One can imagine what it was like to be a handsome, wealthy, well-connected—and single—young man in the Paris and London of the day. In Paris, Fritz took a bright apartment near the rue de Monceau, close to the fabulous mansions of the great Jewish banking families—the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Camondos, and others—most of whom had business connections, and in some cases distant familial ties, to the Dresdner and the Gutmanns. Fritz was soon quite at home. His duties at J. Allard & Cie. not being particularly onerous, he had plenty of time for a succession of lavish dinners, balls, and dances. The lure of the Parisian art world would also create a lifelong attraction.
My grandfather’s favorite activity was to wander down the boulevard Malesherbes to the Madeleine and from there to the Ritz in the place Vendôme. The bar at the Ritz became Fritz’s “other office” (oddly, years later he would still be using Ritz stationery for private memos). From there he would venture out into the endlessly enticing world of Paris’s art emporiums.
Almost next door to the Ritz was the Seligmann brothers’ celebrated gallery at number 23 place Vendôme. When Jacques Seligmann invited my grandfather to the newly converted Palais de Sagan, the guests were stunned by the array of masterpieces. Here, perhaps for the first time, Fritz found himself rubbing shoulders with his father’s exalted world. Other art mavens included Edmond de Rothschild, and from across the Atlantic Eugen’s old friend John Pierpont Morgan.
However, across the square at 8 place Vendôme, in an upstairs gallery at the beautiful old Hôtel Delpech de Chaunot, Fritz discovered the Renaissance sanctuary founded by Count Trotti. In his art gallery Trotti had assembled a veritable cornucopia of ancient artifacts from his native Ferrara, from Tuscany, and all of northern Italy. In retrospect, this was another clear confirmation of the Gutmann family’s passion for all things Italian. Fritz made a mental note that when he had a home of his own (and walls to cover), this would be one of his first destinations. Apart from Fritz’s already deep connection to the beauty of the Renaissance, he was also drawn to the charms of l’impressionnisme, a quintessentially Parisian sensation, and in particular the works of Edgar Degas.
Fritz did return to Paris many times, but obviously he could not have foreseen the consequence, decades later, of events that would take place at number 16 place Vendôme.
• • •
In 1912, at age twenty-six, Fritz was named assistant director at the London branch of the Dresdner on Old Broad Street (just behind the Bank of England), a post held earlier by his brother Herbert. After La Belle Époque of Paris (much like the Gilded Age in New York), London might have seemed more than a bit dull. But for a lover of theater, London outshone even Paris. I can imagine young Fritz in spats, top hat, and tails, catching one of the last hansom cabs from his bachelor flat in Mayfair to see Johnston Forbes-Robertson—said by many to be the greatest Hamlet of all time—perform at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, or to catch the beautiful Anna Pavlova in her Saison Russe ballet at the new Palace Theatre.
As in Paris, Fritz’s family and business connections in England offered a ready-made entrée into London society. His brother Herbert, one of the most gregarious of men, seemed to have befriended almost everybody who was anybody during his time in London. Fritz simply borrowed Herbert’s calling card. It was all quite exciting and glamorous—lunches at Claridge’s, balls at the Savoy, motoring weekends in the country, cross-Channel trips to Paris.
Hans Schuster, his brother-in-law, introduced Fritz to his longtime friend H. H. Asquith, Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister and noted bon vivant. Asquith was something of a Germanophile, although this would cause him trouble later. When Toinon and Hans were in England, Fritz was often invited to play bridge with them at the Asquiths’ country retreat in Berkshire. Fritz was also a frequent guest at the German Embassy at Carlton House Terrace, one of London society’s most sought-after spots, where the new German ambassador and his beautiful wife hosted a breathtakingly ambitious series of balls and receptions. Fritz was beginning to develop a taste for this glamorous world.
During the summer of 1913, Fritz took a break from his hectic social life to catch some alpine air at a beautiful new hotel, the Suvretta House. The hotel had just opened its doors to universal acclaim the previous Christmas. Here, overlooking Lake St. Moritz in Switzerland, he found Louise von Landau. It was the first time Louise had been able to convince her mother, Thekla, to take a trip out of Germany since Louise’s father had died.
