I remember that as a curious young boy I had come across a faded black-and-white photograph of my father’s parents, Fritz and Louise—two distinguished-looking, older people dressed in elegant but old-fashioned clothes. They had stared back at me from some distant, seemingly unknowable past. I say “older” although, at the time the photograph was taken, they probably were only in their thirties or forties; they never had a chance to actually become elderly. When I looked more closely, I could see my father in them, and even myself. But they seemed to belong to a world that didn’t connect with mine.
Today, on the wall of my office at home in Los Angeles, I look at a portrait of my great-grandfather Eugen Gutmann. Painted at the end of the nineteenth century by celebrated portrait painter Franz von Lenbach, I found it just a few years ago at an auction in Cologne, while I was hunting for another Lenbach that is still missing. Every morning I greet Eugen in four languages—German, French, Italian, and English—and ask what the day will bring. Some days he remains impassive, and then some days I get the distinct impression he is smiling down at me—a twinkle in those gray-blue eyes—and then I know a new clue is lurking not far away. For the last few years—and as if guided by my great-grandfather’s aura—I have bit by bit been able to resurrect the history of my nearly disappeared family.
Eugen’s parents, Bernhard and Marie Gutmann, were both from Bohemia, part of the old Austrian Empire. Bernhard had come from a pious family. His grandfather, great-grandfather, and many before him had been either rabbis or rabbinical judges, mostly from Leipnik and Kolin (now both in the Czech Republic).
When Bernhard was still a child, his father, Tobias, had moved to the Bohemian capital of Prague and into small-time banking, which was, at the time, probably not much more than old-fashioned money changing. For Tobias and his family, the early decades of the nineteenth century must have been like stepping out of the Middle Ages and into a new, modern world. Bernhard, in 1815, had been born into a time of upheaval. Napoléon and the French revolution had changed everything—the modern era was beginning.
Sensing that even greater opportunity beckoned, just over the Erzgebirge Mountains in the new German Confederation, Bernhard moved to Dresden. The granting of full political rights to Jews in Germany was still a few decades away, but in the 1830s the King of Saxony lifted all economic and commercial restrictions on Jews in Dresden. Similar changes occurred throughout the new Confederation of Germany, where a long pent-up surge of intellectual and entrepreneurial energy was unleashed. Around 1840, Bernhard Gutmann founded the private bank named simply, in the fashion of the times, the Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann.
The new bank specialized in commodities trading, currency exchange, and loans for industrial development. It prospered such that Bernhard could comfortably afford a large and elegant three-story villa overlooking the park on the fashionable Bürgerwiese. Salomon Oppenheim, a “court Jew” from Cologne and founder of the bank that still bears his name, would commission a Florentine-style palazzo just a few doors down.
Even though Bernhard was still quite young—in 1840 he was only twenty-five—he became a member of the board and benefactor of the new Dresden synagogue, a magnificent Moorish-revival building designed by Gottfried Semper, perhaps the foremost German architect of the day. The Semper Synagogue epitomized an impressive and prominent place of worship, clearly a measure of the prosperity and aspirations of the small Jewish community in Dresden, which at the time numbered fewer than one thousand. It was perhaps also a measure of the historical hopelessness of those aspirations that, a century later, Nazi brownshirts would burn the Dresden synagogue to the ground on Kristallnacht.
With the new synagogue came a new form of worship. While the major prayers were still spoken in Hebrew, many of the services were conducted in German, accompanied by choral singing—a small but significant step in the assimilation of German Jews into the surrounding German culture. As might be expected, this shift toward modernity caused tensions within the Jewish community. With the physical and symbolic tearing down of the ghetto walls, and the resulting intermingling of Jews with the Gentile culture, some Jews feared that assimilation would pose a more existential threat to Jewish faith and identity than centuries of intimidation and persecution ever had.
Bernhard was, by all accounts, politically and personally a conservative man, pious and sober. He was a transitional figure between the old order and the new. Firmly rooted in his ancient community, Bernhard would uphold the Jewish traditions until his death in 1895.
His last years were lived out with great dignity and in considerable comfort in a fairy-tale white castle surrounded by a moat full of swans. Schloss Schönfeld, overlooking the Elbe River, became known as “the magic castle.” It had been built in the sixteenth century and was considered the finest of Renaissance castles in the region. Bernhard had acquired it just a few years after the final restrictions had been lifted on Jews owning real estate. It was a striking testament to the remarkable rise of the Gutmann family and the emancipation of Jews in Germany.
Bernhard and Marie’s third child, my great-grandfather Eugen, was born in Dresden in 1840, the eldest son in a family of twelve siblings. All but one of these survived into adulthood, which was remarkable for that era. Eugen is portrayed in family lore as an outgoing and generous boy. He is also described as impulsive, perhaps even a bit of a rebel. Records are scant, but as a young boy he almost certainly was enrolled in Dresden’s “Jewish school,” considered even by the Gentile community to be perhaps Dresden’s best grammar school, and later attended the local gymnasium (high school). No doubt, he would have been a regular attendee at the synagogue of which his father was such a prominent figure, although from what I learned about him later, I have to assume that the Jewish traditions never truly took hold.
