Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The State itself showed signs of becoming more accommodating. One by one, German states issued emancipation decrees in the late eighteenth century; Prussia’s came in 1812. Granted freedom of movement, Jews responded by relocating within and between German states, and as Berlin opened up, it became a favored destination. Then, in 1871, Jews finally got the vote; all formal restrictions on citizenship were lifted. From a population of 50,000 in 1871 when Berlin became the capital, their numbers grew to 170,000, about 8 percent of the population, by 1910. Many of them initially clustered around the massive synagogue on Orianenburgstrasse (a key target during the Kristallnacht of 1938), but they soon fanned out as their population expanded, and many integrated into non-Jewish neighborhoods. If the results were upward mobility, the accumulation of sizeable fortunes, and the construction of palatial homes, another result was a cleavage between those who “made it”—the integrating, prospering, learned Jew—and those who didn’t—the “ghetto” Jew, a backward relic affiliated with lowly status, ignorance, and separation from the German mainstream. The ghetto Jew was a reminder of the unfortunate origins that the new Jew often preferred to forget.6

  The result was, for many Jews, that Jewishness became an increasingly private affair, as what was deemed public or civic acquired a distinctly secular tone. It was no less complex nonetheless, and indeed it is sometimes harder to see how families resolved their Jewishness with their Germanness when so much of this process was going on in the sanctuary of the home. What we do know is that conversion often represented joining a national culture more than a decisive spiritual transformation. In fact, for many it was more a passport to a better future. Whereas many after 1945—led above all by Gershom Scholem—came to treat conversion and assimilation as signs of just how misguided too many German Jews were, we should not lose sight of the fact that before 1933, relinquishing religious autonomy for civic emancipation was a strategy that appealed to more and more Jews.

  This is clear in the case of the Hirschmann family. Like so many others, their predecessors drifted from the Jewish community some time in the 1800s and declared themselves without denomination, or konfessionslos. Among other things, this had tax implications: no share of taxes went to a church or synagogue. Precisely when this happened to the Hirschmanns is unclear, in part because their integration was so uneven. For all the other ways in which they assimilated, parts of the family were still paying their dues to the synagogue until the late 1920s. Carl wrote to Hedda in 1930 that he finally succeeded in his petition to have her mother, Ottilie Marcuse, exempted from all further synagogue dues (called the community tax). By then, money was tight, so Carl was looking for ways to save.7

  If one’s Jewish identity was a private matter, there were fewer and fewer sanctions against letting it drop altogether, easing the passage from a hyphenated German-Jew to become a German of Jewish background, and thence to becoming a German, which is how Otto Albert would self-identify as he grew up—as a composite of the more general currents flowing under the Enlightenment. Hannah Arendt once wrote controversially of this process, lamenting that “the terrible and bloody annihilation of individual Jews was preceded by the bloodless destruction of the Jewish people.” To someone like Gershom Scholem, who grew up in Berlin and witnessed these passages of Jews to Germans firsthand, this was the inevitable result of any commitment to belong to a civic community and give up one’s faith in order to do it. While he loved the Berlin of his childhood, adulthood allowed Scholem to see the price that many Jews paid for their assimilation into a society that was much more ambivalent about toleration than Jews were. It would have saddened but not surprised Scholem to know that Carl Hirschmann felt the kind of hypernationalism and mystical exaltation in 1916 that would eventually devour many of his family and kin. By then, a family like the Hirschmanns had moved past the debates that had so divided earlier generations of Jews in Germany, debates between emancipation with integration or the preservation of a separate cultural community. At the time, the perils of the former were not so easy to see. Until then, assimilationist ideals appeared to be making good on their promise. The result was that the Hirschmanns represented syncretisms that were very common among Berliners of Jewish origin. To begin with, they had unmistakably Jewish family names, and there is no evidence that they felt compelled to scrub away the Semitic overtones. The Hirschmanns’ aunts and uncles were buried in the Jewish cemetery of Weissensee. Their newspaper was the Vossische Zeitung, a slightly leftish, secular daily, which some grumbled was the “Jewish paper.”8

