The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Very aware of world events, Aby still bombarded Max and Eric with telephone calls, expressing stern judgments about contemporary events. Ever a student of the Zeitgeist, a lightning rod for charged particles in the air, Aby saw the coming threats to civilized discourse and heard the jackboots marching. He believed his library could be an antidote to the menace. On the morning of October 26, 1929, he grew apoplectic on the phone while discussing the plebiscite for the new Young Plan on reparations, then under sharp Nazi attack. Yet his anger soon subsided and when his family doctor, Heinrich Embden, called that afternoon, he sang out gaily, “All is well above the collar.”23 Aby, age sixty-three, ventured no claims for the body below.

  That evening, Gertrud Bing stayed for dinner after work, as she did once a week, and Mary retreated to her studio on the top floor in a remote corner of the roomy house. Aby and Bing were having a lively exchange when Gertrud suddenly heard Mary calling “Aby!” Aby scoffed, saying that Mary would not do that and that she was too far away for her voice to be heard. Unconvinced, Bing went upstairs to investigate and found Mary working in her studio. She told Bing that she hadn’t called Aby; later, she admitted she had heard Aby calling “Mary!” and had dismissed it as implausible. Wife and mistress then returned to the dining room and found Aby dead from a heart attack on the floor. The historian of symbols died in a way that imaged his strange triangular relationship with these two women.

  The next morning, the two found the last entry in Aby’s diary, a line of verse praising the “late-ripening apple tree” in his garden.24 He had identified with this old tree, which seemed dead and then suddenly put forth white blossoms again. To preserve Aby’s memory, Mary had photographs taken of his head so she could sculpt a posthumous bust. Even in death, Aby refused to feign piety. Although Jews believed that dead bodies should be buried and remain untouched until the Messiah’s advent, Aby left instructions for his cremation.

  The Warburgs summoned Fritz Saxl back from London to take charge of the sixty-five-thousand-volume library. Max advised Gertrud Bing to start collecting reminiscences for a future biography, but her emotional involvement with the subject would always prevent its completion.25 Much of Aby’s influence stemmed from his personality, not his small output of published work. He therefore required talented disciples far more than other original thinkers; he found them in Saxl and Bing. They brought out the first two volumes of Aby’s collected writings in 1932, right before Hitler took power, but much of his writing would remain unpublished or untranslated.

  When Aby died, the newspapers recognized him as a major figure. His was a reputation purchased at the price of great personal pain. One obituary described him as “unrelenting against compromise and half-measures, a fighter, a judge courageous and severe, a servant of scholarship. So powerful was his personality that he will live on as an inspiring example.”26 Indeed, as the years passed, his reputation grew enormously. As art scholarship turned to “deconstructing” myth and symbolism, he was hailed as a progenitor of one of the century’s most influential critical schools. George Steiner would call him “one of the seminal figures in modern culture,” who created “nothing less than a new model of the Renaissance and of the relations of the secular West to its antique well-springs.”27 His posthumous reputation is now firmly established. John Russell of The New York Times has said that many qualified observers now consider Aby “the greatest single influence on the development of art historical studies in this century.”28

  In the end, the gods proved kind to Aby Warburg. He died two days after the start of the 1929 Wall Street crash, which would shatter the false prosperity of the 1920s and usher in a world as murky and ominous as anything in Aby’s most tormented dreams. By December, the Warburg library was struggling financially, and Felix pledged fifty thousand dollars a year for it to survive. Aby had promised lavish subsidies to attract scholars and the brothers once again made good on their promises.

  It is unbearable to contemplate the anguish Aby would have suffered in Nazi Germany, with its book-burnings and glorified rites of pagan brutality. He got out just in time, before his beloved German culture gave way to barbarism. The year after his death, the Nazis ran the Bauhaus out of Weimar. Before long, they would reject the cultural contributions of an entire generation of Jewish scholars. In the end, Aby Warburg had won his struggle with the forces of unreason. Germany, alas, had not.

  CHAPTER 21

  ––

  Capitalist Collectives

  Felix Warburg’s growing eminence in the 1920s was perhaps the most implausible success story among the Famous Five brothers. Long patronized as the family flyweight, dismissed as not bright enough for the Hamburg bank, he had steadily risen in stature in the charity sphere after Jacob Schiff’s death. Scion of a rich family and married to a smart heiress, he had the rare good fortune to convert his natural goodness into a career.

