by Ron Chernow
With emancipation, religion increasingly clashed with the claims of worldly ambition. As Jews strayed further into the outside world, adherence to Jewish law became a terrible impediment to business success. Tracking down kosher restaurants in strange towns was often a bewildering and insoluble problem. For that reason, Moritz and Siegmund generally abstained from Scandinavian travel—no small sacrifice for a north German business—and Sara approved of this self-imposed travel ban. “Grandmother was afraid they would not eat kosher food there,” Moritz’s son explained.29
Whether doubtful of their enduring reality or still conditioned by ancient persecution, Moritz was reluctant to grasp the freedoms proffered by emancipation. The gates had swung open, but he hesitated to tiptoe too far outside the Jewish community, afraid of the repercussions. Shaped by millennia of persecution, the Jewish psyche didn’t change overnight and Moritz had internalized too much caution to become venturesome. Once given the chance to buy a hereditary Prussian title for three million marks, he demurred with a knowing smirk: “I preferred to keep my kosher three million.”30 Moritz and Siegmund were still immured behind the old cultural walls.
The eminently practical Moritz accepted the way the world worked and never felt the youthful itch of idealism. As a young man, he observed, “That money compels deference in this world seems incongruous; but one cannot eat with philosophical phrases alone.”31 He wasn’t one to marry a beautiful waif. In 1860, he went to Wiesbaden with Sara, who took the baths for her rheumatism. She posted him to a Rhenish musical festival where he met Charlotte Oppenheim and her cousin, Markus Goldschmidt, who came from an Orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt. When Moritz, twenty-two, told his mother that he wanted to marry Charlotte, Sara brushed this aside. “Silly young man,” she said.32 But with her ravenous dowager’s appetite for gossip, Sara must have known that Charlotte wanted to marry Markus and that the Oppenheims objected because they were cousins.33 Did Sara’s dismissive response to Moritz’s statement mask a secret delight, even a hidden agenda?
In Charlotte Oppenheim, Sara found a daughter-in-law with drive and intelligence to match her own. Charlotte’s father, Nathan, was a jewel and antique dealer in Frankfurt, a man of broad culture, who had cofounded the opera house, learned thirteen languages, and consumed the entire encyclopedia. Charlotte’s mother, from the Goldschmidt banking clan, ran Nathan’s jewelry business during his gem-buying trips abroad. The Oppenheims exhibited a cheerful work ethic and sense of community service that made them perfect counterparts of the Warburgs. Trained in piano and singing and able to spout long sections of Goethe by heart, Charlotte was a gifted bluestocking. Yet there was nothing vague or ethereal about this short, bustling woman, who was a compact little dynamo with big plans. She sat ramrod straight in her chair, her stiff spine and alert gaze capturing her resolute approach to life and domineering nature.
On June 12, 1864, Moritz and Charlotte were married and set up house in Hamburg, at Number 17 Mittelweg (“middle way”), just a few blocks from the Alsterufer home of Siegmund and Théophilie. Sara wasted no time showing her preference for the buxom Charlotte over the stylish Théophilie. On a July evening, Charlotte arrived in Hamburg and discovered that her new mother-in-law, with awesome energy, had set up an entire house for her. Agog, Charlotte wandered incredulously through the brilliantly lit rooms and up the stairways decked with welcoming flags. As she recalled, “The sight of the Hamburg maids dressed in brightly colored cotton dresses, white aprons and white caps with tulle ribbons was a perfect delight for me.… Our own bathroom. I would never have dreamt of such a thing in our home in Frankfurt.” Sara had attended to everything. Opening a drawer in the breakfast room, Charlotte said, “I found a little ‘account book,’ stationery of all kinds, ink, pens—in short there was nothing missing. There was also a little pigeonhole for the household cash box.”34 Sara’s faith in Charlotte was rewarded a thousandfold, for the Warburgs would be the embodiment of Charlotte’s Oppenheim’s spacious vision.
At this stage of her life, Charlotte was still gay and cheerful. She wrote poetry, often went to the theater and concerts, and was mildly surprised and faintly patronizing that Hamburg lacked an art gallery. She struggled with the local dialect and anglophile phlegm of the town, but in time she adapted and became Sara’s protégée. She visited her mother-in-law every day after Sara’s afternoon drive and darned clothes as they talked. Every evening, when Moritz came to render his report to Sara, Charlotte had already been there for hours.