  Time thereby purged aspects of Jewish life and replaced them with secular ones. One sign of becoming un-Jewish was conversion. While we know remarkably little about how this was done, we do know that droves of Jews converted to Christianity: 25,000 in the nineteenth century, and another 10,000 from 1900 to 1933. The Jewish policy in Prussia after 1813 made citizenship rights more accessible. In return, citizens should convert to Protestantism.9 The Prussian establishment attached cultural conditions to citizenship to ensure that Jews did not simply take on the outer trappings of Germanness while preserving a separate, Jewish identity internally; indeed, it reflected underlying misgivings about the Enlightenment emphasis on secular patriotism and the Haskala notion of public and civic secularity: could these salon-aficionados really be entrusted as guardians of a modern Prussian and German state?

  Increasing numbers of Jews made the passage nonetheless. We do not know when Otto Albert’s parents’ families converted, or indeed whether theirs was simply a matter of being konfessionslos. Either way, it was far enough in the past that it was not a matter for discussion or reflection. Both parents agreed to take a further step: they wanted their children baptized as Lutherans. The decision seems to have come at the urgings of a friend of Hedda’s, who thought this might be a good idea. They “were already distant from Jewish tradition and religion,” recalled Albert many years later. “And there was probably a certain level of opportunism involved. My parents wanted to make it easier for the children.” Eva remembered that it meant that at school, when it came time for classes in religion, the Jewish girls went with a Jewish teacher, while she stayed with the rest and was thus spared the cloud that hovered over the Jewish girls—that they were “not really” German. Eva herself was so bored of the exercise that her parents, who were utterly secular, gave her permission to be absent from all religious classes. For Otto Albert, conversion had no religious connotation; his main memory of church was seeing stained glass. When he did take religion classes, he read Tolstoy—and became a lifelong admirer of the Russian’s spiritualist prose. When asked later by a German interviewer about his baptism, Hirschman replied, “I remember that I refused to be confirmed. I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel ready to become a confirmed Christian. Even though I had already begun to take private lessons towards confirmation. But somehow I wasn’t impressed by the minister, and then I asked my parents to stop.” That was it. Conversion and baptism seem to have been more civic rituals, and not very ritualized at that, more gestures of acceptance of a public culture as well as a private belief system that distanced Jews like the Hirschmanns from their Jewish past without making them Christian; they could be modern Germans and Berliners without either. In the end, baptism was so redundant that OA could slough it off with no apparent controversy because he already occupied one end of the integrating spectrum, dropping the “Jew” and the hyphen that once followed a “German” identity.10

  What this meant at the time to a young Otto Albert is hard to say. The Jewish Question is absent from early letters and manuscripts. Though retrospection is fraught with distortion, we get some sense that assimilation represented gaining access to multiple cultures more than a sacrifice of any single heritage. On Christmas 1982, he spent the day listening to Bach’s Mätthaus-Passion and was reminded of concerts in childhood Berlin. That evening he wrote to his daughter, Katia, who was herself becoming more interested in Judaism; he was prompted to reflect on “Jewishness and whether to ‘assume’
it.” He continued to note that “I have tried once or twice in my life … but always found that I had too many other roots, beliefs, yearnings, that I just did not want to cut myself off from these other worlds.” Several months later, in response to Katia’s thoughts about her own beliefs, he had to confess that “I cannot follow you on the Jewish tradition.” He did accept that parts of it were his, especially “maintaining a certain Jewish identity outside of my religious attachment—that is, a certain critical turn of mind, a sympathy for the oppressed, an absence of parochial attachments, a certain sense of humor.” But there was much in the Christian faith that he also cherished. “In order to fully enjoy the St. Matthew’s Passion or the Cathedral one has to be able to become momentarily someone who genuinely mourns for Jesus’ death.”11

  Upon one thing the assimilated and unassimilated Jews of Berlin often agreed: the view of the ghetto Jew as someone to be ashamed of. And increasingly, the ghetto Jew was associated with the Ostjuden back-landers, Eastern villagers driven west by the contagion of pogroms in Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland. Indeed, many German Jews disavowed this rabble as being part of the same “race” at all, and not a few worried that the influx of these Jews would stoke anti-Semitism at home. In 1912, the year Carl and Hedda were wed, the Jewish leaders of Berlin convoked a symposium to deal with the threat of the Ostjuden. Out of it came a declaration that the newcomers were a menace to the enlightened principles of integration. Albert could recall “criticizing the Eastern Jews,” though he added that his parents applied equal scorn to “Jews who flaunted their furs, their wealth.” In general, it was not a good idea to draw too much attention to oneself.12