Fritz and Louise had met before, but only briefly, at a party given by Gutmann relatives, the Arnholds, at their villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee, just outside Berlin. On that occasion Louise had, somewhat intimidatingly, been surrounded by more than a few competing suitors. Now in St. Moritz she was surrounded by only the majestic Engadine mountains, and my grandfather no longer felt any reticence. Fritz and Louise were clearly smitten by each other. Within a month he was writing to his father asking his consent for marriage.
The Baroness Louise von Landau was the granddaughter of Jacob von Landau, whose family was originally from Breslau in Silesia, then part of Prussia, but now part of Poland. As a young man, Jacob had tried his luck running a tobacco factory, even horse-trading, before turning to banking. In 1852 he founded the Bankhaus Jacob Landau, first in Breslau and later in Berlin. The bank specialized in mining and metallurgy projects as well as loaning money to leading members of the nobility. In spite of coming from a long line of rabbis, Jacob deftly adapted to the life of an important behind-the-scenes player in the emerging economy.
One story, given credence by some scholars, has it that during the Franco-Prussian War, Jacob induced “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria into agreeing to integrate Bavaria into the new German empire—without which history might have been very different. For his services Jacob was granted a hereditary title of nobility by the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
By the time Jacob died in 1882, the Bankhaus Jacob Landau was one of the largest private banks in Germany and was instrumental in the founding of the Berlin Edison Company (later the electric giant AEG), which brought electric lighting and tramways to Berlin and throughout Germany. Always a pioneer, Jacob was one of the first to get a telephone—his number was Berlin 14.
During this period, the social transformation of the emerging Jewish bourgeoisie was equally dramatic. As an example, in 1883 one of Jacob’s daughters, Margarete von Landau, married Heinrich von Poschinger, a Catholic aristocrat. Poschinger was, among other things, Bismarck’s biographer, and through his connections at court Margarete caught the eye of the future Kaiser. Not only would she become the Crown Prince Frederick’s diarist, but later biographer and confidante to the short-lived second Kaiser.
Two of Jacob’s sons, Hugo and Eugen, followed their father into the world of finance. But Jacob’s eldest son and my great-grandfather, Wilhelm von Landau, had other interests. After graduating from the University of Berlin with a doctorate of philosophy, and armed with his share of the family’s significant fortune, Wilhelm set out in 1870 on a life of world travel and study in archaeology, ethnology, and botany. He participated in, and helped finance, excavations at the ancient cities of Troy and Hattusa, the Bronze Age capital of the Hittites, both in present-day Turkey. Another excavation site was at the Temple of Eshmun (a Phoenician god), in what is now Lebanon.
Wilhelm became perhaps the world’s leading expert on the ancient Phoenician alphabet. He wrote sixteen books, which were published in several languages, including English. These included the dauntingly titled Travels in Asia, Australia and America, Comprising the Period Between 1879 and 1887, which was packed full with a seemingly endless stream of soporifically dull facts and statistics, such as the exact length of the bridge between Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska: 2,750 feet. Somehow Wilhelm still managed to convey a sense of joyful curiosity about the world’s wonders, large and small.
The only photograph I found of great-grandfather Wilhelm shows a thin, hawk-faced man with a Vandyke beard, puffing on a cigar and dressed somewhat eccentrically in a well-worn suit and homburg. His eyes seemed fixed on some distant horizon. Amid all of his writings and travels, at the somewhat advanced age of forty-two, Wilhelm found time to get married to his cousin, Thekla, a woman thirteen years his junior. Eventually, in 1892, they had a daughter, Louise—my grandmother.
Louise grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege in a social atmosphere filled with many of the leading lights of Berlin society. The von Landaus lived in a large villa on the Lützowufer, near the Gutmanns in the Tiergarten district.
In addition to her private tutoring in languages and music, Louise was enrolled at a young age in an exclusive private school. One of Louise’s childhood classmates was Walter Benjamin, who would later become a preeminent German philosopher, literary critic, and essayist. In one of his most famous works, Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900), Benjamin recalled his infatuation with the young “Louise von Landau . . . a little girl of the nobility [whose] name soon had me under its spell.”
