Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

These words were published in 1921, just two years before the birth of Henry Kissinger. Idiosyncratic Wassermann may have been — an exemplar, some would say, of Jewish “self-hatred”—but his anatomy of German-Jewish melancholy was darkly prophetic. 46

IV

The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that required Jews to have surnames). 47By his first wife he had two children, Isak and Löb, but she died giving birth to the latter in May 1812. Meyer Löb then married her sister, Schoenlein. Of their ten children, only one — Abraham Kissinger (1818–99) — had issue. The descendants of Isak and Löb Kissinger were tailors; the descendants of Abraham were teachers. 48Abraham himself was a successful weaver and merchant. He and his wife, Fanny Stern, had nine children in all, including four sons, Joseph, Maier, Simon, and David (1860–1947), all of whom became rabbis. David Kissinger taught religion to the Jewish community of Ermershausen, a village on the Bavarian-Thuringian border. On August 3, 1884, he married Karoline (Lina) Zeilberger (1863–1906), the daughter of a prosperous farmer, who provided her with a ten-thousand-mark dowry. 49They had eight children: Jenny (who died aged six in 1901), Louis (born on February 2, 1887), Ida (born in 1888), Fanny (1892), Karl (1898), Arno (1901), Selma and Simon. 50

Louis Kissinger’s youth was an advertisement for what an intelligent, hardworking Jewish boy could achieve in imperial Germany. At the age of eighteen — without even a diploma, much less a university degree — he embarked on a teaching career. His first job was in Fürth, at the private Heckmannschule for (mainly Jewish) boys, where he was paid 1,000 marks per annum, plus 255 per month for health and old age insurance, to teach German, arithmetic, and science for four hours a day. He remained at the post for fourteen years. 51Despite formally becoming a citizen of Fürth in 1917, 52he seems to have contemplated moving, applying for posts in northern Bavaria and Upper Silesia, but he declined these jobs when offered them. Instead, at the age of thirty, he opted belatedly to sit his school-leaving examination — the Reifeprüfung —at the Fürth Realgymnasium, the town’s senior boys’ school. Equipped with his diploma, he was able to attend courses at Erlangen University. More important, he was able to apply for a more prestigious post at one of Fürth’s public schools: the senior girls’ school known today as the Helene-Lange-Gymnasium. With his appointment as Hauptlehrer (literally “chief teacher”) in 1921, Louis Kissinger became in effect a senior civil servant. Though he continued to teach arithmetic and science — and appears also to have given occasional instruction at the town’s business school ( Handelsschule ) 53—his preferred subject was German literature. “Kissus,” as the girls nicknamed him, was not a strict teacher. He enjoyed introducing his pupils to classics of German poetry like Goethe’s “Der Adler und die Taube” (“The Eagle and the Dove”) and Heinrich Heine’s “Jetzt wohin?” (“Now where?”). The latter would later acquire a painful personal significance. In the poem, written in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions, the exile Heine wonders where he should go if he faces a death sentence in his German homeland.

Where to now? My foolish feet

To Germany would gladly go

But my wiser head is shaking

And seems to tell me “No”:

The war may well be over,

But martial law is still in force….

I sometimes get to thinking

To America I should sail,

To the stable yard of freedom

Whence egalitarians hail.

But I’m fearful of a country

Where the people chew tobacco

Where they bowl without a monarch

Where they spit without spittoons.

Louis Kissinger surely shared Heine’s preference for the land of his birth. Like Heine, he felt as much a German as a Jew.

That Louis Kissinger was a German patriot is not in doubt. He was a member of the national association expressly set up to represent “German citizens of the Jewish faith” (the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens). 54Unlike the majority of German men of his generation, he did not fight in the First World War, but this was for health reasons. 55Other members of the Kissinger family are known to have served in the Bavarian army, which was notably friendlier toward Jews than its larger Prussian counterpart, Jakob Wassermann’s experiences notwithstanding. Louis’s brother Karl saw active service; his future father-in-law, as we shall see, was also called up. Two of his cousins lost their lives in the war. 56To many German Jews of that era, there was no better proof of their commitment to the Reich than this sacrifice. The claim that Jews were underrepresented on the front lines and in the casualty lists was angrily rebutted by patriotic organizations like the one to which Louis Kissinger belonged. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Louis felt under no pressure to dilute his religious faith as proof of his patriotism. He adhered firmly to the Orthodox part of the Fürth community, attending the Neuschul synagogue presided over by Rabbi Yehuda Leib (Leo) Breslauer, rather than the rival Reform congregation of Rabbi Siegfried Behrens. Like Breslauer (and unlike his brother Karl), Louis was uneasy about the Zionist movement, which called on the Jews to establish their own nation-state in Palestine — an idea that was proving especially attractive to Bavarian Jews. 57As his wife later recalled, “He [Louis] knew about [the Zionist leader Theodor] Herzl and everything. He knew but he was never [convinced]…. He was deeply religious but like a child, he believed everything… and he studied Zionism but he couldn’t accept it. He felt so German.” 58

Paula Kissinger — the woman who spoke those words — was born thirty-five miles to the west of Fürth in the village of Leutershausen, on February 24, 1901. Her father, Falk Stern, was a prosperous farmer and cattle dealer and a pillar of the local Jewish community, serving as its chairman ( Vorsitzender ) for fifteen years. Three years after his daughter’s birth, Falk and his brother David pooled their resources to buy the imposing house that still stands at number 8 Am Markt. Paula was brought up in an Orthodox household, learning to read Hebrew fluently and always eating at home in order to keep kosher. As in Fürth, however, religious separation did not imply social segregation. Paula’s closest childhood friend was a Protestant girl named Babette “Babby” Hammerder. “You never saw or felt any anti-Semitism ’til Hitler came,” Paula later recalled. “In fact, they sought you out, they looked for you, they wanted you.” 59Paula was just twelve when her mother, Peppi, died. A bright girl, she was sent by her grieving father to the girls’ school in Fürth, where she lived with her aunt, Berta Fleischmann, whose husband ran the kosher butcher’s in the Hirschenstrasse.

Despite being a widower in his mid-forties, Falk Stern was drafted in June 1915 and served in the infantry in Belgium until his discharge eleven months later. On his return from the front, Paula was summoned back to Leutershausen to keep house for her father and uncle. “I was eighteen,” she later remembered, “and… terribly lonesome in that small town, which had no intellectual [life]… nothing to keep your mind busy. I had to go to the next town to get books from the library.” She already dreamed of going to “faraway places” like Capri, but instead she was confined to the kitchen. “My aunt… taught me how to cook and I hated it. I wanted to read, and when she came I was sitting there and reading instead of doing my work.” 60Escape came when her father married Fanny Walter in April 1918. Not long after that, Paula took a job as an au pair in Halberstadt in North Germany, where she looked after the four children of a wealthy Jewish metal manufacturer. It was not quite Capri, but the family’s summer villa in the Harz Mountains was an improvement over the kitchen in Leutershausen. It was on a visit to her relatives in Fürth that Paula was introduced to the new teacher at her old school. Though Louis Kissinger was fourteen years her elder, they fell in love. In December 1921 they became engaged. Eight months later, on July 28, 1922, they were married.