Carl Sternheim, and Arnold Zweig, as well as writers with roots in Vienna or Prague like Kafka, Kraus, Roth, and Werfel). Yet, amidst the nativism, militarism, and Christianity-infused nationalism that would carry Germany off into three successive wars of aggression, German Jewish accomplishments touched off resentment. Antisemitism draws strength from stigmatization of the alien “other”; in nineteenth-century Germany, it also fed off a desire to punish Jews for their prosperity and acculturation, regardless of what they might have contributed or overcome.
Kurt’s ancestors on his mother’s side, men like Salomon and Moritz von Haber, traced precisely this kind of bootstrapping but perilous path. The first to settle in Germany were rabbis from Bohemia, Galicia, and Italy. One, who became the chief rabbi of Trier, was also a forebear of the social theorist and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx. During the eighteenth century another Jewish ancestor, a Jesuit-educated doctor named Moses Wolff (unrelated to Kurt’s Protestant, paternal Wolff forebears), served as personal physician to Clemens August and Maximilian Friedrich, two of the Rhineland electors who chose the Holy Roman emperor. Ancestors like Moses Wolff sat on local Jewish boards and councils. At the same time, their prosperity and collections of paintings and books signaled how invested they were in German society and culture.
Yet even the most distinguished German Jews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived precarious lives, as the trials of Salomon and Moritz bear out. And now here was Kurt, on the run, as vulnerable as any von Haber.
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