By the time Louise was presented to Berlin society, she had developed into a strikingly beautiful young woman—vivacious, intelligent, an accomplished pianist and keen sportswoman. She was one of the most sought-after young debutantes of the day, Jewish or otherwise.
Fritz’s father would remark later that after Wilhelm’s death in 1908, Louise was, while still relatively wealthy, not fabulously rich because her father had spent much of his share of the family fortune on too many excavations in ancient, dusty places. Meanwhile, around this time, Louise’s uncle Eugen von Landau and his adopted sons (the Sobernheim brothers) were busy laying the foundations of the Commerzbank—a future rival of the Dresdner’s.
The Gutmanns and the von Landaus moved in the same social circles. At the end of 1912, when Fritz returned to Berlin from London for a family visit, Louise was now twenty and in full bloom. At the Arnholds’, over the holidays, Fritz had tried to get close to her, but another suitor, Paul Wallich, always seemed to be in the way. To make matters worse, Paul was the son of Hermann Wallich, Eugen’s archrival at the Deutsche Bank. Fritz kept his cool; always a careful planner, he would bide his time. He knew he would catch Louise alone soon enough. Then the following summer, as luck would have it, St. Moritz offered the perfect opportunity.
Although this was still an era when letters were lovingly kept and filed away in precise bundles wrapped with ribbons inside precious chests, not a single piece of correspondence between Fritz and Louise survived the conflagration that was to come. I can’t help but imagine those letters, written carefully in an elegant hand, being tossed brutishly on some burning pyre. The madness of the mid-twentieth century destroyed not only millions of lives but millions upon millions of memories—gone, vanished, never to be recovered. Without those letters I struggle to know my grandparents.
The only letters concerning the impending marriage that do survive are two from Eugen in Berlin to Fritz in London in August 1913. I found the letters in those drab boxes that appeared in Los Angeles all those years later. These two businesslike and yet tender notes were among the few treasures that my father had managed to preserve.
Eugen noted that Louise would be a perfectly lovely bride, and that Fritz could “be sure that I will welcome your wife-to-be with the same love as one of my own children.” He continued with this somewhat gruff fatherly advice: “A young man should not marry until he has already acquired some wealth and has, at least, a secure position which gives him the assurance that he has sufficient income to live in accordance with his position and, most importantly, without worries. Love alone is not enough. You also need the necessary ‘pocket change’ to go along with it.” Eugen backed this up by noting that Fritz’s annual income as assistant director of the London branch was currently some fifty thousand marks, but would be increased to eighty thousand marks if and when he became director. In other words, the marriage should wait.
Two things are significant in these missives. First, Eugen felt strongly that fifty thousand marks a year was insufficient for a married man to live in the style to which the Gutmanns were accustomed. This at a time when the average salary for a worker in Germany was barely over a thousand marks a year. Second, Eugen’s advice to Fritz is almost word for word the same he had earlier given his older son Herbert when he was contemplating marriage to (the less wealthy) Daisy von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorf—and the result was exactly the same.
Despite Eugen’s reservations, in November 1913, Fritz and Louise were married in a church because Louise had converted as well. The newlyweds departed for their honeymoon in Italy. Soon after, while staying at the new and grand Hotel Excelsior in Rome, Fritz received the following message from Eugen, in terse telegram style: “Yesterday meeting [of the Dresdner board of directors] named [you] director [of the London branch]—21/2 percent bonus. Greetings Papa.” The old man had come around and come through. In addition to the promotion, the honeymoon was successful on another level as well. By the time they returned to London, Louise was pregnant.
Fritz took a comfortable country home just outside London in Byfleet, Surrey, for his family—complete with butler, maid, and cook—and assumed his new duties as the director of the London branch. Although Louise’s “delicate condition” soon precluded her involvement in outside social activities, it was a happy, promising time for a young couple just beginning their lives together.
However, my grandfather had an almost uncanny and tragic knack for being in exactly the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.