Banking, like most businesses of the day, was taught on the job, and it was thought best for a young man to prove his mettle and aptitude removed from the father’s protective care. Therefore, Eugen began his banking career as an apprentice to a different private bank, Günther & Palmié, in Dresden. Next, so he could experience the commodity market firsthand, Eugen briefly worked in Budapest for Hungary’s largest lumber concern; but he soon returned to Dresden and to the family bank. Jewish banking families routinely traded sons for apprenticeships and, just as routinely, daughters for marriage. This practice of double endogamy—intermarriage among Jewish banking families—would create endlessly complicated interlocking family relationships and would later provide fodder for accusations of “conspiracy” against Jewish bankers.
The Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann, dominated by Eugen’s father, had become a prosperous concern, but it was far too restrictive, too conservative a stage for Eugen. At the same time, Germany was emerging as a powerful industrial nation. Energetic, ambitious, and in a hurry, Eugen had bigger plans, plans that revolved around his friendship with another, even more prominent Dresden banking family, the von Kaskels, who lived just down the street from the Gutmanns on the Bürgerwiese.
The Kaskels had been among the original “court Jews” brought back to Dresden by Frederick Augustus I in the eighteenth century. The family later formed the private Bankhaus Kaskel and served as official bankers to the royal court. Unfortunately for the Kaskel Bank, but fortunately for my great-grandfather Eugen, Carl von Kaskel had only one son, Felix, who apparently was far more interested in music than running a bank. With Carl getting on in years, the Bankhaus Kaskel faced a dilemma. At the same time, Germany, now finally united as a modern nation-state after its victory over France in 1871, was awash in new capital looking for investment in more railways, factories, shipping, mining—and more banks. For Eugen, who was already a minority stockholder in Bankhaus Kaskel, it was a perfect alignment of opportunities.
In 1872 Eugen put together a deal with the Kaskels and some of the other great banking families—among them were the Rothschilds of Frankfurt, the Bleichröders of Berlin, and the Oppenheims of Cologne—to create a public joint-stock corporation called the Dresdner Bank (Bank of Dresden). The bank opened its doors in the old Bankhaus Kaskel building in Dresden with thirty employees and an initial capitalization of 24 million marks. As Chairman of the Board of Directors, Felix von Kaskel was the titular head of the bank, but Eugen, then only thirty-two years old, was the driving force as the Dresdner Bank’s managing director. In 1873, less than a year later, it went public on the Berlin Stock Exchange and traded for nearly 110 percent of its initial value. Eugen became Chairman and would hold that position for almost the next half century. A famous financier of the day was quoted as saying, “Gutmann was not just the head of the Dresdner Bank; he was the Dresdner Bank.”
Meanwhile, the Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann continued as a successful private bank, under Eugen’s brother Alfred, until 1921. After Alfred became ill the bank was officially absorbed into the Dresdner.
Over the next decade, Eugen launched a breathtaking series of mergers and acquisitions of smaller private banks and financial institutions. He helped pioneer the concepts of branch banking, opening smaller branches of the Dresdner in cities and towns throughout Germany. He also established individual deposit banking, allowing even the most humble of wage earners to open interest-bearing bank savings accounts—at the time a bold, even radical, innovation. Eugen famously maintained that “every civil servant, even every maid, should have a deposit account,” preferably, of course, with the Dresdner. Eventually, millions of Germans from all walks of life would do just that. But perhaps Eugen’s most farsighted business decision came in the early 1880s when he decided to make Berlin the headquarters of the Dresdner Bank.
Before German unification, Berlin had been an elegant but somewhat isolated city of about four hundred thousand people, the administrative capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, but a poor relation to the great, glittering European capitals of Paris, Vienna, and London. After unification, as the capital of the new German Reich, Berlin experienced the same rapid expansion that swept across almost all of Germany. By 1880, its population had soared to over a million, and it had become the undisputed political and financial center of the new German empire. Just as the Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann had been too small a stage for Eugen, now Dresden—a beautiful and culturally vibrant city, to be sure, but still only a provincial capital—was too small a stage for Eugen’s ambitions. Berlin was the key.
In 1881 Eugen opened a branch office of the Dresdner in Berlin and a few years later moved the bank’s corporate headquarters to the new capital city. Obviously, a powerful bank must have a powerful and imposing headquarters, and here, too, Eugen thought in grand terms. The headquarters building had originally belonged to the family of Bismarck, whom he admired so greatly. Many even said that Eugen resembled the “Iron Chancellor.” In 1887 Eugen commissioned a richly decorated, three-story neoclassical renovation of the building, on the square known as the Opernplatz, conveniently close to the Opera House. Along with other flourishes, the building featured ornate marble columns, mosaic terrazzo floors, and coffered ceilings embellished with roses. Chancellor Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II were among the many distinguished guests at the building’s grand reopening in 1889.
The building functioned as both a testament to the prominence of its occupant as well as a working financial institution. Eugen’s office on the director’s floor looked out over a massive “banking hall” with a thirty-foot-high glass ceiling, where ordinary Berliners—every civil servant and maid—lined up to entrust their money to the good offices of the Dresdner. The downstairs vault area also featured a “jewel room,” where the haute bourgeoisie would store their valuables. Eventually, the Dresdner Bank building covered an entire city block.
Perversely, after World War II the building was used as the district headquarters of the East German Communist Party, which in good proletarian fashion covered the terrazzo floors with honest workers’ linoleum and painted over the beautiful marble columns in drab Stalinist gray.
Today the building is the rather fancy Hotel de Rome. Not much remains from the original. The mosaics from the floor of the great banking hall were refurbished into what is now a ballroom. The director’s room upstairs is now the dining room, and the vaults downstairs have been converted into a spa and sauna rooms. While my wife and I enjoyed coffee and cakes on a sunny morning, in 2007, I was still able to visualize my great-grandfather sitting at his impressive command post, directing an aggressive expansion of the Dresdner.
