The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  In 1917 Max was again thwarted in his bid for the Hamburg Senate. Competing against an undistinguished figure, he thought he had the contest wrapped up. The custom was for the victor to receive well-wishers in his home on election night. That Friday evening, Max raced home and debated whether to wear his tailcoat or tuxedo only to learn by phone that his opponent had won. Bravely, he made excuses, contending that the late hour had caused many members to depart before the vote, while other inebriated members had marked the ballot incorrectly. Aby, who wasn’t fooled, reacted stormily. Max was soon cheering up those who came to console him. Never one to brood or bear a grudge, he searched for some redeeming feature and said his victory might only have incited anti-Semitic feeling. In the end, he and his family, including Charlotte, sat down to enjoy their usual Friday night dinner.15

  —

  For Aby Warburg, the war fulfilled his bleakest premonition of the triumph of madness over reason. The strain of the war shattered his ever delicate mental balance. Three weeks into the war, heeding his “prophetic belly,” he gloomily predicted a German defeat. Early victories that sparked wild transports of joy in Hamburg only further depressed him. “We have triumphed to death,” he said.16

  The war’s timing was tragic for him. In spring 1914, he had discussed his plans to turn his library into a research institute with his protégé, Fritz Saxl, but it proved a lovely, evanescent dream. When war broke out, Saxl was drafted by the Austrian army and plans for the institute were scrapped amid the general madness.

  The usual tale of Aby’s reaction to the war stresses his early pessimism and horror at bloodshed and conjures up a portrait of a sensitive, humane, reasonable soul. Unfortunately, Aby was intensely partisan, sometimes fanatically so, with an extremely slanted and one-sided view of events. He regretted the violation of Belgian neutrality, memorably saying that Germany now wore patent-leather shoes grotesquely spattered with bird shit.17 Yet he vehemently defended German troops against accusations of civilian atrocities, saying they had been fired upon by snipers.18 He was dismayed only by Allied barbarism against Germany. Even his early foreboding that Germany would lose was offset by countless, chauvinistic statements that it must and would win. In Aby’s wartime correspondence, there is scarcely a cool, considered word to be found. He is less the apostle of reason than the embodiment of wartime belligerence.

  During the war’s first weeks, Aby wandered about in anguish, tortured by insomnia and gory, nocturnal visions. Each morning, he awoke with renewed disbelief that Europe was engaged in this mass act of suicide. Every death disturbed him. In January 1915, Aby S.’s grandson, Franz, died from an exploding shell on the Somme and Aby M. wrote his mother: “War swallows the best. We are stoking the furnace with pianos.”19 Feverish, restless, too old to fight and suffering from diabetes, the forty-nine-year-old Aby contributed to war charities, swapped news on street corners, and recorded battles in his diary. He wrote to Paul in Washington, hoping that Paul could counteract anti-German “slander” and get Americans to read German newspapers.20

  Baffled by his own impotence, Aby decided to combat the Allies with the sole weapon at his disposal: his library. Everything must be subordinated to the war effort. Instead of chronicling art history—which he never entirely ceased to do—he began to catalogue the war, clipping eight or nine Hamburg and foreign newspapers daily. Soon file cabinets stuffed with clippings sprouted beside the bookshelves. Aby’s student, Carl Georg Heise, pictured the library as a battlefield and Aby as its commanding officer. Eventually, Aby would accumulate some 25,000 excerpts from wartime news.

  At first, this attempt to systematize the unspeakable gave the embattled Aby an illusory sense of mastery over events. Then the effort grew so strenuous and massively exhausting that he had to dragoon the three children into the effort and they hated copying out the extracts from the papers. When Aby developed a sore shoulder, Mary had to serve as his secretary. Jim Loeb, who spent the war in Germany, told Panina, “I have been trying to get Mary to come here for a while, but I fear Aby will not let her off. Poor little woman; she barely can call her soul her own!”21

  Aby’s wartime catalogue is often portrayed as a high-minded attempt to sift fact from the fog of deceit. In fact, Aby was only enraged by supposed lies directed against Germany and had no interest in discrediting home-grown propaganda. He only saw his virtuous Germany unfairly maligned by a malicious, uncomprehending world and blamed the press, not politicians or generals, for the war. “Without the profligacy of the lying press, the war might never have come about.”22 He envisaged a later war-crime trial in which Germany would expose libels from the Allied press. Writing to busy newspaper editors, Aby beseeched them to note down precisely the source of anti-German statements. Only with such citations, he told an editor, “can the material be reliably gathered for the ‘Handbook of Lies’ which must be written after the war.”23 Editors must have been bemused by this strange, importunate little man who expected pedantic exactitude from harried war reporters.

