passion with which he would make his way and name and eventually reinvent himself in exile—came from his mother, pictured above.
But the story only begins here. The world into which this fully formed young man was launched would not be kind to Bildungsbürger who shunned the grubbiness of politics. For Germans content to lose themselves in books and art and music, history held out consequences—and left clues to what might be in store.
It’s impossible to fully understand my family without excavating a strange and historically significant series of events that took place in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden in Germany’s southwest, during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Kurt Wolff’s great-great-grandfather Salomon von Haber, pictured overleaf, served three grand dukes of Baden, first as an independent financier and, beginning in 1811, as banker for the grand duchy. By the early nineteenth century, Baden had developed extensive material needs, and Salomon knew the levers to pull to pay for them. If the state needed tack for cavalry horses or satin for ladies’ dresses, “court Jews” called on trusted co-religionists around Europe to move gold or float loans. At the same time, Salomon was active in Karlsruhe’s Jewish community, advocating for such reforms as a modernized liturgy and worship in German rather than Hebrew. With Grand Duke Louis I taking his cues from the Habsburgs’ Edict of Toleration, my ancestor the Hofbankier seemed safe and content in his identity as both a member of the elite and a practicing German Jew.
But in 1819 antisemitic riots broke out among university students in the Bavarian city of Würzburg and soon spread across Germany. Mobs of citizens, many of them members of the educated middle class, chanted Hep, hep, Jude verreck! (Death to the Jews!) as they trashed shops and homes and chased Jewish citizens into the countryside. In Baden, even the grand duke’s court banker wasn’t safe. On the night of August 27, a mob gathered outside the Haber palace, Salomon’s home across Marktplatz from Karlsruhe’s main synagogue, pelting it with rocks and chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Escorted by a detachment of bodyguards supplied by the grand duke, Salomon fled to safety in the town of Steinach, sixty miles south.
A Jewish-born Berliner named Ludwig Robert, a playwright and recent convert to Christianity who happened to be in Karlsruhe visiting his fiancée, witnessed the riot and its aftermath: troops on horseback patrolling rubble-strewn streets; placards that read DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO THE JEWS; townspeople not just laughing at the spectacle but grumbling that the commandant had shut down the city’s taverns to quell the unrest. This was antisemitism as festival. The emancipation of Jews within the German Confederation, decreed by Prussia seven years earlier, meant little, a disgusted Robert wrote to his sister in Berlin: “How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice—not to mention their love of humanity—is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers.”
It took days to restore order, which came only after the grand duke sent cannons into the streets. In place of incendiary posters, new ones appeared: EMPERORS, KINGS, DUKES, BEGGARS, CATHOLICS, AND JEWS ARE ALL HUMAN AND AS SUCH OUR EQUALS. In a carriage pulled by six horses, Louis I personally escorted Salomon back from Steinach before making a show of solidarity by temporarily moving into the Haber palace.
Louis I so appreciated Haber’s work on behalf of the grand duchy that in 1829, a year before his own death and two years before Salomon’s, he bestowed on him the title that permitted the family to use the noble “von.” The von Habers had done much to earn the honor. They had developed Baden’s three largest industrial sites—a sugar factory, a cotton mill, and a machine works that built railway locomotives. After Salomon’s death, two of his sons, Louis and Jourdan, took charge of those enterprises, and Louis assumed his father’s role as court banker.
Even as these two von Haber sons remained Jewish, their older brother, Model (Moritz) von Haber, pictured here, had long since converted. In 1819, at twenty-two, he married the daughter of a Parisian banker in a Catholic ceremony and over the following two decades lived a life of social prominence in Paris and London. With the help of agents around the continent, Moritz tended to a portfolio of interests, including mining enterprises in France and Portugal. He also handled the financial affairs of both the French king Charles X and Don Carlos, the Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne.
Sometime in the late 1830s, Moritz had a run-in that touched off what would come to be known throughout Europe as the Haber Affair. The story goes that an English officer named George Hawkins was carrying documents from Spain to England when French authorities with Carlist sympathies detained him. Hawkins suspected Moritz of engineering his arrest and challenged him to a duel. Insisting that the Englishman lacked any standing to do so, Moritz sloughed Hawkins off.
Around the same time, after two decades of consorting with nobility around Europe, Moritz returned to Karlsruhe with the swagger of a man of the world. Thanks to the marriages of his brothers Louis and Jourdan, the prodigal son now had connections to the Rothschild banking family, and he took to describing himself as “a man of private means.” Moritz became a regular at the court of Sophie, the Swedish-born grand duchess of Baden, who shared his worldly outlook and high-spirited nature. Soon gossips had Moritz trysting with the grand duchess at Schloss Favorite, the royal hunting lodge south of the city, and eventually pegged him as father of her youngest daughter, Princess Cäcilie. Officers and courtiers around the ducal palace—to say nothing of Sophie’s husband, Leopold, Louis I’s son and the new grand duke—disapproved of this interloper and the loose talk he was touching off.
At one point Moritz’s old nemesis George Hawkins turned up in Karlsruhe looking for him. Hawkins died before he could get satisfaction in their dispute, but in 1843, Julius Göler von Ravensburg, a Badenese army officer who had sided with Hawkins, decided to take up the late English officer’s cause. He called Moritz ein Hundsfott—a scoundrel. Moritz refused to take the bait and challenge Ravensburg to a duel, and there matters might have ended. But soon the social season in the spa town of Baden-Baden was in full swing, and it seems that Moritz had been dropped from the guest list for one of the fancy balls on the calendar. When he pressed social arbiters for an explanation, Moritz was told that he wasn’t “a man of honor” because he had let a slur go unanswered—at which point Moritz concluded he had no choice but to take Ravensburg on.
In Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, a man of rank or social standing who had been wronged didn’t seek redress through the police or the courts. He insisted instead on an engagement with deadly weapons under prescribed rules. If you had been insulted and didn’t demand a duel, you forfeited your right to associate with people of good repute. For Jews, matters were more complicated; it wasn’t unusual for a German Jewish university student with pistoling skills, slighted by some antisemitic remark, to challenge the offender—but this only touched off a movement among non-Jewish fraternities at German universities to declare Jews categorically “unworthy of satisfaction.” In 1843, such was the disposition, at first, of Moritz’s challenge to Ravensburg: a court of honor declared Moritz too disreputable to be party to a duel—he wasn’t, as the Germans would say, satisfaktionsfähig. And that appeared to be that.
But the protocol of dueling held that each principal nominate a “second,” someone to hammer out logistics and act as a go-between. As his second, Moritz had selected a Russian officer named Mikhail von Werefkin. Ravensburg’s chosen second, a Spanish-born officer of the Baden court, Georg von Sarachaga-Uria, didn’t simply reiterate to Werefkin his patron’s refusal to duel—he also joined Ravensburg to assault the Russian on a Karlsruhe street.
As a result of that incident, Werefkin and Ravensburg hastily agreed to duel each other at a riflery range in the Forchheimer forest south of the city. There, on September 2, Werefkin mortally wounded Ravensburg
