Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The marriage of Carl Hirschmann and Hedda Marcuse contained within it some of the hopes and rewards, as well as some of the compromises and frictions, that accompanied the urge to join the ranks of successful, assimilated Jews. Theirs was an alliance bound by love, shared ambitions, and some common values. After a month apart, Carl wrote his vacationing wife, “Every day I look forward more to see you all again and to be reunited with you all, but most of all I am looking forward to seeing you, to breathe in your sphere, to talk to you. Against that, even meeting the daughters again pales, and that is saying a lot.”15 Nietzsche and Wagner were sources of enthusiasm; from the first encounter, classical music, opera in particular, was a shared passion, and they became avid patrons of Berlin’s burgeoning performance halls.

  But as with any alliance, this one had differences to resolve. Carl and Hedda did not differ so much on what they wanted for the future; their divides were about the past. There is a reason why we know much more about Hedda’s family. She was only too proud of her heritage, something she relied upon to erase the memory of her own first marriage. Carl had access to no such remedy.

  Carl preferred silence to surround his past and was willing to let Hedda’s noise crowd in. At Christmas she would wail openly during ritual performances of Bach’s arias and choruses. When the children got older, this display would make them cringe. Her wardrobe was determined to keep up with the times, which in the 1920s sketched a new outline around the female body. Harry’s wife, Mimi, set the standard of the “new woman,” cutting a profile of elegance with refinement, independence with fashion. She cropped her hair; so did Hedwig. Her fashion preferences were more firmly for modern tastes affiliated with the greater prominence that women of Hedwig’s generation and respectability would enjoy in public.16

  The ways in which women across Weimar Germany were crossing into the public sphere only raised the pressure on Hedwig, which was coming not just from new fashion or consumption; it also came from older, internal family norms. The Marcuses set the social bar high, and Hedda had to struggle to reach it. She had two cousins, Leonie and Estella, who in turn married Max and Ludwig “Lutz” Katzenellenbogen, cousins from a very rich magnate’s family. It was a tight world, sociable and yet invidious. Leonie and Estella sent their only sons, Stephan and Conrad, to the same school as Otto Albert. Yet Otto Albert was always aware of the invisible class barriers and differences in values that contrasted his modest, bookish ways with those of his wealthy, playboy cousins. His mother’s status anxieties were hard to avoid. One day he came home from school and complained that a teacher had slapped him. Enraged, Hedwig (“Mutti” to her children) stormed to the school to protest. When she met with the guilty teacher she was told “Madam, your son is like a race horse, and he has to be hit once in a while to perform even better.” Hedda returned home elated; “My son is like a pure bred horse,” she gushed. OA was a little disappointed that his mother had forgotten his smarting cheek.17

  Her status extroversion could make Mutti a somewhat oppressive mother. When asked about his relationship with her, an otherwise discreet Albert would confess that she was not easy. “The relationship with my mother was not as good as that with my father,” he recalled. “We always had difficulties.”18 When he was asked to describe her as a mother, “overbearing” is how he put it. In the end, however, most of the pressure did not land on her son’s shoulders. It was Otto Albert’s sister Ursula who bore the brunt, and she would later fill her memoirs with resentment. To Ursula, Otto Albert’s knack for staying out of trouble, his good grades, and his nonconfrontational style meant that he was Mutti’s favorite.19 If he was the pet, however, he did not indulge her. She asked him to call her by a more tender name, Mumula. He resisted, calling her Mutti, like the other children did. He was also not above standing up to her: when Mutti caught the children horsing around after bedtime, she barged into the room, pulled the blanket away from Eva, lifted her nightshirt, and spanked her; when she turned to her son, he stood up and looked her in the eye as if to dare her to lift her hand. Instead, words of reprobation followed, and then she left. The sisters watched enviously. There is little doubt that Ursula was probably right: Mutti did have special affection for her son. A portrait was commissioned of a twelve-year-old Otto Albert and hung prominently over the living room mantel. There is a photograph of stylish Hedda wearing a kimono that was the rage among wealthy, European urbanites, her hair coiffed in bobbed fashion, her head titled slightly with arms raised in a vaguely self-sacrificial pose. She is standing under the portrait of her son, whose eyes gaze away from the camera into the horizon.20

