Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (7 page)

The children were not the only consumers of Carl’s obscured heritage. So was Hedwig, until it was too hard to ignore. This murky past was a source of shame for which she bore a deep grudge. One day, while Hedda was scolding young Ursula for having fibbed, Carl entered the room, took one look at the scene, and fled. Hedda, by now enraged, lashed out at her daughter and hissed at her that “lying” was a vice that had “deep roots” in this family. Later, Ursula would discover what her mother meant, for in Carl’s eagerness to woo Hedwig, he was less than forthcoming. Indeed, he had peddled the same tales of ponies and carriages and ensured that Hedwig could not follow the genealogical trail. Perhaps because he sensed that his “eastern,” small town, humble roots could not live up to Hedda’s haughty expectations for any prospective suitor, his stories were embellished. When Carl paid his obligatory visit to Ottilie, to win her approval the story became more elaborate about his family’s estates. Ottilie even
tested Carl’s etiquette, inviting him to lunch and serving him roast pigeon to assess his manners; fortunately, the surgeon was skilled with a knife and passed with flying colors. At no point did Hedwig meet her future in-laws, and she does not seem to have asked to. How complicit she was in the cover-up is hard to say, but it became even more elaborate. When Carl and Hedwig got married, Carl arranged for someone from Kölln to send greetings and congratulations to Ottilie. On the wedding day, apologetic telegrams arrived explaining that it was impossible for Carl’s proud parents to attend the ceremony. Everyone fell for the ruse; everyone wanted it to be true. In moments of marital stress, it became known as “The Lie,” which gave the union troubled foundations.

Ultimately, there was a limit to how long this cover up could last—and we do not know when Hedwig had to face facts she would have preferred to ignore. The absence of the parents would eventually have elicited probes. Certainly, by 1927 the truth was out: one day Carl’s only sister, Betty, showed up from New York with her husband, Herman Lurie. They came bearing gifts, playing the expected part of distant “American” relations. But it was a short visit and left a malodorous impression: this was not a delegation that reflected especially well on the Berlin Hirschmanns’ status. Behind the scenes, the déclassé New York connections, the Yiddish-speaking forebearers from the east, would all have come out.
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The tension over The Lie hung over the family like a nimbus. It shaped the family memories, whose commonalities and discrepancies remind us of what Albert O. Hirschman would repeat over the course of a prolific lifetime—that the beholder’s eye had a role to play in what one made of the landscape of opportunities and constraints that surround us, that we could choose, to a point, the narratives that make us. It is perhaps revealing that Ursula’s memoir of her youth (which was published in French and Italian) discloses the tension over the lie, which she considered fundamental to her parents’ complex marriage and helps explain her mother’s zeal to belong to the opera-going, fur-clad, Berlin establishment. By contrast, Albert—who translated the work into English, although it never got published—glossed over some of the passages that refer to the lie in his redaction, either because it was not a history he wanted dredged up,
or because he thought his sister overstated the east-west divide within the marriage. They thus differed even on how to have their parents remembered: Ursula wanting to reveal the tensions she felt explained her own rebellious streak; Albert preferring not just discretion but the possibility of a less tormented, more hopeful story of the family’s improvability.