The lazy Moritz was willingly dominated by the industrious Charlotte and entrusted her with running his home and educating his children. Years later, Dutch painter Jan Veth captured the contrast between them. Relaxed and idle, Moritz slouches with his cigar, staring out at the Elbe River. Charlotte only sat for the painting on the condition that she could write and she is shown busily penning her memoirs. Moritz has a “womanish” softness, Charlotte a “mannish” hardness. For the dreamy Moritz, life flows lazily by like the river while the puritanical Charlotte consumes each precious minute, writing.
Thus were the two branches of the Warburg family established. Alsterufer and Mittelweg would become Warburg shorthand for the competing sides. Alsterufer males would bear a middle initial “S.” for Siegmund or Samuel, while Mittelweg males had an “M.” for Moritz. For decades, the families would debate who had contributed most to Warburg renown—the Alsterufer or Mittelweg branches. Much of our story will revolve around their jousting, their alternating supremacy, their jealous rivalry. The Warburgs would not only compete brilliantly against their neighbors, but most furiously and mercilessly against themselves.
CHAPTER 2
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The Imperial Theme
Just as most people are forever stamped by the culture of their adolescence, so German Jews were stamped by their emancipation during the reigns of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II. Their dawn was also Germany’s and they were infected with its buoyant nationalism and cult of progress. The Warburgs’ spectacular rise coincided with the tumultuous sequence of events that fused the German states into a single nation by 1871. Just as Germany belatedly scrambled to catch up with the Great Powers, so the Jews struggled to catch up within the surging new state. They happened to be liberated at a moment when the Fatherland teemed with economic opportunity, which permitted a spectacular debut for them.
In 1862, Otto von Bismarck started his long reign of iron and blood, infusing first Prussia and then all of Germany with a Spartan militarism that masked a blazing romanticism. The chancellor presented himself as a solitary heroic warrior, clad in cavalry boots, tunic, and spiked helmet. Much like a later chancellor, he was the lonely seer, bowed beneath the weight of German destiny. After a showdown with Denmark, he annexed the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and in 1866 stunned Europe by defeating mighty Austria.
When Bismarck created the North German Confederation, he tried to coax Hamburg into joining it. To overcome local objections, he embarked upon public works that connected the northern ports with Germany’s interior by railway, and he also courted Jewish residents and extended Jewish freedoms. In Hamburg, he responded to Siegmund Warburg’s proposal to create an “eternal cemetery.” Under Jewish law, bodies were supposed to stay buried in the same spot until resurrection, whereas in Hamburg the Jewish graveyard was freshly dug up every hundred years. When Bismarck approved a new Jewish cemetery near Hamburg, Siegmund asked whether bodies could slumber there for eternity. “Certainly,” replied Bismarck, “as far as it is in the power of the Prussian government to guarantee anything for all eternity.”1
As Fritz Stern noted in his study of Bismarck’s private banker, Gerson von Bleichröder, the chancellor betrayed a deep ambivalence toward Jews. Even though Bleichröder managed his estates, Bismarck repaid him by taking vicious swipes at Jews behind his back. For Bismarck, as for many gentile Germans, the Jew was a dirty secret, a useful catalyst to trade who was nonetheless feared and patronized socially. Opposing complete equality for Jews,
Bismarck yet discouraged public displays of anti-Semitism.
Pursuing three wars in quick succession, Bismarck forged a military colossus under Prussian domination. The king of Prussia, Wilhelm, became the new German emperor. By 1871, Hamburg surrendered its long-standing autonomy to become an imperial state. The capstone of Bismarck’s expansionary program was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 in which he vanquished the French army and encircled and bombarded Paris for four months. In its aftermath, he extracted five billion francs in reparations from France and annexed Alsace and Lorraine. An intoxicated Germany awoke to sudden awareness of its strength, and a dangerous equation was drawn between power and conquest. The thrill of martial glory that infused the populace bound even reluctant liberals to Bismarck’s despotism, breeding a reverence for authority and a warlike spirit that would later yield grim consequences.