Eugen first opened branch offices across Germany and then, in 1895, the first office abroad in London—an event that would later have a profound effect on my own destiny. Eventually, the Dresdner would directly employ several thousand people, while indirectly controlling the lives and fortunes of millions more. In assets it had become the second-largest bank in Germany, behind only the Deutsche Bank.
By 1900, the Dresdner would have the largest branch network in all of the Reich. Around this time and at the height of his power, Eugen had another portrait painted by the great German Jewish Impressionist, Max Liebermann. Many decades later the Liebermann portrait would be afforded a place of honor between portraits of Albert Einstein and Walther Rathenau in the postwar Jewish Museum in Berlin.
One of the ultimate ironies in my family history is that the mighty Dresdner Bank became a major financier of the newly unified Germany and its astonishing rise as a military and industrial world power. It invested heavily in the railroad, oil, mining, pharmaceutical, and electrotechnical heavy industries that were transforming Germany into a world economic power. Krupp armaments, Bayer chemicals and pharmaceuticals, Thyssen steel and iron, Siemens electric—the Dresdner had a hand in financing expansion projects for all of them.
The Dresdner’s major foreign interests would ultimately include the Deutsche-Orient Bank, with offices in Istanbul, Cairo, and Casablanca, Victoria Falls Power Company in South Africa, Russian Union Electric in St. Petersburg, Mexican Electric Works Ltd., the German Asiatic Bank in Shanghai, the German South American Telegraph Company, and the Baghdad Railway Company—among many other powerful entities. In the United States, the Dresdner maintained a close working partnership with J. P. Morgan & Company. Additionally, Eugen served as a director on the boards of thirty-four major corporations, while his Dresdner surrogates served as board members of two hundred other companies.
Although nominally a public corporation, Eugen ran the Dresdner more like a private bank, carefully packing the board with trustworthy friends and even some family members as directors, including his younger brother, Max. One high-level Dresdner employee later wrote, with a clear sense of exasperation, “Eugen Gutmann was full of plans, but the board only heard of them after the decisions were already made. One day he was interested in mining in South Africa, the next in large construction projects in Berlin. Everything depended on his personal whim.”
Eugen’s management style was both vigorous and personal. He was known for peppering his people with exhortatory notes and letters, most often after the bank experienced some minor setback. “Especially in troubled times, you must keep your head up and pass the test of strength!” said one such note. “Fight on! Perhaps victory still clings to our heels!” said another.
Eugen was also known as a patriarchal and benevolent employer who greeted his employees each morning by name; if he was sometimes quick to criticize, he was also quick to reward. One of those employees was Hjalmar Schacht, later infamous as economics minister for the Nazi government; he would eventually wind up in the dock at Nuremberg. Schacht recalled in his memoirs how Eugen had once slipped him a thousand-mark note (over $5,000 today) as a personal, unofficial bonus for concluding a profitable stock deal.
A contemporary journalist described Eugen this way: “Gutmann had a personality that fascinated you right away, but he was also someone whose congeniality made people genuinely wish to engage with him. If nothing else, it was his physical appearance, his well-proportioned figure, his taut bearing in walking with his head held high, but also his wonderfully distinctive features, bearing an astounding similarity to those of Bismarck, and above all his kind blue eyes that made him stand out from all the rest.”
Eugen could also be autocratic, dictatorial, and more than a bit ruthless in his business dealings, as evidenced by his role in the so-called Hibernia Affair, a now forgotten but then quite notorious 1904 financial scandal. It was a clash between private enterprise and the Prussian state, and much to the consternation of many of his peers, Eugen took the side of the state. By doing the government’s bidding, he had seen an opportunity to make a fortune. Berlin had decided it wanted to control a section of the coal industry. To avert an impending cartel, the Prussian cabinet had decided it should secretly nationalize the Hibernia Coal Mining Company.
Discreetly, the minister of commerce asked Eugen to form a consortium to buy Hibernia. The minister assumed Eugen would include Bleichröder, Bismarck’s personal banker. However, Eugen started to buy up all the shares he could on his own, and the stock price rose quickly. Unfortunately rivals learned of this strategy and planned a successful defense. Ultimately Eugen’s ploy failed, along with the government’s attempt at nationalization. Apparently the Dresdner came out of the whole affair about even, but its good standing with the coal industry and the Ruhr was considerably set back. Outwardly unruffled, Eugen shrugged off the whole business with an “all’s fair in love and war” attitude.
Politically, Eugen supported the National Liberal Party, which was not particularly liberal, but backed big business and the Grossbürger, or economic elite. Then, after World War I, at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Eugen joined the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party) at the request of Gustav Stresemann, later Chancellor of Germany and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Almost all the great Jewish bankers did the same, including Max Warburg.
Henry Nathan, Eugen’s close confidant and later chairman of the Dresdner board, described him as “simple and modest” and “reluctant to make public appearances.” In a rare press interview, referring to himself haughtily in the first-person plural, Eugen said, “We don’t pretend to have opinions upon what does not directly concern us. Politics are the affair of the government.” This may have been a bit disingenuous; in a French interview Eugen went so far, with considerable vision, as to foretell a form of European union.
