by Alex Wagner
Anne Marie Muller and Anna Wagner may very well have given their wifely services to their respective husbands, but they had also—unwittingly—established a lineage in their common name. (Given how complex our retention of the Wagner name was, I was particularly satisfied in my decision not to take my husband’s name after marriage—not that it was ever really a debate.)
So Ensch, a person with a real name, had confirmed chi1k’s research. A few days after her/his initial response, chi1k offered an addendum to her/his post. I had read it with interest at the time, but now that so much of her/his research had been confirmed by another source, I was even more inclined to follow it:
Henry Wagner and his father in law Henry Wagner came to the USA together. There is one passenger list which agrees with this and matches up pretty well with another Wagner family from Esch-sur-Alzette.
So Eva/Anna’s father was also named…Henri Wagner. And my great-grandfather He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Wag(e)ner, né Mu(e)ller, had traveled with this other clan of Wagners to the United States, posing as one of them—otherwise, you had to figure, he would have been listed as He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Mu(e)ller. Apparently, this was the moment when Henri Muller became Henry Wagner—not at a wedding, not in Europe. En route to America. This, in turn, suggested something possibly shady: Henry Wagner was immigrating to the United States undercover. Why else identify himself with a clan of Wagners—and enter the New World using their last name (which, to be fair, happened also to be his birth name)?
Maybe Karl’s rumor about something questionable happening during the Franco-Prussian War hadn’t been so off the mark. Perhaps Henry Wagner, né Mu(e)ller, had something he wanted to get away from back in Luxembourg—and wanted to make sure it couldn’t follow him across the Atlantic to America. So he found a new family.
Chi1k next provided a link to a manifest from the ship Algeria of the Cunard Line, which arrived in Queenstown, New York, on June 5, 1871.
Traveling on board was a large family by the name of Wagner:
Henri Wagner, age 50 [born about 1821]
Catherine Wagner, age 42 [born about 1829]
Eva Wagner, age 16 [born about 1855]
Eliza Wagner, age 11 [born about 1860]
Nicolas Wagner, age 8 [born about 1863]
James Wagner, age 5 [born about 1866]
Herman Wagner, age 3 [born about 1868]
and
Henri Wagner, age 22 [born about 1849]
As far as we could divine, my great-grandfather, born Henri Wagener, had, at some point in his early twenties, decided to leave his birthplace and travel to America as “Henri Wagner”…in the company of someone also named Henri Wagner. Henri Wagner the Younger apparently got along well enough with the family of Henri Wagner the Elder that he followed the Wagner clan to a tiny town in northeast Iowa and married one of his daughters, Eva Wagner (also known occasionally as Anna Wagner) several years later.
There were therefore two Henri Wagners that settled in the same region of the state: One was my paternal great-grandfather and the other was my paternal great-great-grandfather, but the two were not related by blood (as far as I knew!). I was infinitely confused about how this had all come to pass. Had Henri Wagner the Younger found this family of Wagners by happenstance? Or did Henri Wagner the Younger target this family specifically because he would have cover—both in name and circumstance—as he tried to escape whatever the hell he was leaving behind in the Old World?
What exactly was the relationship between Henri Wagner and Henri Wagner?
* * *
—
I hoped that American records might clear some of this up. Chi1k pointed me in the direction of an obituary from a local paper circa 1926, detailing the death of Henry Wagner, “the uptown grocer”:
Deceased was born July 4, 1849 at Ech, Luxemberg [sic], where as a young man he followed the occupation of teamster, being so engaged during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and captured by the Germans on the borders of his native land, which afterwards became part of Germany and so remained until the World Wars restored their independence. In 1871, Mr. Wagner came to America and Allamakee County with his employer, also a Mr. Henry Wagner, but no relative. Business called him back to Luxemberg shortly afterwards, but he did not remain there long, joining his employer in French Creek township, Allamakee county where the latter had purchased land and on April 4th 1877, marrying his daughter Anna….
Shortly after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Wagner came to Lansing and have continuously resided here ever since. Both were honest God-fearing people, and by industry and frugality they succeeding in rearing a large family and establishing a model Christian home….[P]rior to the death of his son Frank, [Mr. Wagner] said that his six sons should be his pall-bearers. Now the five boys, Henry, Joseph, Gus, Carl and Leo, and son-in-law James O’Malley of French Creek township will act as such. His eight daughters are the Misses Anna, Katherine, Josephine, Lizzie, Rose, Martha (Mrs. Bowles), Melinda, (Mrs. O’Malley), and Clara.
Funeral held at I.C. Church in the shadow in which he lived for over 30 years and in whose faith and teachings he was a practical and life long adherent.
Short of confirming everything I knew about Henry Wagner’s travel to the United States, the obit conveniently explained how Henry Wagner the Younger had gotten his start once he’d arrived here: It was all thanks to the largesse of his father-in-law and employer, Henry Wagner the Elder. Years before he was legally a member of their family, the Wagner clan had effectively adopted this young stranger Henry as their own, and given him the tools (a partner, a job, and land) to begin anew—to flourish, even—in the United States.