• • •
In Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Barely five weeks later, following the German invasion of Belgium, at midnight on August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Shock and confusion reigned in London—mixed with no small measure of war excitement. Shipping lines to the Continent were canceled; German ships in British harbors were seized. Telegraph and mail communications with Germany were cut off, a blockade of its ports begun. “Spy fever” raged with German bankers, journalists, and, curiously, waiters and domestics suspected of being advance agents for the Kaiser. A moratorium on all international financial transactions was imposed, and within days British police arrived at 65 Old Broad Street to seize the Dresdner Bank’s records and cash reserves—in effect putting the bank into British receivership. Similar police raids were conducted on the London branches of the Deutsche Bank and the Disconto-Gesellschaft.
The quickly enacted Alien Restriction Order required all German and Austro-Hungarian nationals to register with the authorities. Military-age “enemy aliens” were barred from leaving England and traveling even to neutral countries, lest they return home to Germany and swell the ranks of the Kaiser’s armies. Soon, even German women were prohibited from leaving.
Some wealthy and well-connected Germans managed to slip out of England in the very first days after war was declared and make it to various neutral countries—Holland, Sweden, and even the United States. Fritz and Louise could perhaps have done the same, but they did not. Fritz, no doubt, felt that Louise’s pregnancy made it too dangerous for her to travel. He probably also underestimated—not, as we’ll see, for the last time—the hatred and passions that modern war engendered, not just on the front lines but on the home front as well, even in supposedly civilized nations. Whatever the reason, instead of fleeing with the war’s first shots, they stayed and the window of opportunity to flee soon closed. Along with some sixty-six thousand other German and Austrian citizens—men, women, and children—Fritz and Louise were stranded in Britain.
Amid all this confusion and misfortune and dawning worldwide catastrophe, on August 24, 1914, in Byfleet, Surrey, my father, Bernhard Friedrich Eugen Gutmann, was born. As a curious consequence, little Bernard (as he would come to be known) was thus under British law a British citizen, which would have a profound impact on his destiny, and mine. Despite their son’s dual nationality, Fritz and Louise were, by both law and allegiance, considered enemy aliens. Soon thereafter, the British government announced that all military-age enemy civilian males would be interned. My grandfather Fritz Gutmann would be one of them.
This was unprecedented. In previous modern-era European wars, civilian citizens of belligerent states caught behind the lines may have been harassed, persecuted, driven out, or even murdered individually, but they had never been rounded up and imprisoned en masse. Germany reciprocated by arresting several thousand British civilians. Meanwhile, with few exceptions, all enemy alien women, children, and old men would be deported, regardless of how long they had lived in Britain, even if they were married to a British citizen.
Fritz managed to avoid the first wave of internments, but for him and Louise, as with almost every other German still in England, life became increasingly difficult. Their movements were restricted by security regulations imposed on all enemy aliens and by a curfew from 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. Rising anti-German public opinion left the young couple ostracized from their former British friends. Fritz and Louise, with their new baby, found themselves living under a form of house arrest. In time British anti-German attitudes hardened even further, especially after the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in May 1915, with great loss of life. During riots in London and other British cities, German-owned shops were attacked and ransacked by mobs. Parliament called for strict enforcement of the alien internment and deportation policies, with no exceptions whatever. The prevailing slogan was “Collar the Huns.”
Mercifully, late in May 1915, a deal was worked out between the Germans and the British for the repatriation of noncombatants. Louise and baby Bernard bade Fritz a tearful good-bye and left for Harwich, where a cross-Channel ship, bound for neutral territory, was waiting.
One of the rare family tales that I was able to extricate from my father went something like this: Because Bernard threw a tantrum, my father and my grandmother missed the ship they were scheduled to board, only to discover later that it had been struck by a torpedo or mine and sunk. Mercifully the next ship reached Holland safely. From there they crossed the border into Germany, then went on to Berlin, where they moved in with Eugen at the family home on 10 Rauchstrasse.
