Otto Kahn

Art, Money, and Modern Time

Theresa M. Collins

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781469614595, 9780807826966
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620213
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In the early decades of the twentieth century, almost everyone in modern theater, literature, or film knew of Otto Kahn (1867–1934), and those who read the financial press or followed the news from Wall Street could scarcely have missed his name. A partner at one of America’s premier private banks, he played a leading role in reorganizing the U.S. railroad system and supporting the Allied war effort in World War I. The German-Jewish Kahn was also perhaps the most influential patron of the arts the nation has ever seen: he helped finance the Metropolitan Opera, brought the Ballets Russes to America, and bankrolled such promising young talent as poet Hart Crane, the Provincetown Players, and the editors of the Little Review.

This book is the full-scale biography Kahn has long deserved. Theresa Collins chronicles Kahn’s life and times and reveals his singular place at the intersection of capitalism and modernity. Drawing on research in private correspondence, congressional testimony, and other sources, she paints a fascinating portrait of the figure whose seemingly incongruous identities as benefactor and banker inspired the New York Times to dub him the “Man of Velvet and Steel.”

Chapter One: Foundations

Otto Kahn was hardly one to dwell on the details of his founding years. The few stories that he liked to tell were apportioned revelations, drawn from a handful of nested memories, and presented over and over to feature writers for the newspapers and magazines. Puffed and polished, these shaped the tale of Otto Hermann Kahn, the child who fathered the man of bourgeois respectability. Two lines of a plot intertwined like a double helix to determine how the well-dressed, well-mannered millionaire attained his credentials, comportment, and legitimacy. Along one thread, he was an “aristocrat by birth and breeding,” the son of a prominent banker, “almost predestined to be a banker.”¹ Along the other was his cultural capital. From an endowment jointly bestowed by his family and the city of his birth, Mannheim, Kahn’s youth was steeped in respect for the arts and education. The civilizing edifice of aesthetic culture left him with vivid memories, clearer than those of anything Jewish.

Some of the details did noticeably change. For example, the character modeled upon Kahn in Animal Crackers—the aristocratic Roscoe W. Chandler—is discovered to actually be a rabbi-cantor from the old country (changed to a fish peddler in the film), and he will pay nearly any amount to keep it quiet. The joke, some say, satirized Kahn’s religious ambivalence and assimilative strategies, but it may be emblematic of the opposite. During the 1920s Kahn was gradually revealing more of his Jewish identity than he had in earlier years. All along, however, any claim to categorical identities about his past or present would be complex.

Was he noble or middle class, an artist or a banker? With such hazy boundaries, one could (and society would) switch the variables and ask instead: artist or bourgeois, noble or American, German or Jew? Nor should any of these elements be considered too narrowly, without considering how easily Goethe and Heine translated into English, how Shakespeare came into the German canon, or how swiftly light switched between Rembrandt’s Holy Family and families who owned Rembrandts, or, for that matter, how easily bank notes transformed from one currency into another (through gold). As important, we must also consider how much of the international style was founded upon the twin pillars of German embourgeoisement, Bildung (“how an individual is ‘formed’ or ‘cultivated’ within a social collectivity”) and Sittlichkeit (“proper moral comportment”).² One and all converged in Otto Kahn’s German-Anglo-American synthesis of the emancipated Jew, and it constitutes a weighty cargo.

FAMILY PORTRAITS

Otto Hermann Kahn entered the world on February 12, 1867, the third of five sons and fourth of eight children in an affluent household. All his grandparents were still alive except Michael Benedickt Kahn (1798–1861), his paternal grandfather, who as a young man had started a business in the wholesale trade and manufacture of featherbedding, which was still prospering in 1867. None of Otto Kahn’s versions of the family history mention that, before turning to business, this grandfather had trained to be a rabbi. It is unclear whether Kahn himself knew this about his grandfather, or, if he did, offered some casual remark that became the source of the Roscoe Chandler joke, but it was not the only forgotten or understated piece of Kahn’s pedigree. Turning away from the rabbinate estranged Michael Kahn from the religious members of his family. He overcame the alienation through a good marriage in 1825 to Franziska Bäer (1809–92), the daughter of a popular innkeeper; together they worked to establish their business in the small farming community of Stebbach, forty miles from Mannheim. Otto Kahn later claimed to know little if anything about these grandparents, but chances are good that Franziska Kahn was literate and possessed at least rudimentary skills in arithmetic. She might have helped in weighing, measuring, counting, and bookkeeping. She probably also had domestic help for raising the children.³

