The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But somehow, for all his work and all his philanthropies, some mysterious ingredient that it took to be loved always eluded him. He never seemed to achieve Jacob Schiff’s prestige. For all his entertaining, he never matched the Seligmans’ social status, and, when his son Sam married Joseph Seligman’s granddaughter, Margaret Seligman, the Seligmans sniffed their disapproval.

  He used to say, “I wouldn’t mind losing all my money. I don’t have to live the way I do—I could live very simply. But I’d hate to be thought a fool.” More than anything, he dreaded appearing ridiculous. And yet—with his round little figure, his polished bald head, his nearsighted eyes peering through their comically thick spectacles, in his spotless gray spats and his vests aglitter with shining black buttons; throwing his increasingly unwieldy parties, surrounded by his fawning retinue of “friends”—he did, at times, seem the butt of all jokes. He was a Jewish Great Gatsby in the wrong decade, and, as a result, he always seemed a little inappropriate.

  As an old man, he began to dictate his autobiography which he titled, significantly, “The Citizenship of Adolph Lewisohn.” It was never published, and it is a fascinating—and also, in some ways, baffling—document. He mentions his marriage to Emma Cahn of New York in 1878, but never mentions her by her first name again. A few references to her follow—always as “my wife” or “Mrs. Lewisohn.” He took her to England on their wedding trip aboard the Cunarder Russia. She complained about their stateroom, which was next to the coal chutes, but nothing could be done about it. It was also a business trip for Adolph, and he wrote: “We could not always be together, for in London I had to be at the office while my wife went out to see the sights.” He added: “I suppose that generally it would be considered a hardship to have to attend to business while traveling, especially on a wedding trip; but, with the right spirit, business with its interesting contacts not only is a constant education but becomes a splendid pastime.” Adolph’s wife then drops from the pages completely.

  The rest of the book concerns itself with Adolph’s many successes in the copper industry. He does not mention his wife’s death in 1916. He never mentions the five children she bore him, or his grandchildren. He seems to have been a man consumed, early in life, by himself.

  But his son Sam always stuck by him and, in Adolph’s later years, seemed to have been the only one who truly loved him. Sam was a witty, intelligent, and charming man. But even with Sam, Adolph was distant and reserved, too locked in his private grief and loneliness to be father. When Sam married Margaret Seligman, he brought his young bride to live in his father’s house. They had their own apartment on an upper floor, but they always took their evening meal with the old gentleman. Their four daughters were born and raised there.

  One granddaughter, Joan Lewisohn Simon, wrote an admittedly autobiographical novel called Portrait of a Father, in which she has harsh things to say about both her father and grandfather, the latter of whom she describes as looking like “a turtle standing on its hind legs.”

  The little girls would dine with their nurse and governess upstairs, and each evening at precisely three minutes past six, just as the liveried butler was removing the service plates, they would hear the creak and rattle of the elevator ascending. Then the gate would clank open and shut, and their grandfather’s footsteps would shuffle across the thick carpet toward the dining room. The servants would stiffen and eye the little girls warningly. “Best manners!” hissed the governess as their grandfather walked to the head of the table and removed a little black book from his vest pocket. He would then proceed to read to them, in a thick accent which they couldn’t understand, from the book. The girls and the servants would sit in numbed silence until he finished this ritual. Then he would bow slightly, turn, and depart.

  The little girls interpreted it as a kind of blessing. It wasn’t until years later that they discovered that the black book was his engagement book. He had been reading to them, every night, his list of his week’s appointments.

  Joan Simon remembers being eighteen in the Fifth Avenue house and “sitting downstairs, waiting nervously for an evening date, on a stiff wooden chair adjoining a long formal table that in a club would have been arrayed with magazines,” and hearing, to her “dismay,” the elevator landing. It was her grandfather, and he came into the room and sat in another stiff chair—her chair’s twin—a table length away from her to wait for his chauffeur to pick him up for a dinner engagement. There they sat, “two occupants of the same house for eighteen years,” and could find nothing to say to each other. Finally they spoke of the weather, then “recoiled into silence.”

