The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  The Warburgs joined a tiny band of about fifty-five Jews who returned to Hamburg. Some of them were doctors and lawyers who couldn’t get professional licensing in exile.49 From 1955 to 1959 about six thousand Jews returned to Germany, mostly from Israel or Latin America, swelling the Jewish population to twenty-one thousand compared to a half million in 1933.50 Several hundred Iranian Jews settled in Hamburg, which had a thriving trade in Oriental rugs. The Warburg case was an extremely rare example of a prominent Jewish family returning voluntarily from an Anglo-Saxon country. Encountering the disapproval of the world Jewish community, returning Jews would often pretend that their return was temporary. Eager to exorcise the past, both West and East Germany welcomed this redemptive return flow of former Jewish citizens.

  Eric and his family moved into Noah’s Ark, the old eighteenth-century house at Kösterberg with the sloping roof, creaking floors, and Elbe vistas. With Paul’s house soon to be demolished and Max’s and Fritz’s villas being used by the German Red Cross, it was the one house left. Otherwise the gracious atmosphere of stately trees, rolling lawns, and rhododendron bushes remained intact. Eric’s childhood friend, Wolfgang Rittmeister, lived next door and they sailed again on the Baltic in the Kong Bele. (Wolfgang’s brother, John, a courageous psychiatrist, had been shot by Nazi thugs in 1943.) Kathi Schwärz, the farmer’s daughter who had protected the estate from Wehrmacht officers, again served Eric his morning orange juice and brought up the three Warburg children. She would die in Eric’s arms in 1968. Eric delighted in reviving his father’s customs—such as taking a different child for a walk each morning or placing a spoon over a glass when somebody repeated an oft-told tale.

  In searching to recapture the obliterated past, Eric introduced his three children to a world he had known as a boy. Like him, they took sailing lessons on the Alster Lake. In time, all three developed a dual German-American identity and felt comfortable in both countries. Nobody dared subject the Warburg children to anti-Semitic comments, although they had to contend with some painful, self-serving misconceptions about the 1930s that classmates had absorbed from their parents. Because Eric and Dorothea didn’t want the children always to feel apart as Jews, they celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas at Kösterberg. Earlier at Hunt Cottage, Alice had been mortified to see a Christmas tree standing in a side room.51

  Several things eased Eric’s transition back to German life. As a Jew eager to foster reconciliation, he was treated as a conquering hero and even subjected to a certain amount of sycophancy. Germany needed Jews willing to forgive, and not many Jews cared to oblige. Eric’s status, which had declined in New York, rose in Germany. Hamburg had never warmed to the Führer as much as other places and there was correspondingly less neo-Nazism lingering after the war. Kurt Sieveking—the lawyer who had bravely joined M. M. Warburg in 1936—became a postwar mayor, as did Max Brauer, who had bravely jumped from a window of Altona City Hall in 1933 and fled to America. Eric worked out a deal by which he gave the city the Roman Garden at the base of Kösterberg. In exchange he received ten lucrative permits to build houses on the hilltop and the sale of these permits enabled Eric to rebuild his depleted capital.

  Eric returned to Hamburg when former Nazi overlords were still in evidence. At parties, Eric would ignore the former Nazis or sidle away from them. With his bustling energy and Old World gallantry, he learned how to thread his way through this social mine field. Some former friends, ashamed of their behavior under Hitler, came to apologize and Eric generally forgave them. For a Jew in postwar Germany, acceptance could be as unsettling as rejection, for he never knew whether he was being used by a friendly German to cleanse a guilty conscience or even to cover up past crimes.

  Eric’s Viennese wife often found the situation far more unsettling. Not being from Hamburg, she couldn’t tell the good people from the bad and so was more suspicious than Eric. She remembered the Nazi period too vividly to fall into easy social intercourse and always bridled at the anti-American sentiment. At one party, a man tried to ingratiate himself and lapsed too quickly into the familiar “du” form. When he tried to intertwine their arms and drink a toast with her, Dorothea instinctively recoiled. “How do I know what you were doing during the war?” she asked. An uncomfortable hush silenced the room. The man then candidly confessed that he hadn’t been a hero during the Third Reich.52