The Kahns’ featherbedding business careered through complicated times. Several larger economic factors were conducive to its development, including the piecemeal emancipation of Jews, a widespread emancipation of peasants, and the easing toward free trade among the many German states. Added into the mix was an all-inclusive commercial revolution, just on the cusp of industrialization, which brought improved techniques as well as yields to both land and livestock production, then stimulated the development of roads, harbors, and railways.

All of this disturbed traditional social relations, increasing the ranks of landless peasants in need of work and money, but it also created circumstances that allowed the Kahn firm to specialize without much capitalization. The stuffing and stitching were initially done in their own cottage; as the business grew, they would rely upon the putting-out system—contracting and coordinating the labor of others who worked from their own cottages. Then even after a formal factory was established, most of the work was done by hand, because technologies were not nearly as important as market considerations to the featherbedding industry. It helped that featherbedding was neither a novelty nor newly invented. Whether the merchandise was plain or fancy, handmade or machine-manufactured, mattresses, pillows, and comforters were becoming necessities of modern contentment, both in domestic life and in the military.⁴

A medley of traditions and transitions were further shaping the middle class, including inheritances, dowries, and sons to lead later generations of the firm. The firstborn was not always marked in the cradle as the next head of the firm, nor was every son a good businessman, but having five sons improved Michael and Franziska Kahn’s chances to apprentice some of their progeny in the business and to see at least one or more installed in a leadership role. Law and custom further complicated the pattern of succession, or a family’s transmission of wealth and status. Because estates would be divided, siblings could figure on a fair inheritance, but ultimately a legacy depended upon a father’s will. One’s expectation for a fairly proportioned inheritance reinforced a code of obedience to one’s parents, and seeded some competition among the children. Moreover, it meant a family’s wealth could become diluted as it passed from one generation to the next. Sometimes called the “Buddenbrooks dynamic,” after a theme in Thomas Mann’s epic novel, the phenomenon is referred to in French as “Il est plus facile de faire l’argent que pour le garder” (it’s easier to make money than to keep it), and in the American-tailored tradition, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”⁵—both pointing to a singular pattern, and an undercurrent of anxiety within the newly emerging middle classes. The comparison to Buddenbrooks best fits the Kahns, nonetheless, because it embeds the process in historical circumstances surrounding the revolutions of 1848.

When harvest failures in 1846–47 doubled the price of food, leaving many without the resources to pay their financial obligations, hunger riots and other forms of political unrest erupted. Everyone was affected, but not everyone suffered equally. As labor costs cheapened, the need for cash deepened, and thus the Kahns could procure feathers and labor at lower prices. Being a firm of modest capitalization, and apparently unburdened with debts, mortgages, or rents, their enterprise could withstand the worsening storm and come out better on the other side. Still, whatever steadiness was implied by their business’s survival, the family’s fate was not without danger. When revolutions swept through Europe and energized Germans in March 1848, the Kahns had three sons who were old enough to work in the business. They were also old enough to participate in revolutionary activities, which were seething with a particularly diverse, populist brand of upheaval in southwest Germany, a region already rife with democratic movements as news of revolution in France arrived on the last days of February 1848.