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The Franco-Prussian War drove a wedge between the already competitive Mittelweg and Alsterufer Warburgs, since Théophilie was a francophile and Charlotte was deeply nationalistic. This feud exacerbated the personal rivalry between the two women. Charlotte frequently mocked the haughty airs of her “French sister-in-law,” while Théophilie sniffed at the “little provincial girl,” as she dubbed Charlotte.2 The real source of the quarrel, however, was Siegmund’s unchallenged supremacy at the bank. It grated on Charlotte that Moritz had so little influence, and she goaded him to assert himself. As one Alsterufer Warburg described Charlotte’s attitude: “She does not want to have a husband that is less well known than Théophilie’s. Why does everybody talk about the powers and ability of Siegmund and not about her Moritz? Good natured and really quite modest, Moritz lets her talk. But in the end the continual nagging of Charlotte doesn’t miss its mark.”3 Under Charlotte’s prodding, Moritz began to demand more say at the bank and quarreled more with Siegmund.
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Moritz Warburg smoking his cigar, gazing at the Elbe River, while Charlotte Warburg records her memoirs.
(Courtesy of Gabriele Schiff)
Gradually, the split assumed a political dimension. Having grown up in Frankfurt, which hosted the first federal parliament, Charlotte unashamedly exulted over the triumphs of the new German Empire. The Russian-born, francophile Théophilie, by contrast, envisioned her home as an international salon, free of stuffy German insularity. Charlotte supported Bismarck’s French expedition, Théophilie opposed it. Emotions ran so high that the Mittelweg and Alsterufer Warburgs simply stopped speaking. To heal the breach, the two families jointly rented a large Dutch villa on the North Sea for the summer and began to talk again.
The Franco-Prussian War proved a powerful stimulant to the German economy—and, thus, to the fortunes of the Warburg family. Joint-stock banks sprang into being, and many boasted leading Jewish figures, such as Ludwig Bamberger at Deutsche Bank or Eugen Gutmann at Dresdner Bank. The financial needs of the new industrial enterprises outstripped the resources of private bankers, requiring public share flotations. At this juncture, the Warburgs began to underwrite securities, beginning their swift ascent into the world of haute banque. Siegmund patched up relations with the Rothschilds that had lapsed under his father. As a result, the Warburgs participated in the second loan that permitted France to pay reparations to Germany. This was a gigantic windfall for the bankers.
It was a giddy time, as businessmen fathomed the economic potential of a unified German economy. When France, with the help of the Paris Rothschilds, repaid its war debt within two years, the German economy was swamped with cash, setting off a speculative boom. Jewish entrepreneurs excelled in railroads, newspapers, electrical companies, and department stores. Because they wanted to cast off a blighted past, the Jews were natural modernizers and enterprising agents of an often vertiginous change. What stake did they have in clinging to a feudal past that had excluded them?
As bankers hawked shares of new companies, some unscrupulous promoters suckered investors into blatant stock scams. The Warburgs, who had avoided stock promotion, now shed their inhibitions and joined the fray. In 1870, M. M. Warburg & Co. helped to form the Commerzund Disconto Bank, and Moritz joined the board. In Hamburg, the speculative frenzy was reflected in new villas built in the bucolic meadows by the Alster Lake. When flagrant excesses produced a stock market crash in 1873, the Warburgs suffered severe, but not crippling losses. As his son wrote, “Siegmund W. was badly depressed by the crash that followed, because losses persisted for so long a time.”4 Eventually, Siegmund grew philosophic, saying, “It was the Warburgs’ good fortune that whenever we were about to get very rich something would happen and we became poor and had to start all over again.”5
The 1873 bust proved a terrible setback for the recently emancipated Jews. Berlin banks were predominantly Jewish, and ruined investors scapegoated Jewish stock promoters for their misery. A converted Jewish railway mogul named Bethel Henry Strousberg was arrested for fraud and went bankrupt.