• • •
Fritz’s incarceration began in a rather civilized manner. A constable knocked on his door in Surrey and politely asked if the gentleman would be so good as to report to the police station in the morning. The following day Fritz went to the station, carrying only the permitted two small suitcases. From there he was transported to the Isle of Man, where some twenty-three thousand German and Austrian male civilian internees—an eclectic mix from every conceivable profession and social stratum—would spend the war behind barbed wire. It would be more than three years before Fritz would see his wife and baby son again.
The Isle of Man is a tiny, sparsely populated, and windswept island set between England and Ireland in the stormy Irish Sea. For most of the past thousand years or so it has been a largely forgotten place—a barren and almost perpetually gloomy bit of rock far removed from the great affairs of the world. In 1914, the British government considered the Isle of Man to be the perfect place to isolate “enemy” civilians unlucky enough to find themselves stranded in Britain at the start of the First World War.
Two internment camps were on the Isle of Man. The government requisitioned Douglas Camp, originally a holiday camp for boys, and surrounded it by twin barriers of ten-foot-high barbed wire. The larger Knockaloe Camp was built from scratch to handle the growing overload of internees. Initially housed in tents with bunks and straw-filled mattresses, the prisoners were later moved into single-story wooden huts. The camp food was predictably execrable; back in England the typical man on the street muttered that it was a pity the English had to feed the bloody Huns at all.
There were some amenities: a camp hospital, a library, an athletic field for exercise, even a camp school where prisoners could lecture other prisoners ranging on subjects from “Glass Manufacture” to “A Pictorial Journey through North East Siberia.”
My grandfather found his own way to survive the tedium and isolation—he devoured every book available. Then, compensating for a missed university life, he indulged his fellow inmates with erudite lectures on theater, literature, and philosophy—everything from Ibsen to Marx to Darwin. Prisoners could receive and send mail—thoroughly censored—and they were allowed to organize concerts and plays. Ironically, Fritz, who had often dreamed of being a theater director, was allowed to stage a number of Shakespearean productions—in German (notably Theodor Fontane’s famous translation of Hamlet). Many in Germany still maintain that Shakespeare in German is better. Meanwhile, all the women’s parts were played by men in female attire, with Fritz appearing, in cameo, usually as an old man. His English was impeccable, but he stubbornly refused to speak it on the grounds that if he was locked up for the crime of being a German, then a German he would be. Like most of his Berlin contemporaries Fritz had started off as a confirmed Anglophile—sadly that died on the Isle of Man.
Hobbies and small crafts were encouraged among the internees. Drawings and other artworks were also popular. One internee named Brelow carved from wood and old bone a beautifully intricate ex libris stamp for Fritz, portraying an art deco sphinxlike figure over the name F. B. Gutmann. The ex libris stamp, and a signed and (later) framed copy of the pencil-and-charcoal drawing that served as the prototype, were among Fritz’s most precious mementos after the war.
The stamp itself was later lost, but almost unbelievably, some years ago while I was rummaging through an antique-books shop in Rotterdam, I was astonished to see hanging, on the wall above a shelf of dusty, old editions, the framed prototype drawing of the ex libris stamp, signed by the artist and inscribed Douglas, 1917. I knew that the drawing must once have been my grandfather’s. It seemed quite impossible, almost eerie, that I would stumble by chance upon such a thing, and yet there it was. Feigning indifference, and of course not mentioning my personal connection, I asked the antiques dealer if he knew where this somewhat unusual item had come from. I already knew the bitter answer, but the shopkeeper only shrugged. With a minimum of haggling, I bought it for seventy-five euros, which for the shopkeeper was a fair price. For me, the old framed drawing was priceless.
Despite the grim surroundings on the Isle of Man, one might argue that Fritz and the other internees were actually lucky. Unlike German soldiers, the German men who were interned on the Isle of Man could be reasonably certain, barring some serious medical problem, of surviving the war.
Still, I imagine that Fritz would have been more than willing to take his chances. None of Fritz’s many letters home survive, but I did find, in those old boxes, a poem in his wartime notebook (on theater and philosophy) that he wrote, in German, during his incarceration:
The nights are impassable palaces.
Lurking through are the mysterious grins of horror.