  Eric and Dorothea felt that they had a full social life and enjoyed the company of German aristocrats who had found Hitler vulgar and boorish. But many Warburg relatives doubted the idyllic portrait they sketched, seeing Eric and Dorothea as socially isolated, while pretending all was fine. Among Warburgs in America, stories would circulate of Eric trying to climb into the upper ranks of Hamburg merchant society while being derided as “Eric Warburg, the Jew” behind his back. One senses that Eric acquired a psychological investment in the basic decency of many Germans, while some relatives had an equal investment in their view of Germans as incorrigibly evil. Eric worked hard to promote German-Jewish reconciliation and closer American-German ties. As treasurer of the American Council on Germany, he kept John McCloy posted on events and often spoke to him every week on the phone.

  Eric never missed a chance to remind Hamburg of the Warburg contribution. Most people didn’t know that a celebrated Warburg library had ever existed in Weimar Germany. On a gray, windy day in October 1958, Eric presented the Kunsthalle with a bust of Aby that Mary had sculpted after his death, based on photographs of his corpse. (Aby said he would only sit for a life-size equestrian statue.) In a therapeutic ceremony, a Hamburg senator, Dr. Hans Biermann-Ratjen, recalled attending a charity meeting at M. M. Warburg with Max in the 1930s while Brownshirts marched in the street below. He expressed gratitude for Eric’s healing gesture: “What we see here is no German self-abasement but a catharsis.”53

  Never observant Jews, Eric and Dorothea only attended synagogue on High Holy Days. They stood aloof from the rug-trading Iranians who now comprised the bulk of the local Jewish community and Eric’s remoteness caused grumbling. In 1958, he joined with Protestant and Catholic clergy to lay the ground for a new local synagogue on the twentieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. As chairman of Hamburg’s Jewish Hospital—with Fritz the honorary chairman—Eric revived the 120-year Warburg connection with the institution, heading a drive for a new facility. Nicknamed the Fox Terrier by his family, Eric was a dogged fund-raiser and didn’t hesitate to exploit his name. People often found it easier to give than to argue with Eric. He also contributed to the Institute for the History of German Jews and the Friends of the Hebrew University.54

  Eric had a low-profile style, an aversion to publicity. Having passed through the Third Reich, he didn’t wish to say anything that could be exploited by the malicious. In the early 1950s, he published an abbreviated and sanitized version of Max’s memoirs. The volume was cryptic about the Third Reich whereas during World War II Eric had exhorted his father, “you must be very detailed and specific from 1933 on.…”55 Eric steadfastly resisted the efforts of historians to write a book about the family, even though he gathered voluminous materials to that end. Having made the decision to return to Hamburg, he didn’t care to open the Pandora’s box of the past except where an important matter of principle was at stake.

  Outwardly, Eric was always reassuring about German-Jewish relations. When Jewish groups visited Germany, he would state authoritatively that anti-Semitism was extinct. In private he wasn’t nearly so sanguine. He often complained that German schoolchildren weren’t taught enough about the unattractive past and worried about the manic-depressive nature of German political culture, which he saw as prone to alternating euphoria and dejection. “We must see to it,” he said, “that we never again fall too low, but also that we don’t rise too high.”56

  Indeed, Eric was always apprehensive about extremism. He scanned the press for the slightest breath of anti-Semitism, then pounced on the offending editor. Already in the late 1940s, the Warburgs had dealt with a spate of newspaper s
tories and books dredging up the old “Sidney Warburg” canard that the Warburg family had bankrolled Hitler. According to American Jewish Committee documents, Ludendorff’s widow, Mathilde, was especially active in perpetuating this nonsense.57 A 1948 Swiss book called Spanish Summer said that Jimmy Warburg personally delivered the last payments to Hitler in February 1933. The author, Severin Reinhardt, conjured up another Elders of Zion Jewish conspiracy. He alleged that Kuhn, Loeb controlled J. P. Morgan & Company (which would have come as welcome news to Kuhn, Loeb) and that Jacob Schiff and Morgan partner Tom Lamont had financed the Bolshevik Revolution.58

  With the Sidney Warburg story, it was Eric who protested to the newspapers and obtained formal retractions. Jimmy contemplated a libel suit, then decided that publicity would only serve the neo-Nazi cause. Instead he privately brought the matter to the attention of American, British, and French authorities and wrote an affidavit reviewing the entire history of the Sidney Warburg hoax.59