  Asserting an assimilated ideal meant a decorum for the outside world to see while at the same time performing rituals for the inside world, rituals as reminders that the path upon which these people were progressing was a better one. Outer respectability helped to signify acceptance of German national culture, to reciprocate for the granting of civic and political rights. Yiddish, the ghetto tongue, was frowned upon as a debased, vulgar German; if one were going to pray, at least let it be in Hebrew. Otto Albert’s younger sister Eva once used the word nebbich in front of her father, whose family lineage was less firmly rooted in the Enlightenment assimilation ideal and who was all the more conscious of being seen to violate it. He slapped her. The young girl, having picked the word up on the streets, was shocked: she had no idea that it was a Yiddish word.13

  For the most part, the code for the inside world was not repressive. Christmas, for instance, bore all the symbols of a Christian occasion but none of the substance—and was thus something they could all celebrate with no evident stigmas. It was above all an occasion for family members—especially the un-Jewish Jews of Hedda’s side—to congregate for a dinner and to lavish gifts on the children. The preparation took much of December. Cookie-baking involved elaborate doughs that were kneaded with spices and dried fruits and then had to age weeks before going into the oven, filling the apartment with seasonal aromas and making prize foraging-targets for the children and their cousins. On the twenty-third, Carl would come home with a large, live carp and place it in a bathtub of cold water for the next twenty-four hours. The Hirschmann children would squeal in horrified fascination at the whiskered fish and then watch as their father pulled it from its bath and prepared it to be cooked on the twenty-fourth according to a special Polish recipe favored by wealthy Berliners. That night the family feasted and covered the Christmas tree with perfumed beeswax candles, cookies, apples, and jewels, while Hedda played the piano and family and guests sang Christmas hymns.14

  If Christmas held a special place in the family’s memories, so did their apartment and its location—another signature of the importance of decorum and an announcement of the family’s successful ascent to the assimilated idyll. Right after the war, the Hirschmanns found an apartment in the posh Tiergartenviertel, a district just south of the immense Tiergarten Park (which was larger, for instance, than New York’s Central Park). It was a convenient walk for Carl to reach the Moabit hospital, to which he had shifted his practice. But it was also the right kind of setting for upper-middling folk, those leaning slightly leftward in their politics yet concerned to enjoy the comforts and safety of an urban bourgeois life. Once the setting for summer homes for wealthy Berliners in the eighteenth century, with the park serving as the private hunting grounds for the Prussian king, the land was bequeathed by Frederick the Great to the city for recreational purposes, and its surroundings were gradually parceled out to developers. It was here that the characteristic nineteenth-century urban-villa style (large row houses, homogeneous yet boasting an ornamental façade) got a strong foothold—and it was to a floor in one of these expansive townhouses that the Hirschmanns moved.

  The Tiergarten was a favored area for many ascending Jews in their last stages of integration; indeed, it was a fully integrated neighborhood with a lot of assimilated Jews. About one-fifth of its population was Jewish in 1910. One reason is that it was where members of the free professions (law, medicine, education) could rub shoulders with high government officials and the well-heeled. Tiergartenstrasse (the cross street for Hohenzollernstrasse) was known as the Street of Millionaires, and one block down was the street, if not for the rich, certainly for the famous, especially the stars of the silent silver screen. This included Tilla Durieux (née Ottilie Godefroy), the flamboyant stage actress who had married one of Hedda’s cousins, the art dealer Paul Cassirer, whose salon (also nearby) was the first to introduce Berlin Successionists and Postimpressionists to discerning Berlin buyers. Durieux had posed as a haunting Circe in a famous 1913 painting by the great Symbolist artist Franz von Stuck. The public union with the Hirschmann clan ended badly: the couple quarreled and then agreed to divorce. When Cassirer went to meet Durieux at her nearby lawyer’s office, he shot himself and died a few hours later.

