The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  —

  Like Ballin, Aby Warburg’s mental balance teetered along with the Empire, and his strained nerves finally snapped from the accumulated tension and exhaustion. His breakdown, curiously, paralleled the one suffered by Thomas Mann’s Faustus after World War I. For four years, Aby had labored at his newspaper index, as if this colossal, systematic drudgery might keep the demons at bay. He never wavered in his belief in Germany’s sacred cause. Commiserating with Eric in 1918, Aby said he understood the hardship of war, then added, “If our youth don’t stand up, how should we protect ourselves against the enslavement, the real extermination by the Entente?”34 Though a freethinker, Aby was a typical German Jew in his gratitude toward the kaiser. As his later assistant, Gertrud Bing, wrote, “He never forgot that Imperial Germany treated the Jews well and even later on he didn’t like to hear people criticize it.”35

  By September 1918, Aby had to stop seeing people or even reading newspapers, lest they stimulate dreadful new forebodings. Then, in October, all his terrible premonitions came true with Germany’s defeat, and the threads that had tenuously kept his mind together suddenly burst apart. A keen observer of this unraveling was Aby’s pupil, Carl Georg Heise. During the revolutionary turmoil of that fall, as Aby stood poised on a knife edge of madness, Mary asked Heise to come to the Heilwigstrasse house to deal with her husband. Heise found a gaunt Aby wandering through the rooms, muttering to himself and gesturing theatrically. “His brain worked feverishly and unchecked, everything was exaggerated and thereby distorted,” said Heise. However wild, Aby’s words had their own coded logic.

  Consumed by guilt and shame, Aby drew Heise into a corner to make a terrible confession. While talking with a university professor, Aby said, he had told the man “At the bottom of my soul I am a Christian!”36 He was appalled by his own admission. Now he flagellated himself as a loathsome coward, who hadn’t paid due homage to his religion and family and couldn’t be seen in public. When he made Heise swear to keep his revelation a secret, his disciple agreed. “He thereupon immediately screamed it out loud, so that the neighbors could hear it through the open windows,” said Heise.37 Aby grew so violent that Heise feared for his own safety and took shelter behind protective objects. “His voice was terrible. Hoarsely shouting, it now grew shrill, now sank back in an exhausted whisper.”38

  It is remarkable that Aby felt so profoundly guilty about his desertion of Judaism. Apparently, he had never renounced his heritage with a clear conscience and the iconoclasm had taken a terrible toll. He had long occupied a lonely no-man’s land, neither a true Jew nor a gentile, but some unique amalgam of both. He was the Warburg dilemma incarnate. Where did a rational sophisticated Jew belong in the modern world? In July 1918, his brother-in-law, Wilhelm Hertz, invited Aby and Mary to a family gathering along with two anti-Semitic guests. Afterward, Aby hotly told Wilhelm never to invite them again with such people around.39 At the same time, his impatience with Zionism grew. Even after Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Aby denounced Zionism as hopelessly mystical and romantic.40 The semiassimilated, intermediate world of bourgeois comfort inhabited by Max and other German Jews also had no appeal for him.

  As the offspring of a prominent Jewish family who had entered the heavily anti-Semitic world of German art history, Aby was always in an extremely awkward position. At moments, he blamed his family for his being Jewish. “It was as though he hated being a Warburg and yet, at the same time, couldn’t escape from the fact that he was a Warburg,” said a family member.41 He often criticized the Jewish community yet feared giving comfort to anti-Semites. To complicate matters further, he depended upon his Jewish family for money to study Christian art in chapels and basilicas. All these contradictions must have had terrible internal reverberations for such a mentally unstable man.

  Aby’s slow-motion breakdown shattered his family. The wartime pictures of Aby, Mary, and the three children are enveloped in a heavy, stifling gloom. Aby looks fidgety and troubled, while Mary has a downcast, sorrowing Madonna’s gaze. Max Adolph stares dreamily into the far distance, while the younger daughter, Frede, seems aloof, as if holding herself apart from the pull of an emotional vortex. The eldest daughter, Marietta, looks tearful, beautiful, tragic.