  Aby undertook one diplomatic mission. In 1914, Italy wavered whether to side with Germany or defect to the Entente powers. Since Aby had lived in Florence, spoke fluent Italian, and adored the country, he seemed an ideal emissary for Germany. At a September 1914 meeting with Prince von Bülow—soon to be named a special German ambassador to Italy—Aby offered to edit a new illustrated quarterly in Italian to keep Italy as a German ally. The first issue of this Rivista, vetted by von Bülow himself, appeared in October. In November and again in January 1915, Aby went to Italy to lobby old friends and reported on his talks to von Bülow. He was so agitated that his doctor only allowed him to make the second trip after he had rested for eight days beforehand.

  When Italy joined the Entente that spring, Aby felt deeply betrayed and melodramatically likened Italy to a dear old friend stabbed to death by street assassins. He insisted that the Italian government had acted in the face of overwhelming popular goodwill toward Germany. As he told a former assistant, “It’s a pity that one can’t suddenly die from an attack of nausea. Incidentally, I will help to annihilate Italy, however and where I can. This bordello must disappear.”24

  One cannot fathom Aby’s venom without realizing that he viewed the war as a struggle for supremacy between two highly unequal cultures. He saw Germans as civilized and humanistic, Anglo-Saxons as venal barbarians. Germany fought for freedom, and England, then America, for booty. He believed implicitly in the superiority of Germany and Italy, whom he pictured leading a European struggle for cultural dominance against the Far East. When Italy defected to the Allies, it blurred the clear-cut moral lines that had simplified the war for him and made it a holy cause. Good and evil were now frustratingly mixed up.

  Despite the family ties to England and America, Aby thought that the two countries represented a rising new order of decadent, philistine materialism. As he told Paul, “Let them pay—that is the only maxim in which Anglo-Saxon culture believes. But there are ideological reactions and struggles for freedom that one can’t suppress with gold and lies.”25 Aby so demonized Anglo-Saxons that he devised propaganda slogans for use by the German press that reflect a highly personal detestation. Contacting newspaper editors, he encouraged them to employ the slogan, “Britannia rules the slaves” instead of “Britannia rules the waves.” The slaves were the United States and Italy. He suggested to one editor that an allegorical figure of Britannia be shown cracking a black and gold whip over an Italian condottiere.26 To another editor he proposed that the United States should be referred to as the United Northern Slave States of America.27 These mean-spirited gibes are the more remarkable when one realizes that Paul and Felix were sustaining Aby’s cultural pursuits with American dollars.

  In fairness, one must stress that Aby was already undergoing a slow-motion mental disintegration. His mind teemed with images of nightmarish intensity as he spoke of a planet streaming with blood, of a stormwind carrying off the delicate blossoms and leaves of German youth, of the wide, screaming
mouth of heavy industry devouring the intellectual world. Upon first hearing rumors of peace in 1915, he grumbled, “The unchained beast must first drink up more blood.”28

  Aby’s belief in German culture was echoed by Jim Loeb, now spending his ninth summer in southern Germany. Aby was delighted when Jim decided to ride out the war at his estate. Jim spent the war playing Beethoven and Brahms in the great hall of Hochried with its full organ. He thrilled to the mystical strains of Wagner and listened to friends reading aloud from Goethe’s Faust. Like Aby, he was contemptuous of the Italians’ betrayal, referring to them as “greasy traitors” while praising the Germans as “this uncomplaining, great heroic people.”29 Jim expanded his potato patch at Hochried to aid the war effort and gave a whopping one-hundred-thousand-mark donation to the War Relief Agency. No less than Aby, he clung to the view that Germany was fighting off the barbarian hordes.

