The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  By late summer 1933, German Jews were demanding strong leadership and besieged Max with requests for action. In August, he received a fervent plea from Jewish leaders in Cologne, asking him to become the new Moses. “We urgently appeal to you in the name of German Jewry: don’t shut your ears to the cry of distress. Take up the burden that we present to you.”4 Some weeks later, Max joined with other non-Zionist leaders in Essen to create a group that could speak to the Nazi government on behalf of all Jews: the Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung). It would oversee emigration to Palestine and elsewhere and provide Jewish schools, training, and welfare. Once again, Max was a central figure. As historian Yehuda Bauer has written, he not only initiated the group but took “a decisive part in setting up its leadership” and was “to a great extent the arbiter of its policies.”5 At the founding meeting, Max declined to be chairman, believing the Nazis might exploit his close association with Weimar politicians. Instead he persuaded Berlin Rabbi Leo Baeck to become president, with lawyer Otto Hirsch as vice-chairman. Later, Max would believe Baeck had been too peaceful a man to enforce harmony among headstrong personalities.

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  In all these activities, Max was sustained by the dignified example of Carl Melchior. When the Nazis seized power, a gravely pessimistic Melchior trooped into Max’s office with a simple request. For most of Melchior’s life, he hadn’t been especially concerned with Jewish matters. He had waged a fruitless campaign to free Germany from reparations only to be reviled as a blackguard Jew. Having discharged his debt to his country, he now wished to dedicate his time elsewhere. “From now to the end of my life, I would like to fight for the civil rights of the Jews, which have been cancelled in Germany.”6 Max examined the thin, worn face of his old friend, with the veins popping from his temples. “There was visible the escalier du mort,” Max said. He tried to dissuade Melchior from this strenuous task, but the latter insisted, “It is a service I owe.” As a bachelor, Melchior felt he was better positioned than Max for hazardous duty. “I do not cling to life. After all, I have been in the trenches now for twenty years.”7

  In March 1933, Melchior resigned as a German representative to the Bank for International Settlements before Schacht pushed him out and stepped down as chairman of the Beiersdorf supervisory board.8 He didn’t regard the Nazis as amenable to reason. Rather he scented such pent-up violence in the air that he thought it only made sense to negotiate the exit of Jews from Germany.9 Melchior’s health declined and he suffered almost daily heart spasms. Late in the year, he married his long-standing mistress, Marie de Molènes. Twenty years younger than Melchior and from a noble French family, she was a writer of romantic novels. When she suddenly got pregnant after many years with Carl, he wanted to legitimate the child. Melchior labored under a powerful premonition of doom. In December, fearing possible arrest by the Gestapo, he gave his power of attorney to Dr. Kurt Sieveking. A few days later, on December 30, 1933, he died of a stroke from angina. As Max said ruefully, “He died in harness.”10

  In a touch of the macabre, Max’s partner, Aby S., died of a stroke the same day as Melchior, and the Warburg bank was abruptly stripped of two of its seven partners. Aby S. had been a harmless, retiring man with little involvement in the firm, who had devoted most of his time to family and religious matters. On the board of the Jewish community, he was active in the early 1930s in contesting anti-Semitism. In 1934, Aby S.’s son, Karl, wanted to leave for England and was terrorized into selling the Alsterufer house for a distress sale price of 120,000 reichsmarks. He had been warned that Aryans could no longer be tenants in Jewish-owned buildings and received threats from the building department that he would have to paint the house’s exterior. When the sale money was finally remitted to Barclays Bank in 1939, it amounted to exactly 82.5 pounds under the confiscatory exchange rates.11

  Max learned of the death of his two partners while sailing back to Germany aboard the Olympic. He had gone to New York with a secret agenda. With many American banks still possessing frozen credits in Germany, he wondered whether they could tap this blocked money to create an American bank in Berlin that would buy M. M. Warburg and the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft—a reprise of Jimmy’s 1931 idea. Such an American bank, Max thought, would enjoy extra legal armor in protecting Jewish clients. The project, unfortunately, never came to pass.