  Aby’s children watched him with fearful admiration. In his self-absorption, he felt neglected by them and would chide them, “You are not nearly curious enough for my liking.”42 Max Adolph was a pale, gentle, artistic teenager who pondered with compassion the enigma of his contradictory father. “This physically fear-ridden man was mentally the most fearless man I have known,” he said.43 Max Adolph was unwell during the war and greatly affected by his father’s slippage into madness. By October 1918, Aby was even considering taking Max Adolph to Switzerland, possibly to the Kreuzlingen clinic.44 That month, as the German war machine fell apart, madness staked its final claim on Aby. Always excitable, he now grew preternaturally so and talked incessantly. Perceiving danger and annihilation everywhere, he blamed himself. As E. H. Gombrich has written, “The two preoccupations of his scholarly life, the expression of passion and the reaction to fear, were gripping him in the form of terrible tantrums and phobias, obsessions and delusions which ultimately made him a danger to himself and his surroundings.…”45

  On an early-morning walk with his lovely cousin, Elsa, Aby grew so upset that she telephoned the doctor when they got home. At first, nobody knew what to do except to restrain Aby. The next day, he was placed in an isolation cell at a local clinic. He would always blame his family and friends for having shut him up like a wild animal for several weeks of sheer terror. Aby’s nervous breakdown was soon followed by another.

  His starry-eyed, idealistic son, Max Adolph, reacted in a powerful manner. He was walking along a cliff’s edge, when he had a mystical experience. He apprehended the immensity of the universe, the cosmic unity of all things.46 As he later wrote, “Strangely enough, when I was 16 years old, my father’s and my fatherland’s sudden terrible breakdown sparked off in me, like a flash, this very vision; this flash was kindled by the fire of Herakleitos of Ephesos, as far as my immature mind could grasp him.”47 He said the vision’s intensity never entirely faded and prevented him forever after—for reasons he never articulated—from applying himself for very long to any single field in life. Perhaps earthly life seemed to him afterward an insignificant way station on an eternal journey.

  For a time, Aby tried to return home and resume work. His teenage daughter, Marietta, had trained as a nurse. In a terrible misstep, the family had her care for her deteriorating father, an experience that scarred her for life. In his last hours of freedom, Aby knew that the madhouse awaited him and that he might never emerge again. Luckily, the young Fritz Saxl was on hand to take over the library. After his release from the army, Saxl had mounted an antiwar exhibition called “No More Wars,” under Austrian government auspices. Until the very end, Aby continued to work, using every spare moment, and he wouldn’t cede any authority to Saxl until he left Hamburg.

  Aby ended up at the Kreuzlingen sanatorium on Lake Constance in Switzerland, run by psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger. The Binswangers had already treated Fritz Warburg and Jim Loeb. Confined in a closed wing, sealed off from the outer world, Aby would allow only a small handful of relatives and colleagues to visit him. He lived in a strange twilight existence of alternating madness and lucidity. In his early days of confinement, he was joined by Max Adolph, whose nervous breakdown the doctors treated with a newfangled therapy in which patients lay in baths of tepid water to quiet their nerves. Unfortunately, as he tried to relax, Max Adolph could hear his father’s tortured screams at the end of the corridor.48

  Before his confinement, Aby had suffered such agony that friends and relatives hoped he would find solace in the sanatorium. His friend, Percy Schramm, was reminded of the ancient saying that the gods offer madness as a gift of grace.49 The future seemed murky. As Aby’s cousin, Elsa, wrote in a May 1919 let
ter: “… I think constantly of Aby M. To part from this world may not be so terrible, but what hurts is that he had to suffer so much this last year and that we do not know what will be the end of it.”50

  Ironically Aby departed from Hamburg at a moment of triumph for him. Spouting the slogan, “Education hurts nothing,” he had long struggled to persuade local business leaders to start a university.51 In April 1919, the City Council approved creation of the University of Hamburg, which the kaiser had opposed as a potential nursery of subversive thought. With the monarchy and military discredited by war, a weary citizenry searched for fresh answers, and hordes of returning veterans required education. So the world of the intellect thrived in Hamburg even as its main apostle fell prey to the madness he had so long feared and so heroically resisted.

