Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  The rebel bands terrorized the city for almost two years until they were finally defeated and the Frankfurt Jews were officially welcomed back into their houses. Fettmilch and five other ringleaders were hanged that same day. An earlier emperor had mortgaged the Jews to the city of Frankfurt; now Matthias placed the imperial coat of arms on the gates of the Jewish quarter, with the words “Protectorate of His Roman Imperial Majesty and the Holy Roman Empire.” He thereby emphasized his overarching authority, without dissolving the mortgage, so that a sort of double authority over the Jews—the city council and the emperor—remained in place. On Matthias’s orders, the city of Frankfurt had to pay the Jews 175,919 guldens in compensation.

  “The Jews celebrated the day of their return, 20 Adar,1 as Purim Vincent for a long time,” Elkan Juda Cahn concluded the story. “But as time passed, the custom was forgotten. You see, there was enough suffering in the Judengasse during the centuries of its existence. In 1819, when I had already moved out of the Judengasse, there was another pogrom that started in Würzburg and spread through all of Germany. Frankfurt was not spared. With shouts of ‘Hep-Hep! Die, Jew!’ Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked and destroyed. The attackers broke windows, in the Rothschilds’ bank too, and beat Jews on the street in broad daylight.”

  “You too?” Alice asked.

  Her grandfather shook his head. “No, I was lucky.”

  “And how was it when the Judengasse was dissolved and the Jews were allowed to live anywhere?”

  “It started in 1796, the year I was born. Napoleon ruled in France and he gave Jews the same rights as all other citizens. After the French Revolution, the demands for liberty, equality, and fraternity spread. In 1796 the French troops laid siege to Frankfurt and conquered the city. Fires broke out everywhere, the worst in the Judengasse. About a hundred residences in the northern part of the street were destroyed, and almost two thousand Jews were suddenly homeless. They rented apartments from Christians, and that was the beginning of the end for the Judengasse, though it took until 1812 before the Jews were finally no longer subject to the Stättigkeit and—at least in part—received the rights of citizenship. But they paid heavily for it.”

  “Stättigkeit, I don’t know what that word means.”

  “That’s what they called the regulations applying to Jewish residents in Frankfurt. The Stättigkeit also stated how much they were required to pay for the right of residence, and what they were allowed to do, such as where they could do business. More than anything, it set out what they were not allowed to do: live outside of the Judengasse, go for a walk in the city parks, marry when they wanted—there was a set number of weddings allowed too, just like the set number of Jews who were allowed to move to Frankfurt from elsewhere. That all changed under Napoleon.”

  In 1806, Napoleon declared Frankfurt the administrative capital of the Confederation of the Rhine and made Prince Primate Karl von Dalberg the ruler of the city. Dalberg was a man of the Enlightenment, and he admired Napoleon, but he did not want to start a fight with the citizens of Frankfurt, who vehemently opposed equal rights for Jews. As a result, he enacted the New Stättigkeit and Protective Regulations for the Jewish Population of Frankfurt am Main in 1807. According to the new laws, Jews were required to live in a Jewish quarter that comprised the Judengasse and adjacent areas. Their education and schools were tightly regulated. And the protection money they were required to pay annually was raised to twenty-two thousand guldens. It was a serious setback for the Jews. Only when Dalberg’s government ran into grave financial difficulties, in 1811, did he sign an edict of emancipation in exchange for 440,000 guldens. In this Highest Decree Concerning the Civil Rights of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt, it stated: “Henceforth the Israelite inhabitants of the city of Frankfurt shall enjoy the same civil rights and privileges under the same obligations as the other, Christian citizens, and all prior regulations, decrees, and customary laws concerning the previous inequality of rights and levies are hereby abrogated and no longer in effect.”

  “One hundred and fifty thousand guldens had to be paid right away,” Elkan Juda Cahn told Alice, “or else Dalberg would not have signed it. I was fifteen, and I still remember how hard it was for us to come up with the money. Everyone gave what they could, but without the help of the Rothschild bank we would never have managed it. The community paid interest on the loans until 1863, even though the Jews’ equal rights were rescinded only four years after they were proclaimed. Even so, there was no going back to how it was.”

