Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (6 page)

In among the showy and scandalous was also the staid. The Tiergarten was a neighborhood of consulates and embassies; the Greek consulate was next door to the Hirschmanns home, and Otto Albert frequently had to dash into its backyard to retrieve errant balls. It was the ample second story of a villa-style house addressed Hohenzollernstrasse 21 that was home. The street ran between the Landwehrkanal and the park; at its top was Hedda’s mother’s house. Ottilie, “Öhmchen” to her grandchildren, insisted that they dutifully visit her on their way to the park with their nanny.

Respectability was thus sown into the very fabric of Hedwig’s family, and it went back several generations. Her parents, Ottilie Aron and Albert Marcuse, formed an alliance of successful Jewish Frankfurt financiers (the Arons) and Berlin magnates (the Marcuses). Success in finance and business had created a platform for later generations to join the professional ranks. Hedda’s brother Joseph loomed large in family lore. Having fought with distinction as a major in World War I, he was an exalted citizen until he died at a young age in 1931. He embraced his Lutheranism, befriended the Kaiser, owned a house with a small stable in the tony sector of the Tiergarten, and enjoyed wearing his military uniform draped with medals. His marriage to a beautiful, tall, blond singer with whom he had been having an affair for some years may have prompted his sister to warn her children that this kind of behavior was not entirely appropriate, but his money, virility, and style were the envy of many. Much less is known of Harry, a successful neurologist who died very young in 1927, all but unmemorable to his nieces and nephews. Franz, the youngest, was manqué. He did not “make it,” literally. With no career and dependent on Ottilie until her death, he was a bit of a sponge. Bearing chocolates, he would visit his young nieces and nephew to play cards, midway through suggesting that they play for money, and would occasionally ask to borrow pocket change. After 1933, as the family began to pull up stakes from Germany, he stayed behind, only to die in 1940 in a Nazi concentration camp, the victim of a decree that converted whole swaths of the assimilated into Jews in order to rid the world of them.

The pursuit of respectability often comes with slips—and in the case of Otto Albert’s mother, a potentially catastrophic one. Hedwig was born in Berlin in 1880. Her family lived on Magazinstrasse, in a middle-class neighborhood, where upwardly mobile Jews could gain a toehold. Her religion was registered as nondenominational, with “----------” before the entry on her birth certificate. (As a sign of the times, when the Nazis issued her a passport in April 1939, it bore the blazing stamp of “J”, for
Juden
.) Her parents were of means enough to provide a good education not just to the boys, but also to Hedda, who spent time at the university. The slip came with her first entry into the marriage market, which went badly. She married a lawyer from Nürenburg named, by pure coincidence, Hirschmann. The story behind this ill-fated match is unclear. Rumors had it that he was impotent, though a subsequent marriage brought him several children. Other rumors had him the victim of a mental disease. “Not normal” was the consensus. Either way, Hedwig left him, secured a divorce—much to the shame of her mother—and left Berlin to finish her studies in Munich and later in Strasbourg, at first to study medicine and then history of art. Beyond the reach of gossipy circles, the cloud of scandal could pass.

Hedwig thus carried a stigma, which she labored to disguise. This campaign motivated an effort to cover the tracks of a less-than-respectable past with a second marriage, to Carl. Hedwig and Carl’s concern for appearances reflected inner desires and aspirations for themselves and their children. The outward search for respectability could also cover inner complexities and was not completely successful at cloaking the family’s seams—through them some of the tensions and conflicting memories would occasionally show through. Not long after Carl moved to Berlin, he met Hedwig at a philharmonic concert and immediately struck up his courtship. Carl was an ambitious doctor from out of town; she was a well-educated divorcée, no longer so young, with all the connotations and rumors this might carry with it. Accompanied by her wealthy aunt, Hedda must have seemed several social rungs above him. But they coincidentally shared a last name—the pretext for an initial, if slightly awkward, banter. Within a short time, Hedda was on her way to her second engagement.
Besides, if Hedda did her best to cover her stigma, Carl did his best to obscure his own. In a fashion, Carl and Hedda came to love and need each other in equal measure—Carl in order to join the proper ranks, and Hedda to have the proper family that a fräulein of her class and culture would have needed to remain in her rank.

The marriage of Carl Hirschmann and Hedda Marcuse contained within it some of the hopes and rewards, as well as some of the compromises and frictions, that accompanied the urge to join the ranks of successful, assimilated Jews. Theirs was an alliance bound by love, shared ambitions, and some common values. After a month apart, Carl wrote his vacationing wife, “Every day I look forward more to see you all again and to be reunited with you all, but most of all I am looking forward to seeing you, to breathe in your sphere, to talk to you. Against that, even meeting the daughters again pales, and that is saying a lot.”
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Nietzsche and Wagner were sources of enthusiasm; from the first encounter, classical music, opera in particular, was a shared passion, and they became avid patrons of Berlin’s burgeoning performance halls.

But as with any alliance, this one had differences to resolve. Carl and Hedda did not differ so much on what they wanted for the future; their divides were about the past. There is a reason why we know much more about Hedda’s family. She was only too proud of her heritage, something she relied upon to erase the memory of her own first marriage. Carl had access to no such remedy.