Without a doubt, Eugen remained a man of considerable influence, part of a network of industrialists and bankers who worked hand in hand with the German state to further Germany’s interests as well as their own. They financed not only Germany’s industry, but also its growing and far-flung imperial interests in Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Like Eugen, many of these key players were of Jewish origin, including Carl Fürstenberg, the Arnholds, the Rathenaus, the Warburgs, and Albert Ballin, director of the Hamburg-America Line. They came to be known derogatorily as the Kaiserjuden, or the Kaiser’s Jews.
Despite his own obvious ambivalence toward Jews, Wilhelm II, a vain and impetuous man, publicly treated these Jewish industrialists and financiers with respect, inviting them to sailing regattas, to stag parties at his hunting lodges, and, most important, to roundtable meetings for their economic advice. Unfortunately this kind of access to the monarch would invoke considerable suspicion among much of the population. Paradoxically, a generation later this service to the German empire by Jewish industrialists and financiers would count for nought in the fatherland, while in Britain and the United States it would be viewed with intense suspicion.
Meanwhile, for Eugen’s services to the empire and despite his much-remarked-upon sense of personal modesty, he accumulated several awards and titles. In addition to being named a Privy Councillor to the Kaiser, he was also the recipient of the Order of the Red Eagle from the Prussian government, an honorary consul in Berlin for the Italian government, and among other things a Royal Commander of the Kingdom of Romania and a Knight Grand Cross of the Italian Crown.
I think Eugen liked collecting these honors in the same way he collected gold boxes. However, when offered the title of baron by Bismarck and the Kaiser, he declined. Perhaps he felt he just didn’t need it. He was, after all, a modern man. According to the Annual of the Fortune and Income of Millionaires in Prussia—a sort of Forbes 500 of the day—Eugen was one of the wealthiest men in Germany.
On the personal side, Eugen loved women and opera; he especially loved the combination of the two. I have no evidence concerning romantic encounters he pursued as a young banker in Dresden—Eugen was not a diarist, and no youthful love letters have been found—but I do know that one love affair was with an accomplished, albeit amateur, opera singer named Sophie Magnus. Family lore has it that he fell in love just hearing her voice as he passed a window. Sophie was my great-grandmother.
For a family researcher, Sophie presents something of an enigma. A family legend—which my father believed until the day he died—claims Sophie was the daughter of an Edinburgh fur dealer named Hermann Magnus, but my research showed otherwise. Sophie, who was born in 1852, was indeed the daughter of a furrier, and he was named Magnus, but he was a Jewish wholesaler of furs in Leipzig and was originally from Hamburg, not Scotland. How this story began is a mystery. Perhaps it was because Hermann died young and his death left Sophie and her younger sisters dependent on the support of their wealthy cousins the Warburgs (the great banking family from Hamburg and Altona). This thrust Sophie into the role of surrogate mother to all her younger siblings—a role, I suspect, she did not relish. Her younger sisters resented her strictness, and this, no doubt, led to one of the feuds, I would discover, for which my family was famous.
One of Sophie’s younger sisters, Alice, later married Max Warburg (who also turned down the title of baron). That distant, and then unknown, family connection with the Warburgs resurfaced years later in the 1960s. Fresh out of high school and at my mother’s insistence, I reluctantly went for an interview at the London banking firm of S. G. Warburg & Co., only to be told by Sir Siegmund Warburg himself that, due to our family connections, hiring me might smack of “nepotism.” At the time I had no idea what he was talking about.
Still, despite her family’s reduced fortunes, Sophie was able to study painting and opera, two appropriate subjects for young ladies of the day, and ones in which she excelled. The delicate watercolors I found among my father’s papers after his death were painted by her in a sure and obviously talented hand. She even studied voice at the Dresden Opera for a time with the famous soprano Marcella Sembrich. Sophie is described as a dark, imposing beauty—perhaps by modern standards a little plump—but a young woman of intelligence and refinement.
Eugen and Sophie were married in 1872, just as the Dresdner Bank was getting started. With the increasing success of the bank, Eugen bought an impressive Renaissance-style villa on the Bürgerwiese in Dresden, just a short walk away from his parents’ home and right next door to the Palais Kaskel-Oppenheim. The following year Sophie quickly bore the first of their seven children, daughter Lili. She was followed by another daughter, Toinon, in 1876, and then, to Eugen’s relief, five sons in quick succession: Walther in 1877 (sadly, a sickly boy who would die young), Herbert in 1879, Kurt in 1883, Max in 1885, and in 1886 my grandfather Friedrich, known always as Fritz.
Following the bank headquarters’ move to Berlin in 1884, the family had settled into a beautiful two-story villa at 10 Rauchstrasse in the Tiergarten quarter of Berlin, the most sought-after area among the emerging haute bourgeoisie.
The house, designed by noted architect Christian Heidecke, featured fifteen main rooms grouped around a central court—including a ladies’ drawing room, a private office for Eugen, a gentlemen’s smoking room, a glass-enclosed winter garden that also served as a music room, and a magnificent formal dining room. Sophie and Eugen’s dressing rooms, as well as the children’s rooms, were on the second floor; household servants lived in small rooms in the gabled attic. The house was decorated in what would be known as le goût Rothschild (in the taste of the Rothschilds), with extensive brocade and gilt, antique-wood paneling, and fabulously elaborate stucco ceilings. The eighteenth-century French furnishings were from the eras of Louis XIV through Louis XVI: tulipwood secretaries, mahogany bureaus, cabinets inlaid with tortoiseshell and ivory, marquetry tables, gilded mirrors, Gobelin tapestries, and vitrines full of Meissen.
