by Ron Chernow
Hamburg experienced electrifying growth that elevated it into a major world entrepôt. By the port, twenty thousand men razed picturesque old courtyards and sunless, narrow lanes to summon up the dazzling brick colossus of the Speicherstadt. It was a modern marvel of engineering, a warehouse city on the water, woven by an intricate network of bridges and canals. Each building had a water side where bundles of spice, coffee, and oriental rugs could be hoisted straight into open lofts. Photos show a city busily reinventing itself. Horse-drawn omnibuses raced along the streets, steamers plied the lake, and tall-masted ships packed the port. The port was a scene of hectic activity. In 1895, the aging Bismarck came to town and Bernhard von Bülow recorded his reaction: “He stopped when he set foot on the giant steamboat, looked at the ship for a long time, at the many steamers lying in the vicinity, at the docks and huge cranes, at the mighty picture presented by the harbor, and said at last, ‘I am stirred and moved. Yes, this is a new age—a new world.’ ”1 It wasn’t really his world, though: In 1890, Bismarck had been swept aside by the brash young emperor.
Hamburg would always retain a dual personality. A rough, lawless place of swearing sailors, militant dockworkers, brutal bosses, and raffish whorehouses, it also had residential areas of surpassing refinement and elegant taste. Many burghers displaced by the Speicherstadt moved around the Alster lakes. Even the downtown business district kept a tranquil charm, the tapered lines of its verdigris church steeples sketching out a graceful silhouette. The boom sharpened social divisions, and the Warburgs and their neighbors had little direct contact with left-wing stevedores in the noisy, unruly tenements of the St. Pauli district.
Rushing to overtake other powers, Germany not only built new transatlantic ships, but expanded coal and steel production at a headlong pace. This belated industrial revolution—so accelerated, so compressed—generated both giddy excitement and a widespread sense of nervous exhaustion. It was hard enough for the Reich to forge a cohesive culture from its mosaic of constituent states, but it had to accomplish this even as railways, mills, mines, and factories transformed the country’s face. A wise solution might have been to foster a culture receptive to diversity. Instead, Germany stressed monolithic conformity and engaged in an anxious, insecure, often escapist quest for a “pure” German identity, frequently finding it in a mythic past of virgin forests and mountains. Unfortunately, the Germans needed “outsiders” to define the still-elusive concept of “insiders,” and the Jews nicely served the purpose.
Quite naturally, the Jewish community was more impressed by its gains in the new Germany than by the remaining areas of outright exclusion. Of the Warburg children, Max, the second son, was the most inflamed by the military pride and exalted rhetoric of the German Empire. He would be the Warburg most susceptible to the alluring vision that Jews could be fully absorbed into the mainstream of German society. His life would prove sadly emblematic of the fate that awaited superpatriotic Jews who attained prominence under the kaiser.
A poor student, Max only stayed in school to please Moritz and when he passed his Abitur in 1886 the family collectively exhaled with relief. As Max confessed, “actually, from age 16 to 18, I spent more time flirting than working.”2 Like other Warburg children, he rarely encountered anti-Semitism in school, and when it surfaced his best friend always trounced the culprits. Charlotte noted Max’s engaging manner, his social skills. “Good old Max had friends in all circles,” she said. “With his bright blue eyes under bushy eyebrows and his irresistible smile, he wins over everybody. Whatever he undertakes, he succeeds in doing.”3
Photos show a slim, rakish young man. A great charmer, a fine dancer and rider, Max had a magnetic warmth and the power of quick decision. He gravitated to banking, but had a youthful need to associate it with some transcendent purpose. He wondered whether the banker “couldn’t serve humanity, without squeezing it, and whether he couldn’t turn the profit of the world to his own profit as well.”4 In 1887, Max apprenticed with the Frankfurt bank of I. Dreyfus, staying with his Oppenheim grandparents—a period memorable for his nonstop flirtation with cousins and other girls. In Frankfurt, he was exposed to the then superior culture of the Oppenheims and their artistic circle. Then he apprenticed with Wertheim & Gomperz in Amsterdam and scored his first business triumph by winning a correspondent relationship for M. M. Warburg with the Niederlandische Bank. Though he learned Dutch, he found Holland almost risibly tedious and seized every distraction, later saying, “Never have I so thoroughly examined a museum as I did the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuiz.”5
Max was the first Warburg who assumed that his Judaism would present no stumbling block to his ambition. Some small warning voice that had whispered caution to his ancestors never spoke to him. Slightly deaf in one ear, he could have dodged military service, but he wanted to emulate those rich boys who got commissions in prestigious cavalry regiments. He was a superb rider who loved to drill and he knew he would look smart in uniform. Yet even the omnipotent Bleichröder had had to put forth strenuous exertion to get an army officer’s commission for his son.