  The times abounded in opportunities for New York Jews to aid their overseas brethren as the American economy hummed along and much of Europe languished. On June 17, 1924, Felix and other dignitaries gathered for a highly unusual luncheon presentation at the Kuhn, Loeb offices at 52 William Street. Dr. Joseph Rosen, a prominent agronomist with the Joint Distribution Committee, unrolled a huge, colored map of the Ukraine and the Crimea. The purple tracts, Rosen explained, designated current Jewish farm colonies. Blue sections indicated areas abandoned or seized from pre-Revolution landowners and now offered free by the Soviet government for Jewish agricultural settlements. Red tracts, which had always been state owned, also formed part of a unique Soviet offer now on the table.

  Jews in Biblical times had worked as shepherds, farmers, and vintners, but they had become highly urbanized in the modern world, shunted into trading, peddling, or moneylending. Confined to the Pale of Settlement under the czar, the Russian Jews hadn’t been allowed to buy or manage land beyond their tumbledown shtetls. A czarist plan to resettle them on the land had turned into a wretched hoax, hobbling its recipients with myriad rules. So the map unfurled by Rosen tantalized these Jewish leaders with a sense of limitless possibility.

  After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks dropped the policy of state anti-Semitism, but most Jews didn’t fit into the new prescribed categories of proletarians and peasants, and Jewish traders and artisans were maligned as “anti-social” or “class enemies.” So the Soviets sympathized with any program that would convert them into “productive” laborers on the land, especially if it meant a massive influx of American dollars and modern agricultural technology.

  A stalwart Republican—Frieda was the family Democrat—Felix had no more relish for the Bolsheviks than for the reactionary Romanoffs. During the 1920s, he and Herbert Lehman provided large loans to David Dubinsky so he could purge Communists from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Felix dreaded the glib Jews-equal-Bolshevism equation that was gaining currency in anti-Semitic circles and that featured in recent Nazi diatribes against Max and Fritz. Stories filtering back from the workers’ paradise made him recoil: “No private property permitted, no trading permitted, the houses belonging to the Government, and nobody permitted to have more than his daily portion of bread.…” he told his sons, aghast.1 At first Felix wouldn’t sign an agreement with a Soviet government dedicated to Marxist principles.

  As famine and civil strife convulsed the postwar Pale, threatening nearly three million Soviet Jews, Felix and the Joint couldn’t ignore their urgent plight and worked intimately with Herbert Hoover and his American Relief Administration. Tens of thousands of Jews were being murdered by marauding bandits. Entire villages were wiped out in fierce fighting between Soviets and Poles. Then, in 1921, Soviet crops failed, a disaster so colossal that the Joint set up soup kitchens there, and even the U.S. Congress sent corn to alleviate the situation.

  Among the Hoover relief aides grappling with the crisis was Dr. Joseph A. Rosen, nicknamed “the famine angel of Russia.” After being jailed in Siberia for his Menshevik views, Rosen emigrated to the U
nited States in 1903. He never entirely shed his Socialist sympathies, which helped to make him palatable to the Soviet government. On a field trip to the famine district, Rosen contracted typhus and nearly died. In 1922, he worked out an agreement with the Soviets to create loan co-ops and training schools for Jews and began to advocate an enormous colonization project. A successful experiment that resettled five hundred families on the land stimulated the appetites of both the Soviet government and the Joint for further action.

  ——

  Felix Warburg in his favorite yachting cap. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

  This set the stage for the dramatic June 1924 luncheon at Kuhn, Loeb. The Ukraine government stood ready to transfer two hundred thousand acres for Jewish farm resettlement, with Rosen foreseeing another one and a half million arable acres available in the Crimea. The Joint was being offered the equivalent of a small state. “It is the best black soil of Russia,” said Rosen. “There are no more fertile lands anywhere in the United States.”2 In summary, he declared, “I don’t see any other project of such importance and value, a possibility that will never repeat itself.”3

  Rosen inflamed the imagination of these Jewish luminaries. Emotional and volatile, Felix was quick to catch fire and then radiate an infectious enthusiasm for a new project. “I absolutely agree with Mr. [James N.] Rosenberg’s statement in regard to the desirability of giving this experiment a fair trial,” he said. Because these conservative bankers and lawyers felt jittery about cooperating with Bolsheviks, Felix added, “I am not afraid that this action could in any way be misconstrued and used against the Jews in Russia, whatever the future may bring.”4

