Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (8 page)

If he was the model of open-mindedness, Carl was not endowed with irony, and one is tempted to ascribe his son’s own sense of humor and ironic detachment to his reaction to his father. So, while Carl labored on his career, doted on his wife’s family, and welcomed his children’s own peregrinations, he was unequipped to deal with some of the harshness of life in Weimar Berlin when times got tougher. For one thing, the dream of assimilation and acceptance was not easily defended from resilient anti-Semitism without raising some awkward doubts about the promise of assimilation. And there was plenty of evidence of anti-Semitism all around. Carl Hirschmann sported a scar across his forehead—the legacy of a fencing duel. A fellow student had made an anti-Semitic slur, which led to a fight. Carl wore his scar like a badge of honor, his
Schmiss
a testament to his self-respect. The slights did not go away after the war. But what Carl did—a tactic shared by many others who preferred to avoid challenges to their dreams or the discomforts of racial conflict—was to shut it out. He hushed up signs of intolerance, either to shelter his children or in the hope that time would let it all pass. Or both. In the summertime retreats to the North Sea, Carl would help his children build sand castles. Some of the beachgoers would hoist little makeshift flags—red, black, red and gold—all innocently signifying the party loyalties of the Weimar spectrum. For the Hirschmanns, the flag was black, red, and gold—for the
republic. On one vacation in the early 1930s, the children woke up and returned to the beach to find the flags down, many of the castles wrecked, and swastikas planted on the beach. Carl preferred to move to another beach and quietly enforce a consensus that this was not something to discuss. The summer of 1931 was the last for the German beaches; thereafter, Carl took his family to Holland, Switzerland, or the Dolomites.
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The Hirschmanns lived well, though not opulently or luxuriously, at the cusp of Berlin’s upper-middle class. There was money enough to pay for maids and nannies. The maids lived in the back of the apartment in a small room with a toilet. One of the nannies, Fräulein Wolf, who went by the name Aunt Hete, was responsible for tucking the children into bed each night, “annoying us immeasurably with the phrase she repeated each evening: ‘Closing time at the Bosporus.’ ”
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When Otto Albert was ten years old, a demoiselle came to the house to teach French to the children, and she lived with them for several years. Later, an au pair came from Paris and tutored the children in their teenage years before moving back when the Great Depression deepened and the Hirschmanns had to tighten their belts.
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English may have been a useful language—even in those days—for business, and Carl certainly would have been aware of the doors it might open. But French was the language of high culture. If there was a discussion between Hedda and Carl, the choice of foreign language was incontrovertible.

The apartment on Hohenzollernstrasse was also well apportioned. There was a gramophone and a collection of opera records—themselves a sign that the Hirschmanns were keeping up with the times, although the latest breakthrough, a phonograph equipped with an amplifier (devised in 1925), was beyond their reach; they had to hand crank their music machinery. Music lessons were obligatory: Eva and Ursula learned to play the piano. OA was proud to carry around his impressive cello. There was also money enough to buy art—and to be seen in the right places buying art. They procured a Signac from the Tannhäusers, who became family friends and whose gallery on the ultrafancy Bellevuestrasse shared a block with elegant restaurants, wine stores, and other galleries and was a ten-minute stroll from Hohenzollernstrasse. They also hired painters to make
portraits of family members. The most important, and most prominent, was the portrait of Otto Albert that hung in the living room. And there were the vacations to Pontresina in Switzerland to ski, to the North Sea and Holland for summer beaches. But none of them could be said to have been the highest end: Pontresina did not have St Moritz’s snows; Kampen did not have Westerland’s showy beaches.

Within this context, Otto Albert had a supportive, generally loving, comfortable upbringing. His parents had enough confidence in him to let him take extended vacations with friends. Some excursions were organized by his school. In June 1930, Hedwig had taken Ursula and Eva on vacation to Switzerland. Carl had to stay in Berlin to work. Otto Albert hoisted a backpack—arranged with the help of two maids—over his shoulders and left with friends for the train station for a week’s camping. Carl assured his wife that OA had left with the right kind of undershirt, though he had to lighten his load by taking out a bulky tin of food.