Together, Henry the Younger and Anna had fourteen children and established what was by all accounts a “model” Christian home (and with fourteen children, you could specifically say it was a model Catholic home; birth control was clearly not in play). The Wagners of Lansing had lived—according to the local paper, at least—in the shadow of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Lansing (IC = local shorthand). Christian religiosity was arguably the most noteworthy achievement of Henry’s life: More text was dedicated to his faith than the business for which he was the proprietor.
Reading an obit like this made it increasingly hard to imagine any validity to Karl’s theory about some dark and tortured Luxembourg past being my great-grandfather’s driving motivation out of Europe. It was hard to imagine him as some sort of Franco-Prussian War criminal; Henry Wagner the American seemed like a pretty stand-up guy. Not to mention a fairly religious one, too. How was it that I could have ever imagined the patriarch of this clan to have some sort of dark wartime secret and a Jewish background to boot? The obituary summed up a Catholic life, lived devotedly, with room for nothing else.
So, yes: At first glance, my wild theories flew in the face of all the evidence I’d amassed. But if you looked at this with my now well-trained and paranoid gimlet eye, it could also strangely support them. If one was indeed Jewish by heritage, if not practice—insofar as one spoke Yiddish and drank Passover wine—and one did not want to be seen by society as Jewish by heritage…then perhaps devout Catholicism was our Wagnerian version of a religious smokescreen. The strategy, basically, could have been: “out-Christian the Christians.” By establishing a model Catholic home and populating it with a horde of children, Henry had fooled everyone. Lansing society would never have thought to question the Wagners’ Christian bona fides.
Was there any historical precedent for this kind of hoodwink? I rang up Barbara Kessel, who had written a book called Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots.*2 (Although my hopes to become suddenly Jewish had gotten more complicated than initially estimated.)
Speaking to me by phone from Jerusalem, Kessel explained that it was common for Jews to hide their religion during and after World War II. In the wake of the Nazi pogroms a
nd death camps, Kessel said that there were certain Jewish immigrants who gave up on their religion: It had cost them too dearly. “From here on in,” she explained to me, “they decided, ‘We are not Jewish or staying in touch with our Jewish family.’ ”
But she added that hiding one’s Jewish faith just wasn’t as common in the years in question—the “1880 to 1919 experience” when He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Wag(e)ner, né Mu(e)ller, would have immigrated to the United States and presumably hidden his heritage.
There were reasons other than Nazis, of course, to hide one’s Jewish roots. Kessel posited it might have advanced one’s career and social standing to be affiliated with the church community. And, she added, there was certainly anti-Semitism: “It was not so healthy or beneficial to announce your Jewish affiliation.”
Then there was the pressure to conform. “There was something romantic about being American,” said Kessel. “It was aspirational.” Of course, being Jewish should not have precluded being American—the American identity (and American citizenship!) was not predicated on being a gentile, after all. At least not officially. But, even today, it doesn’t take much work to see that if you’re something other than a white Christian in these United States, you’re a good candidate for American hyphenation (Muslim-American, Mexican-American), a designation that sets you outside the mainstream, however innocuously or conspicuously so. Was it any surprise that, over a century ago, it might have been easier to conform—to drop the thing entirely that signified your difference—if you wanted to be known as generically, simply American?
The obituary raised questions as much as it answered them. Henry had indeed been entangled in the Franco-Prussian War—but what exactly had happened? If you didn’t remember what happened in the Franco-Prussian War (I sure didn’t until I started reading up on it), here’s what went down: In the second half of the nineteenth century, the world was in flux, thanks in part to an epic land grab by various European empires. Prussia was looking to consolidate by annexing the German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden. The French weren’t keen on this Prussian power move right in their own backyard. In the middle of these two powers was Luxembourg—caught in an epic dick-swinging contest.
It gets more complicated: In 1870, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who had Prussian ties, made overtures to take the Spanish crown and thereby create a Spanish-Prussian alliance. The French, already wary, did not like this at all. Thus began the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Tiny Luxembourg was smack-dab in the middle of any invasion routes, and the war played out in the country’s backyard. In the end, the Prussians triumphed—led by a superior military and better technology—which resulted in German unification, a political development that would have major repercussions in the European years to follow, to, ahem, say the least.
So how could Henry Wagner have gotten caught up in it from his perch in Esch-sur-Alzette? This line in his obit stood out to me: As a young man he followed the occupation of teamster, being so engaged during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and captured by the Germans on the borders of his native land.