  It was even harder for Margaret Seligman Lewisohn, a beautiful and intelligent woman herself. Joan Simon has spoken of how awkward her mother used to feel in the house while the great New Year’s Eve parties were going on—parties of which she was officially the hostess, and yet not really. In his ninetieth year—his last—Adolph Lewisohn sang and danced at his New Year’s Eve party until 3 A.M.

  The disappointing size of his estate was the cause of many bitter scenes. His heirs, who in 1930 had expected thirty million dollars to divide between them, found, eight years later, only three millions. (Today his descendants rather wistfully say that at one point he was worth two hundred million.) Though he left, among other things, a priceless collection of paintings, two of his granddaughters found themselves quarreling over possession of a Grand Rapids telephone stand.

  One granddaughter, who did not live in the same house with him, remembers him kindly. “He had,” says Mrs. Richard Bernhard vigorously, “the most wonderful knack of coming out with the punch line, putting the capstone on every argument. You could talk to him, and you wouldn’t believe he was even listening to you—then out it would come.” Once, she recalls, when her late husband, a partner in Wertheim & Company, had been offered a particularly tempting new job in England in the late twenties, they took the question to Mr. Lewisohn, the family patriarch. He listened in silence to all the younger man’s arguments for going back to England—or perhaps he wasn’t listening. Then suddenly he raised his head and said, “Your forefathers came to America because it was the land of promise.” That was all. Mr. Bernhard stayed in New York.

  As a boy in Hamburg, Adolph had taken long, solitary walks in the woods outside the city, picking wildflowers. He had once created his own little herbarium which he kept flourishing in his window overlooking the canal. In his great Ardsley estate, he had fabulous gardens and huge hothouses filled with growing plants. He used to like to take his friends and various tutors on walks through his gardens, and at times he would stoop and talk tenderly to the flowers.

  Toward the end of his autobiography, he makes this haunting statement: “As I sit here in the comfort and leisure of my home, dictating from time to time these random memories of a long life, I feel that I am talking, not to the public, but to a kindly indulgent company of my friends … but the distance between human hearts seems greater than in the old days.”

  It was. But he never knew why.

  * Neither, for the same period, had J. P. Morgan, Jr.

  46

  THE END OF A DREAM

  In the early 1930’s there suddenly appeared a fictitious Warburg. He was, or so he signed himself, Sidney Warburg, and he made his appearance as the author of a pamphlet titled The Resources of National Socialism: Three Conversations with Hitler. In a preface to this apologia, this Warburg claimed to be the son of Felix Warburg. Felix had four sons—Frederick, Gerald, Paul, and Edward—but no Sidney. Sidney Warburg was a hoax. No Warburg ever had a conversation with Hitler. But one, Paul’s and Felix’s brother Max, came close.

  Max Warburg, head of M. M. Warburg & Company in Germany, was, as the family used to say, “not a typical Warburg.” Typical Warburgs were dark and flashing-eyed, with wide foreheads and prominent noses. Max, however, looked like his mother’s family, the Oppenheims, with blue eyes, fair hair, and a small nose. These physiological details are important since during Hitler’s rise
it was often helpful for a Jew not to “look Jewish.”

  Max Warburg joined the German Army as a young man, and chose the smart Hussars. He loved his uniform and was such a good soldier that, as a special favor, he was permitted to attend Officers Corps meetings, even though he knew that as a Jew he could never receive a commission. Nonetheless, in his early twenties he had written to Grossvater Warburg saying that he wanted to make the German Army his career. Grossvater was flabbergasted, and wrote back saying that he didn’t know which was worse—having a son who would turn his back on the family bank in favor of the army or tolerating the humiliation of a son who would never be more than a noncommissioned officer. At last Max gave in and returned to Hamburg to learn banking.

