Endpapers. Alexander Wolff

Endpapers - Alexander Wolff


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the unrest. This was antisemitism as festival. The emancipation of Jews within the German Confederation, decreed by Prussia seven years earlier, meant little, a disgusted Robert wrote to his sister in Berlin: “How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice—not to mention their love of humanity—is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers.”

      It took days to restore order, which came only after the grand duke sent cannons into the streets. In place of incendiary posters, new ones appeared: EMPERORS, KINGS, DUKES, BEGGARS, CATHOLICS, AND JEWS ARE ALL HUMAN AND AS SUCH OUR EQUALS. In a carriage pulled by six horses, Louis I personally escorted Salomon back from Steinach before making a show of solidarity by temporarily moving into the Haber palace.

      Louis I so appreciated Haber’s work on behalf of the grand duchy that in 1829, a year before his own death and two years before Salomon’s, he bestowed on him the title that permitted the family to use the noble “von.” The von Habers had done much to earn the honor. They had developed Baden’s three largest industrial sites—a sugar factory, a cotton mill, and a machine works that built railway locomotives. After Salomon’s death, two of his sons, Louis and Jourdan, took charge of those enterprises, and Louis assumed his father’s role as court banker.

      Even as these two von Haber sons remained Jewish, their older brother, Model (Moritz) von Haber, pictured here, had long since converted. In 1819, at twenty-two, he married the daughter of a Parisian banker in a Catholic ceremony and over the following two decades lived a life of social prominence in Paris and London. With the help of agents around the continent, Moritz tended to a portfolio of interests, including mining enterprises in France and Portugal. He also handled the financial affairs of both the French king Charles X and Don Carlos, the Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne.

      Sometime in the late 1830s, Moritz had a run-in that touched off what would come to be known throughout Europe as the Haber Affair. The story goes that an English officer named George Hawkins was carrying documents from Spain to England when French authorities with Carlist sympathies detained him. Hawkins suspected Moritz of engineering his arrest and challenged him to a duel. Insisting that the Englishman lacked any standing to do so, Moritz sloughed Hawkins off.

      Around the same time, after two decades of consorting with nobility around Europe, Moritz returned to Karlsruhe with the swagger of a man of the world. Thanks to the marriages of his brothers Louis and Jourdan, the prodigal son now had connections to the Rothschild banking family, and he took to describing himself as “a man of private means.” Moritz became a regular at the court of Sophie, the Swedish-born grand duchess of Baden, who shared his worldly outlook and high-spirited nature. Soon gossips had Moritz trysting with the grand duchess at Schloss Favorite, the royal hunting lodge south of the city, and eventually pegged him as father of her youngest daughter, Princess Cäcilie. Officers and courtiers around the ducal palace—to say nothing of Sophie’s husband, Leopold, Louis I’s son and the new grand duke—disapproved of this interloper and the loose talk he was touching off.

      At one point Moritz’s old nemesis George Hawkins turned up in Karlsruhe looking for him. Hawkins died before he could get satisfaction in their dispute, but in 1843, Julius Göler von Ravensburg, a Badenese army officer who had sided with Hawkins, decided to take up the late English officer’s cause. He called Moritz ein Hundsfott—a scoundrel. Moritz refused to take the bait and challenge Ravensburg to a duel, and there matters might have ended. But soon the social season in the spa town of Baden-Baden was in full swing, and it seems that Moritz had been dropped from the guest list for one of the fancy balls on the calendar. When he pressed social arbiters for an explanation, Moritz was told that he wasn’t “a man of honor” because he had let a slur go unanswered—at which point Moritz concluded he had no choice but to take Ravensburg on.

      In Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, a man of rank or social standing who had been wronged didn’t seek redress through the police or the courts. He insisted instead on an engagement with deadly weapons under prescribed rules. If you had been insulted and didn’t demand a duel, you forfeited your right to associate with people of good repute. For Jews, matters were more complicated; it wasn’t unusual for a German Jewish university student with pistoling skills, slighted by some anti­semitic remark, to challenge the offender—but this only touched off a movement among non-Jewish fraternities at German universities to declare Jews categorically “unworthy of satisfaction.” In 1843, such was the disposition, at first, of Moritz’s challenge to Ravensburg: a court of honor declared Moritz too disreputable to be party to a duel—he wasn’t, as the Germans would say, satisfaktionsfähig. And that appeared to be that.

      But the protocol of dueling held that each principal nominate a “second,” someone to hammer out logistics and act as a go-between. As his second, Moritz had selected a Russian officer named Mikhail von Werefkin. Ravensburg’s chosen second, a Spanish-born officer of the Baden court, Georg von Sarachaga-Uria, didn’t simply reiterate to Werefkin his patron’s refusal to duel—he also joined Ravensburg to assault the Russian on a Karlsruhe street.

      As a result of that incident, Werefkin and Ravensburg hastily agreed to duel each other at a riflery range in the Forchheimer forest south of the city. There, on September 2, Werefkin mortally wounded Ravensburg with his first shot. But as he lay on the ground, Ravensburg was able to squeeze off a shot of his own, killing Werefkin.

      The death of both duelists set Baden on edge. Three days later, in the aftermath of Ravensburg’s funeral, a procession of mourners made its way along Langestrasse, Karlsruhe’s main east-west thoroughfare. As the funeral train reached the Haber palace, pictured here, and dusk settled over the city, a rumor spread that Moritz himself was watching from an upper window.

      At that, the ranks of the mourners dissolved. Students and soldiers led a mob of 150 people that stormed and ransacked the same home Moritz’s father had been chased from during the Hep, Hep riots two dozen years before. “Down with the Jews!” the crowd shouted, and “Tonight we’ll finish the Hep, Hep over there!” Rioters set upon two Jewish-owned businesses nearby, throwing the owners through their shop windows. David Meola, director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama and an expert on the history of the Haber Affair, told me that the attack lasted hours, with soldiers egging on townspeople, who yelled things like “drown them in blood!” The rioting caused tens of thousands of florins in damage, the equivalent of at least several million dollars today. This time the incumbent grand duke supplied no protection. During those intervening years, the status of even Karlsruhe’s most prominent Jews had grown ever more tenuous.

      In fact, as the riot raged, Moritz was no longer in the family home. A half hour earlier police had remanded him to Rastatt, south of the city. There he was quickly convicted of inciting the Ravensburg-Werefkin duel and sentenced to fourteen days in prison. As soon as he served his sentence, the authorities deported him to Hesse.

      Over the following weeks Sarachaga-Uria vowed to avenge the death of his comrade. He challenged Moritz in an open letter, using language so inflammatory that it made clear he had no misgivings about dueling someone he would call in print ein geborener Israelit, a Jew by blood. Moritz accepted, and on December 14—this time well north of Karlsruhe, near the Hessian village of Roggenheim—my ancestor killed Sarachaga-Uria with his second shot. Afterward Moritz was detained, charged with illegal dueling, and convicted by a Hessian military court, which sentenced him to six months in prison, four of them suspended for good behavior and community service. Upon his release Moritz filed and won libel suits against a Karlsruhe newspaper and a Frankfurt-based journalist, donating the settlement monies to charity.

      As it unspooled over those months, the Haber Affair caused a sensation around the continent. Moritz had his sympathizers, especially in the Rhenish press. Many Germans knew of the family’s public spiritedness and Moritz’s own charitable giving, including a large donation to recovery efforts in Hamburg after the city’s fire of 1842. But much of the coverage pandered to the basest instincts of an inflamed population.


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