The villa at 10 Rauchstrasse teemed with life. There were gardens and gardeners, cooks and maids, a butler, a carriage house, coachmen, and horses in the stables. By the turn of the century, Eugen, who was always fascinated by the new and innovative, added to the horse-drawn carriages a more modern conveyance. I was delighted to uncover a photo from around 1900 of Eugen’s first Elektromobil, a battery-powered, chauffeur-driven electric hansom cab made by Karl Benz.
From the villa grounds echoed the sounds of horses neighing and the barking of dogs, of which there were many, especially poodles. From the upstairs rooms, where the children lived, came the usual childish cries and squeals and laughter, the screeching of violin lessons, the dull notes of scales played on a piano, and the rote repetition of verbs and declensions being chanted in several languages. Far from being a museum piece, the house on Rauchstrasse was a noisy, going family concern.
Although the actual raising of the children was left to a succession of harried nurses, nannies, governesses, and tutors, Eugen was keenly involved in his children’s lives, to a degree that was unusual for the time, and particularly so for such a powerful, autocratic figure. He took a tolerant and openly affectionate view of them and closely followed their education and development. Occasionally he would even play simple card games with his children and would beam with delight when, with childish outrage, they would catch him cheating. (Years later he was still trying out the same old tricks on his grandchildren, including my father.) Considering the business and social demands on Eugen’s time, these interactions were necessarily rare, which to the children made these moments with their father even more precious. They regarded this patriarchal figure with awe. There is no doubt that he loved them, and they him.
Sophie, on the other hand, was much more emotionally distant, perhaps because of her own difficult childhood. My grandfather Fritz, the youngest, would remember that he rarely ever saw his mother, except when she would come upstairs, resplendent in evening gown, jewels, and pearls, to formally inspect the children before she dashed off for an evening at the opera or the theater, or to play hostess at the latest grand dinner party.
These glittering, glamorous affairs were numerous; Eugen’s social connections were extensive. The dinner guests included all the major captains of finance and industry, and next-door neighbors the Hainauers, who represented the French Rothschilds. There was also a seemingly endless stream of diplomats, politicians, musicians, young writers such as Thomas Mann, artists such as Max Liebermann, Prussian army officers, the Baron and Baroness This and the Duke and Duchess of That. The house was filled with the passionate discussion of philosophy and politics, music and art.
So this was my great-grandfather: a pillar of finance and industry, a social lion, a man of enormous wealth, a respected and widely renowned connoisseur of art, and a loving father of a large and happy brood of children. He would seem to be the quintessential man who has everything.
In Eugen’s time, collecting art reflected more than an appreciation of aesthetics and beauty. As a symbol of power and wealth, one’s ability to afford great art could also provoke great envy. It was common for Berlin sophisticates to snicker at the wealthy parvenus and arrivistes—particularly the Jewish ones—who sought through their art collections to achieve social aggrandizement. Eugen, though never formally schooled in art, instinctively knew the difference between the priceless and the merely overpriced. One of the most magnificent private collections of objets d’art in all of Germany was on display in those dazzling vitrines and cabinets at 10 Rauchstrasse.
Unlike the way he pursued his banking career, Eugen assembled his art collection cautiously. He started small—quite literally. He began with miniature portraits. My great-grandfather seemed from the start to have a knack for the sublime. Miniatures by now-recognized masters of the genre such as François Dumont, Richard Cosway, Peter Adolf Hall, and Peter Paillou became part of Eugen’s growing collection. His passion then progressed to gold boxes: eighteenth-century objets de vertu—snuffboxes and containers that were exquisite in execution, masterfully fashioned, inlaid with pearls, jewels, ivory, and tortoiseshell.
Growing up in Dresden, with the Grünes Gewölbe, or “Green Vault” treasure rooms of the Kings of Saxony, would have set the standard for Eugen. Following his footsteps in Dresden, a few years ago I found myself before an entire section devoted to exotic and elaborate gilded nautilus shells. I think at that moment I came close to experiencing the same awe that must have inspired my great-grandfather—nautilus shells, jewels and gemstones, ivory and pearls, coconuts and ostrich eggs, all fashioned in gold and silver.
In 1893 Eugen made a much-anticipated trip to Paris. Just a few years before, Frédéric Spitzer, the famed Viennese antiquarian and adviser to the Rothschilds, had died, leaving one of the largest and most coveted collections in fin de siècle Europe. Dubbed the “sale of the century,” the auction would last over three months. Eugen knew it would be the most hotly contested auction and the bidding would be furious. All the same, he had done his research, and he had to have several pieces. Uppermost on his list was one of the famous Orpheus clocks, of which fewer than a dozen are left in the world. This particular one was perhaps the most exquisitely engraved gilt table clock of the Renaissance. The mysterious dial, Eugen was told, had been crafted by the master of sixteenth-century German goldsmiths, Wenzel Jamnitzer.
In the early 1530s Jamnitzer had opened his narrow workshop, just a few doors down from Albrecht Dürer’s house, in the shadows of the Imperial Castle of Nuremberg. The ground floor centered around an enormous hot kiln. On the next floor were printing presses for etchings. From here Jamnitzer and his sons produced a dazzling array of vases, engravings, jewelry, and artifacts of silver and gold. Soon he was appointed court goldsmith to the German Emperor. Much of Jamnitzer’s fame was based on highly inventive objects for the curiosity cabinets of princes, as well as extravagant presentation pieces. On just a few occasions Jamnitzer would focus his talents on decorating a clock; of these barely a handful survive.