  Part Three

  THE FALL OF THE MITTELWEG WARBURGS

  ——

  Carl Melchior.

  (Warburg family, Hamburg)

  CHAPTER 15

  ––

  Phantom Castle, Phantom Peace

  In early 1919, Germany wasn’t yet at peace; hostilities merely shifted from the western front to domestic streets. The Weimar Republic was born amid high hopes and the blackest despair. Led by President Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrats assumed office with a program to construct a welfare state and alleviate the misery of the demobilized soldiers. This ambitious agenda would clash with an urgent need for fiscal austerity, impaling the Republic on the horns of an insoluble dilemma.

  The most determined foes of the new regime were the Spartacists, a Marxist splinter group that aimed at a Soviet-style republic. It was headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the latter the daughter of a wealthy timber man who was descended from a line of rabbis. Targeting rich local merchants for protest, the Hamburg Spartacists, according to Warburg family legend, marched on Aby’s house before he entered the sanatorium. “Ten or fifteen of them went to his house,” recalled his niece. “He said to them, ‘Gentlemen, first let’s have a glass of wine.’ They sat at his dining room table and stayed the whole night, roaring with laughter.”1

  The Spartacists were opposed by the illegal, paramilitary Freikorps. Later used to circumvent the military limits imposed on Germany at Versailles, these marauding mercenaries—many of them footloose, embittered, unemployed veterans—were financed by right-wing business groups. To counter the Spartacists, the Weimar government tossed its own weary troops into pitched battles. Max’s son, Eric, first saw combat in this vicious internal war. Before Christmas 1918, he and his regiment stormed the Berlin Castle, occupied by a mutinous naval division; eight gunners died in an abortive effort. Eric’s unit ejected Spartacists from other buildings. On January 15, 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were both assassinated in Berlin.

  Eric was a young monarchist who prayed for the kaiser’s restoration. On Wilhelm’s birthday, he wrote his father, “God grant that we may yet have the monarchical form of government, which is the only correct one for Germany.”2 His exposure to Berlin bloodshed and Communist takeovers of banks and universities confirmed his already deep-seated conservatism. As Spartacist terror spread, he deplored governmental weakness. “Against these people, there is only one method: fight, fight, and fight yet again.”3 When Eric worked for a Berlin bank after being demobilized, he was nearly beaten up for opposing a strike.

  In March 1919, after twelve hundred people had died, martial law was declared in Berlin. Strikes and revolutionary councils sprang up with the improvised speed of street theater. The mark plunged, beginning a bottomless spiral, for nobody could assign a value to the currency until German reparations were set. This started the financial ruin of middle-class Germans who had invested their savings in war bonds. Though the fighting was over, the Allied blockade still cut off imports of food and fertilizer. Even the fishing fleet was grounded, and black markets flourished to cope with the shortages.

  As a constitutional assembly met in Weimar, the government struggled to get its bearings. For the Versailles peace conference, it had to rely upon private experts to represent Germany, the financial intricacies of reparations pushing Jewish bankers to the fore at a perilous juncture. As early as November 16, 1918, Max Warburg had received a telegram, inviting him to represent the German Treasury as a delegate. The government hoped that with his American brothers, Max might convince the Allies to settle for reasonable reparations. But he knew that in the rancorous postwar atmosphere, he should tread cautiously. He explained that a Jew shouldn’t undertake the mission, “for without doubt, if the conditions of the Entente were dreadfully hard … the consequence would surely be anti-Semitic attacks.”4 Instead of using private bankers, Max suggested that the Treasury dispatch Finance Ministry officials to Versailles. The government insisted, however, that private bankers had the negotiating skills and foreign stature and that the victorious Allies would feel more comfortable dealing with them.