  Max was something of a tufthunter. As part of his training, he was sent to England for a year, where he worked for the House of Rothschild. He was a familiar figure at West End parties and, to keep the various members of the English aristocracy straightened out, sat up at nights memorizing Burke’s Peerage and Debrett. He was remarkably adaptable, and, according to the family, by the end of that year in London Max was “more British than the British,” with an impeccable Etonian accent. Returning to Germany, he became a close friend of Albert Ballin, the famous court Jewish friend of the Kaiser, who headed the enormously prosperous Hamburg-America Line, which was one of the greatest factors in German life, not just as a business but also as Germany’s most powerful advertisement of itself to the world at large.

  Though court life in Germany was strict and rule-ridden—the rule that Jews were not received was one of the most unshakable—suddenly Max Warburg, along with Ballin, was a familiar figure on the Kaiser’s yacht. As the century moved into its third decade, the Hamburg-America Line became notably Hitlerian in its stance, and Max Warburg had become a member of the Hamburg-America’s executive committee.

  In retrospect, there were many ironies in Max Warburg’s life. Certainly his special treatment began to convince him that he was somehow specially equipped to handle “the Jewish question,” as it was being called in Germany. During World War I Max was financial adviser to the Imperial Government of Germany, and at the war’s end he was appointed to a special committee to assist the German peace delegation at Versailles. He was so devotedly German that, when he saw the “humiliating” terms of the treaty submitted by the Allied Powers, he promptly resigned from his committee post and had demanded that all the other members resign as well. But poisonous myths were being created—that the German Army had never been defeated but had been stabbed in the back by “the November criminals”—the Republicans, the Socialists, and the Jews. Soon “the Jew Max Warburg” was being named among those responsible for the Versailles Treaty, and, as the false rumors spread, he was called the infamous treaty’s architect. An attempt on his life was planned, and for several months after Versailles Max was forced to hide in the country outside Hamburg. It was during this period that his brothers in America, given the perspective that distance provides, began urging Max to leave Germany.

  But Max was too much of a German. When the German Republic was coming into being, Max was offered his choice of two posts: Minister of Finance or Ambassador to the United States. To everybody’s surprise, he turned them both down—for reasons that revealed a certain ambivalence in his nature. He would rather not accept the post of Minister of Finance, he said, because he considered the job “too big and too important,” because the problems facing the young Republic were “very grave,” and because “any mistake which I might make would reflect on all German Jewry.” He turned down the ambassadorship saying that, as head of M. M. Warburg for many years, he was “more accustomed to command than to obey.” He added that “An ambassador is nothing more than a glorified messenger boy.”

  For all this loftiness, even arrogance, of tone, it is quite clear that by 1930 Max Warburg was a seriously frightened man. His main concern became saving, if at all possible, the Warburg bank and properties in Germany. To do so, he used his old connections with the Kaiser and the imperial court to become a close friend of the prominent Nazi, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, the German Federal Bank.* Schacht often turned to Max for advice in financial matters, and continued doing so for several years after Hitler came to power. Through Schacht, Max became convinced that the Warburg bank would never be seized and that he himself might be to Hitler what Albert Ballin had been to the Kaiser, the court Jew. Alas, as the months marched relentlessly onward, this possibility seemed less than remote, particularly to Max’s despairing brothers in New York. A law of April, 1933, decreed that all Jews be dismissed from government service and the universities, and they were also barred from the professions. Yet a week later, Max Warburg was dining with his friend, the Nazi Schacht. In September, 1935, marriages between Jews and persons of “German blood” were forbidden, and Jews were deprived of virtually all their remaining rights.