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  In 1933, the demonic images that had tormented Aby M. Warburg were projected into gruesome reality. Aby had hoped that art and culture would curb unreason. Instead, the Nazis hunted down artists and intellectuals as state enemies. When the Gestapo shuttered the avant-garde Bauhaus in July, Eddie Warburg brought painter Josef Albers and his wife to America, guaranteeing Josef’s salary at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Jewish museum directors were hounded from their posts and Aby’s pupil, Carl Georg Heise, was expelled from Hamburg’s art museum. For the centennial of its native son, Brahms, Hamburg banned the young Jewish pianist, Rudolf Serkin. Even the local statue of Heinrich Heine was put away in a shed.

  Far from guarding free expression, the German universities served as hothouses of intolerance. On May 10, 1933, students hurled books by Mann, Einstein, Proust, and Freud on a pyre outside the Berlin Opera House, followed five days later by an SS bonfire of books near Altona. The Nazis severed the “Jewish” Warburg Library from Hamburg University and decreed that it was unlawful to visit this contaminated venue. Already strapped by the Depression and weakened by drastic economies, the library effectively ground to a halt.

  Hamburg’s university had been a showcase for Jewish scholarship in Weimar Germany, and Max had received an honorary doctorate for his founding efforts. In 1929 Ernst Cassirer rose to become its rector—the first Jew to achieve that distinction in Germany. Now in April 1933, Jewish professors were “cleansed” from its faculty. Teaching in New York that spring, Panofsky got a cable advising him of his dismissal, and Cassirer was likewise driven out. The head of the Warburg Library, Fritz Saxl, resigned as honorary professor. Max stayed on the university’s board, insisting that German scholarship should return to its old thorough independence.12

  For the Warburgs, the idea of uprooting and relocating the library was heavily freighted with symbolism: It was like severing the family tap-root in Germany. As Gertrud Bing said, “To Max Warburg the idea that the Institute should leave its native soil was at first distasteful.…”13 Mary and her children at first also resisted the move. Pessimistic about the library’s future, Saxl had to fight against family illusions. At first, the library was saved by a legal loophole. Felix and Paul’s estate owned 60 percent of the library, which enabled George Messersmith, the American consul general in Berlin, to release a statement declaring portions of it to be American property. This provided temporary immunity from attack. If the library had been German property, it would have fallen under “monument protection” regulations that would have made later transfer impossible.

  For the Warburgs, the issue of Aby’s books mirrored the larger debate about how to respond to Hitler. Felix wanted both his brothers and Aby’s books to leave, and was disturbed by their endless dithering. In August, he told a friend, “I personally am very anxious to have the books transferred, but the Hamburg people still feel that this insanity of Hitler is curable.”14 Felix rebuffed an offer to house the books at the Germanic Museum at Harvard, stating that “with Hohenzollern and Hitler tendencies in the air,” he preferred having the books at New York University, where Panofsky was teaching.15 Holland wanted the wandering library, and Italy offered to put it into a Roman palazzo, but “going to Italy seemed like getting out of the frying pan into the fire,” commented Eric.16 These destinations suffered a common flaw: They would only have accepted the books as a gift, which would have saddled the Warburgs, under German tax law, with an insupportable burden. The British, however, understood that for tax and political reasons, the transfer had to be in the form of a temporary loan.

  In July 1933, Professor W. G. Constable o
f the Courtauld Institute and Dr. C. S. Gibson of Guy’s Hospital visited Hamburg to reconnoiter. In October came another prestigious scout: Sir Denison Ross, head of the Royal School of Oriental Languages. Back in London, Sir Denison assembled a committee under Lord Lee of Fareham, a former first lord of the admiralty and chairman of the Courtauld Institute. Having received an emergency call from Fritz Saxl, Kenneth Clark, head of the National Gallery, extolled the Warburg Library to Lord Lee. The Warburgs agreed to send the library to the University of London as a three-year loan without a permanent endowment. For three years, the American Warburgs would supply forty thousand gold marks and the German Warburgs ten thousand gold marks per annum. The committee also got a three-year financial pledge from Samuel Courtauld and found suitable quarters on the ground floor of Thames House near Parliament. On October 28, 1933, the British sent a formal invitation to Max to lend them the library. Now the Warburgs turned nervously to the German government for the all-important permissions.