  The difference between Ursula and Otto Albert did not reflect a gap in values. They both shared an aversion to Mutti’s pretensions. But they differed in how they dealt with their aversion to them. Otto Albert, a son, enjoyed some latitude to escape to be with his schoolmates. As a boy, he learned to keep his cool. He refined the art of avoiding a drama, which only added to his family reputation as unflappable. Ursula could not, and did not, keep her cool. The result was sometimes volcanic, especially when the delicate balance on Hohenzollernstrasse was upset by external misfortunes.21

  Hedwig Hirschmann, c. 1924.

  Carl Hirschmann’s background is more obscure, and what little is known would only become clear to his son in piecemeal fashion. There appear to be reasons for this. His birth certificate tells us that he was born in 1880 in Kölln, of “mosaic” religion, the son of Fanny (née Caspary) and Samuel Hirschmann. “Mosaic” was purposefully vague. Kölln was a village in a German belt ceded to Poland (and was thus known as Kielno) after the armistice—in effect an eastern frontier, not far from Danzig-Gdansk, close to the border with Lithuania. This was deep into Ost territory. Indeed, Carl’s father was born in Kovno (renamed Kaunas), Lithuania, confirming Carl’s undeniable Ostjuden heritage. Considerable energy went into covering this up—indeed, it was kept hidden from the children. It was only many years later, when Hirschman was applying for US citizenship and anxious to have his papers in order, that Mutti disclosed the truth of Carl’s birthplace. It is not known what his parents did for a living; some say they were farmers, others say the father was a merchant. At some point, Carl accompanied his family to New York, where many poorer German and East European Jews headed at the invitation of a relative who had struck it rich. He picked up enough English to become proficient but never adapted; emigration did not go well. There is some sense that the American branch of the family was involved in shady affairs.22

  Carl had higher aspirations for himself. He returned to Germany, worked his way through medical school in Hamburg, and eventually moved to Berlin in 1911. Medicine was a preferred field for Jews, less constrained than other professions, such as law or academia, but which had the aura of being reserved for the wellborn. It was also a profession in which Jew and Gentile worked side by side and in which Gentile patients would submit to the care of a Semite. Fritz Stern, also of assimilated Jewish parents and the son of a successful doctor in Breslau, recalled that “in Imperial Germany, the physician’s white coat was the uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance.”23 Besides, Carl had large but delicate and beautiful—a surgeon’s—hands, which once reminded his son of Flaubert’s depiction of his own father (also a physician), “brawny hands—very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering.”24

  The road to success at the operating table was not an easy one for Carl—and we know little about how he traveled it. He made it clear to the children that his past was an unwelcome subject of conversation, steering talk to matters of the present, a story by Franz Kafka, or a patient’s stubborn condition. They learned not to ask questions. Hedwig was as complicit as Carl in obscuring his background from her children and the rest of her family. But Carl played an active role in this and was certainly more than just willing to go along with the more-Marcuse-oriented family life; when he did d
ivulge accounts of his past, he told his children stories of growing up with a pony and riding in a carriage, as might befit a landed family.