  In the 1950s, Zionist groups largely lost interest in Germany but the American Jewish Committee did not. Before returning to Brinckmann, Wirtz in 1956, Eric had joined the AJC’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Once in Germany, he served as their media watchdog, surveying the press for signs of resurgent bias. In 1956, the German interior minister seized nine thousand copies of an anti-Semitic pamphlet called “The Bank Conspiracy of Jekyll Island” in which Paul was again chastised for creating the Fed to further Jewish power. Eric was heartened when Bonn dealt promptly with the matter.60

  But the neo-Nazi movement never entirely died out in Germany. In 1953, the British high commissioner arrested seven former Nazis—including Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann—for infiltrating conservative political parties in Germany. A report issued by American authorities in Germany that year stated, “The majority of the Germans believe that there was more good than evil in National Socialism.”61 Three years later, the Nazi party was outlawed along with the Communists, but in the late 1950s, vandals again scrawled swastikas on German synagogue walls.

  If anything, Eric was overly sensitive to references to Jewish wealth or power. He protested a 1957 Der Spiegel article which mentioned Jews involved in developing the hydrogen bomb. The article made no special point of their religion. While admitting the article lacked malice, Eric still warned the AJC, “The Hitlers of tomorrow, however, can only too easily interpret it again as ‘the most sinister influence.’ ”62 That same year, Eric grew indignant about a profile of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer in Der Spiegel which described the monopoly power of the South African diamond mogul. Again, Eric told the AJC that the article wasn’t overtly anti-Semitic. “However, by a very slight twist all this is excellent material for a future ‘Stürmer.’ …”63 In 1959, Stern published a letter about financial sources of the Nazi movement, citing the Sidney Warburg fabrication. In a stinging letter to the editor, Eric warned that the book had been the subject of legal proceedings and could be again.64 Behind a soothing facade of German-Jewish amity and reconciliation, he maintained eternal vigilance on the issue. Eric was never quite as certain that the volcano was extinct as he publicly professed. There was always a little quiver of doubt.

  ——

  Nina, Alice, and Frieda Warburg at the Fishrock camp in the Adirondacks. (Courtesy of Katharine Weber)

  CHAPTER 41

  ––

  Museum Pieces

  In 1941, Frieda Schiff Warburg had a heart attack, which was delicately styled a “breakdown” by the family. It began a slow deterioration of her health. Despite frequent nausea, she soldiered on, grateful that she and Felix had traveled in better days. When first widowed, she lived at 1109 Fifth Avenue with refugee relatives: first Ingrid, then Max and Alice and Gisela and Eric. For a long time, she lived with her eldest son, Freddy, the last child to marry. Every day they breakfasted in silence, with Freddy reading the sports section and Frieda studying the obituaries. Their most spirited exchange came the day Babe Ruth died, when their interests memorably dovetailed. Till the end of her life, Frieda kept abreast of world events, devouring books and newspapers.

  The cavernous mansion seemed vacant without Felix and the sociable, laughing children. When Frieda moved into a duplex apartment at 1 East Eighty-Eighth Street, she couldn’t bear to see the old house razed. In 1944, on the seventy-third anniversary of Felix’s birth, she bequeathed the Gothic structure that her father feared would precipitate Manhattan pogroms to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for its Jewish Museum. It was a logical recipient, Felix having served as a director and founder of the museum in 1904. In a Music Room ceremony, Frieda, her voice thickening with emotion, handed the deed over to Rabbi Louis Finkelstein. “This house is so full of precious memories and giving it away is not easy.”1 Three years passed before the museum opened to the public in May 1947 and a nervous Frieda stepped again into its ghost-ridden foyer. At once, she breathed easy. “I must confess that the first time I entered 1109 after it had been transformed into the Jewish Museum was a very poignant moment. But I discovered to my joy that, instead of depressing me, it gave me a wonderful feeling of happiness.”2

  On January 21, 1945, Frieda had suffered a great loss with Nina’s death. With her Louisa May Alcott hairdo, Nina had entertained guests at lovely English teas during the war. If downcast in later years, she at least suffered in style and went about in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce; even in death Paul spoiled her. Before she joined him in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, she provided for a Paul Warburg chair in economics at Harvard, later occupied by John Kenneth Galbraith.