The Teamsters: It was in their Washington, D.C., union offices where my mother once worked in the 1970s, the locus of her happy reminiscences about mob bosses returning stolen cars, and the French chef who worked on-site to prepare lunches for all the employees. (This was back in the day when big labor had big power, and—in addition to negotiating fair wages for its members—provided certain “creature comforts” for those in HQ.) The Teamsters horsehead logo was as familiar to me as Garfield’s cartoon cat face, and just the mere mention of it conjured the twin ghosts of youth and loneliness. I’d spent countless hours looking at that logo while playing solitaire, trying to understand why you wouldn’t necessarily want a horsehead on your playing cards if you were somehow connected to the mob. But in this context, the horsehead wasn’t some inadvertently ironic graphic flourish, but a reminder of the union’s origin story, when teamsters didn’t drive eighteen-wheelers to deliver their goods, but instead drove teams of horses. Thus, “teamster.” Which is apparently what He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Wag(e)ner, né Mu(e)ller, was doing when he was “captured” by the Germans.
If he had indeed been held by the ultimately triumphant enemy army, why, as his obituary stated, did Henry Wagner return to Luxembourg “shortly after” he’d arrived in America? The obit explained away this bit of unlikely travel by saying that “business called him back,” but who’d ever heard of going back to the war-torn Old World once you’d stepped foot in the New? It was expensive to go back and forth across the Atlantic; I scoured the Internet for immigration logs of return from America to Europe, and there were virtually no records. This was not done in large numbers; so few passengers could afford the trip that it was really a voyage of luxury tourism more than anything else. So why go back? What kind of international “business”—run from a tiny town in northeastern Iowa!—would necessitate a trip to Luxembourg in the late 1800s? What had Henry left behind that called him back?
I’d become increasingly aware, through all this travel and research and Inter-nerding, that I’d unwittingly developed a theory: In becoming American, something is lost. I knew what we’d lost in Burma (and indeed what Burma herself had lost since we’d left), but I didn’t know what Henry had lost, what our family had lost, when he came to America.
I’d need to go back to the source, to Esch-sur-Alzette—to pay a visit to the grand duchy herself to find the answer to that question. I’d see what kind of records were still left. Possibly there would even be a local census that surveyed the Jewish residents and the Catholic ones, and from there I could glean the answers to the initial mystery that was now being crowded by so many others: Were we Muller/Wagners actually Jewish? I’d put foot to ground and stomp around, hoping to land on those elusive and resonant vibrations of my family story. I’d find out what we’d lost.
*1 The Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871.
*2 My husband opened the mail the day the book arrived and immediately assumed it was for him, courtesy of his polite but still despondent extended Jewish family who seemed to me to want little more than for him to return to the faith.
I knew precisely one significant thing about Luxembourg when I boarded the train bound for Luxembourg City from Paris: Businesses liked the place because the corporate taxes were low. Low taxes begat company headquarters, which in turn begat men and women of indistinct European provenance in sharp suits wearing the disinterested gaze of the twenty-first-century wealthy. And indeed, if you needed piqué cotton toddler clothes or fur throws for the living room couch, there were plenty of haute-bourgeois accoutrements to be purchased on the cobblestone streets of the capital.
The National Archives of Luxembourg were situated on a hairpin turn overlooking a walled fortification over the Alzette River. Given the land assigned to American government offices, it was pretty commanding real estate for a mostly humdrum research building, but maybe this was just the way things were in the bountiful land of low taxes and many luxury goods. Either way, I didn’t have time to enjoy the views: I was on the hunt for evidence about Henry Wagner’s departure from this duchy and then his return sometime in the mid-1870s—as well as possible clues as to why he’d made this mysterious departure in the first place.
Had Henry left, like so many others, lusting after the gleaming promise of America and her waving wheat fields? Or was there a boot in his ass, chasing him out of the country under dark of night? Maybe he’d just been lovestruck, ready to follow his eventual wife wherever she might go? Beyond that, I wanted verifiable evidence that Henry Wagner had left the country under questionable circumstances—and, um, Judaism: Did they have any record of Henry Wagner’s faith buried somewhere in the microfilm?
What had he left behind that he tried to gather again? Was he after the same thing I was after, to reclaim some sense of who he was, an identity that Henry Wagner had prematurely abandoned and possibly los
t?
I was one of only a handful of researchers in the place and realized quickly that everyone who worked in the building (and was presumably there to help me figure out whatever I was trying to figure out) spoke a strange dialect of Luxembourgish French German.*1 This was a tricky and seemingly unwinnable combination, especially for someone (me) who had only a few years of college French under her belt.
As I pretended to do research on the first day, various strange personages revealed themselves to me, including a ponytailed, ear-cuffed archivist who was responsible for retrieving the really old books that were too delicate to sit in the stacks. He had the intellectual workman look of a Phish roadie, and things were proceeding fairly smoothly between us, until he involved me in a conversation about the global divide on matters of personal history. Or at least, I am fairly certain that’s what our conversation was about, because it was entirely in attempted French—the language we were both aspiring to speak.
ME: These archives are very well—uh—very good!
ARCHIVIST: Well, that depends.
ME: My mother is from Burma, and nothing exists there.
ARCHIVIST: Burma!
ME: Yes, in Asia. And nothing exists.
ARCHIVIST: Well, that’s because in those cultures, the past is the past. When it’s over, it’s over.