The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  It would be another fifteen months before Aby left Kreuzungen for good. In early 1924, he still wavered and the doctors themselves remained uncertain. To persuade Aby to resume work in Hamburg, Saxl dispatched Ernst Cassirer to see him, thinking Cassirer the sort of steady soul who could stiffen Aby’s resolve. Before Cassirer’s visit in January 1924, Aby spent days in a fit of nervous expectation, preparing and scrawling numberless questions. When Cassirer arrived, Aby panicked and kept him waiting a half hour. Suddenly, he wanted every object to be cleared from his desk top. Doubtless from nerves, he had relapsed into the old fetishism in which these objects possessed malevolent powers. All in all, it was a successful visit, but Aby still wavered between clarity and strange, mystical babble. Afterward, Cassirer strolled with Aby, who leaned on Mary’s arm. At one point, Aby, pointing to a room, declared, “Look, Cassirer, that’s where they keep my wife a prisoner up there.”28

  One day in August 1924, a small, anxious man left the Kreuzungen clinic. If his eyes were darker and indescribably sad, he was also more gentle and serene, radiating a calm power, a new philosophic detachment, the air of arrogant authority and explosive temper having disappeared. Aby’s departure represented a tremendous triumph of human willpower over paralyzing fears, and he justly took pride in it. As his son said, “like Münchhausen, he used to say, in that great classic yarn, he had pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”29 Dubbing himself a revenant or “ghost,” he spoke of his second life and signed one letter “Warburg redux.” As Fritz Saxl said, “He had the feeling, and inspired it in others, that he was a soldier come home after a victorious battle, a battle for life against the forces of darkness and hell.”30 Aby described his return to normal life as a miracle and it would continue to surprise him almost daily.31 He had overcome his inner conflict with tremendous perseverance, putting his struggle to creative use at the same time.

  By an astonishing coincidence, the literary sensation of 1924 was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which sold fifty thousand copies that year. In the book, Hans Castorp visits his cousin in a Swiss sanatorium, contracts tuberculosis, then spends seven years there (versus six for Aby). For Mann, the sanatorium serves as an image of prewar Europe sliding into irreversible despair and death, while for Aby it had proven a temporary place of healing and renewal.

  Secluded for six years, Aby had missed whole chapters of history: the revolution, Versailles, the Rathenau murder, and hyperinflation. Except for the war, he had experienced only the optimism of late Imperial Germany. Now Weimar Germany had caught up with his prophetic soul. This time of chaos and disintegration opened up compartments of the human mind that had been sealed shut in quieter times. There was a new vogue for things that had long obsessed Aby, especially the irrational and mystic sides of life. Expressionist art—dark, pessimistic, with violent colors, disjointed figures and a nocturnal air of doom—dominated painting and drama. The pagan underpinnings of civilization burst forth. Yet the temper of the time often glorified what Aby had most feared. The Surrealists, for example, tried to tap the uncensored mind as a pure spring of creativity. Peter Gay has spoken of the “revolt against reason” in Weimar Germany and the “love affair with death” that “loomed so large over the German mind.”32 The Warburg library, with its meticulous scholarship, would resist the fads of irrationality that thrived in the 1920s. At the same time, the surge of interest in esoteric subjects, ranging from ethnology to astrology, inevitably fostered curiosity about Aby’s recondite research.

  When Aby reached Hamburg, he announced his arrival by sending Ludwig Binswanger a picture postcard of Hamburg’s harbor. It must have been dreamlike but disconcerting to find his private library—his retreat from the world—now turned into a public institution. And where he had been a somewhat obscure scholar before his forced retirement, he now headed a theoretical school and was admired by such luminaries as Cassirer and Panofsky. Aby walked into a library that was newer and bigger, having expanded in directions no longer strictly dictated by his own thought patterns. Staring at a sudden bulge in books, he sighed with horror, “My poor Renaissance!”33

  As an honorary professor at the university, Aby was soon teaching attentive seminar students, though he continued to suffer from spasms and nervous ailments and had to intersperse his work with rest cures. On April 25, 1925, he delivered his maiden speech at the Warburg library. Regretfully, Ludwig Binswanger declined the invitation, telling Aby that for him the lecture would have been more than a reunion, but “a sort of official end of your existence as a sick man.”34 Binswanger often said that he missed Aby from both a human and intellectual standpoint and he would frequently use his patient’s trenchant witticisms in his own professional speeches.