  A month later, after securing the State Department’s imprimatur, the Joint created the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation—the so-called “Agro-Joint”—with an initial four-hundred-thousand-dollar appropriation and Rosen as its president. Herbert Hoover would hail this audacious venture as “one of the outstanding pieces of human engineering in the world.”5 It would progress under the most unlikely auspices, with Felix finally coaxing Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., into making huge gifts to agricultural cooperatives deep in the Soviet Union.

  The saga of the Soviet Jewish farm settlements is a forgotten chapter of history. The project spoke to a long-standing Jewish dream of escaping from job restrictions imposed upon European Jews since medieval times. Farming held an ancient attraction for Jewish urbanites. Chaim Weizmann envisioned agriculture as forming the heart of Jewish life in Palestine. Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschilds had sponsored agricultural colonies in the nineteenth century. As bankers who were dismayed by invidious cliches about Jewish cleverness with money, the Warburgs favored Jews entering the full spectrum of employment. Felix also had a rich man’s sentimental faith in manual labor and urged young Jews to consider fields other than finance. In the Soviet Union, Dr. Rosen saw a great historic experiment under way. “Since the Diaspora, for twenty centuries we Jews have been pushed from pillar to post. We have never been given a decent chance to settle on the soil.… The accusation is always leveled against us that we are exploiters and profiteers, lawyers, bankers, etc. It has remained for Russia … to give Jews the first opportunity in modern history—indeed the first opportunity in two thousand years—to prove that the accusation always leveled against us is a lie.”6

  At first, the Agro-Joint contributed the bulk of funds; the Soviets made a minor contribution. The land often lacked water, and the Soviets were glad to have American plutocrats drilling expensive wells. Some ten thousand whitewashed houses with red tile roofs sprouted across the Soviet steppes. The scale of Agro-Joint colonization was awesome. In a dozen years, it transplanted more than a quarter-million Soviet Jews to 215 colonies spread over two and a half million acres of land. They rode a thousand American-made tractors and tended twenty thousand cows, twenty-five thousand chickens, and even eighty-five hundred pigs. In time, four hundred vocational schools also sprang up to teach Jews metal, woodworking, printing, and other trades.

  Some colonies had a Zionist bent and saw themselves as way stations on the road to Palestine. The bulk of Zionists, however, regarded the colonies as a dangerous distraction. Weizmann derided the “Babbitts” for diverting precious funds from Palestine and feeding Utopian fantasies that Jews could find a home in Soviet Russia.7 He saw the large sums being spent as dollars disappearing down a bottomless drain. In 1925, Dr. Stephen S. Wise presented a lengthy indictment against the Agro-Joint, denigrating Felix et al. as disloyal Americans and Soviet dupes who lured Jewish settlers to colonies only to expose them to future butchery. Louis Marshall recalled, “Dr. Wise, in a speech made at Springfield, Massachusetts, said that one Bialik [Chaim Nachman Bialik, a poet] was worth more than a thousand Felix Warburgs, amid a tumultuous applause from the audience.…”8 Even moderate critics argued that the Agro-Joint would only benefit a tiny percentage of Jews and that the Soviets would ultimately renege on the deal.

  Nevertheless, for Felix the Soviet colonies brought out the sort of joyful, pioneering zest that Zionists felt for Palestine. Now in his mid-fifties and moving into semiretirement, Felix often seemed a more old-fashioned fellow. It annoyed him that young people spoke slang, not the beautiful formal speech of old, and he regretted how motion pictures were replacing leisurely reading. This yearning for a simpler age of innocence made him a ripe convert for the romantic Soviet settlements.

  In 1927, Felix, fifty-seven, and Frieda, fifty-three, took an around-the-world trip. Unable to detach himself totally from his fifty-seven charities, he instructed his secretary, Alice R. Emanuel, to keep him liberally supplied with news. When Alice returned from vacation, the news-starved Felix sent a two-word cable: “Please gossip.”9 On the boat, Felix, in a wistful mood, jotted down reminiscences. Recalling how he and other Warburg children once pretended to communicate through the Big Dipper, he entitled his memoir, “Under the Seven Stars.”

