The values of Harry’s social circle
Most of Harry’s friends were typical German Jews of the educated stratum–students, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and antiquarians who relished books, classical music, and intellectual debate. In politics, except for the ardent Communists Walter and Betty Elberfeld, they sympathized with the SPD. Political interests extended to the children. The youngest Hirschbach, Franz, recalled playing “Reichstag” as a boy in the early 1930s–performing speeches reported in the Berliner Tageblatt to the “applause and jeering” of his elders.42
Most members of the circle were moderate assimilationists. The Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, the largest German Jewish organization, argued (in 1931) that Jews “must place the highest value on humanity as a whole, while at the same time loving the German people and our specific Jewishness.”43 This assimilationist ideal soon proved to be a pipe dream. Stung by the Nazi takeover, the Central Union declared on 23 March 1933: “No body can rob us of our German fatherland…. In that we fight this battle, we carry out a German, not a selfish-Jewish, fight.”44 This was the predominant view of liberal Jews. Peter Gay’s family in Nazi Berlin, for example, thought that “the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany–we were.”45
Individuals in the Gottschalk/Meyer circle varied in their relationship to Judaism. Ernst and Laura Gottschalk kept kosher until World War I made observance difficult, and they did not resume after the war; they sent their sons to religious school and had them bar-mitzvahed, and they observed the Jewish holidays.46 The Freyhans also practiced their religion, to Harry’s disgust, for he had a visceral distaste for any religious observation. Harry described Hans Freyhan as “pretty thick and exceedingly pious, which are doubtless not unconnected,…so god-fearing that when he came home from a holiday recently on a Saturday, he had his brother go to the station for him to carry his suitcase home.”47 Harry’s ignorance left unremarked Hans’s impious willingness to have someone else violate the prohibition against carrying anything on the Sabbath. Ernst Meyer’s sons were bar-mitzvahed, but only because bar mitzvahs were the norm in his circle; he did not object when Rudy declared himself opposed to all religious observance.48 Like Rudy, after his own bar mitzvah Gustav Mayer rejected the Jewish practice in which he had been raised. The Meyers observed Hanukkah in some fashion. When Grete gave Harry a present, she wrote a note: “So that you notice it’s Hanukkah!”49 In 1933, one or two of the younger generation became Zionists. From then on, Zionists and Nazis agreed in one goal: German Jews should move to Israel.
At the far end of the assimilationist spectrum were Rose Hirschbach, her siblings, and her husband, who would have nothing to do with Judaism. Rose and Martin had their four sons baptized Lutheran, and confirmed as well. Rose and Martin wanted their sons to merge totally into “German culture and civilization,” for which Martin had fought in World War I; their Protestant identity “eliminated a major difference between us and our schoolmates.”50 To Hitler, though, “non-Aryan Christians” like the Hirschbachs were Jews.
Despite their mostly casual relation to Judaism, members of the circle had–Harry charged–an “absurd” tendency to view “things from a strictly Jewish center, a sort of Hebraico-Centric theory of the universe.”51 They had company. When, in 1932, the Jewish New Year “happened to coincide with [President Paul von] Hindenburg’s birthday,…all the Berlin Jewish congregations sen[t] hearty congratulations, doubtless not wholly unmindful of the near possibility of having to have Hitler for President.”52 The accelerating tempo of anti-Semitic acts during the year preceding Hitler’s accession to power made the Meyers “apprehensive…. As Herr Meyer one day remarked–‘These are exciting times, would that they were less exciting.’”53 As Chapters 4 and 5 will show, Harry’s friends’ hard-headed realization of the implications of Hitler’s rise to power, coupled with their educational background, saved their lives.
Paul Gottschalk, alias P.G.
Paul Gottschalk’s family and friends felt universal “admiration and love” for him.54 To the young people in his family and his office he was a solicitous but stern mentor; they called him “P.G.,” the abbreviation summing up the half-intimate, half-formal nature of many of his personal relationships. They were “fascinated by his unique and glamorous business”–visits to America were a rarity at the time–and appreciated him as “a cultured and friendly person with many stories about his friends and contacts on both continents.”55 With Paul as the generous host, the family gathered annually to celebrate his birthday; twenty guests attended his fifty-third, in 1933. Harry was grateful for P.G.’s self-assigned role as “guide and confessor.”56 Perhaps Paul recognized a kindred spirit, for as a youth he too had been so shy outside his family that he appeared to be “stupid or mute.”57 Harry could pop in to P.G.’s office at 3a Unter den Linden, just down the street from the university, and get advice or cash, pick up a book, or discuss politics.58
At the end of Paul’s very long life, he was persuaded to write his memoirs.59 He began with a reminiscence of his mother, from whom he “inherited a capacity for vivid fantasy, a quick wit, and perhaps also a great interest in people and their concerns, and if I may say so, the natural gift for gaining the confidence and winning the friendship of people.” This gift was apparent in his relations with librarians and collectors, which were at once professional and social. His formal education ended in 1899, when he passed the Abitur. With a scholarly bent, he chose the antiquarian trade over academia because of the greater chance of success, for most Jewish academics were relegated to the lower ranks.60 For the most part, he acquired on his own the “all-encompassing knowledge” that he thought essential for his chosen profession.61 He was “at heart a pedagogue, with a need to teach all the bright, young, loyal workers he had the knack of finding.”62 In his New York office, even a part-time packer had to read French and German–“somewhat unusual requirements,” recalled Arthur H. Minters, an assistant who became an antiquarian book dealer himself. P.G. lectured his assistants “about the book trade in Europe before both world wars”; subjecting them to a monthly quiz, “he would scold us or box our ears if we answered stupidly. ‘A grown-up must do it!’ he’d say if we called on him for help.” One of his daily habits was looking in the New York Times obits for recently dead collectors whose heirs might be eager to sell.63
During the self-designed study tour to Italy in 1906 that launched his career, P.G. visited museums, libraries, antiquarians, and private collectors. Although only twenty-six, he so enchanted the specialists with whom he talked that they gave him good deals. In Rome the advice of an antiquarian to do business in the United States “struck me like lightening and was decisive for my business and for my life.” On his first American trip later that year, he made cold calls on custodians of major research libraries, persuading them that he could find the rare and out-of-print books that they had hitherto sought in vain. He could, and he did. Beginning in 1907, he issued catalogues listing incunabula and other rare books, runs of European scientific journals, and unpublished manuscripts ranging from holograph scores by famous European composers to Americana by such figures as Franklin and Washington.64 Copiously illustrated, accompanied by scholarly texts, and published privately in limited editions, these catalogues are now themselves antiquarian items. He was well connected throughout Europe. When the philosopher Karl Jaspers traveled in Italy in 1922, P.G.– who knew him through Gustav Mayer, Jaspers’s brother-in-law– arranged for him to meet with the famous philosopher Benedetto Croce.65 He also introduced Harry to Jaspers in Heidelberg. “Too naive to talk to one of Germany’s two leading philosophers,” Harry at least retained “a sort of photo image in my mind.”66
Although P.G.’s life was affected by wars, economic downturns, and the like, his talent for making the best of things gave him success or serenity (and, at times, both). When World War I broke out, three American university libraries asked him to collect war-related materials, which he did even after being drafted; at the