Behind doors ghosts are assembling,
not knowing about each other
not knowing about life
or about the burden of the prowling masses,
crowding the earth.
Nor had they ever heard the roaring song of love.
Not to comprehend is the fate of the damned.
Their feelings numbed, they languish in derangement
and die the death of poverty.
Shove them beneath the stubble field!
But the victors grow and ascend through the ether
in the twilight of the universe
and herald the song that the others despise.
Other accounts of life in the camps speak of the mind-numbing monotony, the soul-killing isolation. By the end of the war, international observers reported that almost every internee suffered to some degree from a form of clinical depression dubbed barbed-wire disease. Fritz did not go mad behind the wire, but as the wasted months and years passed by, he was increasingly bitter, angry, and defiant. He waited and waited, feeling his youth slipping away. He dreamed of his wife and child.
• • •
The euphoria for war was perhaps greatest in Germany. Pastors, priests, and rabbis alike preached that the war was just and necessary, and of course that God was on Germany’s side—a timeless and universal conceit. Strangely, most German Jews saw the war as an opportunity, a chance to prove once and for all their inherent Germanness, and to remove the still-lingering barriers against them in the army and the German civil service. After all, the Kaiser himself had announced in his initial war speech to the Reichstag that there could no longer be distinctions of religion, class, or ethnicity in Germany. “I know only Germans,” Wilhelm declared to thunderous approval.
At first, it seemed as if German unity could be realized. The Prussian high command, albeit grudgingly, finally allowed a handful of Jews into the officer corps. Louise’s uncle Eugen von Landau became the first Jewish cavalry officer to make it to the rank of major (without converting). Jews also were admitted in greater numbers to the higher ranks of the judiciary and civil service. But eventually, as the casualties at the front mounted—a third of a million Germans dead at Verdun alone—and the deprivations at home grew more severe, the German people’s initial enthusiasm for the war, and the sense of national unity that it had engendered, began to sour. Military requirements, coupled with the increasingly effective British naval blockade, made fresh foodstuffs increasingly hard to find. Long queues formed outside shops for bread, milk, sugar, everything. By the end of 1916, turnips and beets were the primary staples of the urban German diet, and some foods, such as fresh meat, were almost impossible to get in the cities, even at wildly inflated black-market prices. There were riots in some German cities.
As in almost every period of economic or social stress in Germany, the latent anti-Semitism that seemed to lurk just below the German psyche began to reassert itself. Much of the widespread fear and contempt was directed at the Ostjuden, the poor and culturally foreign Eastern European Jews who streamed by the tens of thousands into Germany from the Eastern Front and congregated in the cities in appallingly primitive conditions. Many German Jews worried that the newcomers would erase the gains that they had made in assimilation.
Native-born German Jews were not immune to the renewed wave of anti-Semitism. German Jewish bankers and industrialists, it was muttered, were intentionally prolonging the war to boost their profits; Jewish black marketers were getting rich while Christian babies starved. Right-wing members of the Reichstag claimed that young German Jewish men were “draft dodgers,” and even if they were conscripted, they always got safe, cushy jobs in the rear, while the “real” Germans did the fighting. In a seemingly self-defeating effort to prove that last calumny, in late 1916 the German high command ordered a survey of the troops—the infamous “Jew census”—to determine how many Jews were serving in the army, and in what capacity. When it was found that a hundred thousand German Jews were in the ranks, and serving in equal proportion in the front lines, the report was officially suppressed.
Meanwhile, another “census” demonstrated even more dramatically the devotion of German Jews to their country—namely twelve thousand Jews died fighting for the fatherland. Among them were Sergeant Erich Waldemar Gutmann, the twenty-five-year-old son of Eugen’s brother Alfred, killed in Flanders in 1915 while serving in an infantry regiment, and Lieutenant Hans Gutmann, the thirty-three-year-old only son of Eugen’s brother Max, also killed in Belgium in 1916.