  —

  The war thrust not only Max, Paul, and Felix into prominence, but even Fritz—the goggle-eyed younger brother with the walrus mustache. As chairman of the Hamburg Metal Exchange, he was tapped for the advisory board of the War Metals Company, which ensured a ready supply of raw materials for Germany.30

  In 1915, Max traveled three times to Sweden at the behest of the Foreign Office and vainly attempted to get Foreign Minister Knut Wallenberg to abandon neutrality and fight with Germany. As soon as Wallenberg noted Sweden’s extensive trade ties to England, the talks were frostily terminated. Max then advised the Foreign Office to send a commercial attaché to Sweden to foster trade, and Fritz was assigned to the Stockholm embassy as an economic adviser. He never received an official rank, giving him greater leeway to conduct barter deals.

  Slated to stay in Stockholm for two weeks, Fritz ended up staying in Sweden with his family until the armistice. His friend Baron von Lucius, the head of the German legation, relied on him in business negotiations. No slouch, Fritz obtained a large loan for the Reichsbank and arranged a big swap of Swedish ore for the German coal that kept Swedish railroads running. He bartered German potash for Swedish lard, German coal for Swedish horses.

  For Fritz and Anna Beata, the war years in Stockholm meant a pleasing respite from the eternal social domination of Malice. Anna, who came from the Swedish Warburgs, founded a Fröbel society there to promote progressive kindergarten work. She befriended Elsa Brändström, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador in Moscow, whose nursing work with German prisoners in Russia would earn her the title of the Swedish Florence Nightingale. Together, the women co-authored a children’s book, What Should We Do?31

  In July 1916 Fritz stumbled into the history books quite by accident. A Russian delegation was passing through Stockholm on its way home from financial talks in London, when a Count Olsufjew asked to meet a German from the economic sphere. Having sounded out the mood in France and England, he said offhand, he wanted to do the same for Germany. The casual request concealed a serious agenda. During talks at the Foreign Office in Berlin, Fritz had received instructions to follow up on such overtures, and von Lucius encouraged him to meet with the Russians.32 (In Max’s version, Fritz went only because von Lucius had left Stockholm the day before.33) Perhaps to give the German government some self-protective distance from the talks, Fritz claimed that he attended the Grand Hotel meeting with little official coaching and that he was astonished when the door opened and Alexander Protopopov, vice-president of the Russian Duma, strolled into the room. Suddenly Fritz was engaged in high-level, if discreetly unofficial talks, looking toward a separate peace between Germany and Russia.

  In his opening remarks, Fritz was careful to stress that he was voicing his own views and not those of his government. He insisted that Germany had the stamina and resources to fight a protracted war, but that its real grievance lay with France and England, not Russia. He proposed a swap in which Germany would get Baltic territory and Russia parts of German-occupied Poland, followed by stepped-up trade between Russia and Germany.34

  Again soft-pedaling the affair, Fritz later said that the conversation was improvised on both sides and that the German Foreign Office was skeptical of its success. In Russia, Protopopov faced a violently hostile reception. He made a presentation that seemed to impress the vacillating Czar Nicholas II. But when the secret talks became known, they were denounced by pro-British Russian liberals, and Protopopov, in self-defense, alleged that Fritz had initiated the talks. More a pawn than a master in this intricate chess game, Fritz was kept in the dark about parallel peace overtures that Germany was making toward Russia. Only after the war did an official correspondent inform him, “Your negotiations with Pr. and O. were only a link in a longer chain.”35 In November 1916, Germany announced an independent Poland and tried to recruit Polish volunteers, an inflammatory step that killed any chance for further peace talks with Russia.