The burden of the lie could be borne as long as Carl was better at delivering on the promise for a brighter future than reminding his wife of his “east-Jewish” past. Much, therefore, depended on career advancement as a sign of achievement and a source of higher income. Accordingly, Carl was ambitious. He rose quickly up the surgeon’s ladder of success. By 1920, he was the head of surgery at the Municipal Hospital-Moabit, a rambling clinic in a working-class district on the other edge of the Tiergarten, a site of much agitation in the late imperial years. That same year, he entered the annals of local medical history when he assisted Otto Mass, the lead doctor at the Hospital Berlin-Buch, in a successful operation on a relapsed brain tumor. Otto Albert’s father was best known for his collaboration with Dr. A. Simons, a neurologist. Together, they figured out a way to get access to the pituitary gland, whose malfunctioning could lead to the disease acromegaly (enlarged feet, hands, and facial features); the trick was to proceed not through the cranium but through the nose. This procedure yielded a series of medical sketches, which a proud Carl brought home to show his son. Otto Albert was probably impressed, but the drawings made him want to vomit.
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Carl worked hard, putting in long days at the hospital before coming home for
Abendbrot
, a supper often served cold, with the rest of the family, and then going to his home clinic to greet patients and make phone calls. The telephone figures prominently in the adult Hirschman’s recollections of his father. In the evenings it rang frequently. Albert could recall his father stepping out of concerts to make an emergency call—sometimes leaving a note that he had to rush to the hospital, thus missing the second half of a performance. Indeed, he passed up many family vacations to stay in Berlin to minister his patients.
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Hedda’s extroversion was a contrast to Carl’s quiet, studious, and slightly sad disposition. There is an especially moving photographic portrait of Carl, taken some time around 1930 by the well-known photographer
Gertrude Simon. He is dressed in a dark suit; his head is heavy boned and provides the setting for large, thoughtfully melancholic eyes. In his home office there hung a print of a nineteenth-century Symbolist painter, Arnold Böcklin. It was a famous 1872 self-portrait of the artist at work with death leering over his shoulder playing a violin (the original hung at the National Gallery). Böcklin was best known for his Island of the Dead series. Much later, the son could recall shuddering at the sight of the image and could not fathom his father’s interest in representations of the morbid. It depressed him, and he wished his father would replace the picture with something more uplifting. Both Albert and Eva recall their father, especially after a long day at work, and more commonly after 1929, going into his home office and sitting there in silence, his head in his hands, gazing downward. “He depressed easily,” remembered Eva. Otto Albert, in particular, worried; his sister remembers repeated attempts by the son to cheer the father up with chess games, talk about books, or light banter. He had few personal friends, though plenty of family acquaintances emanating from Hedda’s affiliations. His closest friend was Ulrich Friedemann, a pediatrician and fellow assimilated Jew whose family was a frequent guest at Hohenzollernstrasse.
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There were times in which the life of hard work appeared to take its toll on the father. In the summer of 1930, he once more forfeited the family vacation, tending to his mother-in-law and caring for Tilla Durieux (recently wed to Lutz Katzenellenbogen). One patient in particular (called Löwenburg) was causing no end of grief, and he did not feel ready to pass him on to the doctors of the Charité Hospital. “It’s dreadfully hot here again and the day with its worries and 1000 petty concerns is wearying, but all I can say is that I’m bearing up well and since I have resolved to keep my head up, I’m feeling well.” The fatigue of self-sacrifice is clear: “I’m so full of worries about others, I don’t let it come up any more that I hide myself in myself, but instead want to live busily and actively, and both especially strongly for you all,” he wrote to his vacationing family. Two days later, Carl sounds as if he is reaching his rope’s end. Ground down by the conflict between Tilla Durieux and Lutz Katzenellenbogen and trying to keep the newsmaking actress at arm’s length while the Löwenburg
case was causing “mental agitation,” he confessed: “I’m tired and worn down.”
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Hirschman’s own memories of his father are filled with portraits of kindness and seriousness. There were the occasions for fun: Carl and Otto Albert would occasionally do exercises on the gymnastics bar, swings, and trapeze out in front of the villa. Carl was no absent father. Though he left early every morning for the hospital, he returned every day to dine with the family. He lavished attention when he could on all three children. He was also dutiful in minding the affairs of Hedwig’s sometimes high-maintenance relations. Carl ministered to the health of his mother-in-law, occasionally giving up vacations to stay in Berlin to look after her as she got older. He was also charged with accompanying Hedwig’s cousin Lutz Katzenellenbogen on a cruise to Egypt, the purpose of which was not only to keep the wealthy kinsman entertained, but also to talk him out of divorcing his wife, thereby avoiding a family scandal. The latter task was a futile one. Lutz left Estella and created a major dustup with the family, made worse a bit later when he struck up an affair and then a marriage with the scandal-prone Tilla Durieux.
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The trip to Egypt did yield one side benefit: on the way back, Carl arranged for Hedwig and Otto Albert to meet him in Paris, where they would spend a week together. It was not the twelve-year-old’s first trip to another country, but it was the first to Paris, and it left a permanent impression. The boy was awestruck by the city’s beauty, the open boulevards, the parks, the Louvre, the expanse from the great museum to the Étoile, the mammoth Père Lachaise acropolis for famous deceased citizens as well as the Communards’ Wall. It was the entwined beauty and history that fascinated Otto Albert; he never forgot his first sight of the Gothic stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle. Carl was committed to showing his son the world; what is more, he encouraged him to see it for himself.
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Carl Hirschmann c. 1928.