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Six months earlier, OA had gone skiing in Switzerland with a different group of friends. “Don’t be afraid,” he admonished his parents. “Today we went somewhat higher, though not much and the sun burned so much that I do not look so anemic.” The previous night had brought a fresh coat of powdered snow, so the skiing was great; his main attention was focused on the New Year’s celebration. For the costume ball, OA and his friends dressed as girls, with bodice, stockings, and mock dresses and ribbons in their hair. They all danced until two in the morning, “tipsy from champagne and punch.” There was also the occasion for flirting with girls, as well as games involving light kissing. Otto Albert described how the boys and girls lined up in pairs; he was stuck with Frau D, “but actually I would rather have gone with Lolo.” The next day, they all took the day off from the slopes and slept in. A subsequent letter explains how OA did manage to make his way into Lolo’s graces by offering her math tutorials.
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Otto Albert did not feel ashamed to let his family know of his nascent interest in girls. There was the innocent, organized, chaperoned sort, such as the dancing and flirting on vacations. But if he was interested in girls, he was neither anxious to prove himself nor compelled by curiosity. Certainly, he was no match for his cousins the Katzenellenbogens, who had
reputations like their father’s to keep up. OA’s first “love” came via a friend and classmate, Peter Franck. The Francks, like the Hirschmanns, were well-off, assimilated Jews (the mother was Jewish, the father was not), but they lived in the less posh outskirts, near Heerstrasse. Otto Albert would venture out there to spend time with Peter, though increasingly his real reason became clearer and Peter learned to get out of the way and let his sister, Inge, and OA take walks in the neighboring woods. OA confessed to his sister that his affections for Inge were as powerful as hers for a mysterious French teacher with whom Ursula had fallen madly in love. In the end, the friendship with Peter outlasted the love for his sister. Otto Albert does not appear to have had his next amorous involvement until he joined the Socialist Youth movement in 1932, but that relationship was so saturated by the political atmosphere in which both adolescents had plunged themselves that there was little time to devote to romance, even more so as Germany and the Hirschmanns careened toward the upheavals of early 1933.
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For the time being, OA’s “girls” were his sisters. He had an affectionate relationship with both. Eva, five years his junior, was very much the little sister, admiring her “Söhni’s” (her term of endearment) achievements and dependent on him for an alchemy of fun and protection. In the days in which they shared a bedroom, once the lights were out, the leg wrestling would begin, or OA would launch into narratives about history. Eva listened attentively to the exploits of Alexander the Great. She also giggled at jokes such as, “Charlemagne pees in his pants, Pippin the Short washes them” (our first-known of OA’s word games, this one playing with the German
pipi
and Pippin). OA would also grill his little sister on what she’d retained from his nighttime sermons. He also took her bicycling, but they were under strictest orders to push their cycles if they were to cross the busy Tiergartenstrasse, a rule honored only in the breach. Eva would accompany her brother to the park and watch him pop wheelies; they would speed their bicycles over jerry-rigged ramps and play chicken. OA was also a loving tease; on one of his trips, he sent a postcard to his little sister: “Perhaps you would take 5 minutes less to clean your room and write me this time. And make sure you handle my
books well! I talk a lot about you and I mention especially your bad sides—a very rich topic of conversation that lasts for 5 dances, while your good ones would last at most one.” The appetite for mischievous fun was a trait; decades later, Albert would pull pranks on his wife, such as short-sheeting the bed so he could snicker as Sarah wrestled with the linens before a night’s sleep.
