Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
still-at-liberty Jew.
At the time of the Haber Affair, Baden’s Jews stood on the cusp of emancipation. The legislature of the grand duchy had taken up the issue for a dozen consecutive sessions, and only a few months earlier the parliament of the nearby Prussian Rhineland had voted to grant Jews full civil rights. As Baden celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its constitution, the Jewish-born writer Heinrich Heine was hailing full freedom as “the call of the times.” Yet even though Jews in 1843 made up no more than 1.5 percent of the grand duchy’s population, and perhaps 5 or 6 percent within Karlsruhe’s city limits, Badenese Christians feared Jewish emancipation.
At trial, Moritz’s liberal, Christian lawyer had enumerated the many ways his client had been done wrong. His home had been invaded, his property destroyed, his freedom taken away. Yet because of press censorship, the public could take only some of this into account. Then, upon his release, Moritz was summarily expelled from Baden. All these injustices were visited upon a citizen of the grand duchy—one whose family had been ennobled by the grand duke’s father—just days after Baden celebrated its status as a Rechtsstaat, a government of laws.
In the years afterward, framing of the Haber Affair took on an increasingly antisemitic cast. The publisher of a manifesto that Sarachaga-Uria had written before the second duel, distributed after the Spanish officer’s death, chose to pair the text with an engraving of Sarachaga-Uria alongside Ravensburg and Werefkin over the caption Duell-Opfern (Duel Sacrifices). Popular accounts called Ravensburg a Landeskind, a “child of the nation” who had given his life for the fatherland.
That story line would persist into the next century with the publication in 1926 of the historical novella King Haber. The book doesn’t bother to change the name of its main character, “the banker, Moritz Haber, or to give him his recent title, Baron von Haber.” In it Moritz cuckolds the grand duke, fathers a child with the grand duchess, and meets his comeuppance after a procession of mourners leaving the funeral of a “Baron Raven” spot him on the balcony of his own home and pelt him with rocks. Someone in the crowd finally fires the shot that kills him. The story has such defamatory resonances that in 1947 one of Salomon’s descendants, Willy Model, tried to claw back some of our common ancestor’s reputation with an affidavit sorting out what was hearsay from what was known to have happened.
The Haber Affair foreshadowed atrocities to come. The timing of the publication of King Haber—on the cusp of the Nazis’ seizure of power—helped stoke the antisemitism that Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would step in to exploit. And the episode conformed with Jud Süss, the 1940 film based on an eighteenth-century Jewish court banker who became a recurring figure in Nazi propaganda.
In the anti-Moritz manifesto written before his death in the second duel, Sarachaga-Uria declared that “religion and honor” would prevent Moritz from ever being “true and straight.” Whatever the outcome of the duel, the Badenese officer further proclaimed, it would be “a judgment of God between good and evil, right and wrong.”
After winning his duel with Sarachaga-Uria, Moritz couldn’t resist a triumphant riposte. In January 1844, having served out his sentence in Hesse, he bought space in newspapers around the German states. “So!” read one of his Erklärungen, or declarations. “The highest driver of all human fate has judged according to his wisdom between good and evil, right and wrong.”
David Meola puts it this way in a scholarly article about the Haber Affair: “As victor of the duel, Haber can be seen as having been judged—by God—to be both good and right. Moreover, in the public sphere, Haber would also have the last word, defeating his opponent again posthumously using his adversary’s own words and beliefs.”
For Uncle Moritz, it must have made for the most satisfying touché.
I have few clues to how my ancestors processed the life and trials of Moritz von Haber through the years. Kurt’s grandfather August, the eldest son of Moritz’s sister Henriette von Haber, would go on to handle some of his uncle’s business affairs, so it’s hard to imagine my grandfather not having heard of his notorious forebear. But my father never mentioned Moritz. I learned of him and this entire saga only after arriving in Berlin, from pursuing a throwaway line in a genealogical essay by my aunt Holly, Kurt’s daughter-in-law. She refers to “an internationally known rake, duelist, and adventurer” and suggests that, in his great-great-uncle’s cosmopolitan instincts, generous spirit, nose for commerce, and eye for women, Kurt may have found both inspiration and template.
Kurt and Moritz shared one more thing. Both believed they enjoyed all the rights of a citizen of a constitutional state, only to discover that they didn’t.
The journeys of my exile grandfather and emigrant father stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States, the country that once took them in. Today the German chancellor, not the American president, is welcoming asylum seekers, denouncing neo-Nazism, and banging the drum for global integration and liberal democracy. The contrast appears even more stark when viewed from Berlin, perhaps the most radically welcoming city on earth—not just over the previous few years, as Angela Merkel threw Germany open to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria, but also through much of the city’s history, dating back to when the Duke of Prussia invited fifty Viennese Jewish families to settle there after the Thirty Years’ War.
Not all Germans are offering an embrace. Merkel has failed to win over followers of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, the AfD, which is especially popular in the villages and countryside of the old East Germany encircling the city. But in Berlin proper, particularly where we’ve landed, in Kreuzberg, a defiant cosmopolitanism obtains. We see it in graffiti like NAZIS RAUS (Nazis out) and find it in clubs like SO36, which hosts a monthly dance night for gay Muslims. It’s heralded by a banner reading ISLAMOPHOBIA DAMAGES THE SOUL, hung from the facade of the church around the corner, where we’re as likely to hear world music as Lutheran liturgy. It comes with the lingering spirit of the activists who once organized squats in abandoned buildings, and shortly before the fall of the Wall declared the Free Republic of Kreuzberg, issuing “visas” and building “customs posts” of papier-mâché. And it validates what the exiled journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote from the safety of England on the eve of World War II: “Berlin was, let us say it with Prussian precision, the very essence of an international metropolis. It had, so to speak, roots in the air. It extracted its life force not from the native soil of the surrounding country . . . but from all the great cities of the world.”
The six-hour time difference between Washington, DC, and Berlin ensures that a sleep-cycle’s worth of backed-up US news alerts greets us each morning. Three days after our arrival comes news that ethnonationalists have engineered a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump fails to condemn the neo-Nazis who assembled, one of whom struck and killed a protestor, Heather Heyer, with his car. The president goes on to describe the day’s actors as including “very fine people, on both sides.”
These events have a pointed local parallel. Germans will soon go to the polls, to weigh in on Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome refugees in defiance of the AfD, which has been dog-whistling the doctrine of “blood and soil” at the heart of National Socialism. For most of my life I’ve been aware of the stakes of a choice like this for Germany. And here it lies before me, at the same time America seems to stand at a similar crossroads.
Done with the War
Kurt, 1913 to 1924
My grandfather had barely reached his midtwenties, but his adult life was off to the headiest kind of start. In 1913 Kurt brought out the work of his two in-house readers, Franz Werfel and the Expressionist poet and playwright Walter Hasenclever. He foreshadowed a long devotion to the visual arts by publishing the writings of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. And he launched the Expressionist literary magazine Der jüngste Tag (The Judgment Day), with which he pledged to showcase writing that, “while