  Frieda jealously guarded Felix’s memory. In his 1949 autobiography, Chaim Weizmann portrayed Felix as an obstinate, misinformed philanthropist and Frieda fired off a blistering letter of protest. Gradually she emerged as a figure in her own right with a decided activist bent. She led a Hadassah fund-raising drive to build a Jerusalem hospital and established a foundation to aid Israeli immigrants. Socially, she strayed beyond the confines of Our Crowd and showed more of Felix’s versatility.

  From her father, Frieda had inherited a strong superego that had lent a stiff edge to her personality. Now she loosened up and showed more humor, playing bridge, enjoying her grandchildren, hazarding jokes in speeches, and chain-smoking with remarkable abandon. She delighted in the racy exploits of her niece Dorothy Schiff, publisher of The New York Post, who was as emancipated as Frieda had been sheltered. At the same time, Frieda kept her father’s bluntness and never hesitated, for instance, to tell people they were too fat. No less punctual than Jacob Schiff, she would direct an icy glare at visitors who came late. As frugal as ever, she loved to buy clothes from catalogues and excitedly informed friends of her bargain purchases.

  In her final years, Frieda traded the Woodlands manor for a smaller house on the estate, Meadow Farm, where her widowed mother had lived. Even as she became a semi-invalid, the regal Frieda held court in bed. She demanded old-fashioned formality, with children always “presented” to her. “The grandchildren were brought in dressed up at teatime and made nice noises,” said Piggy’s daughter, Felicia. “We ate wonderful little tea sandwiches. She always had people around.”3 When bored or irritated with the discussion, she turned off her hearing aid. After the morning mail arrived in a leather box, she dedicated herself to her extensive correspondence. Attended by Otto the butler and Hilde the maid, Frieda wintered at Eden Road in Palm Beach and was thoroughly the grande dame as she stared at the world through a lorgnette. Reclining on a couch, she dictated her reminiscences into a tape recorder, which Eddie spun into a charming little volume.

  At Meadow Farm, Frieda often stretched out on a chaise longue in pale silks and lace. Several times a week, Dr. Herman Tarnower came to take her blood pressure and Frieda smoothed his way into “Our Crowd.” Allergic to digitalis, she needed close monitoring and Dr. Tarnower showed up so regularly at midday that Eddie anointed him Doctor Lunch Hour. Years later, as the best-selling “Scarsdale Diet Doctor” of tabloid notoriety, Dr. Tarnower was shot by his disgruntled lover
, Jean Harris, the headmistress of an exclusive girls’ school. Frieda could be a dangerous patient. She was so addicted to cigarettes that even when the doctors placed her in an oxygen tent, she would push it aside to light up, creating a general fear of explosion.

  The great sadness of Frieda’s last years was the rash of intermarriage among her children. When Freddy married outside the faith in 1946, all four sons had non-Jewish wives. More of her grandchildren would end up celebrating Christmas than Hanukkah. It was a stunning development for the royal family of American Jewry, as was the epidemic divorce rate among the Friedaflix grandchildren. Some of the intermarriage resulted simply from demographics: The Warburgs found many more partners of their educational and socioeconomic level among non-Jews. Yet it also suggested, if not a purposeful flight from the Jewish past, a notable eagerness to blend inconspicuously into WASP society. It marked the climax of a steady progression away from faith in the Warburg family and among German Jews generally, as the doubts of one generation hardened into denial in the next.

  For Frieda, Judaism represented a rich ethical tradition and she showed little interest in prayer or ceremony. Yet she went to synagogue on High Holy Days and it upset her that her grandchildren celebrated Christmas. Frieda, however, learned to accept even unwelcome changes in an adaptable, loving spirit. A fiercely loyal woman, she choked down her feelings for the sake of family cohesion. In the end, family brought her more solace and comfort than religion. In 1956, age eighty, Frieda wrote, “There have been times when I yearned for the ability to lose myself in deep religious faith, and, although I have observed many of the forms, I must admit that the most meaningful experience to me has been the sense of family (Familiengefühl) which has grown and flourished in our household.”4