  No, there was no going back. In 1812, three Jews attained public office: Mayer Amschel Rothschild was elected to the Wahlkollegium;2 Dr. Joseph Oppenheimer took over the office after Rothschild’s death, and the following year became municipal councilor and a member of the city school board; lastly, Ludwig Börne, then still named Löw Baruch, a well-respected man who published books and newspapers and fought against anti-Semitism and for freedom of the press, was appointed police actuary (clerk of the law court). Even if a few years later, when the old restrictions on Jews were put back into effect, he had to fight for his position and was eventually retired with a pension, such a thing had never existed before. Napoleon’s troops had spread the idea of emancipation and civil rights through all of Europe, and it could no longer be withstood. Frankfurt withstood it a bit longer than other places, in any case, since the Christian citizens did not want to grant Jews equal rights. But the Judengasse was never built up again, even though many Frankfurt citizens demanded it. There was a constant oscillation between hope and disappointment, from the failed National Assembly and all the quarrels that went with it up to the founding of the monarchy.

  “But in the end we got our rights,” Alice’s grandfather said triumphantly. “Now we are free citizens, just like the Christians. You are lucky, Alice. You were born in a better time than I was.”

  “Back when you were allowed to leave the Judengasse, was that when you bought this house?” Alice wanted to know.

  “No,” her grandfather said. “First I lived on Langestrasse. Your mother was born there. I only bought this house much later. But some Jews had magnificent, elegant houses built, even under Dalberg—real palaces. For example, the banker Zacharias Wertheimer whose house, the Red Tower, had been destroyed in the fire of 1796, had a palace built ten years later. And in the burned-out part of the Judengasse, the Rothschilds built a new office building on the foundations of five houses that had burned down; that was at the top of the street, by the Bornheimer Gate, where the north gate of the Judengasse used to be.”

  “When you lived in the Judengasse, were you still Orthodox?”

  Elkan Juda Cahn shook his head. “We were not Orthodox. I don’t know why, that’s just how it was with us. But if you want to know more about that, you should ask your uncle, Bernhard Stern, the doctor—he studied in school, he knows a lot more about all that than I do. The Sterns are an old, respected family, and I was really very proud when your mother married your father. Ask Uncle Bernhard.”

  And Alice did. The next time she was sitting with Klärchen in the elegant salon of the Stern house, she noticed the portrait of Süsskind Stern from 1671, the very first portrait of a Frankfurt Jew, as her uncle Bernhard liked to point out again and again. “Did the Sterns use to be pious Jews?”

  Uncle Bernhard, sitting at the table smoking his pipe, nodded. “Yes, they were always good Jews, you would have to say that, at least in earlier times. Your great-grandfather, Abraham Süsskind Stern, was a scholar. He was a bookseller, but in truth he dedicated his life to studying the Talmud. I myself saw very many books with countless notes and annotations in his handwriting at the house of his son, my uncle, Moritz Abraham Stern. He thought of Moses Mendelssohn as his model. Moses Mendelssohn was a great philosopher who translated the Jewish Bible into German so that his brethren who didn’t know Hebrew could read it as well. He was interested in science and art but still strictly followed the laws of the Torah.”

  “And what about my grandfat
her?” Alice asked. “Did he also strictly follow the laws?”

  Uncle Bernhard laughed. “No. Moritz was very different from his brothers, Jakob and Emanuel, who would hesitate even to eat in a Christian household. Your great-grandparents, though, were truly religious, especially your great-grandmother Vögele Eva Reiss. I definitely have to tell you about her.