  In among the showy and scandalous was also the staid. The Tiergarten was a neighborhood of consulates and embassies; the Greek consulate was next door to the Hirschmanns home, and Otto Albert frequently had to dash into its backyard to retrieve errant balls. It was the ample second story of a villa-style house addressed Hohenzollernstrasse 21 that was home. The street ran between the Landwehrkanal and the park; at its top was Hedda’s mother’s house. Ottilie, “Öhmchen” to her grandchildren, insisted that they dutifully visit her on their way to the park with their nanny.

  Respectability was thus sown into the very fabric of Hedwig’s family, and it went back several generations. Her parents, Ottilie Aron and Albert Marcuse, formed an alliance of successful Jewish Frankfurt financiers (the Arons) and Berlin magnates (the Marcuses). Success in finance and business had created a platform for later generations to join the professional ranks. Hedda’s brother Joseph loomed large in family lore. Having fought with distinction as a major in World War I, he was an exalted citizen until he died at a young age in 1931. He embraced his Lutheranism, befriended the Kaiser, owned a house with a small stable in the tony sector of the Tiergarten, and enjoyed wearing his military uniform draped with medals. His marriage to a beautiful, tall, blond singer with whom he had been having an affair for some years may have prompted his sister to warn her children that this kind of behavior was not entirely appropriate, but his money, virility, and style were the envy of many. Much less is known of Harry, a successful neurologist who died very young in 1927, all but unmemorable to his nieces and nephews. Franz, the youngest, was manqué. He did not “make it,” literally. With no career and dependent on Ottilie until her death, he was a bit of a sponge. Bearing chocolates, he would visit his young nieces and nephew to play cards, midway through suggesting that they play for money, and would occasionally ask to borrow pocket change. After 1933, as the family began to pull up stakes from Germany, he stayed behind, only to die in 1940 in a Nazi concentration camp, the victim of a decree that converted whole swaths of the assimilated into Jews in order to rid the world of them.

  The pursuit of respe
ctability often comes with slips—and in the case of Otto Albert’s mother, a potentially catastrophic one. Hedwig was born in Berlin in 1880. Her family lived on Magazinstrasse, in a middle-class neighborhood, where upwardly mobile Jews could gain a toehold. Her religion was registered as nondenominational, with “----------” before the entry on her birth certificate. (As a sign of the times, when the Nazis issued her a passport in April 1939, it bore the blazing stamp of “J”, for Juden.) Her parents were of means enough to provide a good education not just to the boys, but also to Hedda, who spent time at the university. The slip came with her first entry into the marriage market, which went badly. She married a lawyer from Nürenburg named, by pure coincidence, Hirschmann. The story behind this ill-fated match is unclear. Rumors had it that he was impotent, though a subsequent marriage brought him several children. Other rumors had him the victim of a mental disease. “Not normal” was the consensus. Either way, Hedwig left him, secured a divorce—much to the shame of her mother—and left Berlin to finish her studies in Munich and later in Strasbourg, at first to study medicine and then history of art. Beyond the reach of gossipy circles, the cloud of scandal could pass.

  Hedwig thus carried a stigma, which she labored to disguise. This campaign motivated an effort to cover the tracks of a less-than-respectable past with a second marriage, to Carl. Hedwig and Carl’s concern for appearances reflected inner desires and aspirations for themselves and their children. The outward search for respectability could also cover inner complexities and was not completely successful at cloaking the family’s seams—through them some of the tensions and conflicting memories would occasionally show through. Not long after Carl moved to Berlin, he met Hedwig at a philharmonic concert and immediately struck up his courtship. Carl was an ambitious doctor from out of town; she was a well-educated divorcée, no longer so young, with all the connotations and rumors this might carry with it. Accompanied by her wealthy aunt, Hedda must have seemed several social rungs above him. But they coincidentally shared a last name—the pretext for an initial, if slightly awkward, banter. Within a short time, Hedda was on her way to her second engagement. Besides, if Hedda did her best to cover her stigma, Carl did his best to obscure his own. In a fashion, Carl and Hedda came to love and need each other in equal measure—Carl in order to join the proper ranks, and Hedda to have the proper family that a fräulein of her class and culture would have needed to remain in her rank.