought out a passionate, combative tenacity in Lola, a fighting spirit not unlike that of her father, whom she adored. She was a compound of gossamer beauty and iron will, Mona Lisa with a field marshal’s soul.

  As already mentioned, Lola, in marrying Rudo, had entered into a strange, triangular relationship with his brother, Kurt, the founder and headmaster of the Salem school. Rudo was a big, hearty outdoorsman who liked to hunt, garden, and sail in yachting regattas. “[Lola] said she always felt safe with Rudo,” said a friend.2 Where Rudo was earthy, Kurt was brilliantly mercurial, and Lola worshipped his mind. Many Warburgs thought that the bachelor Kurt was either asexual or a repressed homosexual, which, if so, probably enabled Lola to achieve great intimacy with him without arousing the jealousy of his brother.

  As occurred with Chaim Weizmann, Kurt slaked Lola’s thirst for intellectual stimulation. Aware of her lack of education, she avidly listened to Kurt spouting his pioneering theories of education and became his devoted pupil. As with all causes she advocated, Lola gave herself unreservedly to Kurt and catered to his personal needs. From early brain surgery, he suffered from an excruciating sensitivity to sunlight and wore thick, gogglelike glasses. Lola helped him to select the wide-brimmed hats that became his trademark and she kept the curtains drawn for him. (He even had Venetian blinds installed in his car.) Kurt fully reciprocated the fascination and always said that Lola would have been a wonderful Salem student.

  When Kurt and Prince Max of Baden started Salem on Lake Constance after World War I, they had envisioned it as a training ground for a new generation of German leaders, and many civil servants and aristocrats sent their children there. The school was housed in an old Cistercian monastery, donated by the prince, and it enforced a Spartan, disciplined style. As part of its mission, the school hoped to instill democratic principles in its students. Clearly, a crusader such as Kurt couldn’t coexist with Nazism, and when Hitler praised some SS men who murdered a young Communist in 1932, Kurt wrote to the Salem parents, informing them that Nazi and Salem principles were incompatible. If they disagreed, parents were encouraged to withdraw their children from the school. Kurt gambled everything on a matter of principle, and most Salem parents supported him.

  In March 1933, the Nazis arrested Kurt and forbid further contact between him and his students. Lola frantically cast about for ways to get him released. She even went to a fashionable Berlin analyst who had treated Rudolf Hess in the hope of learning something about that Nazi that might help. After vigorous protests from British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Kurt was released. A veteran anglophile—Salem was patterned after a British public school—he emigrated to Scotland, where he founded the Gordonstoun School. Among the boys following him was Philip Mountbatten, who became head boy at Gordonstoun. Both Prince Philip and Prince Charles would number among the Gordonstoun alumni, later providing Lola with a coveted link to the British royal family.

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  Lola Hahn-Warburg with her children, Benita and Oscar. (Courtesy of Lucie Kaye)

  Lola suffered a second misfortune in 1933. On a sweltering summer day, Rudo was about to take their children, Oscar, ten, and Benita, six, for a horseback ride when Oscar sagged mysteriously in the heat. It turned out he had polio, possibly contracted from the swampy land around the Hahns’ weekend house outside Berlin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t properly diagnosed for two weeks. When the doctors said that Oscar should be isolated and quarantined in a hospital, Lola insisted that he be treated by their Jewish doctor. When this proved impossible, she stayed at home with Oscar. She threw herself into this medical ordeal with awesome stamina and searched for the best medical advice. Max and Alice ordered a special bed from Switzerland that rose like a hospital bed. For six and a half weeks, Lola slept beside Oscar and cared for him. A woman who thrived in a crisis, she found extra reserves of energy. With characteristic faith in her own judgment, she administered morphine to Oscar in a way that she knew would relieve his pain without producing addiction. Lola would say she had given birth to Oscar twice.3

  The golden girl of the 1920s was now often tired and worn from helping her crippled child. Every night, she and Oscar would pray together. He was an active and high-spirited little boy, and this made it harder for him to accept his handicap. With almost fanatical perseverance, Lola tried to persuade him that he could live normally. Equipped with crutches and special shoes, Oscar slowly learned to walk. Even with the irons biting deep into his flesh, he moved about with tremendous determination. Despite many initial failures, Lola got him to play table tennis until he could beat other people and she encouraged him to develop his upper body muscles. When Rudo went shooting, Oscar went too, and while at Gordonstoun, he went sailing. Standing on crutches, Oscar was bar mitzvahed in July 1936 and was only frustrated that he couldn’t dance at the celebration.