In October 1888, Max covered up his hearing defect and started military service with the 3rd Bavarian Light Cavalry Regiment in Munich, Bavaria being one of the few places with Jewish officers. Max’s letters betray a deep admiration for military discipline and a growing patriotism, despite engrained anti-Semitism among the officers. In one paean to the Fatherland, he told Charlotte that whether it was a matter of social democracy or industrial enterprise, Germans tended to pursue things “with quite a different sort of effectiveness and thoroughness as in other lands.”6
Within a year, the young chauvinist was appointed a noncommissioned officer and wrote Moritz a sixteen-page letter outlining in detail his plans to become a regular career officer. This was still a highly fanciful ambition for a Jewish boy, since Jews seldom rose beyond Vize-Feldwebel or sergeant of the reserve. (The Prussian Army lacked reserve officers until World War I.) Max awaited his father’s reply with great hope. After a tense, painful wait, he received a one-line reply from the laconic Moritz that seemed to compress two thousand years of Jewish history into one word. “My dear Max, meschugge [crazy]. Your loving father.”7 If hurt and outraged, Max saw the wisdom of his father’s advice when he was blackballed in secret ballot by the Bavarian officers. For all its folly, this early episode showed how fearless Max was in entering German society, if also how utterly doomed to disappointment. In his later stewardship at the bank, Max would often be likened to a general who instilled a spirit of joyful discipline and his confident, barrel-chested élan indeed suggested an imperial cavalry officer.
Moritz used his connection with the French Rothschilds to slip Max into a position as a secretary with Banque Impériale Ottomane in Paris in 1890. The city was plentifully supplied with fine wine and pretty women and it was a heady experience for the bon vivant. Max learned French by memorizing letters from old copybooks and sometimes attended Sorbonne lectures. By night, he caroused expensively. At the start of each month, Moritz sent a check to Max’s rue de Teheran apartment. Since Max frittered away the funds before month’s end, he crossed the Seine and stayed with a painter friend in the Latin Quarter until Moritz sent the next check. Max’s sexual conquests must have been legion, for years later, riding down the Champs-Élysées with his wife, he would wave gaily at many women on the sidewalk.
Max did an obligatory stint at N. M. Rothschild & Sons in London, renting a flat near Park Lane and affecting a British manner. Given Hamburg’s extensive trade links with Britain and anglophile culture, the fit was natural and easy. The status-conscious Warburgs were always close students of society, and to prepare for Rothschild gatherings Max pored over Burke’s Peerage. After Paris, the City of London seemed staid and genteel. One day Baron Alfred de Rothschild reproached him for working too hard. “A gentleman is not to be found in the office before eleven and never stays beyond four.”8 Profiting from this advice, Max returned each weekend to Paris for revelry. When
a friend spotted him there and reported this back in Hamburg, Moritz was incredulous, insisting, “That must have been a double, because my son is in London.”9 Moritz bet twenty marks that the Doppelgänger wasn’t his son. Hastily Max confessed that he had indeed visited Paris—but on the most urgent of business purposes, of course.
This foreign idyll ended in 1892. Max was about to embark on a round-the-world trip with his London friend, Paul Kohn-Speyer, when news arrived that the Gunzburg bank in St. Petersburg had experienced a disastrous loss from the Lena Gold Fields in Siberia. When the bank stopped payment, this threatened a seven-million-mark loan that the Warburgs had outstanding to the Gunzburgs. Short-handed after Siegmund’s death, Moritz summoned Max home to cope with the crisis. The Warburgs stood loyally by the Gunzburgs, strengthening the tie with their in-laws and even improving their own credit rating. Years later, the Gunzburgs lavishly and stylishly repaid the loan with a heap of gold coins.