  For his lecture on astrology, Aby had to stand for nearly two hours and improvised from hand-held notes. Max wryly told Binswanger that two hours on astrology was perhaps too much of a good thing, but that Aby had at least demonstrated he was up to the demands of his work.35 Mary expressed amazement at his stamina and said that he wound up in a stronger state than his listeners.36 Such self-reinforcing flights of energy and invention had always been characteristic of Aby.

  Friction was bound to develop between Aby and Fritz Saxl, who had assembled his own staff and flourished in the absence of his autocratic mentor. Aby was quick to perceive threats to his authority. With a touch of black humor, he said his colleagues “couldn’t get accustomed to the fact that I wasn’t dead, but was back and alive.”37 Indeed, the institute proved too small for both men. By 1926 Aby dispatched Saxl to England to study astrological manuscripts, a move also dictated by their romantic competition over Gertrud Bing.

  Even while Aby was at Kreuzungen, his brothers had contemplated a separate library building on the adjoining site at 116 Heilwigstrasse. They hoped this might both draw Aby back to Hamburg and give Mary some breathing space. As usual, their house was bursting at the seams with books. Thirty thousand volumes crept up the staircase and billowed into every corner. Pantry and billiard room bulged with books, shelves sagged dangerously, and halls and landings were congested. The accretion never ended and more books kept arriving every day.

  In 1924, Aby awarded the contract for an adjoining Warburg Library to architect Fritz Schumacher, who then passed on the project to Gerhard Langmaack. Managing to foil his brothers’ plan for a separate library, Aby had the two buildings internally fused behind separate facades, producing combined shelf space for 120,000 books. On August 25, the foundation stone was laid. Soon trucks rumbled through the neighborhood, carting steel and concrete slabs to protect the books. Safes arrived to house rare books and a fire alarm system was installed. At one point, Aby lectured on the library’s purpose to the carpenters and suppliers. To avoid publicity, the library would possess an austere front of patterned brick with the initials KBW or Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (The Warburg Library of Cultural Science) in Jugendstil lettering. The interior was ingenious. During their Kreuzungen chat, Ernst Cassirer had extolled the ellipse as a central creative figure of the universe.

  Aby knew it traced the course of the orbiting planets and insisted upon an elliptical lecture room for the library. The reading room also had curving walls and tall rows of books illuminated by a huge circular skylight.

  The library was a family endeavor, the brothers contributing 188,000 reichsmarks to its completion. Because of Aby’s finicky demands, the structure cost four times its original estimated price. Aby had an iron balustrade from Sara’s old house brought over. Max donated a former bank elevator and brother Fritz a candelabra from the stairway. At the May 1926 dedication, visitors passed beneath the word Mnemosyne—the Greek goddess of memory—which was emblazoned above the front entrance.38 Above the door of the lecture hall, Aby put a photographic blowup of a fresco detail, showing a criminal bursting from his ropes and escaping with his life—an image pregnant with autobiographical meaning. Erwin Panofsky gave the inaugural lecture. In a delightful talk, Max likened the library to
a Warburg bank branch that would deal with cosmic instead of earthly pursuits.

  Aby gave the mayor a tour of the new institution, taking him to an upper floor of the library which had a circular terrace with a view of the willow-lined Alster Canal out back. Aby told the Bürgermeister that this terrace was the library’s most important feature, for here refreshing yoghurt would be served. At this joyous moment, Aby came up with a joke that was, in his typical fashion, oddly ghoulish and premonitory. He said that Hamburg might someday be destroyed and he pictured a chat, years later, between two elderly ladies: “Warburg? Yes, who was that Warburg? No idea. Oh, yeah, Warburg, he was the small man in the Heilwigstrasse who served yoghurt.”39