  Yet Max Warburg still hung on to the family bank and, that winter, submitted to Schacht the Warburg Plan—a system designed to facilitate the emigration of Jews out of Germany. The Warburg Plan would help other German Jews to escape; Max himself still seems to have believed he would be spared. Schacht spent several months going over the Warburg Plan, submitted it to a number of committees and “experts” on the “Jewish question,” and the plan is said to have rested for several days on the desk of the Führer himself. However, though Max made several inquiries about the status of his plan, very little seemed to have been done about it. The Warburg Plan was still passing from desk to desk in the Nazi regime in the autumn of 1937 when Max Warburg, still harboring a hopeless hope that his plan would save the Jews of Germany, sailed for New York from Hamburg to find supporters in America. He was still in New York in 1938 when word reached him of the burning of the shops and synagogues, and it was only then that he saw the futility of returning to Germany. Shortly afterward, the 140-year-old bank was taken forcibly away from the Warburgs. Max, an old and broken man, asked his son Eric, already a citizen, to help him get his American citizenship.

  In the United States Max began to write his memoirs, in which he spoke candidly of what it was like to be an important Jew surviving under Hitler until as late as 1937–1938. The manuscript, in the early 1940’s, was accepted by the Macmillan Company for publication, and an advance was paid. But the Warburg family, now that the United States was in the war, became fearful that “the moment was not right” for such a document. Perhaps, all things considered, it wasn’t. Too many terrible fires were already burning. Max withdrew the manuscript and returned the advance, and now, when much that it may have contained could be enlightening, both of the Nazis he knew and of his own complex character, it has disappeared. Max Warburg became an American citizen in 1944, at the age of seventy-seven, and died two years later.

  Eric Warburg, who had considerably more foresight than his father and who was the first of the German Warburgs to become a United States citizen, enlisted in the U.S. Army early in the war, becoming one of the few German-born officers in the American forces. In the customary Warburg way, with great élan, Eric was able to avenge his father’s treatment in Germany, and to even the Warburg score with the Nazis. In the African campaign, as a Lieutenant Colonel in Air Force Intelligence, Eric’s knowledge of the language enabled him to interrogate shot-down German soldiers. He took part in the Normandy invasion and, when Hermann Göring was captured, was Göring’s chief U.S. interrogator. The interrogation lasted forty-eight hours, and, though grueling, the session was conducted with perfect Warburg aplomb.

  Eric usually had the last, sardonic word. Once, when he was escorting a captured German general to the billet in a farmhouse that had been assigned to him, the general protested the accommodations violently, shouting, “Ich bin dock ein General der Wehrmacht!” Eric Warburg, with splendidly quiet tact, replied, “Ja, aber leider haben wir Sie nicht erwartet.” (“Yes, but unfortunately we weren’t expecting you.”)

  After the war it was Eric who persuaded the Allies to l
et the family bank in Hamburg resume operations, and he is now the senior partner in the Hamburg office, though both he and his young son, Max II, remain U.S. citizens.*

  The war drew families together as randomly as it flung them apart, and in New York the effect of Hitler’s policies toward Jews was most profound. It was the end of a dream. The dream had managed to survive, almost intact, the First World War. That war had been easy to blame, as Otto Kahn had done, on “the Prussian ruling class.” Part of the dream had involved romantic associations with the homeland and sentimental nostalgia for “the old Germany” which, in the mind’s eye, had always been green and springlike:

  Denk’ ich an Deutschland in der Nacht

  Dann bin ich um den Schlaf Gebracht.…

  But an even more important part of the dream had been the German Jew’s notion, in Germany and America, of his “specialness.” When the German Jew thought of himself, he tended to do so in terms of the poetry of Heine and the music of Mendelssohn, and the many Jewish contributions, which every good German Jew could recite, to German science, education, and industry. As all these were systematically erased in Germany, New York’s German Jewish families looked at one another in horror, reappraising all the things—their German culture and language, their German steamships, their German wines—from which they had once drawn a sense of importance and superiority. With a heavy feeling of loss, they took up the task of gathering scattered members of their families in from the flames of Europe.