Many years later, during a visit to Dresden’s New Jewish Cemetery with my wife, May, and our ten-year-old son, James, I found poor Erich’s and Hans’s names inscribed on a post–World War I monument to the Jewish sons of the city who had died for the Vaterland. Along the mossy east wall I discovered the graves and headstones of the Familie Gutmann—among them the graves of the Bohemian patriarch, Bernhard, his wife, Marie, and their son Alfred. The stones were inscribed in Hebrew and German and bore Stars of David. Somehow, those Jewish graves and symbols, and that cenotaph to World War I Jewish war dead, had survived virtually undisturbed for the last eighty years—from Nazi rule, then Allied bombing, to Soviet invasion, and, finally, East German skinheads bearing spray-paint cans. It seemed nothing short of miraculous—so much so that I wondered if the spirits of those dead young Jewish soldiers had somehow served as otherworldly guardians at the gate of the cemetery.
The rabbi who unlocked the seldom-used gate and let us in had sensed I was Jewish and had given me a yarmulke to wear. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that my branch of the Gutmanns hadn’t been Jewish since 1898. But seeing those graves, feeling that connection, I wondered if, for me at least, that was completely true.
• • •
By 1916 no German family, no matter how wealthy, could be totally isolated from the war’s effects. True, the residents at 10 Rauchstrasse were far better off than most. Black-market food prices could be paid, and what could not be bought could be grown. In the grounds behind the mansion the lawn was torn up and a vegetable garden planted. As soon as baby Bernard arrived in Berlin, Eugen even installed a cow on the estate grounds to provide milk for his grandson, which it faithfully did until it was stolen for meat by hungry Berliners. Parties and dinners were still held at the Tiergarten villa and the Schloss Zeesen, with a concert here and there, and occasional nights at the opera, but the grand and glittering affairs of prewar days receded into the past.
Fortunately for Eugen, most of his sons would remain out of harm’s way. Fritz, of course, was isolated on the Isle of Man. Herbert continued as director of the Deutsche-Orient Bank. His extensive contacts with Germany’s ally the Ottoman Empire made Herbert vital to the war effort. Kurt, unlike most Germans, had held on to his liberal, pacifist beliefs even as the war began, beliefs that only grew stronger as the bloodletting went on. He authored a number of articles and essays questioning the war. His book La Vérité est en Marche! had to be published in Switzerland to keep a step ahead of the increasingly harsh German censors, not to mention internal security services. Kurt managed to stay out of jail but created endless headaches for Eugen.
I discovered just recently that Max was not so fortunate. Wrenched from the comfort of Berlin’s salons, he found himself by the end of 1914 on the Eastern Front. Max fought valiantly in the frozen swamplands of Lithuania, ending up, improbably, as sergeant major of the Second Dragoon Guards.
Despite successes on the Eastern Front, by autumn of 1918 the German army was exhausted and the people restless. A spirit of revolution and mutiny spread quickly throughout the country. Along with the German high command, the new German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden—the same Prince Max who had escorted Great-Aunt Lili to the altar when she married the ill-fated baron—urged Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate. On November 10, the last Kaiser begrudgingly crossed the border into neutral Holland and into sullen exile, never to return again to Germany. The Kaiser, now technically a war criminal, had begun the war by preaching unity throughout the Reich, but now resorted to blaming the Jews for his woes.
The war had been a catastrophe for Germany. When the shooting stopped on November 11, 1918, 2 million German soldiers were dead, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians. After four years of their own staggering losses, the victors were in no mood to be generous to the vanquished. Through the Treaty of Versailles, Germany would be stripped of her colonies, see her national borders shrink, her military dismantled, her merchant fleet seized, and then have part of her territory occupied. Carl Melchior, a partner of Max Warburg’s and Germany’s financial adviser to the Treaty of Versailles, tried vainly to scale back the staggering war reparations. Years later, Hitler’s deputy in the Reichstag would blame Melchior, Rathenau, and Jews in general for Germany’s humiliating defeat.
Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany was near anarchy. Although the moderate Social Democrats were in nominal control of the new German Republic, all was chaos as various left and right factions battled for supremacy. There were gun battles, strikes, mass demonstrations, assassinations, riots. In Berlin, civilians fired Mausers and machine guns from behind barricades, women cut up dead horses in the street for food, mobs ransacked stores, and disabled soldiers begged on the sides of the roads. For a while there was genuine fear of a Russian-style Bolshevik revolution in Germany, with all that would entail.