The clock Eugen coveted was one of these. If one can visualize the chronometrically perfect components rendered in gilt brass, with a case of gold and bronze covered with intricate high-relief depictions of scenes from the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld, one has an idea of the mechanical mastery and artistic genius of this clock.
After a spirited contest in Spitzer’s elaborate Paris mansion, near the Arc de Triomphe, my great-grandfather prevailed, and the Orpheus Clock, originally intended for an Italian Renaissance prince, would soon find its way to the Gutmann home in Berlin.
As time went on, Eugen’s collecting interests became increasingly eclectic: Renaissance jeweled pendants, seventeenth-century pocket watches, Italian bronzes, medieval illustrated manuscripts, and Renaissance majolica pottery.
Perhaps the most astonishing pieces in Eugen’s collection, and closest to his heart, were the German Renaissance and Mannerist silver-gilt sculptures. Most of these pieces illustrated Eugen’s continued fascination with the combination of beauty and function. Johannes Lencker’s ewer, featuring a nymph on the back of a mythological fish-man known as a triton, is considered to be one of the greatest pieces ever made by the master sculptors of sixteenth-century Augsburg. Eugen acquired from the late Baron Karl von Rothschild a magnificent pair of sixteenth-century silver-gilt drinking cups by Hans Petzolt of Nuremberg. Perhaps the most coveted of all was the Jamnitzer Becher (chalice), created by Wenzel Jamnitzer’s son Abraham and featuring a pedestal of three golden elephants supporting an ornate stem flanked by golden angels and a perfectly white ivory cup topped with a gold crown, out of which blossomed an entire miniature Gothic castle, replete with turrets adorned with silver and pearl. And this was just one of hundreds of exquisite pieces.
I discovered that Eugen’s collection was not static, but rather a constantly evolving ensemble. In 1907, finding his collection a bit heavy with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century silver-gilt “wager cups” and silver plate, he sold some of those pieces to his American counterpart, J. P. Morgan, for a reported 1 million marks (roughly 6 million in today’s dollars). Later Eugen bought the famous Jamnitzer chalice from the estate of the last Baron von Harsdorf of Nuremberg for roughly the modern-day equivalent of $2 million.
The Gutmann silver and gold collection—in German simply the Silbersammlung Gutmann—became almost legendary in its time. Even the vitrine display cabinets were famous in their own right. During the same trip to Paris when Eugen secured the Orpheus Clock as well as the Reinhold Clock for his collection, he also, quite remarkably, acquired from Fontainebleau a spectacular series of Empire ormolu cabinets that had once belonged to Napoléon.
In 1906, Eugen’s friend Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Berlin state museums, publicly exhibited the collection in honor of the Kaiser. Later, the distinguished art historian Otto von Falke wrote that Eugen’s collection was “worthy to rank beside the treasure chambers of princes.” It also became the object of considerable jealousy. One century and multiple catastrophes later, I would hold some of those silver pieces in my hands and marvel not only at the skill of the men who’d made them, but at the artistic taste and discernment of the man who had so lovingly collected them.
I remember when I first began my search into my family’s history, Aunt Lili had warned me that nothing good would ever come from unlocking the saga of the Silbersammlung Gutmann. She compared it to the mythical Nibelungen gold and said it was cursed. At the time I had no idea what she meant. Now I do.
German Jews reacted to prejudice against them in different ways, many of which created deep divisions within the Jewish community, and even between individual families. Most Jews retained their traditional heritage and identity even while practicing German customs. For example, many assimilated Jews celebrated the Sabbath on Sundays, instead of Saturday. In Berlin, most of the city’s Jews observed Christmas as a national holiday, complete with tannenbaums in their living rooms. Still others took a different tack, embracing an assertive form of Judaism—Zionism—as an alternative to assimilation. Even so, many German Jews chose to become Christian, at least nominally. Eugen and his children were among this group. In 1898, they officially converted to Lutheranism, just a few years after Bernhard, the patriarch, had passed away. Was the timing out of respect? I have often wondered why.
Significantly, Bernhard left his castle, Schloss Schönfeld, not to Eugen but to Eugen’s younger brother Alfred. Bernhard had been unhappy with Eugen’s lack of religious observance for some time, whereas Alfred had remained faithful to the Jewish religion. Perhaps this had been the cause of another Gutmann family feud?
Certainly the conversion was not the result of some sudden personal epiphany or crisis of faith on Eugen’s part. Eugen had never been religious, at least not since his boyhood days in Dresden. He and Sophie and the children had barely observed the High Holidays, if at all, and only rarely attended Berlin’s grand, Moorish-style New Synagogue on the Oranienburger Strasse. In December the house on the Rauchstrasse not only had a Christmas tree, but also a smaller tree decorated with German sausages for the family dogs.
It could be said of Eugen, a relentlessly secular man, that his only true places of worship were the bank, the home, and the opera house—and that was equally true after his conversion. A nonpracticing Jew before, he became an equally nonpracticing Christian afterward. Save for his conversion and the occasional wedding, Eugen was never known to set foot in a church.