  Leaving Frieda in Japan, Felix traveled to the Soviet Union and toured forty Agro-Joint colonies with Dr. Rosen, Dr. Bernhard Kahn, and James Becker. Felix kept a diary while Becker shot a thousand feet of film. At first, they traveled by private railroad car. Entering more remote regions, they climbed into two chauffeured limousines for long overland rides to settlements. Their shiny cars were increasingly caked and spattered with mud as they drove across treeless plateaus of rich black soil covered with wild grass and weeds. After driving for hours, the whitewashed Agro-Joint houses would suddenly come into view and hundreds of sunburnt people would pour from the fields to greet the legendary Jewish leader from New York. The group visited a settlement named Felix Warburg No. 4 and 5, and Felix also laid the cornerstone for a high school that bore his name.

  For a pampered man accustomed to luxury, he responded to these threadbare outposts with the glad-handing gusto of a politician on the hustings and his curiosity seemed insatiable. He watched horses pulling ploughs through the bountiful earth and surveyed machine shops, medical dispensaries, vineyards, tile factories, flour mills, and cooperative workshops. Suddenly he was like a modern Prospero, standing before a world he had conjured into being. In one colony, he met a Mr. Shapiro, the old caretaker of Baron de Gunzburg’s properties. In community rooms and schools across the Crimea and the Ukraine, Jewish settlers flocked to hear this elegant, effusive man applaud their efforts in a German accent. For the rest of his life, Felix would carry unforgettable memories of peasants stooped over crops, as in Millet paintings, and of moonlit trains speeding across the steppes.

  Jews had always wondered how they would look and act if liberated from the historical accidents that shaped them. In these Soviet villages, Felix saw a healthy contrast to the jaded urban sophisticates he had known, Jewish and Christian. Of the women, he said, “They do not mind getting wrinkles, no foolish lipsticks or youthful short flapper costumes.”10 The men seemed noble and weatherbeaten—proof that Jews could be good farmers. “Why should they not be so?” he asked. “It is the hi
storic occupation of the Jew.”11 Indeed, the colonies thrived even though most of the farmers lacked experience.

  Elated by his two-week trip, Felix said it had been “thrilling, inspiring, reassuring, encouraging and made one feel grateful for the privilege of being connected with this enterprise and its workers.”12 When he met Soviet leader Alexei Rykov in Moscow, Felix not only praised the colonies, but solicited extra government help. They worked out a plan for the Agro-Joint and the Soviets to raise together twenty million dollars for the settlements in a fifty-fifty split. Parroting the capitalist line to please Felix, the Soviets assured him that Agro-Joint farmers could set their own, higher prices for better produce and could buy their own animals with their earnings. In fact, some Agro-Joint colonies were extremely collectivist, a fact the Joint conveniently preferred to overlook.

  A week later, Felix was debriefed by the U.S. embassy in Berlin and sounded decidedly more pessimistic about Bolshevist Russia than in his glowing reports to the Joint. “He states that buildings, plants and machinery are deteriorating, no provision being made for repairs or up-keep,” an embassy official told Washington. Felix had evidently undertaken free-lance diplomacy in Moscow, telling Rykov that U.S.-Soviet relations could only improve if the Soviet Union honored foreign debts and ceased anti-American propaganda. Rykov said they were ready to honor debts dating back to the Kerensky government.

  Back in New York, Felix championed the Agro-Joint colonies with indefatigable energy—an ironic fate indeed for the son-in-law of Jacob Schiff, historic scourge of the Soviets. To market Soviet bonds for the venture, the Joint set up the American Society for Jewish Farm Settlements in Russia, Inc., an operation that made some curious political bedfellows. To appease the Zionists, the Joint raised the money from rich individuals, not its own funds. Julius Rosenwald subscribed five million dollars, Felix one million, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., five hundred thousand, and Paul Warburg fifty thousand. Felix served as honorary president. These donors had to endure the caustic wit of Dr. Stephen Wise, who sneered, “Millions, including a very large sum from Warburg, are poured into Russia; Palestine gets investigations.”13 The Zionists delighted in noting that Russia, historic bane of the Jews, was now being rewarded. Yet Felix also ranked among the largest American donors to Palestine and saw no contradiction in subsidizing the Soviet colonies as well.