  After the opening, Aby lectured on Rembrandt’s painting of the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis. Instead of studying this from a photo, Aby had had an enormous copy painted and hung in the library stairway. Struggling with asthma, he spoke at first in a quiet, labored manner and the audience feared he wouldn’t finish. Then, he gained strength and wound up mesmerizing his audience. The Warburgs were still slaves to Aby’s whims and family attendance was compulsory at such events. Aby was irate when Alice didn’t bring his niece Gisela to one long evening lecture. “She can sleep after I’m dead to her heart’s content,” he complained.40

  The library developed a devoted following of scholars, students, and guests, whom Aby—with a nod to Kreuzungen—referred to as his institute’s “patients.” Those who visited the reading room discovered a marvelous but forbidding maze of books, laid out with their own quirky arrangement. By design, there was no catalogue to steer them through this maze, forcing them to browse and discover connections with their own eyes and hands. For the serious scholar, it was a place always packed with delightful surprises. All the curious interconnections of Aby’s theories were reflected in the idiosyncratic placement of the books. At last, near the end of his life, Aby saw his fantasy projected into vivid reality. The solitary figure, after years hidden away in a sanatorium, had suddenly become a celebrated public man.

  CHAPTER 19

  ––

  The Chemistry of Hate

  Like all German Jews, Max Warburg lived with an insoluble dilemma. If he flexed his muscles, he confirmed Nazi fantasies of Jewish power; if he displayed excessive caution, he invited opponents to trample him with impunity. Dubbed the “Uncrowned King of Hamburg,” he wore that crown uneasily. Despite their central role on reparations, Max and Melchior continued to shrink from overt political action. “Whatever we championed would at once have been represented as in the interests of international Jewry,” said Max.1

  Despite the Warburgs’ caution, the anti-Semitic barrage against them only intensified. The more Max was accused of evil machinations, the more marginal his true power became. In 1923, he decided to adopt a more aggressive attitude toward press libels. He still trusted that the German state would combat the Nazi menace, an abiding faith in legal forms that was predictable, if misplaced. Unlike Eastern European Jews, German Jews regarded the state as their protector from anti-Semitic predators—and none more so than the Warburgs, who had benefited from state patronage as both Court Jews and private bankers. In fact, the courts of Weimar Germany would prove far more tolerant of extremism from the right than from the left.

  By 1924, the Nazi party formed a small Reichstag bloc, and their propaganda featured a comprehensive critique of the modern world. Many Germans felt disoriented by their belated passage into modernity, the pace of industrialization and urbanization seeming to them chaotic and frightening. Wartime defeat and the discredited monarchy had left a vacuum in which a thousand ideologies flourished. Active in the stock exchange and mass marketing, department stores and promotion, theater and advertising, the Jews of Weimar Germany seemed to personify this exciting but also upsetting new world. They not only advanced in the professions, but became integral to the arts. With Jews suddenly prominent in so many areas, the Nazis could hold them responsible for every novelty from industrial consolidation to financial speculation to avant-garde thought.

  In this atmosphere, it no longer sufficed to charge the Warburgs with isolated acts of betrayal. Now every random fact of their existence had to be closely spun into a fantastic conspiracy. The family’s business-cum-marriage links seemed especially productive soil to the paranoid Nazi mind. Felix’s love for Frieda or Paul’s for Nina became incriminating steps in the family’s march toward world mastery. The theory was infinitely elastic, weaving every thread of Warburg history into a lurid tapestry. The Nazis didn’t worry about internal contradictions. The Warburgs were secret stooges both of Wall Street and Russian revolutionaries. Some left-wing agitators even accused Max of financing the Nazi party itself. The point was not to be accurate but to breed suspicion and confusion.

  As anti-Semites exploited the Weimar press freedom, the mouthpiece for slander against the Warburgs remained Leipzig pamphleteer Theodor Fritsch, founder of the Hammer publishing house.2 Fritsch gave his calumny a pseudoscholarly gloss. He tried to dust off the old myth that Jews engaged in ritual murder—the blood libel that thirsty Jews needed Christian blood to celebrate Passover. He claimed to have spent years poring over rabbinical writings from the Talmud to the Cabala. By deciphering Hebrew passages opaque to other gentiles, he alleged, he had learned that Jews were allowed to trick gentiles in business, kill their bosses, and expropriate non-Jewish wealth. No lie was too preposterous or fantastic. As early as 1915 Fritsch began to pay modest fines and serve brief sentences for libel. In 1922, the Reichstag rebuked him for breaking a pact to refrain from attacks on Max Warburg. This only whetted his appetite, however, and so he ghosted a book called Spanish Summer, published under a pen name in Switzerland, that resumed his anti-Warburg diatribes.