  The children were not the only consumers of Carl’s obscured heritage. So was Hedwig, until it was too hard to ignore. This murky past was a source of shame for which she bore a deep grudge. One day, while Hedda was scolding young Ursula for having fibbed, Carl entered the room, took one look at the scene, and fled. Hedda, by now enraged, lashed out at her daughter and hissed at her that “lying” was a vice that had “deep roots” in this family. Later, Ursula would discover what her mother meant, for in Carl’s eagerness to woo Hedwig, he was less than forthcoming. Indeed, he had peddled the same tales of ponies and carriages and ensured that Hedwig could not follow the genealogical trail. Perhaps because he sensed that his “eastern,” small town, humble roots could not live up to Hedda’s haughty expectations for any prospective suitor, his stories were embellished. When Carl paid his obligatory visit to Ottilie, to win her approval the story became more elaborate about his family’s estates. Ottilie even tested Carl’s etiquette, inviting him to lunch and serving him roast pigeon to assess his manners; fortunately, the surgeon was skilled with a knife and passed with flying colors. At no point did Hedwig meet her future in-laws, and she does not seem to have asked to. How complicit she was in the cover-up is hard to say, but it became even more elaborate. When Carl and Hedwig got married, Carl arranged for someone from Kölln to send greetings and congratulations to Ottilie. On the wedding day, apologetic telegrams arrived explaining that it was impossible for Carl’s proud parents to attend the ceremony. Everyone fell for the ruse; everyone wanted it to be true. In moments of marital stress, it became known as “The Lie,” which gave the union troubled foundations.

  Ultimately, there was a limit to how long this cover up could last—and we do not know when Hedwig had to face facts she would have preferred to ignore. The absence of the parents would eventually have elicited probes. Certainly, by 1927 the truth was out: one day Carl’s only sister, Betty, showed up from New York with her husband, Herman Lurie. They came bearing gifts, playing the expected part of distant “American” relations. But it was a short visit and left a malodorous impression: this was not a delegation that reflected especially well on the Berlin Hirschmanns’ status. Behind the scenes, the déclassé New York connections, the Yiddish-speaking forebearers from the east, would all have come out.25

  The tension over The Lie hung over the family like a nimbus. It shaped the family memories, whose commonalities and discrepancies remind us of what Albert O. Hirschman would repeat over the course of a prolific lifetime—that the beholder’s eye had a role to play in what one made of the landscape of opportunities and constraints that surround us, that we could choose, to a point, the narratives that make us. It is perhaps revealing that Ursula’s memoir of her youth (which was published in French and Italian) discloses the tension over the lie, which she considered fundamental to her parents’ complex marriage and helps explain her mother’s zeal to belong to the opera-going, fur-clad, Berlin establishment. By contrast, Albert—who translated the work into English, although it never got published—glossed over some of the passages that refer to the lie in his redaction, either because it was not a history he wanted dredged up, or because he thought his sister overstated the east-west divide within the marriage. They thus differed even on how to have their parents remembered: Ursula wanting to reveal the tensions she felt explained her own rebellious streak; Albert preferring not just discretion but the possibility of a less tormented, more hopeful story of the family’s improvability.

  The burden of the lie could be borne as long as Carl was better at delivering on the promise for a brighter future than reminding his wife of his “east-Jewish” past. Much, therefore, depended on career advancement as a sign of achievement and a source of higher income. Accordingly, Carl was ambitious. He rose quickly up the surgeon’s ladder of success. By 1920, he was the head of surgery at the Municipal Hospital-Moabit, a rambling clinic in a working-class district on the other edge of the Tiergarten, a site of much agitation in the late imperial years. That same year, he entered the annals of local medical history when he assisted Otto Mass, the lead doctor at the Hospital Berlin-Buch, in a successful operation on a relapsed brain tumor. Otto Albert’s father was best known for his collaboration with Dr. A. Simons, a neurologist. Together, they figured out a way to get access to the pituitary gland, whose malfunctioning could lead to the disease acromegaly (enlarged feet, hands, and facial features); the trick was to proceed not through the cranium but through the nose. This procedure yielded a series of medical sketches, which a proud Carl brought home to show his son. Otto Albert was probably impressed, but the drawings made him want to vomit.26 Carl worked hard, putting in long days at the hospital before coming home for Abendbrot, a supper often served cold, with the rest of the family, and then going to his home clinic to greet patients and make phone calls. The telephone figures prominently in the adult Hirschman’s recollections of his father. In the evenings it rang frequently. Albert could recall his father stepping out of concerts to make an emergency call—sometimes leaving a note that he had to rush to the hospital, thus missing the second half of a performance. Indeed, he passed up many family vacations to stay in Berlin to minister his patients.27