For the Warburgs, troubles always arrived in battalions. In 1892, Max, a novice to the firm, struggled through a nightmarish summer. Because Hamburg was a seaport hosting a vast transient population, it was always susceptible to sudden epidemics. Tenement residents drank from the polluted Elbe River and sickness spread quickly. That summer, a virulent cholera epidemic ran through Hamburg, claiming eight thousand lives. The cholera bacillus could kill people in a day or two, since severe vomiting and diarrhea drained bodily fluids, and entire streets of inhabitants perished from contaminated water. At its height, the epidemic took a thousand lives daily and the terrified populace stopped shaking hands or even touching their own faces. Authorities sealed off” the port and closed the schools. Whether for drinking or bathing, all water had to be boiled.
Unfazed, Max strolled confidently through this ghastly landscape of plagues and terrors, running the bank during the epidemic. All outgoing mail was disinfected. Although the thirty Warburg employees received two bottles of Hennessy cognac apiece to replace drinking water, several died. Since the Warburgs couldn’t make people work, Max and two others toiled from seven in the morning until midnight. From his ground-floor window, he could watch municipal carts, piled high with fresh corpses, trundling by in the streets. He showed a characteristic faith in his own invincibility, a fearlessness both brave and foolhardy, an inborn certitude that he could outface danger. As a man of pure optimism, he typified German Jews under the kaiser. “I had the certain feeling that I was immune,” he admitted.10 Even after the plague ended, a mournful air lingered, as women shrouded their faces behind black veils and men walked the streets in mourning bands.
The cholera epidemic had unfortunate political repercussions, as anti-Semites blamed it on the mass influx of Jewish emigrants. Agitators were quick to equate Jews with unhealthy foreigners, branding them an impure, unholy, alien element corrupting the body politic. The pestilence also gave isolationist German nationalists a chance to rebuke Hamburg for being overly influenced by outside economic interests. In time, the identification of Jews and inimical foreign trade would ripen in anti-Semitic literature and provide a theme with powerful nativist appeal. By the next year, the Anti-Semitic party claimed sixteen Reichstag seats.
Though only in his fifties, Moritz began to yield responsibility to Max, appointing him a partner in 1893. He thought Max would be a splendid businessman, if he could just muster the discipline. “If Max only arrives on time, he always gets the deal done,” he observed.11 Max soon began writing the annual reports. When the bank’s chief clerk died that year, Moritz enlisted Paul, naming him a partner two years later. Moritz was extremely proud of his stable of thoroughbred sons—they must have seemed a gift of the gods—and his indolent, self-effacing nature encouraged his young prodigies to take charge quickly.
Paul was a thin, bony young man—“We Warburgs were built to be racehorses,” he once said—who already showed a deep and ineradicable sadness in his warm, sensitive eyes.12 As a boy, his intellectual feats even eclipsed those of Aby. Before his second birthday, he recited verse and sang songs with precise lyrics. As sickly and delicate as Max was red-blooded and impetuous, he was taunted by his older brothers. Felix’s wife later recalled that “in his early years Aby and Max gave [Paul] what is nowadays called an ‘inferiority complex’ by refusing to play with him and telling him he was ugly and weak.”13 By early adulthood, the shy Paul suffered from a gastric ulcer and vague, nameless depression. Where Aby manipulated his ailments to indulge his wishes and expand his own personal power, Paul stoically bore life’s crosses. If Aby’s story would be one of a turbulent, narcissistic indulgence and exploration of self, Paul’s would be characterized by an equally tenacious streak of disciplined self-denial.
Paul was a financial prodigy malgré lui, who made money without especially caring about money. With his finely honed intelligence, he wanted to be a teacher or civil engineer, and early experience only confirmed a congenital disdain for business that never entirely deserted him. He loathed his two-year stint with a Hamburg trading firm during which he laboriously stuck labels on merchandise bales at the docks. Then he trained at Samuel Montagu in London and the Banque Russe pour le Commerce Étranger in Paris. Because he had broken an elbow joint in school, he was excused from military service and took Max’s place in the planned round-the-world tour. This carried him through Egypt, India, China, and Japan, ending with a transcontinental trip from Seattle to New York. Paul adored Japan’s lyric beauty, recoiled at India’s filth and squalor, and memorialized his trip in poems. He had an unusually fine sensibility for a young man starting a banking career.
