Ron Chernow - The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family

Acclaim for
RON CHERNOWS
THE WARBURGS

Ron Chernows blockbuster history traces the heart-rending saga of this German-Jewish banking family. Despite his scrupulous documentation of sources, Chernow is never less than readable. A graceful and lucid writer, he offers old-fashioned narrative in the grand style.

New York Newsday

The history of a fascinating family. What we learn about in this book is people. Chernow is very good at bringing them to life. He has a sharp eye for detail. One can open the book anywhere and enjoy it.

New Republic

Ron Chernow has made the stories of these four brothers the cornerstones of a dark, though not quite tragic, family saga. [He is] a graceful writer with an eye for the telling anecdote. The result is a book of considerable pathos and immediacyThrough his portrait of this complex dynastic organism, he sheds interesing light on various larger historical themes.

Boston Sunday Globe

Excellent family history. This chronicle of one of the most important banking families in history tells us much about the people. A great, and lengthy, saga.

The Times (London)

The Warburgs stand revealed as a family more fortune-kissed, fated and fascinating even than the Kennedys, and just as important and now their story has been ably told.

New York Daily News

RON CHERNOW
THE WARBURGS

Ron Chernow holds degrees in English literature from Yale and Cambridge. His articles on business, politics, and history have appeared in more than thirty national and regional publications. His celebrated first book, The House of Morgan , won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The Warburgs was awarded the Columbia Business Schools 1993 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing, and was named a Notable Book by both The New York Times and the American Library Association. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Valerie, a sociologist.

Books by RON CHERNOW

The House of Morgan
The Warburgs

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1994

Copyright 1993 by Ron Chernow
Family tree illustration copyright 1993 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

Chernow, Ron.
The Warburgs/Ron Chernow.
p. cm.
I. Warburg family. 2. Jewish bankersBiography. 3. Jews
GermanyBiography. 4. JewsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
DS C 42 1993 943.00492400922dc20
[B] 93-16599
eISBN: 978-0-307-81350-3

Author photograph Marion Ettlinger

v3.1

To VALERIE and MELANIE

But the essential point which most non-Jews overlook and which forms the very crux of the Jewish tragedy, is that those Jews who are giving their energies and brains to the Germans are doing it in their capacities as Germans and are enriching Germany and not Jewry, which they are abandoning. They must hide their Judaism in order to be allowed to place their brains and abilities at the disposal of the Germans. They are to no little extent responsible for German greatness. The tragedy of it all is that whereas we do not recognize them as Jews Madame Wagner does not recognize them as Germans, and so we stand there as the most exploited and misunderstood of people.

C HAIM W EIZMANN to Lord Balfour,
December 12, 1914

A non-German cannot possibly imagine the heartbreaking position of the German Jew. German Jewyou must place full emphasis on both words. You must understand them as the final product of a lengthy evolutionary process. His twofold love and his struggle on two fronts drive him close to the brink of despair.

J AKOB W ASSERMANN ,
My Life as German
and Jew

When refugees meet and exchange stories about their escape from Hitler and their lives abroad, each has a unique story to tell, yet each story is like all the others: a life bravely made over but also a dream lost forever.

P ETER G AY ,
The Jews of Germany:
A Historical Portrait

CONTENTS

PRELUDE

The German Jews were a people shipwrecked by history. Arguably the most productive group of Jews in history, they were also, in many ways, the least typical. Few groups have been so admired for their achievements or so maligned for their attitudes. Persecuted by other Germans as too Jewish, they were often scorned by other Jews as too German. Their existence rested on a tenuous illusion of acceptance until the Nazis came along and tore that dream to tatters. People still puzzle over why these bright, industrious people were so blind to a mortal threat to their existence. In frustration, some Jews deny them the dignity of their tragedy.

This book attempts to clarify the mystery through the epic story of one of the worlds most distinguished Jewish families: the Warburgs. No less than the Rothschilds, they were revered as Jewish royalty. A huge, charming, and gregarious clan with enormous joie de vivre , they may rank as the oldest, continuously active banking family in the world, tracing their ancestry to the sixteenth century. This ancient lineage permits a comprehensive look at Jewish evolution on German soil.

It is always dangerous to generalize about a clan as diverse and individualistic as the contradictory, opinionated Warburgs. But as a rule, one can say that they exhibited all the enterprise, daring, and philanthropy of the Jewish community in Germany. With their unfailing energy and high spirits, they adored music and literature, light verse and amateur theatricals, elegant parties and outrageous pranks. They financed German industry, influenced its politics, and enriched its culture. In fact, they excelled in so many areasproducing not only notable bankers, but eminent scholars, politicians, scientists, artists, musicians, philanthropists, socialites, and art patronsas to rival such protean families as the Huxleys and Jameses. Their story exhibits the abundance of German-Jewish achievement and the eerily close fit of German and Jewish culture.

The Warburgs also displayed the shortcomings of German Jews. They could be snobbish, arrogant, and status-conscious, especially toward their Eastern European brethren. They were often rigid, authoritarian parents. Superpatriotic and steeped in German culture, they exhibited a fierce, sometimes uncritical, devotion to Germany until it was too late. Seemingly heedless of the darker side of the German psyche (although some family members were all too aware of it) and subservient to the state, they were generally ill equipped to deal with the tragedy that befell them. The Warburgs didnt love Germany wisely but too well.

Through the prism of their history, one sees all the forces that shaped the German Jews: their emancipation in Imperial Germany; their striking emergence in Weimar Germany; their persecution and expulsion in the Third Reich; and their stamina in America, England, Israel, and elsewhere. Few Jewish families so robustly exploited the opportunities open to them under the kaiser or suffered so grievously because of them. Because the Warburgs intermarried with the Schiffs and Loebs of New York, their story also traces the development of the German Jews abroad. Since part of the family returned to Germany after the war, their chronicle carries the story right up to the present.

The Warburgs owed much of their early success to Rothschild patronage and they later occupied an analogous place in Jewish charities. As the Rothschild star was dimming in the early twentieth century, the Warburg star shone most brightly. The contrast between the families is instructive. The power of the Rothschilds arose from the mysterious interplay between private banks and royal courts. The Warburgs, by contrast, were modern, proudly democratic, and closely allied with the new industrial classes. Viewing themselves as free, independent citizens of Hamburg, they identified with its ethos of social mobility, unfettered trade, and democratic politics.

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