  Responsibility in the matter rested with the Hamburg government, not Berlin. Some hard-core Nazis wanted to plunder the library for their “cultural centers,” while bureaucratic admirers of Aby wanted to keep the library. For seven weeks, Max conducted tense, delicate negotiations with Dr. W. von Kleinschmit, director of the Authority for Church and Artistic Matters in Hamburg. The Nazis had ambivalent reactions to the transfer. They saw a chance to persuade the British of how reasonable they were, but feared accusations of hypocrisy from their followers. How to have it both ways?

  In the end, Kleinschmit told Max that he would impose a total news blackout about the transfer. He pointedly warned, “I now loyally also expect from you that you will use all your influence to prevent the foreign press from publishing anything regarding the transfer of the Library to England.”17 He said he expected the library to return in three years. In a minor concession, the Warburgs agreed to leave behind two fragments of Aby’s corpus: two thousand books related to World War I and the panels created for the Hamburg planetarium.

  The Warburgs now moved swiftly to ship out the library. Workers stripped the edifice of eighty thousand books and thousands of photos and slides. The entire library—including iron shelves, cameras, and bookbinding devices—was packed into 531 boxes by hand-picked anti-Nazi movers. As they performed this bittersweet task, Mary set out cups of tea for them on the trestles and planks. The mountain of boxes was then loaded onto two small ships, the Hermia and the Jessica, moored down by the Elbe docks. Freighted with their precious cargo, they steamed down the river and across the North Sea, then docked in the Thames. Saxl, Bing, and other refugee scholars fled to London as well. As Saxl said wryly, “Some scholars like Petrarch or Erasmus have always been fond of traveling, but traveling adventures are not so common in the lives of learned institutions.”18

  The timing of the move was providential. Two weeks later, jurisdiction over such matters passed to Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry. In 1934, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a scathing, full-page review of a bibliography published by the Warburg institute, showing how even scholarly work could be ransacked for propaganda purposes. And even if Aby’s books had survived the fanatical bonfires of 1933, they might have perished in the wartime aerial pounding of Hamburg. The hollowed-out shell of the Warburg Library stood as a ghostly reminder of the creative force of Jewish scholars in Weimar Germany. As one observer put it, the building, with the word “Mnemosyne” over the door, “became the empty sham of a beautiful memory.”19

  After the boats removed the books that had been both the bane and joy of her life with Aby, Mary Warburg developed cancer. In her self-sacrificing, uncomplaining way, she didn’t mention her pains to the doctors at first. She died almost exactly one year after the books left for London.

  Right before Mary died, Felix said that she and her children could sell the library building and keep the money. In exchange, he was given authority over the final disposal of Aby’s books.20 This became a matter of some moment as the deadline for the three-year “loan” to London approached its expiration date. Samuel Courtauld had provided three thousand pounds per annum for the library on the condition that it stay in England at the end of the three years. Now Felix had a sudden brainstorm. Why not bring over Saxl and the books from London, have Panofsky give seminars, and recreate the Warburg Library in Paul’s vacant mansion at 17 East Eightieth Street? Felix was prepared to donate five hundred thousand dollars for a joint memorial to Paul and Aby.