Paul’s entry into M. M. Warburg & Co. upset the pact between the Mittelweg and Alsterufer branches by which each side contributed one son as a partner. Théophilie had gotten her son, Aby S., admitted into the firm, but Paul tipped the balance toward transparent Mittelweg dominance. When Moritz had first broached this a few years earlier, Paul was enamored of Théophilie’s cheerful daughter, Rosa. Moritz said not to worry, Paul would be her future son-in-law. “Théophilie got furious because according to her one thing had nothing to do with the other and apart from that she found it revolting that her daughter would marry her full cousin,” said Théophilie’s granddaughter.14 When Moritz insisted that an expanding business required a third partner, Théophilie grudgingly sold part of her partnership stake to Paul.
Théophilie lived in grandiose fashion until the end. Even after Siegmund died, she stayed alone at the Alsterufer house, accompanied by a butler and four maids. In summer, she received relatives from Kiev and spent winters on the Riviera. A doughty, determined woman, she tried to combat her rheumatism by climbing the stairs of her house. When she died in 1905, Aby S. took over the Alsterufer house.
The Mittelweg Warburgs always thought Aby S. a dim-witted nonentity—“My uncle’s oldest son was a dope,” Fritz said flatly—who dedicated most of his time to family correspondence and Jewish community work.15 Despite his handsome, aristocratic face and immaculate dress, he never shed the tiny appearance of a premature child. A charming melancholic, gentle and querulous, he later became severely diabetic, which made him temperamental. He chose wives of equal delicacy. In 1894, he married a frail, pretty Russian girl named Olga Lucie Leonine. A year after their marriage, Aby took her to a Freiburg doctor for special surgery so that she could bear children. After he returned to Hamburg, she developed complications and spent a terrible night of lonely suffering, afraid to disturb the nurse; three days later, she died. Aby S. never recovered. Even when he married Elly Simon two years later, he insisted that they name their first daughter Olga. He gave his first wife’s jewelry and possessions to the little girl and retained a special affection for her.
During his decades at the bank, Aby S. was an invisible presence who seldom appears in official correspondence. He was more intelligent than the Mittelweg Warburgs made out, but sad and moody from his assorted maladies. As one grandson described the mood of his Alsterufer home, “It was most of the time a mood of sweet melancholy, drifting in li
ke the gray mist on the wintry Alster.”16 Like a strict but loving nurse, his wife, Elly, tended him and traveled south with him to the Riviera for his health. Aby S. was pious and kept a kosher house and raised his children so strictly that they had to make appointments to see him. If they didn’t finish their dinner, they would receive the same plate for breakfast.
Aby S. perpetuated French magnificence at the Alsterufer and had a special Louis XV salon. In his study he hung many French Impressionists and a Canaletto painting of the Grand Canal. The house contained rich red carpets, mahogany wainscoting, and furniture from Paris. An elevator gave it a passing resemblance to a small but elegant hotel. Footmen stood behind each place at dinner and the chief servant in this extravagant place even wore a tailcoat and white gloves. With unconscious pomposity, Aby S. once told his son, “Charles, please tell the butler to tell the maid to run my bath.”17 Aby S. was a stranger to ordinary life and seemed like a visitor from Mars on public outings. When his children got him to ride a public bus, he tried to tip the driver before disembarking. Later on, Aby S. bought an enormous red-brick weekend house on the coast at Travemünde, complete with lilac bushes, a tennis court, an open-air theater, and ponies for his son and four daughters.
Pretty much ignoring Aby S. at the bank, Max and Paul grew into a confident, unbeatable team. Paul was as thoughtful and prudent as Max was rash and dynamic. Where Paul was abundantly endowed with doubts, anxieties, and forebodings, Max was full of pep and a sometimes dangerously blind confidence. Paul seemed to carry the darkness of the Jewish past, while Max embodied the bright future. A story from their adolescence points up the contrast. One afternoon the brothers were reading together—Paul a weighty tome, Max a superficial novel. Abruptly Max snapped closed his book and said, “We must get dressed for Frau X’s party.” “Why should I go?” Paul replied. “I’m ugly, I have a bad figure, I am a bore, and I shall bore everyone.” “I shan’t be a bore,” retorted the buoyant Max. “I shall be the life and soul of the party.”18