The death of both duelists set Baden on edge. Three days later, in the aftermath of Ravensburg’s funeral, a procession of mourners made its way along Langestrasse, Karlsruhe’s main east-west thoroughfare. As the funeral train reached the Haber palace, pictured here, and dusk settled over the city, a rumor spread that Moritz himself was watching from an upper window.
At that, the ranks of the mourners dissolved. Students and soldiers led a mob of 150 people that stormed and ransacked the same home Moritz’s father had been chased from during the Hep, Hep riots two dozen years before. “Down with the Jews!” the crowd shouted, and “Tonight we’ll finish the Hep, Hep over there!” Rioters set upon two Jewish-owned businesses nearby, throwing the owners through their shop windows. David Meola, director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama and an expert on the history of the Haber Affair, told me that the attack lasted hours, with soldiers egging on townspeople, who yelled things like “drown them in blood!” The rioting caused tens of thousands of florins in damage, the equivalent of at least several million dollars today. This time the incumbent grand duke supplied no protection. During those intervening years, the status of even Karlsruhe’s most prominent Jews had grown ever more tenuous.
In fact, as the riot raged, Moritz was no longer in the family home. A half hour earlier police had remanded him to Rastatt, south of the city. There he was quickly convicted of inciting the Ravensburg-Werefkin duel and sentenced to fourteen days in prison. As soon as he served his sentence, the authorities deported him to Hesse.
Over the following weeks Sarachaga-Uria vowed to avenge the death of his comrade. He challenged Moritz in an open letter, using language so inflammatory that it made clear he had no misgivings about dueling someone he would call in print ein geborener Israelit, a Jew by blood. Moritz accepted, and on December 14—this time well north of Karlsruhe, near the Hessian village of Roggenheim—my ancestor killed Sarachaga-Uria with his second shot. Afterward Moritz was detained, charged with illegal dueling, and convicted by a Hessian military court, which sentenced him to six months in prison, four of them suspended for good behavior and community service. Upon his release Moritz filed and won libel suits against a Karlsruhe newspaper and a Frankfurt-based journalist, donating the settlement monies to charity.
As it unspooled over those months, the Haber Affair caused a sensation around the continent. Moritz had his sympathizers, especially in the Rhenish press. Many Germans knew of the family’s public spiritedness and Moritz’s own charitable giving, including a large donation to recovery efforts in Hamburg after the city’s fire of 1842. But much of the coverage pandered to the basest instincts of an inflamed population. To most Badeners, the events of late 1843 came down to a simple accounting: on one side, three dead Christians; on the other, one uppity and still-at-liberty Jew.
At the time of the Haber Affair, Baden’s Jews stood on the cusp of emancipation. The legislature of the grand duchy had taken up the issue for a dozen consecutive sessions, and only a few months earlier the parliament of the nearby Prussian Rhineland had voted to grant Jews full civil rights. As Baden celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its constitution, the Jewish-born writer Heinrich Heine was hailing full freedom as “the call of the times.” Yet even though Jews in 1843 made up no more than 1.5 percent of the grand duchy’s population, and perhaps 5 or 6 percent within Karlsruhe’s city limits, Badenese Christians feared Jewish emancipation.
At trial, Moritz’s liberal, Christian lawyer had enumerated the many ways his client had been done wrong. His home had been invaded, his property destroyed, his freedom taken away. Yet because of press censorship, the public could take only some of this into account. Then, upon his release, Moritz was summarily expelled from Baden. All these injustices were visited upon a citizen of the grand duchy—one whose family had been ennobled by the grand duke’s father—just days after Baden celebrated its status as a Rechtsstaat, a government of laws.
In the years afterward, framing of the Haber Affair took on an increasingly antisemitic cast. The publisher of a manifesto that Sarachaga-Uria had written before the second duel, distributed after the Spanish officer’s death, chose to pair the text with an engraving of Sarachaga-Uria alongside Ravensburg and Werefkin over the caption Duell-Opfern (Duel Sacrifices). Popular accounts called Ravensburg a Landeskind, a “child of the nation” who had given his life for the fatherland.
That story line would persist into the next century with the publication in 1926 of the historical novella King Haber. The book doesn’t bother to change the name of its main character, “the banker, Moritz Haber, or to give him his recent title, Baron von Haber.” In it Moritz cuckolds the grand duke, fathers a child with the grand duchess, and meets his comeuppance after a procession of mourners leaving the funeral of a “Baron Raven” spot him on the balcony of his own home and pelt him with rocks. Someone in the crowd finally fires the shot that kills him. The story has such defamatory resonances that in 1947 one of Salomon’s descendants, Willy Model, tried to claw back some of our common ancestor’s reputation with an affidavit sorting out what was hearsay from what was known to have happened.
The Haber Affair foreshadowed atrocities to come. The timing of the publication of King Haber—on the cusp of the Nazis’ seizure of power—helped stoke the antisemitism that Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would step in to exploit. And the episode conformed with Jud Süss, the 1940 film based on an eighteenth-century Jewish court banker who became a recurring figure in Nazi propaganda.
In the anti-Moritz manifesto written before his death in the second duel, Sarachaga-Uria declared that “religion and honor” would prevent Moritz from ever being “true and straight.” Whatever the outcome of the duel, the Badenese officer further proclaimed, it would be “a judgment of God between good and evil, right and wrong.”
After winning his duel with Sarachaga-Uria, Moritz couldn’t resist a triumphant riposte. In January 1844, having served out his sentence in Hesse, he bought space in newspapers around the German states. “So!” read one of his Erklärungen, or declarations. “The highest driver of all human fate has judged according to his wisdom between good and evil, right and wrong.”
David Meola puts it this way in a scholarly article about the Haber Affair: “As victor of the duel, Haber can be seen as having been judged—by God—to be both good and right. Moreover, in the public sphere, Haber would also have the last word, defeating his opponent again posthumously using his adversary’s own words and beliefs.”
For Uncle Moritz, it must have made for the most satisfying touché.
I have few clues to how my ancestors processed the life and trials of Moritz von Haber through the years. Kurt’s grandfather August, the eldest son of Moritz’s sister Henriette von Haber, would go on to handle some of his uncle’s business affairs, so it’s hard to imagine my grandfather not having heard of his notorious forebear. But my father never mentioned Moritz. I learned of him and this entire saga only after arriving in Berlin, from pursuing a throwaway line in a genealogical essay by my aunt Holly, Kurt’s daughter-in-law. She refers to “an internationally known rake, duelist, and adventurer” and suggests that, in his great-great-uncle’s cosmopolitan instincts, generous spirit, nose for commerce, and eye for women, Kurt may have found both inspiration and template.
Kurt and Moritz shared one more thing. Both believed they enjoyed all the rights of a citizen of a constitutional state, only to discover that they didn’t.
The journeys of my exile grandfather and emigrant father stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States, the country that once took them in. Today the German chancellor, not the American president, is welcoming asylum seekers,