  With Oscar, Lola exhibited superhuman bravery. One day, in a case of mistaken identity, the Gestapo appeared at the door and asked to search the house. In a flash, Lola said they could enter only on one condition. In one room, she explained, they would see a little boy on crutches. “I will tell him that you are all insurance men so as not to upset him.” When the Gestapo poked their heads into his room, Oscar greeted the “insurance men” and waved his crutches.4 Many Warburgs believe Lola became so obsessed with Oscar as to neglect her daughter, Benita. Some anecdotal evidence supports this. One day, Benita was bitten by a bee but at first said nothing. When the child was asked why she hadn’t spoken up sooner, she said she didn’t think anyone would care.5 Benita herself said she never felt neglected.6

  In the end, Lola’s devotion to Oscar curbed her affair with Chaim Weizmann, which persisted after Hitler came to power. Weizmann’s letters from the early 1930s are sprinkled with references to trysts with Lola in St. Moritz, Zurich, and Palestine. He didn’t seem to hide these assignations from his wife. Lola shared his passion for Palestine, even though it is hard to picture her opting for the rugged life there. She had the irresistible appeal of a gorgeous woman who enjoyed dedicating herself to visionary men. Weizmann anointed her with affectionate names, calling her Loli or dearest Lol.

  To this confidante, Weizmann unbuttoned his feelings in melancholic letters that revealed his secret worries. He bewailed his fatigue, depression, and disappointments. After moving to Palestine, he was dismayed by its gold rush atmosphere. “Some days I could cry from fatigue and heartache,” he told her in 1934.7 What he couldn’t say publicly as a Zionist leader he of
ten confided to Lola. “It seems to me that I’m the oldest Jew in the world, perhaps 2,000 years, with all the miseries and failing and hopelessness loaded on him.…”8 He didn’t mince words about non-Zionists in the Jewish Agency, including Felix, berating them for their superficiality and frivolity.

  Weizmann sympathized with Lola over Kurt Hahn’s arrest and her struggle with Oscar. “That you have to carry the burden of two and sometimes three families is unjust, but the world is construed absurdly,” he wrote.9 Oscar’s polio came at a critical juncture in their love affair. Before she died, Lola told friends that she and Weizmann had discussed divorcing their spouses and went off to Switzerland with such thoughts in mind. Then Oscar wrote to Lola, saying how much he missed her. She knew then she could never leave Rudo. The affair with Weizmann petered out, apparently, by the time Lola and Rudo fled to London in 1938.10

  Despite her enormous domestic burdens, Lola made a noteworthy contribution to Jewish welfare work in Nazi Germany along with her youngest sister, Gisi, who also lived in Berlin. A skillful organizer and fund-raiser, Lola copied her father’s methods. She worked closely with Wilfrid Israel, whose family owned the large, voguish Berlin department store of N. Israel. A dapper, discreet homosexual, Israel counted artists and intellectuals among his friends and served as the original for the Bernhard Landauer character in Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Goodbye to Berlin. During the Nazi years, he was Max Warburg’s secret emissary, assigned to sensitive missions to Britain. Like Max, he thought wealthy Jews had a special obligation to stay in Germany and resist the Nazis.

  In 1932, Wilfrid Israel talked to the poet and teacher, Recha Freier, about ways to counter the corrosive despair among Jewish youth. When the Nazis banned Jewish students from most universities, the need for action grew urgent. So Israel and Freier joined forces with Henrietta Szold, Lola, and others to create Youth Aliyah, which would train and send Jewish teenagers to Palestine. (Aliyah means “ascent” or “emigration” in Hebrew.) Besides instructing young Jews in crafts and agriculture, it also taught them Hebrew. Lola acted as liaison between the organization and other Jewish groups. Youth Aliyah would help thousands of teenagers resettle in Palestine by World War II. Some students were trained at Kösterberg in gardening, fishing, and seamanship.

  Starting in 1935, the skinny, blond, blue-eyed Gisi was a spark plug of the Youth Aliyah office in Berlin. For two years, she had worked at M. M. Warburg and then attended lectures at Oxford before Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah (the American Women’s Zionist Organization), recruited her for Palestine work. During a 1935 Palestine visit, she cabled home that she wanted to stay but Max cabled back: “Understand wish but beg you to come home.”11 Gisi obeyed. The Warburg answer to Joan of Arc, she was an inspirational speaker at fund-raisers and unselfishly devoted to Youth Aliyah. “I like to know that Hitler’s victims are being turned into democratic fighters for freedom,” she told one audience.12 Often she had the weighty task of selecting those applicants to be trained for Palestine.

  At one point, while her boss underwent an operation, Gisi temporarily served as director of Youth Aliyah in Berlin. It occurred just as the British drastically cut back on immigration certificates for Palestine. To maintain morale, Youth Aliyah sent out a circular to Jewish teenagers, urging them to study Hebrew in the meantime. During this period, Gisi was summoned to the dread Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. She knew that many people who had entered the building never emerged from its torture chambers. For thirty minutes, Gestapo interrogators searched for a blue file. When they found it, they began asking her, unexpectedly, to translate Hebrew words. It gradually dawned on Gisi that a Youth Aliyah clerk, by some grotesque mistake, had mailed a Nazi Gauleiter the literature urging Jewish teenagers to study Hebrew. The recipient took it as an offensive joke. Gisi patiently explained that it was an accident, with no insult intended. “If you engage in other such jokes,” she was told, “your outfit will be closed.”13 After her release, she went back to the Youth Aliyah office. Once the initial wave of terror passed, she began to contemplate the comic spectacle of a Nazi official breaking open the Youth Aliyah envelope. “I had a hysterical laughing fit in the office, thinking of that Gauleiter opening his mail, telling him to learn Hebrew.” She said she had never laughed so hard in her life.14

