Confronting History: A Memoir

3 - Family Matters

3 Family Matters THE SETTING in which I was reared, rather than the family itself, seems to have exercised the most direct influence on my life; nevertheless , it was my family's history which not only made the setting itself possible, but remained a constant if rather silent presence, even if I did not realize its full importance. The family's deeds which affected my life, and indeed defined my place in German society, seemed to have been accomplished before my time. No living family member, with the possible exception of my sister or my stepmother, was destined to playa decisive role in my life. The decades before the First World War were an age in which, through the application of personal ingenuity and risk-taking, German fortunes were made and vast businesses founded-the Age of the Founders, as it is often called, after those who managed to establish economic empires which left their mark on coming generations. Here innovation and a love of action were rewarded in a Germany engaged in the process of rapid industrialization. Both sides of the family had such founders: Salomon Lachmann, my father's grandfather, more traditionally in the grain trade, and Rudolf Mosse, my mother's father, much more spectacularly as the initiator of modern advertising in Germany and as a newspaper founder and publisher. Salomon Lachmann was a Prussian grain merchant who had gained great wealth in the 1860s when he began to supply the Prussian army with food during its wars against Austria and France. His service to the Prussian state was even greater, however. There was no well-established spy system at the time, and grain merchants were well placed to monitor the movement ofenemy armies according to the amount of grain they confiscated in 19 Family Matters the countryside. Salomon Lachmann was able to inform the Prussian military of the movements of the Austrian army and later to provide a similar service during the Franco-Prussian War. High Prussian officers and gentlemen-in-waiting to the emperor attended his funeral. Apparently only one of his six children inherited his drive, directed no longer toward commerce but community service. Edmund Lachmann was president of the Berlin Jewish Community for forty years and was a leading figure in supporting and directing programs of social assistance. He was also one of the first Jewish officers in the Prussian army. The four other sons, including my grandfather, were rentiers who lived off the fortune their father had made and, as far as I can judge, never found adequate occupations. The Lachmanns, for all that, were not like the characters in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, a fictional family saga set in the same era, where the energy and virility of the founder were exhausted in later generations , leading to eventual decline and extinction. Some of the greatgrandchildren of Salomon Lachmann were again to distinguish themselves . Whether this was due to the shock and consequences of exile will occupy us later. Meanwhile, my grandfather followed the course which many of the generation succeeding the founders had apparently taken. Georg Lachmann was established by his family in several businesses, and he was a success at none of them (lamps from one of his failed ventures in manufacture were scattered all over our Berlin house until the end). He married into a distinguished family, however. My grandmother's father, Jacob Eltzbacher, had fled Germany after the revolution of 1848. He settled in Holland, where he made his fortune. He built a summer house on the coast near Amsterdam, which became the nucleus of the village of Sandfort, today Amsterdam's most popular and crowded bathing resort. At Sandfort my father spent some of the happiest hours of his youth. But when it came time to die, my great-grandfather asked that his body be buried in German soil. Nearly a century later a friend ofmine in Bonn, then West Germany's capital, told me that he had discovered a small overgrown Jewish cemetery in the neighborhood where he lived. Soon I stood before Jacob Eltzbacher's grave. The fact that Eltzbacher had apparently been a "48er," had taken part in the 1848 revolution, was to me a matter of considerable pride when, during the struggle against the Nazis, he became in my mind a premature antifascist. And yet, the family contained an even more spectacular revolutionary figure, though not in the service of Germany: my maternal greatgrandfather Markus Mosse, a country medical practitioner in the Prussian...