Carl preferred silence to surround his past and was willing to let Hedda’s noise crowd in. At Christmas she would wail openly during ritual performances of Bach’s arias and choruses. When the children got older, this display would make them cringe. Her wardrobe was determined to keep up with the times, which in the 1920s sketched a new outline around the female body. Harry’s wife, Mimi, set the standard of the “new woman,” cutting a profile of elegance with refinement, independence with fashion. She cropped her hair; so did Hedwig. Her fashion preferences were more firmly for modern tastes affiliated with the greater prominence that women of Hedwig’s generation and respectability would enjoy in public.
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The ways in which women across Weimar Germany were crossing into the public sphere only raised the pressure on Hedwig, which was coming not just from new fashion or consumption; it also came from older, internal family norms. The Marcuses set the social bar high, and Hedda had to struggle to reach it. She had two cousins, Leonie and Estella, who in turn married Max and Ludwig “Lutz” Katzenellenbogen, cousins from a very rich magnate’s family. It was a tight world, sociable and yet invidious. Leonie and Estella sent their only sons, Stephan and Conrad, to the same school as Otto Albert. Yet Otto Albert was always aware of the invisible class barriers and differences in values that contrasted his modest, bookish ways with those of his wealthy, playboy cousins. His mother’s status anxieties were hard to avoid. One day he came home from school and complained that a teacher had slapped him. Enraged, Hedwig (“Mutti” to her children) stormed to the school to protest. When she met with the guilty teacher she was told “Madam, your son is like a race horse, and he has to be hit once in a while to perform even better.” Hedda returned home elated; “My son is like a pure bred horse,” she gushed. OA was a little disappointed that his mother had forgotten his smarting cheek.
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Her status extroversion could make Mutti a somewhat oppressive mother. When asked about his relationship with her, an otherwise discreet Albert would confess that she was not easy. “The relationship with my mother was not as good as that with my father,” he recalled. “We always had difficulties.”
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When he was asked to describe her as a mother, “overbearing” is how he put it. In the end, however, most of the pressure did not land on her son’s shoulders. It was Otto Albert’s sister Ursula who bore the brunt, and she would later fill her memoirs with resentment. To Ursula, Otto Albert’s knack for staying out of trouble, his good grades, and his nonconfrontational style meant that he was Mutti’s favorite.
¹⁹
If he was the pet, however, he did not indulge her. She asked him to call her by a more tender name, Mumula. He resisted, calling her Mutti, like the other children did. He was also not above standing up to her: when Mutti caught the children horsing around after bedtime, she barged into the room, pulled the blanket away from Eva, lifted her nightshirt, and spanked her; when she turned to her son, he stood up and looked her in the eye as if to
dare her to lift her hand. Instead, words of reprobation followed, and then she left. The sisters watched enviously. There is little doubt that Ursula was probably right: Mutti did have special affection for her son. A portrait was commissioned of a twelve-year-old Otto Albert and hung prominently over the living room mantel. There is a photograph of stylish Hedda wearing a kimono that was the rage among wealthy, European urbanites, her hair coiffed in bobbed fashion, her head titled slightly with arms raised in a vaguely self-sacrificial pose. She is standing under the portrait of her son, whose eyes gaze away from the camera into the horizon.
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The difference between Ursula and Otto Albert did not reflect a gap in values. They both shared an aversion to Mutti’s pretensions. But they differed in how they dealt with their aversion to them. Otto Albert, a son, enjoyed some latitude to escape to be with his schoolmates. As a boy, he learned to keep his cool. He refined the art of avoiding a drama, which only added to his family reputation as unflappable. Ursula could not, and did not, keep her cool. The result was sometimes volcanic, especially when the delicate balance on Hohenzollernstrasse was upset by external misfortunes.
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Hedwig Hirschmann, c. 1924.

Carl Hirschmann’s background is more obscure, and what little is known would only become clear to his son in piecemeal fashion. There appear to be reasons for this. His birth certificate tells us that he was born in 1880 in Kölln, of “mosaic” religion, the son of Fanny (née Caspary) and Samuel Hirschmann. “Mosaic” was purposefully vague. Kölln was a village in a German belt ceded to Poland (and was thus known as Kielno) after the armistice—in effect an eastern frontier, not far from Danzig-Gdansk, close to the border with Lithuania. This was deep into
Ost
territory. Indeed, Carl’s father was born in Kovno (renamed Kaunas), Lithuania, confirming Carl’s undeniable Ostjuden heritage. Considerable energy went into covering this up—indeed, it was kept hidden from the children. It was only many years later, when Hirschman was applying for US citizenship and anxious to have his papers in order, that Mutti disclosed the truth of Carl’s birthplace. It is not known what his parents did for a living; some say they were farmers, others say the father was a merchant. At some point, Carl accompanied his family to New York, where many poorer German and East European Jews headed at the invitation of a relative who had struck it rich. He picked up enough English to become proficient but never adapted; emigration did not go well. There is some sense that the American branch of the family was involved in shady affairs.
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Carl had higher aspirations for himself. He returned to Germany, worked his way through medical school in Hamburg, and eventually moved to Berlin in 1911. Medicine was a preferred field for Jews, less constrained than other professions, such as law or academia, but which had the aura of being reserved for the wellborn. It was also a profession in which Jew and Gentile worked side by side and in which Gentile patients
would submit to the care of a Semite. Fritz Stern, also of assimilated Jewish parents and the son of a successful doctor in Breslau, recalled that “in Imperial Germany, the physician’s white coat was the uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance.”
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Besides, Carl had large but delicate and beautiful—a surgeon’s—hands, which once reminded his son of Flaubert’s depiction of his own father (also a physician), “brawny hands—very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering.”
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The road to success at the operating table was not an easy one for Carl—and we know little about how he traveled it. He made it clear to the children that his past was an unwelcome subject of conversation, steering talk to matters of the present, a story by Franz Kafka, or a patient’s stubborn condition. They learned not to ask questions. Hedwig was as complicit as Carl in obscuring his background from her children and the rest of her family. But Carl played an active role in this and was certainly more than just willing to go along with the more-Marcuse-oriented family life; when he did divulge accounts of his past, he told his children stories of growing up with a pony and riding in a carriage, as might befit a landed family.