  Hedda’s extroversion was a contrast to Carl’s quiet, studious, and slightly sad disposition. There is an especially moving photographic portrait of Carl, taken some time around 1930 by the well-known photographer Gertrude Simon. He is dressed in a dark suit; his head is heavy boned and provides the setting for large, thoughtfully melancholic eyes. In his home office there hung a print of a nineteenth-century Symbolist painter, Arnold Böcklin. It was a famous 1872 self-portrait of the artist at work with death leering over his shoulder playing a violin (the original hung at the National Gallery). Böcklin was best known for his Island of the Dead series. Much later, the son could recall shuddering at the sight of the image and could not fathom his father’s interest in representations of the morbid. It depressed him, and he wished his father would replace the picture with something more uplifting. Both Albert and Eva recall their father, especially after a long day at work, and more commonly after 1929, going into his home office and sitting there in silence, his head in his hands, gazing downward. “He depressed easily,” remembered Eva. Otto Albert, in particular, worried; his sister remembers repeated attempts by the son to cheer the father up with chess games, talk about books, or light banter. He had few personal friends, though plenty of family acquaintances emanating from Hedda’s affiliations. His closest friend was Ulrich Friedemann, a pediatrician and fellow assimilated Jew whose family was a frequent guest at Hohenzollernstrasse.28 There were times in which the life of hard work appeared to take its toll on the father. In the summer of 1930, he once more forfeited the family vacation, tending to his mother-in-law and caring for Tilla Durieux (recently wed to Lutz Katzenellenbogen). One patient in particular (called Löwenburg) was causing no end of grief, and he did not feel ready to pass him on to the doctors of the Charité Hospital. “It’s dreadfully hot here again and the day with its worries and 1000 petty concerns is wearying, but all I can say is that I’m bearing up well and since I have resolved to keep my head up, I’m feeling well.” The fatigue of self-sacrifice is clear: “I’m so full of worries about others, I don’t let it come up any more that I hide myself in myself, but instead want to live busily and actively, and both especially strongly for you all,” he wrote to his vacationing family. Two days later, Carl sounds as if he is reaching his rope’s end. Ground down by the conflict between Tilla Durieux and Lutz Katzenellenbogen and trying to keep the newsmaking actress at arm’s length while the Löwenburg case was causing “mental agitation,” he confessed: “I’m tired and worn down.”29

  Hirschman’s own memories of his father are filled with portraits of kindness and seriousness. There were the occasions for fun: Carl and Otto Albert would occasionally do exercises on the
gymnastics bar, swings, and trapeze out in front of the villa. Carl was no absent father. Though he left early every morning for the hospital, he returned every day to dine with the family. He lavished attention when he could on all three children. He was also dutiful in minding the affairs of Hedwig’s sometimes high-maintenance relations. Carl ministered to the health of his mother-in-law, occasionally giving up vacations to stay in Berlin to look after her as she got older. He was also charged with accompanying Hedwig’s cousin Lutz Katzenellenbogen on a cruise to Egypt, the purpose of which was not only to keep the wealthy kinsman entertained, but also to talk him out of divorcing his wife, thereby avoiding a family scandal. The latter task was a futile one. Lutz left Estella and created a major dustup with the family, made worse a bit later when he struck up an affair and then a marriage with the scandal-prone Tilla Durieux.30

  The trip to Egypt did yield one side benefit: on the way back, Carl arranged for Hedwig and Otto Albert to meet him in Paris, where they would spend a week together. It was not the twelve-year-old’s first trip to another country, but it was the first to Paris, and it left a permanent impression. The boy was awestruck by the city’s beauty, the open boulevards, the parks, the Louvre, the expanse from the great museum to the Étoile, the mammoth Père Lachaise acropolis for famous deceased citizens as well as the Communards’ Wall. It was the entwined beauty and history that fascinated Otto Albert; he never forgot his first sight of the Gothic stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle. Carl was committed to showing his son the world; what is more, he encouraged him to see it for himself.31