The war had been a disaster for the Dresdner Bank as well. Its assets were seized in Britain, France, Russia, the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—never to be returned. The bank had lost roughly half of its prewar capital. Wartime inflation, though a mere shadow of what was to come, had further weakened the Dresdner’s capital position, and Germany’s uncertain political and financial status had choked off access to almost all foreign credit.
However, the Gutmann family had one bit of good news amid all this turmoil: even before the war ended, Fritz had finally managed to escape from the Isle of Man.
• • •
Fritz’s escape was not some feat of derring-do, but rather the result of an agreement signed in The Hague between the belligerents in 1917. Fritz’s brother-in-law, the neutral Swedish diplomat Hans Henrik von Essen, served as a vital go-between. Great Britain agreed to release to the custody of the Netherlands some sixteen hundred German internees, while Germany agreed to send a smaller number of British internees there. Loaded aboard a Dutch paddle steamer marked as a “hospital ship” to avoid German submarine attack, Fritz sailed to Rotterdam. The sixteen hundred men were technically still interned and, therefore, unable to return to Germany. However, for the first time they were allowed to move about more or less freely. Although Fritz seldom if ever spoke of his wartime experiences, other German internees later wrote of the joy of having a good meal in a restaurant, of seeing women and children again, of breathing free air. On the downside, a number of internees initially had trouble dodging cars and trolleys and even climbing stairs, none of which they had seen for nearly four years.
Although initially restricted to the Rotterdam area, Fritz eventually got permission to relocate to the coastal resort of Noordwijk, which for him was almost like going home. As a boy he had spent many a Gutmann family holiday at the fashionable Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin, set amid the sand dunes. Inland, behind the windy dunes, began the vast tulip fields that stretched from Leiden north to Heemstede.
That tradition would continue. In the 1950s my family would often stay in Noordwijk—also in the grand style that my father always insisted on, but could not really afford. Nick and I would play hide-and-seek among the giant wicker chairs on the windy beach, while my father was off to Amsterdam or The Hague on, what was to us, another of his mysterious quests.
With money wired from Berlin, Fritz rented a generous suite of rooms, and after overcoming the usual mountain of Dutch red tape, Louise and three-year-old Bernard finally were able to cross the heavily guarded German-Dutch border and join him. The reunion, like their honeymoon, was successful on multiple levels—Louise was soon pregnant again.
Still not allowed to return to Germany, Fritz waited for the war to end and pondered his future. Given the troubles Fritz foresaw for Germany and the situation at the Dresdner, the prospects did not seem particularly bright or appealing. Instinctively, he sensed that the peace and calm he found in neutral Holland, and its ability to act as a safe haven between opposing forces, would be key.
Fritz was not the same man he had been four years earlier. Some of the changes were what one might expect of a former prisoner of war. He had developed an aversion to confined spaces, a desire to make up for lost time, and a near obsession with food (for the rest of his life Fritz would hate to see food wasted). But some of the changes went deeper. The years in prison had been a leveling experience. On the Isle of Man he had been closely aligned with men of every class and background and had found that he could move easily among them. Like his father, he would be dignified, but approachable; exacting, but at the same time generous. True, he could at times be angry and impatient. But he still maintained his wry sense of humor, only now with a sharper, almost caustic edge. With a comment or even just a look, he could be withering, even to those he loved. Yet, unlike so many others who had been caught up in the war, the years in prison, the memory of being marched through the London streets amid the crowds of jeering, hate-filled faces, had not left him with a lust for revenge. If anything, for the rest of his life he would feel nothing but disdain, even contempt, for nationalism, militarism, the superheated passions of politics and ideology and ethnic hatred—all of which would continue to consume Germany for decades after the war to end all wars.
Perhaps Fritz sensed that Germany offered only chaos, when all he wanted was peace. Whatever the reason, after four years of defiantly being a German, he would, ironically, soon no longer be one.