  This idea petrified the German Warburgs, who had been evasive with the Nazi authorities about the library’s ultimate fate. In July 1935, Felix had a stormy session with Eric in New York and tried to figure out why the Hamburg family was so intransigent. Eric finally revealed that the Völkischer Beobachter had made an incendiary political issue of the Warburg Library, portraying it as a nefarious family plot to make money by selling “non-Aryan” books to education institutions. Felix was stunned and expressed astonishment that he had only learned of this after prodding Eric: “I told him what I have told him over and over again—that I wanted all the news and all the truth about the things in which I was interested and not predigested stuff and this thing I should have heard long before his accidental coming over,” Felix told Max afterward.21

  A memo in the M. M. Warburg file shows how perilous the book issue had become. Eric wanted to reassure von Kleinschmit that the original three-year loan to England would be extended from five to twenty years, since Germany then enjoyed better relations with England than with America. “A broaching of this question can therefore be of great trouble for us in Germany,” the memo warned about a possible transfer to America.22 Also, the English might feel double-crossed if they lost the books, which could inspire anti-Semitism in London. Finally, the memo contended that Paul had never been a special fan of Aby’s work and that it made no sense to commemorate them jointly.23 Eric secretly enlisted his cousins Bettina and Edward to foil Felix’s plan.

  In late 1935, various schemes were floated to reconcile the feuding Warburgs. Panofsky advanced the notion of having a Warburg sister institute in America that might exchange students and scholars with London. Eric proposed a diplomatic settlement: forty-two thousand books would go to New York, ten thousand back to Hamburg, and thirty thousand would remain in London. Gertrud Bing rightly objected that this division would destroy the library’s raison d’ětre.24 Backed by Aby’s son, Max Adolph, Max urged Felix to relent, saying that any attempt to dislodge the books would have frightful consequences for them in Germany, since the Nazis would never believe that the Hamburg Warburgs lacked ultimate authority over the library.25

  It seems peculiar that Felix persisted despite such warnings. Eric even warned him that he might be thrown into a concentration camp if the books sailed to New York.26 Felix sounded out the American ambassador in Berlin, William E. Dodd, about whether the library could travel to New York. In response, the State Department drew up a report that should have dispelled Felix’s illusions on the subject. It stressed that the library had been transferred without publicity, but that a shift to New York would generate press coverage and anti-German protest in New York. The library, in short, should stay in England. Across the report, Felix scrawled one word: “Rubbish.”27 Felix must have thought Max instigated this document.

  In late 1936, Felix capitulated when it became clear that, at the very least, Berlin’s reaction was a terrible imponderable. In the end, Samuel Courtauld gave the Warburg Institute a seven-year financial reprieve and the University of London provided space in the Imperial Institute buildings. Thus the “temporary loan” of the library to London began to take on the trappings of an irreversible move. The Anglo-Saxon culture that had struck Aby as such a lethal menace to mankind during World War I had ended up safeguarding his own legacy.

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  In Warburg iconography, Max would symbolize those German Jews who thought it best to stay in Germany and tilt lances with the devil, while Siegmund would symbolize those who thought such a course wrong a
nd futile. As mentioned, Siegmund had at first been sanguine about the Nazis. If he experienced a radical conversion, it probably had something to do with geography. Managing the M. M. Warburg office in Berlin, he and Eva saw The Three-Penny Opera and socialized more with political activists, intellectuals, and other undesirables targeted by the Nazis. Because Hitler saw Berlin as infested with his enemies, its citizens heard more stories of midnight disappearances than people elsewhere. Siegmund wasn’t lulled by the optimism that came with the territory in Hamburg.

  Gravitating to rebels and iconoclasts, Siegmund struck up a close friendship with the black sheep of another famous family, Edmund Stinnes. Like the Krupps and Thyssens, the Stinnes family had helped to develop the German coal and steel industry. Hugo Stinnes, we recall, had injected the “Jewish question” into the debate over reparations policy. His younger son, Hugo, Jr., became a convinced Nazi. Edmund became an equally impassioned foe of Hitler. With a doctorate in chemistry, he owned a chain of gas stations when Hitler came to power. He not only had many Jewish friends but a half-Jewish wife, which introduced an element of fear into his life.

  In 1933, Edmund Stinnes met Hitler to discuss the German economy. He left aghast. “He felt that Hitler was completely off-the-wall—screaming, nonsensical, irrational,” said his daughter.28 To worsen matters, Edmund’s business companion at the meeting was captivated by Hitler. As Edmund’s closest Jewish friend, Siegmund would certainly have heard all about this encounter.