  In 1923, Fritsch produced two venomous Hammer broadsides that finally forced Max to sue him. In one, “The Secret Kaiser,” Fritsch portrayed him as the master wire-puller of German politics and “Chief of Staff of World Jewry,” who had installed Wilhelm Cuno as German chancellor in 1922.3 Fritsch called Max the country’s richest man, controlling fifty foreign and domestic banks. (He only controlled one.) After outlining Max’s links to the Schiffs and Loebs, Fritsch charged that American Jewish bankers had instigated the war to profit from it, thus exactly inverting the reality that the “Our Crowd” bankers had been the least warlike on Wall Street—out of love for Germany. In another article, Fritsch asked, “Who is Responsible for the Defeat?” and answered, predictably, that it was a Jewish cabal led by the Warburg bank. “The men of the Golden International alone bear the responsibility for the dreadful events of the last ten years,” Fritsch enlightened his readers.4

  ——

  Felix and Max Warburg on the Kösterberg terrace. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

  In August 1923, both Max and Melchior filed a suit against Fritsch, which was delayed after Fritsch became a Reichstag member and gained some political immunity. On June 28, 1924, two Social Democrats took up the cudgels for Max in the Reichstag and denounced Fritsch. The trial against Fritsch finally convened that December. It was a fascinating case, for under the judicial system of the day, Max could confront Fritsch directly and he handled himself with quick wit and cool self-assurance. Fritsch, in turn, previewed the entire stockpile of Nazi rhetoric against the Warburgs. The Nazis delighted in such trials to exhibit their inflammatory oratory. But the trial provided only a shadowy preview of the 1930s, because the Jewish victim still felt secure enough to engage in a certain amount of irony.

  In his opening statement Max gave a heartfelt affirmation of his German loyalty. “What Herr Fritsch thinks of me personally, I don’t care, but I have a name to defend that has existed for centuries in Germany and especially in Hamburg. I cannot admit that because my activity, by chance, has occurred more in the public sphere than that of my forefathers, that it should be spattered with mud. Already in the years 1870/71, members of my family volunteered and died, just as they did in the years 1914–1918. We are not surpassed in our lov
e of the Vaterland and our service to the Vaterland by any Christian.”5 Max adduced facts that undercut Fritsch’s demonology, pointing out that prewar Germany lacked Jewish officers or government ministers; that the Reichsbank hadn’t employed Jews even in lowly positions; and that the majority of M. M. Warburg clients were Christian. He could only laugh ruefully at Fritsch’s rigmarole of charges.

  In reply, Fritsch tried to give a veneer of respectability, even high-minded-ness, to his verbal savagery. “I should like to explain again … that my attacks aren’t directed against the plaintiffs as people, but rather to combat a universal principle, the Jewish system, which is, naturally, represented by people.… I stress that I have no objections to Herr Warburg as a person. It’s possible that he’s the most honorable man. My attacks are only directed against him to the extent that, as a member of international high finance, he is responsible for certain facts.…”6 One of Fritsch’s lawyers presented his client as an idealist under siege, driven by undying love of the Volk, while his other lawyer saw the trial as a small but noble chapter in the two-thousand-year-old struggle by Aryans to throw off the yoke of Jewish subjugation.

  Throughout the trial, Max treated Fritsch in an urbane, mocking style, as if humoring a lunatic. After Fritsch’s opening comments, Max interjected, “I don’t know, whether at this moment, I can now say a word for Jewish international finance.”7 The dry wit played well against Fritsch’s crackpot tenacity. In his ramblings, Fritsch told how the Jew was always a Jew first and hence a suspect national of any country. Citing the Warburgs as part of a secret Jewish world government, Fritsch noted how they served governments in an advisory role to mask their influence. There was a slight grain of truth contained in this distortion, for Max Warburg had indeed avoided office and favored advisory positions. But he had done so precisely to avoid such anti-Semitic slurs!