If not motivated by faith, was his conversion an attempt by Eugen to improve his social standing and business prospects, or was it a necessary first step toward achieving a royal appointment to the German nobility? At the time of his conversion, Eugen was already wealthy and was clearly respected in Germany. As for aspirations to nobility, that, too, seems unlikely. When he had been offered the title of baron by the Kaiser, Eugen reacted by saying he didn’t need to add anything to his name: “Gutmann was enough.”
So again, why the conversion? A hopeless attempt to break the anti-Semitic curse? I cannot know for certain. It was not discussed within the family. Certainly my father never spoke of it. I can only speculate. Perhaps it was for Eugen simply a public statement of his German identity, a final logical step in his steady assimilation. Maybe he gave up something that he didn’t endorse—a separate Jewish culture—in favor of something that he believed in most strongly—a unified and secularized German nation. Or, perhaps in the same way he grew rich by anticipating market forces and trends, Eugen sensed something dark and foreboding within the German nation, some premonition of disaster, and wanted to insulate, if possible, his children and grandchildren from what he thought might be coming.
The Gutmann family conversion persuaded few of Eugen’s contemporaries that the Gutmann family was now, suddenly, no longer Jewish. Unlike in earlier eras, when the distinction between Jew and Christian was essentially religious, by the turn of the century Jewishness in Germany and elsewhere had become a question of race, of ethnicity, of blood. It might be possible to change one’s religion, but changing one’s ancestry was impossible. Thus, those Germans who chose to hate and despise Jews would continue to hate and despise converted Jews.
It’s probably also fair to say that most German Jews, even the most religiously secular among them, regarded conversion as a kind of cultural betrayal and generally did not accept that Jewish converts had ever truly stopped being Jewish. All of which may explain why, curiously, even after becoming Christian, Heinrich Heine remains in both Jewish and secular literature a “Jewish poet,” the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Fritz Haber remains a “Jewish chemist,” and Eugen Gutmann, to this day, is still a “Jewish banker.”
So the Gutmanns would remain Jewish in Gentile eyes, defectors in Jewish eyes, and secular in their own eyes. This situation would cause for subsequent generations, down to my own, no end of misunderstanding and loss of cultural connection and identity—some of it merely awkward, and some of it fatal.
Meanwhile, at home, other uncertainties loomed over Eugen as the new century dawned. His marriage to Sophie, never tranquil, was breaking apart. She had always been a difficult personality, headstrong and increasingly resentful of her duties. Eugen’s reputed philandering could not have helped, but it was Sophie who became the subject of a scandalous rumor—an affair with a young tutor in the Gutmann household. Perhaps true, perhaps not, the story rocked the Berlin tabloids. There was even talk of a duel until the tutor fled the country.
It was all simply too much for the family. The couple divorced in 1902 and Sophie moved to Italy, where she married a young Italian count, Cesare Sciamplicotti. She died in 1915 when she was only sixty-three. It is perhaps revealing that after the divorce the three youngest children—Kurt, Max, and Fritz—all still teenagers, stayed home in Berlin with Papa.
After the divorce Eugen married another aspiring opera singer, a much younger German American woman named Mary Stevenson, who unfortunately died a few years later. With admirable vigor for a man of seventy-eight, Eugen then carried on an affair with the celebrated opera diva Barbara Kemp. He bought a Baroque manor house, the Schloss Zeesen, on a lake south of the city, where he continued to play host to Berlin society. He vacationed at the elegant Dutch seaside resorts of Scheveningen and Noordwijk, and at the new Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Maria in Switzerland. As Eugen approached retirement, he could look back on a life that had been, for the most part, well and successfully lived.
Not surprisingly, Eugen’s children would also have their trials and tribulations. His eldest daughter, Lili, was a great beauty—elegant, refined, and, thanks to her father, wealthy. As she came of age, she was a center of considerable attention from the young banking scions, diplomats, and bemedaled Prussian military officers who socialized at the Gutmann villa.
Among them was a dashing young cavalry major named Baron Adolf von Holzing-Berstett. Lili’s 1898 wedding to Adolf was a lavish affair at which Prince Max of Baden, the last Chancellor of the German Empire, accompanied Lili to the altar in a church filled with exotic flowers gifted by Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden. But their marriage proved unhappy. The union produced no children, and in 1909 the baron, beset by gambling debts, committed suicide. One wonders why he didn’t ask Lili or Eugen for the money, but perhaps he had already gone too often to that well. Two years later, my great-aunt Lili would remarry, to an Italian diplomat and aristocrat, Luca Orsini Baroni. Significantly, Luca would later become the Italian ambassador to Germany.
Eugen’s other daughter, Toinon, married Hans Schuster-Burckhardt, the son of the chairman of the Swiss Bank Corporation. Hans would become one of Eugen’s most trusted aides at the Dresdner Bank. They had three children, but sadly, Hans would die in 1914 of an apparent heart attack. Toinon would later marry Baron Hans Henrik von Essen, the Swedish ambassador to Germany.
As for Eugen’s sons, they were a source of both pride and frustration. After sickly Walther’s early death, Herbert became the heir apparent. He took a degree in international economics at the University of Berlin and then started his climb up the Dresdner hierarchy—first as manager, then assistant director of the bank’s London branch, later as member of the Dresdner board and also director of the offshoot Deutsche-Orient Bank. Although dismissed by some as a “pale shadow” of his father, Herbert was a gifted banker who established close relations with other international business and financial leaders. He was also a consummate socialite, forging links with members of the royal court, including Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s eldest son, with whom he shared a passion for golf.