Between Carl and his son was also a shared, mutually respected intellectual world. The father took a keen interest in the boy’s education; he taught him chess (a game for which Albert bore a lifelong affection; later, in his own travels, he would carry with him a portable set so he could explore openings and pursue lines on his own). Carl read Kafka’s short stories, explained Nietzsche to his son, and engaged in long discussions about the incompatibility of Nietzsche and Marx. “Investigations of a Dog,” one of Kafka’s posthumously published stories, was one of the favorites of both father and son. The tale of a dog’s pseudorational method to arrive at incongruous explanations for his existence was not just absurd, it also pointed to some of the foibles that accompany closed certainties, a style that would yield a lifelong imprint. Carl also welcomed the son’s own discoveries. On one summer climbing trip to the Sudetenland, a teenage Otto Albert somehow procured a copy of a book by Max Adler, one of the founders of Austro-Marxism, and presented it to his father. Carl, otherwise not an avid reader of openly political tracts, appreciated Adler’s eclecticism and sympathized with the leftish yet firmly anti-Leninist message. Many years later, Hirschman remembered the conversations between father and son about Max Adler as characteristic of the warmth and consideration that Carl brought to his fathering style—a reprieve from Mutti’s nonbookishness and suspicion of radical political ideas, a stance that would create conflicts and divides in the household as OA and Ursula became more active. For the time being, the love of literature and the affection between father and son were tightly bound. In 1925, Carl could not join the family on summer vacation on the North Sea beaches. There was too much work with patients at home. But he clearly missed the time he would have spent with Otto Albert. “I would love to join in,” he lamented, “bathing, gymnastics, playing with the ball or chasing after it, flying a kite, making a noise, romping about, all that would be right up my alley, provided that you join in everything and people then say, when father and his son go to the North Sea!” There was room in Carl’s letters to his son to complement affection with advice: “I also ask you kindly not to overexert yourself.” There were also important matters to consider: “so gifted a student as you has no need to work in the holidays.” The letter closes with a poem by Heinrich Heine from the section on the North Sea in his
Book of Songs
:

The storm rages now

And whips the waves,

And the waters, boiling and furious,

Tower into a moving waste

Of white and flowing mountains.

And the ship climbs them

Sharply, painfully;

And suddenly plunges down,

Into a black and yawning chasm of flood.

O Sea!

Mother of Venus, born of your quickening foam.

Before signing off, Carl concluded, “You will know who is ‘born of quickening foam.’ ”
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Carl himself had moderately progressive views (as did Hedwig, but she kept these to herself) and tended to vote Social Democratic in German elections. His sensibilities were not, however, the expression of a strong ideological disposition. Quite the contrary. He reserved judgment, avoided proclamatory styles, and raised skeptical questions when faced with his children’s youthful hubris, often asking his son and daughters
their
thoughts on Kafka or Goethe. One day, Otto Albert asked point blank about his father’s convictions, and when Carl concluded that he had no guiding principles, Otto Albert bolted down the hall exclaiming to his sister “Weiss Du was? Vati hat keine Weltanschauung!” (You know what? Daddy has no world view!).
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