  Max recommended as a delegate his legal counsel, the lucid, incorruptible Carl Melchior, who had seen wartime government service in Romania and Russia. In 1917, Melchior had replaced Felix as an M. M. Warburg partner, the first nonfamily partner in the bank’s 120-year history. (His brother married Aby S.’s sister, Elsa, after Carl became a partner.) State Secretary Schiffer told Max, “At least go as the chairman of the finance delegation!”5 Max recommended Melchior as chairman, saying he would gladly serve under him on the finance committee. Since Melchior was younger than Max, not to mention subordinate at the bank, an astounded Schiffer asked, “You don’t mean to say that you’re willing to work under Dr. Melchior as chairman?” Max replied, “Under nobody more willingly than him.”6 Indeed, he would serve under Melchior on the finance committee, while Melchior also served on the main delegation under Foreign Minister Count Brockdorff-Rantzau.

  For Max to advance Melchior’s name was an inspired move, for his junior partner would distinguish himself at Versailles. Yet one wonders whether Max was entirely candid with Schiffer in declining the finance chairmanship for himself. After all, as a Jew and Warburg partner, Melchior was no less vulnerable to anti-Semitic smears than Max. Perhaps Max feared the repercussions for Paul’s career if he adopted a high profile at Versailles. In any event, in Melchior Max created a unique go-between to the political world. For fourteen years, Melchior would play a role at every major reparations conference, giving Max wide yet unofficial influence. And in business, Melchior would provide a consistently thoughtful foil to Max’s often excessive exuberance.

  Pictures of Carl Melchior show an elegant, polished bachelor, with close-cropped silver hair, an erect bearing and air of imperturbable calm. His round, mournful eyes seemed to deliberate upon tragic possibilities. With innate courtesy and self-control, he seldom showed strong emotion. “He was a very dignified man with a stillness and quietness about him,” said his niece.7 While people noted that he looked younger than his years, he also carried some unspoken burden of sadness that made him seem prematurely aged.

  Melchior had replaced Paul as the bank’s resident sage, and they came to occupy somewhat analogous places in German and American finance. Both men of enormous wisdom, dignity, and integrity, they were filled with gloomy foreboding. With his big ego and gambler’s daring, Max seemed to like people of modest, unassuming brilliance. Melchior’s love of literature, painting, and art—he collected German Expressionist painters and terra-cotta figurines from the Middle East—appealed to Max. Not surprisingly, Max said he and Melchior became like brothers.8 Once he told Baffin that he had never had a colleague of such clear, steady vision. “I estimate him appreciably higher than myself, which, given my own lack of modesty, will say a great deal.”9

  Melchior was an unwavering German patriot who liked to quote Friedrich List, “In the background of all my thoughts stands Germany.”10 Yet in a period of intense national suspicions, he would win universal praise for his honest dealings and rare objectivity. As John Maynard Keynes said, Melchior “upheld the dignity of defeat.”11 The friendship betwee
n Melchior and Keynes started in a French railway car in January 1919 when they discussed a proposal to get food to Germany in exchange for surrender of the German merchant marine. Keynes recalled, “Melchior spoke always deliberately but without pause, in a way which gave one an extraordinary impression that he was truthful.”12 In a tavern back room, Melchior had the somber task of negotiating away the German merchant fleet.

  In March, Keynes and Melchior met again at the Belgian resort of Spa. The ship surrender deal hit a serious snag when the Allies tried to remove the German crews. In this incendiary atmosphere Keynes and Melchior discovered a personal bond. Keynes remembered Melchior: “Staring heavy-lidded, helpless, looking, as I had seen him before, like an honourable animal in pain.”13 They began their own informal talks. Keynes said Germany would only get food for ships and advised a conciliatory posture. In reply, Melchior “spoke with the passionate pessimism of a Jew. German honour and organisation and morality were crumbling; he saw no light anywhere; he expected Germany to collapse and civilisation to grow dim; we must do what we could; but dark forces were passing over us.”14 Later on in Brussels, they concluded a deal whereby Britain swapped food for German ships.