  “She was twenty-one years old when her family lost their house and all their possessions in the fire of 1796, but she didn’t let that stop her. She got silk fabric from an uncle who was a silk dealer and sold it at a profit, mostly to French émigrés. That earned her enough money not only to support her family but to put together a dowry for one of her sisters. She was an extremely capable and fearless woman. When she heard that Bavarian soldiers were ransacking the Judengasse, she got a high-ranking Bavarian officer to accompany her there. The looters were disobeying their commander and drawing their weapons when Vögele, the young Jewess, walked right into the thick of the melee and didn’t budge until at last Herr von Bethmann arrived with a company of Cossacks to drive off the Bavarians. She was a strict woman, but fair and generous. No beggar left her doorstep empty-handed. And when a maid, Jitel Dudelsheim, who had worked for her for decades, grew old and sick, she took her in and took care of her like a member of the family. And she was truly religious. Even in her old age she fasted on the Day of Atonement. I can still see her now, sitting in her simply furnished living room on Allerheiligengasse: a small, venerable woman, hair covered in a black scarf and a white cap. Or standing, already a very old woman, in her little shop between rolls tied with silk ribbons and bundles of pencils. As children we never once left her presence without her putting her hands on our heads and blessing us.

  Portrait of Süsskind Stern, 1671 (photo credit 2.2)

  “She and her husband, Abraham Süsskind, took the raising of their sons very seriously, especially their son Moritz Abraham, who showed great intelligence from early on. Uncle Moritz had a huge effect on my intellectual and moral development. As a young man I lived in his house for more than three years, while I was a medical student in Göttingen. I was his favorite nephew—he said so again and again—and his influence on me can absolutely not be overestimated. His parents didn’t let Uncle Moritz go to a public school, as other Jewish children were already doing at the time; instead, he was taught at home, by tutors. He learned Latin and Greek, he is a superb Hebraist, and he is deeply familiar with German literature as well. Even as a young man he loved Schiller and Goethe and was inspired by Fouqué’s novels. He is truly an extraordinary man. Wait a minute, I want to read you something.”

  Uncle Bernhard opened a cabinet, took out a thick notebook, and opened it with reverence. “My cousin Alfred, who was only a boy when I was living with them in Göttingen, once secretly showed me his father’s, Uncle Moritz’s, diary. I know that it was wrong to look, but I was curious, and then I copied out the beginning because it made such an impression on me. And it inspired me to keep a diary myself. Uncle Moritz was sixteen when he wrote this, younger than you are now, Klärchen. Listen:

  My Diary

  Dedicated to myself

  For a considerable time now I have entertained the desire to compose a diary, in which I might have as it were a mirror to keep myself perpetually in view by setting down my innermost thoughts, observations, conversations, &c., and then later, in cold blood, precisely investigating these data to determine what is good in them and what is bad, with the firm determination to root out the weeds that deprive the flower of virtue of its soil and thus enable that flower to sprout up in its fullness all the more resplendently. Only by repeatedly reviewing one’s mistakes is it possible for the resolution to improve oneself to take root; otherwise it is all too quickly blotted out of our minds as soon as a new pleasure appears, just as the straight road vanishes from the eye of the wanderer whenever he lets himself be led astray by the glittering shimmer of the will-o’-the-wisp. Even the smallest deeds should not be exempt. For can Man, stumbling blindly into the future, seeing only the present, truly say with any certainty that this or that deed is insignificant? The book of history shows us thousands of examples that contradict this idea. A single word, a movement, a breath can have the greatest effect on our whole lives and bring joy or sorrow. Now this thought has reached maturity, and I plan to, God willing, follow it throughout my entire life.

  Today I have turned 16 years old, I am no longer a child, and I have begun to have more serious thoughts and to look to the future with a more focused gaze. Still, relying on God and His assistance, I will always be happy so long as it pleases Him to grant me my health. May it please Him to let me become a good man, so that I might be a joy to my parents in their old age—they to whom I owe so much and who have had so much trouble on my account, who have been so patient with me—and also that I might be of some use to the rest of my fellow men. Amen.

  Uncle Bernhard lowered the notebook and looked at the two girls. “Can you imagine what kind of man this boy would become, and why his influence on me was so great?”

  The girls nodded, although Alice simply could not imagine her great-uncle Moritz as a sixteen-year-old. She knew him from his visits to Frankfurt: he always stayed with Uncle Bernhard, and Alice avoided visiting the Sterns when he was there. Uncle Moritz was a strict old man with penetrating eyes; when he was around, Alice always had the feeling of looking wrong, saying the wrong thing, and not behaving the way she should. Klärchen, too, was a little afraid of him and always glad when he left.