So even as this tumultuous decade provided opportunities for Jews, it exposed them to mounting attacks, for they were identified with the hectic, belated industrialism and booming urbanization of the early Empire. Already, more than half the German Jews were upper middle class and thrived under emancipation. They symbolized a modernity that many Germans found profoundly threatening and preferred to regard as a foreign graft, an alien presence, and not an organic development of their own society. When the Reichsbank was formed in 1875, broadsides branded it a Jewish conspiracy. One pamphlet said Jews were clustered in businesses that enjoyed large, easy profits, “namely in the banking business and in wholesale trade.”6 The term “anti-Semitism” first appeared in a Jewish newspaper in 1879 when Hamburg anarchist Wilhelm Marr injected the “Jewish Question” into German politics and launched his Anti-Semitic League. One should note that it was when Jews emerged from the ghetto—when they shed their beards and badges and became indistinguishable from other Germans—that the anti-Semitic movement first emerged. What disturbed the German Christians was the Jew as alter ego, not the Jew as Other.
In 1879, Sara rebuffed Bismarck in his request for the butter cakes—a famous Warburg tale. One day, a stockbroker and Bismarck hunting companion named Emil Vogt told Moritz that the chancellor wanted special butter cakes that were cooked for the Jewish Passover each year. Sara first agreed to supply them if her contribution remained anonymous; she would sign her annual gift, “From a patriot.”7 But in 1879, Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher, gave a venomous sermon against the Jews, arguing that “Israel must renounce its aim of becoming the master of Germany.” Unless new restrictions stopped the Jews, “the cancer from which we suffer will grow.”8 When the opportunistic Bismarck failed to denounce Stoecker, Sara retaliated. “Then Bismarck will get no more butter cakes,” she announced. When Vogt came to track down the missing cakes, Sara said tartly that Bismarck “should already know” why he hadn’t gotten them.9 He had met a will as imperious as his own.
Hamburg’s Jewish community, if smaller than Berlin’s, was also more secure, and its Jewish businessmen blended smoothly into the mercantile atmosphere. Berlin, as the home of the court and state bureaucracy and the feudal aristocrats and military caste, was rent by tension between rigid traditionalists and robust new capitalists. Hamburg, by contrast, warmed to the new industrial order, and its Jews didn’t dislodge an entrenched Junker class. Here, the union of German and Jewish culture proved a potent and highly compatible mix. By the late 1870s, Siegmund was serving in the city council or Bürgerschaft.
Amid this setting of imperial pomp, Charlotte and Moritz Warburg prepared their five sons and two daughters for life in the new German Reich. After a shortage of male Warburg heirs, Charlotte rapidly provided four—Aby in 1866, Max in 1867, Paul in 1868, Felix in 1871, plus a daughter, Olga, in 1873. The twins, Fritz and Louise, arrived in 1879. The brothers, all with the middle initial M. for Moritz, formed a critical mass of energy and talent that would transform the Warburgs and lift them out of their provincial milieu. They had t
he traditional family yearning for success, but without the historic restraints and secret inhibitions. And there were five of them.
Charlotte trained her seven children with a cheerful but strict and didactic determination. Frustrated with Moritz, she sought fulfillment through her wondrous sons. At Mittelweg 17, she presided in a white lace cap, tied under her chin, and tight-fitting dresses that reflected her austere energy. To convey a Spartan rigor, she avoided soft chairs. Every afternoon, she reviewed the children’s homework, correcting errors. Even when she was on holiday, she would scrutinize their homework by mail. On vacation in Ostend, she chided Aby for sending an essay on his best Viennese stationery. “Do you think your work would gain in my eyes for having a fine ship painted on top?” she asked.10 Forging a team, she stressed not only the work ethic, but brotherly togetherness. She knew both how to stimulate and mitigate sibling rivalry. “My dear Max, do you remember to read aloud softly every day to yourself? Paul and Felix like listening when you read to them.”11 If Max had to memorize a poem for school, Charlotte made him pace the room, reciting it aloud for hours.
An evangelist of success, Charlotte papered the children’s rooms with inspirational slogans. They would find doors marked “Carpe diem” or lift a desk top and behold, “See how beautiful it is, when brothers live in harmony with each other.”12 Although the daughters didn’t receive as much education—Charlotte just assumed they would marry—they too were inculcated with the work ethic of this busy family. They were not allowed to read in the morning—a habit Charlotte deemed idle at that hour—and received only one new dress per season. She never told the children that Moritz was a rich banker, describing him as a “merchant,” and she did everything possible to fight the corrupting indolence that comes with wealth. She also fought selfishness. When the children were given little metal piggy banks, they had to set aside a tenth of their savings for charity in accordance with the Jewish practice of tithing.