  It was typical of Gisi to maintain her good humor and equanimity in difficult moments. When Hitler decided to force Jews to adopt Jewish-sounding first names if they didn’t already have them, Gisi applauded the move in the Youth Aliyah office. “Hitler has saved us thousands of marks,” she said, because they could shorten cables to the last name alone and thus save money. Max was bewildered that his daughter could joke about such matters. “That is the strangest humor I ever heard,” he told her.15

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  Two of Max’s daughters, Renate and Anita, were spared much of the Third Reich. In the 1920s, Renate may have seemed the most colorful daughter, if a shade eccentric and naïvely susceptible to the exotic fads of the Weimar years. With her spunk and verve, she seemed a lot like Max. This versatile young woman studied Latin and Greek, wrote poetry, played the piano, became an expert in antique organs, and painted well enough to sell her work. In 1927, she married Dr. Richard Samson, son of the Warburg family lawyer and anything but your typical Jewish doctor. Through a Berlin guru, he had become an adherent of a mystic Indian sect that believed in vegetarianism and practiced sex only during full moons. Becoming involved in the cult too, Renate had to wear all white. About fifty devotees followed the guru’s dictates, even when he told them to dig for gold at a certain spot outside Berlin. After the Nazis came to power, Anita learned from Somerset Maugham’s niece that the maharajah of Indore was seeking a personal physician and local hospital director. Though sixty doctors had already been interviewed, Dr. Samson got the post and not only took Renate and their son, but brought a team of German physicians with him.

  With their son, Mattanja, the Samsons lived with the maharajah in fairytale magnificence, dwelling in a mansion staffed by thirteen servants and with a pet cobra in the garden. Chafing under lunar limits imposed upon her sex life, the red-blooded Renate fell in love with Walter Strauss, a doctor her husband recruited from Germany. She divorced Samson and married Strauss who was a fine doctor, very musical, and a good sportsman, but without Renate’s joie de vivre. He proved a disastrous, disloyal husband. They moved to Glasgow, had a spastic daughter, and later divorced. In her last years, Renate would marry an eminent archeologist, Sir William Calder, who would die within a year after their marriage.

  Anita, the third daughter, was pretty, spirited, and very sociable. After attending Salem, she studied violin with the first violinist of the Berlin Philharmonic. Then she turned to sculpture in 1928 after Max shipped her off to Florence to break up a love affair. In time, she also drew and designed textiles and ceramics. Dubious about the future of German Jews, she left for London in 1935 after Siegmund assured Max that he would guarantee her financial security. Soon after arriving in London, Anita had an expensive pearl necklace appraised and insured by Lloyd’s of London. By a freakish coincidence, it was stolen within days. Teams of suspicious insurance inspectors fanned out, convinced the theft had been staged. When they concluded that it was legitimate, Anita received enough money to support herself for two years.

  Anita imagined that she could act as a bridge between England and newly arrived refugees from Germany. Working with the Jewish Refugee Committee, she supervised exhibitions for refugee artists. In 1940, she married the non-Jewish Max Wolf, son of a Swiss mayor, and a courageous correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. For three years, he had worked underground in Germany, his cover story being that he was writing for a film magazine. Putting his life at risk, he sneaked out the minutes of the Reichstag trial in the bottom of a bag of fruit.

  The extremely colorful Malice daughters were much more like Max than Alice. Funny, vivacious, and enthusiastic, they were totally committed to social causes. Anita and
Renate had their mother’s artistic talents, but not her remote temperament. They came to terms with Alice only with difficulty. Lola found it hard to confess her resentment of the mother who had brutally tagged her “stupid Lola.” She would refer to her “beloved mother” but there was always something forced and labored about it. The distance from their mother certainly added to the daughters’ adoration of Max. Their identification with Father doubtless fed their emancipated outlook on life and their desire to seek fulfillment outside the home in unconventional ways.

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  Fritz Warburg and his twin sister, Louise Derenberg, were less nationalistic than their older brothers, and their families were consequently less sanguine about the plight of German Jewry. Louise’s son, Walter, was a patent lawyer who could no longer practice or publish articles. Desperate to leave in 1933, he told Felix he couldn’t imagine exposing children to such fanatic hatred.16 His sister, Ruth, was married to a leftish Dutch avant-garde artist, César Domela, who had befriended Mondrian, Klee, Kandinsky, and other artists now denigrated as degenerate by the Nazis. The Domelas left after the Reichstag burning in 1933 and would survive World War II in occupied Paris. Ruth’s sister, Gabriele, worked at a home for delinquent girls in Frankfurt and as a social worker for the Hamburg Jewish community before fleeing to England in 1936. The Derenberg children would harbor bitterness toward Max for encouraging their mother to stay in Germany. In the end, it was César Domela’s Dutch citizenship, not Max’s connections, that would rescue Louise.