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The relationship with Ursula was at once more intimate and more fraught. A year and a half his senior, Ursula felt the pressure of a younger, overachieving sibling; close enough in age to be paired, they were not easily separated, even when Ursula might have wanted some daylight between them. When she was first sent to school, so was her brother, with the argument that he could do whatever she could. If Otto Albert went to a high-end French
Gymnasium
, Ursula’s was more practical and English-oriented. If she excelled at music and art (as, in a sense, she was encouraged to do as a girl in a bourgeois household), OA was the academic. And the signals as to which of these two orientations was the prized one were explicit. His ability to deflect opprobrium was also a source of envy. He rarely got in trouble and could stand up to Mutti; Ursula’s relationship with her mother was often seismic. She never got the freedoms that her brother could take for granted—to travel, to study, to spend time with friends well beyond the neighborhood. She accompanied her mother to Switzerland while her brother went on expeditions with classmates. In penning her memoirs, Ursula made the distinction between the two of them quite stark: OA—the darling, achieving, driven, athletic, agreeable, handsome, celebrated by both parents—was the antithesis to the ill-tempered, combative, frequently ill (prone to fevers, exhaustion, which compelled her mother to subject her to endless tests and exams, often to discover that the spells were related to her emerging menstrual cycle), and less academically inclined Ursula. It seems likely the parents did little to obscure this disparity.
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But sibling rivalry did not stand in the way of a deep and very basic intimacy. They shared each other’s secrets. When Ursula began her furtive, but intense, passions for men—and not a few of them had crowded onto the scene by the time she was seventeen—it was to her brother that she turned as a confidant. OA found himself trying to console his sometimes distraught sister, creating a supportive cocoon to shelter her anguish. When Ursula fell headlong into an obsession with an unavailable man, OA stroked her with his words: “Ursel, oh Ursel, my very, very dear Ursel! How right you were to fall in love with him. How stupid of those fogeyish people who demur at words! Don’t they understand that it is about so, so much more?” He did, however, try to bring her to reason: the man was older, lived far away, and was a devout Catholic: “In the long run he would be unbearable for you,” he warned. “I think that the urge to be a ‘little girl’ has become less pronounced for you [she was seventeen at the time]. And I have to say, don’t start again with an exchange of letters, don’t let him get into the suffering again as before—not out of questions of decency, but rather because he would be talked into it and become
dishonest
.”
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Otto Albert and Ursula, c. 1919.

While the Hirschmanns enjoyed many of the elements of an upper-middle-class standard of living, there was not quite enough money to cover large items that would have represented having made it with surety. They lived at the cusp of the establishment, not in it. Perhaps this is why Hedwig could not dispel her anxiety, especially when she compared herself to other members of her clan and their high lifestyles. There was no automobile at a time when a vehicle was within reach of members of the Hirschmann class and was certainly an icon of arrival for anyone who wanted to join the ranks of the
haute bourgeoisie
. Though the family lived in a good location, they took trams and subways to visit Hedda’s numerous and scattered relatives. Birthdays were, for instance, important gatherings for the extended kin and the Hirschmann children would have been counted among those who would arrive by public transportation. It would seem likely that Hedda winced at the thought of her relations watching her children stepping from a tram.
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More significantly, the Hirschmanns did not own their home; they rented. In the late 1920s, as Carl’s career blossomed, the parents would go apartment hunting. But there was either not enough savings, or the prospect of moving into tighter quarters was a deterrent to leaving their floor on Hohenzollernstrasse. Then, when the Depression hit, financial troubles put an end to the fantasy of home ownership. Otto Albert could recall the winter scene at Pontresina in late 1929, watching the hotel guests interrupt their après-ski dinners to call Berlin to find out the latest casualties on the stock market. Little did he know, his father was one of them.
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Carl had placed most of the family savings in the Ostwerke, which collapsed in the autumn of 1931. A powerful holding company for which Lutz Katzenellenbogen had served as president while overseeing a number of dramatic, if scandalous, buyouts and takeovers in the 1920s, Ostwerke
went down with the financial system. The scandal landed Hedwig’s cousin in prison. Katzenellenbogen came to symbolize the era of speculation and monied frenzy laced with overtones of conspiracies by Jews who peddled themselves as loyal Germans. In a public trial, the courts found him guilty of borrowing money from several banks without disclosing his liabilities and for falsifying the prospectus sent out to investors for one of his major mergers. Tilla, whom Carl had brokered into wedlock with Lutz, smuggled pills to her husband to help him commit suicide (which was also botched).
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