  “He has an indomitable personality,” Uncle Bernhard continued. “Some people call him stubborn too. He began quite early on to doubt the sacred character of many of the traditional forms of Jewish practice. A friend told me that Moritz had a secular book under his prayer shawl in the synagogue once—Goethe’s Faust—and was reading it while everyone thought he was deep in prayer. Then he studied mathematics in Göttingen, under Gauss, and that was where he met up with his brother Emanuel again, your grandfather, Alice. Emanuel had gone off on adventures to South America after the firm he was working for, Wolf, went bankrupt. Young Emanuel was a good musician; he became choirmaster for a battalion of the French civic militia and met a traveling recruiter whose job it was to find soldiers for the Brazilian government. Emanuel followed the call and set off for Brazil. He caught yellow fever not long after he got there and was taken to the military hospital, but he survived. A businessman who knew him from Frankfurt helped him get out of the army and paid an English ship’s captain to bring his protégé back to Europe as a ‘sick sailor.’ Emanuel showed up in Göttingen with a sunburned face and his clothing in tatters—his money had run out. So Uncle Moritz supplied the necessary funds and sent him back to Frankfurt, while he himself stayed in Göttingen. He couldn’t become a professor at first, because he was Jewish, but he did become a lecturer at the university.”

  Moritz Abraham Stern never cut his ties to the Judengasse, and even though it took almost two days to travel by post coach from Göttingen to Frankfurt, he often returned home, especially when the Jewish Reform Society invited him to work with them. He was convinced that the Jews not only needed to put aside the strict observances of their religion but should even give up their hope in the coming of the Messiah, and he felt that their homeland was nothing more and nothing less than the country where they were born, their secular fatherland. In a letter to a friend that was later published, he expressed himself this way:

  When I ask myself what it is that obliges me to work for the Jews and their betterment, I am constrained to answer that it is in no way a sense of religious fellow feeling with the great majority of the faithful, since for a long time I have doubtless been as far removed from the Jewish faith as from Christianity. I cannot even say, like you and others, that I share with them a pure monotheistic belief. What binds me to Judaism and makes me feel closer to its believers than to others is purely a filial sense of duty. I am simply oriented toward the camp of the religion in which I grew up and whose teachings
I learned, the same as I am toward my mother, my family, my fatherland … It is my duty to defend the interests of the Jews; that is a bedrock principle for me.

  Then Uncle Bernhard told the girls about how Uncle Moritz had gotten married, which had turned out to be rather difficult, since the Stättigkeit stated that only fifteen Jewish weddings per year were permitted in Frankfurt. Moritz and his bride got around the prohibition by having their wedding in Bockenheim, in Hesse. Six years later, after the birth of their third child, a girl, the young woman died. In 1859, Dr. Moritz Abraham Stern finally achieved the goal he had worked so hard for and became the first unconverted Jewish professor in Germany. In later years other Jews became professors, but he was the one who opened the door.

  “He never gave up,” Uncle Bernhard said. “And every time younger people like us complained that the quest for equal rights was going backward instead of forward, he would say, ‘You have no idea how it was when I was young.’ ”

  Uncle Bernhard shut the notebook and put it back in the cabinet.

  Two years later, Klärchen, just nineteen years old, married the son of the man that Uncle Bernhard had described so enthusiastically: Alfred Stern, a historian and by then a professor at the University of Bern.

  * * *

  1 March 10.

  2 The Wahlkollegium was an electoral college of 75 citizens who chose slightly more than half the members of Frankfurt’s legislative body.

  3.

  Family Life

  It was a certain Michael Frank, a successful businessman, who paid court to Alice Stern. Michael Frank was from Landau-in-der-Pfalz. Alice’s family, who had never heard of the Franks, were not enthusiastic about the match; they would rather she had found a groom among the well-known Jewish families in Frankfurt, or even among their relatives, for example, Richard, her cousin. That was common practice at the time—Klärchen, after all, had married her cousin Alfred.