  When the Nazis later rewrote this history to suit their needs, the modest, unassuming Fritz was villainized for his “treacherous” part in the Protopopov affair. In 1925, Nazi publicist Theodor Fritsch insisted that Fritz had fumbled a sure chance for a separate peace in 1916. Such a peace, Fritsch declared, would have simultaneously assured German victory and spared Russia the Bolshevik Revolution. Fritsch asserted that any patriotic German diplomat could have successfully concluded the talks. So, in one deft stroke, the Nazis alleged that Fritz had wrecked Imperial Germany, advanced the Communist cause, and changed the entire course of European history.36

  —

  By 1916, the war that had sent cheering, delirious throngs into the Rathaus square in August 1914 had produced a dull feeling of oppression. With groceries scarce, the turnip formed the staple of the Hamburg diet. As food supplies dwindled, grim lines lengthened before stores. A third of the Hamburg population had to resort to huge public eating halls. The food shortages produced charges of rampant graft, resulting in strikes and police crackdowns. That September, women and students rioted, shouted “Down with the kaiser,” and demanded an end to the war. As Max said of 1916, “Life took on a dreary, joyless heaviness.”37

  With the economy so dismal, Max fetched business from unlikely places. One day in 1917, he got a visit from Carl Hagenbeck, founder of the Hamburg zoo. With even humans scrounging and scavenging for food, it was prohibitively expensive for Hagenbeck to feed his beasts and he needed to borrow eight thousand marks. Max hesitated to lend money to sustain zoo animals in near-famine conditions and only agreed on the proviso that he take a mortgage on the rhinoceros. It was an inspired step: After the war, he sold the rhino to the Budapest zoo and recouped his money.

  If Max fell prey to many delusions over the years, he foresaw with crystal clarity the folly of Germany’s unrestricted U-boat warfare and accurately predicted that such a strategy would ensure America’s entry into the war. In December 1916, Paul sent Max a letter through an intermediary that said the Allies had nearly exhausted the market for American loans but that U-boat warfare would foster sympathy and expand that market.38 Having the benefit of Paul’s wisdom, Max knew better than German military leaders exactly what U.S. entry would signify, but was often ostracized by officialdom. When Hamburg’s Chamber of Commerce appealed to the kaiser in early January 1917 to start unrestricted submarine warfare, Max emphatically protested. But he could now voice his dissenting views only within a shrinking political circle.

  He made two last attempts to modify policy. On January 20, 1917, he dined with Arndt von Holtzendorff, HAPAG’s Berlin agent, and Karl Helfferich, the Imperial Treasury secretary, his most influential ally on the submarine question. As Max warmly argued the need to refrain from U-boat attacks, he could tell from Helfferich’s skeptical expression that he had lost his last ally. German leaders didn’t believe that America would wage war in retaliation. After Wilson sent his peace message to the U.S. Senate on January 22, Max implored the German Foreign Office to respond constructively and made a prophetic plea: “If it comes to war with America, we will boost the moral, financial and economic strength of Germany’s enemies to
such an extent that we can hope for nothing more in the future; that is my firm conviction.…”39

  By chance, Max lunched at his club with Admiral von Holtzendorff and Arthur Zimmermann on January 31—the fateful day Germany announced the open U-boat campaign. Rather than finding his naval companions buoyant, he saw that they were subdued and depressed, as if secretly uncertain of their views. In early February, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. During the next two months, even Paul Warburg argued that America should join the war if Germany didn’t halt its misguided campaign of submarine terror. By April 6, 1917, the United States joined the war, as Max had predicted. For the German-American Warburg family, it was a disaster of unimaginable proportions and inexpressible grief.

  Charlotte wrote a touching letter to Woodrow Wilson. Saying that there must be other mothers like her with sons on both sides of the ocean, she asked whether there was no chance of ending the war. Before the U.S. entry into the war, letters had still united the German and American Warburgs. Small and buxom but still energetic, Charlotte sat at her desk, a jar of boiled drinking water beside her, writing to her children in New York. She kept their return letters in a basket in the breakfast room and read them aloud whenever the entire family assembled. After April 1917, the Warburgs were cut off by an impenetrable wall. Occasionally, travelers brought smuggled letters from America, but these couriers were unreliable. One got scared and threw a packet of letters overboard on a transatlantic liner, causing Felix to throw up his hands in despair. “Such a schlemiel!”40 For Max and Paul, who had corresponded so copiously, it was a strange, disorienting interlude. As if they had been Siamese twins, Max said he felt separated from his second self.41 Felix now had to relinquish the M. M. Warburg partnership he had inherited from Paul in 1914.