Herbert fell in love with the beautiful Daisy von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorf, a member of an aristocratic Catholic family. While Eugen liked Daisy, he opposed the marriage on the grounds that it was just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one. Nevertheless, Herbert loved Daisy passionately, and the wedding went on.
Kurt, meanwhile, always something of a rebel, turned his back on a career at the Dresdner, studying instead literature and theater at university. He was a talented singer, making his amateur debut as a tenor at the Teatro Carignano in Turin. Unfortunately, in 1912, no doubt with Eugen’s grudging financial backing, Kurt wrote, produced, and starred in a play in Hamburg that was widely panned. He married Vera Herzfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish commodities magnate, which at least helped fulfill Eugen’s requirement that brides come with the necessary wherewithal. But to Eugen’s annoyance, Kurt became deeply involved in liberal politics.
Another son, Max, also preferred the arts to business. As close to openly gay as one could be in those days, Max studied art at the famous Dresden Academy and was a talented painter and pianist. He devoted his time between the salons of Berlin and Rome.
Then there was the youngest, Friedrich, “Fritz,” the baby—my grandfather. Fritz was born in 1886, surrounded from birth by fabulous wealth and privilege. The youngest child, he was relentlessly coddled, babied, and fussed over by his older sisters and his remarkably indulgent father. A photo of the seven children, taken when Fritz was about three, shows all five boys dressed in sailor suits—the standard outfit for boys of upper-class families of the day—with Fritz in the middle, being held protectively in the arms of his fourteen-year-old sister, Toinon. Little Fritz, staring directly at the camera, seems quite comfortable being the center of attention.
By all accounts, Fritz was an intelligent, lively boy with a quick wit and subtle sense of humor that followed him into manhood. In the few photographs I have of him, including one by the American avant-garde photographer Man Ray, there is always a hint of a wry smile. Although he was handsome, Fritz was not physically imposing. Slightly shorter than average, and plagued from his earliest days with flat feet, he gamely tried but did not excel amid the “physical culture” craze then sweeping Germany. Still, he had definite leadership qualities—people simply liked him—and a self-assurance often lacking in the youngest sons of powerful men. He held his father in awe but wasn’t close to his mother, a remote woman who left when he was just fifteen.
One wonders what Fritz made of his family’s place in the world. Through a child’s eyes, the wealth—the servants, the carriages, the opulent home—would have been unexceptional, the natural order of things. But the family’s religious and cultural status would have been a bit more complicated and confusing. Just twelve when the family converted, Fritz obviously had no say in the matter. Father’s word was final.
Unlike his Jewish friends and cousins, Fritz never studied Hebrew, never had a bar mitzvah. And unlike his Gentile friends, he never attended church on Sunday, never went to Bible class, never took communion. He was different from most of the other boys. Although thoroughly assimilated and at least four generations removed from the Bohemian ghetto, I am sure, on many levels, Fritz still felt his Jewish heritage, but he never identified as Jewish, even though his Jewishness was never far away.
At the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium, where wealthy Berliners, both Christian and Jewish, sent their sons, one of his classmates was Kurt Hahn, the famous educator. Other alumni included Walther Rathenau, the future Jewish-German foreign minister.
Like all the Gutmann children, Fritz grew up with a keen knowledge of and appreciation for the arts. Given Eugen’s passion for the subject, and the magnificent artworks that filled almost every wall and cabinet at 10 Rauchstrasse, he could hardly have avoided it. Fritz also, as I would later discover, had some talent as a painter—this no doubt from Sophie’s side—and was something of a poet. His interests lay in the appreciation of the arts, their history and philosophy, and, above all, aesthetics. Later he would wistfully say that he might have been happiest as a theater director or an art dealer. Perhaps things would have turned out very differently if Fritz had followed his own dreams and not those of his father.
Eugen, disappointed that Kurt and Max had not gone into the family business, and perhaps seeing Fritz as something of a last chance, was eager for his youngest son to join the Dresdner Bank. Years of tutoring and family holidays all over Europe had given Fritz a cosmopolitan outlook and an impressive command of languages: German, French, English, Italian, and even some Dutch. After graduating from the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium, Fritz skipped university and, at the young age of eighteen, went straight into banking at the Dresdner. Fortunately, he had, if not a love for the world of finance, most certainly an aptitude for it.
When Fritz joined the bank in 1904, the family interconnections were complicated and endless. Herbert, Fritz’s brother, and Max, Eugen’s brother, were board directors, as were Fritz’s brother-in-law (Hans Schuster-Burckhardt, Toinon’s husband) and Waldemar Mueller (a brother-in-law of Eugen’s brother Alfred). Additionally, Eugen’s first cousin Felix Gutmann was the first director of the Berlin branch of the bank. The Dresdner remained very much a family business, and as chairman of the board, Eugen was the Dresdner’s guiding force.
I imagine that having all those family members already deeply ensconced in the Dresdner hierarchy must have seemed a bit claustrophobic for Fritz, just as it had been for Eugen many decades earlier at the Bankhaus Bernhard Gutmann in Dresden. But if filial duty denied him a career in the theater or art world, he hoped at least for some degree of autonomy within the family business. In 1910, after a few years at the bank headquarters in Berlin, Fritz was considered sufficiently prepared to be sent to Paris as a member of the board of the Banque J. Allard & Cie., in which the Dresdner had a controlling interest.
But unlike Eugen, who had lived in an era and in a country that, though flawed, had allowed him to flourish and prosper, Fritz was entering an era of upheaval and great uncertainty.