Within one week an assembly convened in Mannheim demanding a bill of rights. Spontaneous mass meetings and insurrections erupted in several cities, with strong popular support throughout the region. Although many expected the coming spring to bring revolution into full bloom, instead the southwest fell under siege with the arrival of Hessian troops until order was restored. Not long after, Germany’s first national parliament convened as the Frankfurt Assembly; yet by autumn, as popular confidence in the assembly diminished, demonstrations resumed and the troops returned—first Prussians, then Hessians to relieve them. Order was again forcibly imposed. Then as soon as the occupying forces withdrew, popular associations mobilized once more, with local militia joining the democrats to establish provisional governments in Karlsruhe and Mannheim. The Prussians came back, engaged in heavy battles, and recaptured Mannheim in June 1849. The rest of the region was suppressed with similar force. These events, Otto Kahn later said, formed an inherited hatred for Prussian militarism, as he was “the son of a man who had fought in the revolution of 1848 against Prussian autocracy.” His father, Bernhard (1827–1905), the eldest son of Michael and Franziska, seems to have been secretary for the Volksvereins Stebbach. Accordingly, he would have petitioned for freedoms of political association, among other liberal causes, and joined the provisional national committee of Volksvereins, a close network of organized democrats whose calls for a popular assembly at Offenburg was a prelude to the May 1849 revolution. Like many of the some 6,000 refugees of the revolution, Bernhard Kahn (1827–1905) was sentenced to death and escaped to America. He joined his younger brother, the middle son, Emil (born 1832), in Albany, New York, and apparently took up business related to their father’s interests.⁶

The brothers were typical of many if not most of the Germans who emigrated to America before 1860. The majority of the 1.5 million German-born immigrants of their generation originated in the rural southern and southwestern German states. They settled in the mid-Atlantic and eastern north-central regions of the United States, often needing charity upon their arrival, then buying cheap farm land when able, and sometimes amassing capital after beginning as peddlers. The Kahn brothers, who arrived with the financial resources to establish themselves in business immediately and settled in urban America, were similar to approximately one-third of German immigrants, who were more likely to be urban dwellers than either Americans as a whole or Germans in their homeland. America’s cities would change in consequence because a large, influential segment of the German American immigrants in the cities were affluent, well-educated liberals who immediately organized economic and cultural communities, establishing schools, clubs, newspapers, hospitals, musical societies, reading rooms, and recreational facilities. While strongest in New York City, these bilingual and German-speaking networks could be found in any city with a newly settled population of German immigrants. Their ties back to Europe were solid as well. German culture stayed dear and it eventually grew nearer, as amnesty was granted for the revolutionaries in their native land. That allowed condemned “Forty-Eighters” to travel between America and Germany for vacations and business, the education of their children, and various family obligations.⁷

It is as likely as not that Bernhard Kahn came to the United States in search of a haven rather than a homeland. He nonetheless became an American citizen in 1854, then took his first trip back to Germany no later than 1860. Whether he intended to visit or knew he would stay, during this visit he met and married Emma Eberstadt (1840–1906) and thereafter remained in Germany. Emil soon repatriated as well. By now, their father’s business had relocated to Mannheim, the commercial center of Baden, where Michael Kahn was granted the rights of citizenship on July 29, 1851, and brought his family to live in April 1854. Two brothers, the second-born son Hermann (b. 1829) and the younger Leopold (b. 1841), remained engaged in their father’s enterprise, which had also established its own factory and taken a leading position in the German featherbed industry. There was one notable setback, however, when a fire in 1858 destroyed the factory, the probable consequences of which were fairly significant. By the time Bernhard came home, his father had decided to rebuild and expand the plant rather than retire and live off his investments. This may have implied that he intended his sons to inherit the business and not merely his fortune, but also that perhaps there was not enough money to simply retire and live as well as the Kahns wanted. In addition, reconstruction and expansion after the fire would have diminished the family’s capital; thus a more intense interest in angling for a legacy was likely in play when Bernhard Kahn and Emma Eberstadt were married.⁸

On the face of it, Emma Eberstadt made a perfectly good bride. She was a lively, pretty, talented woman, holding a cheerful though serious view of life, according to her favorite son. In all likeliness some romance developed between the future husband and wife, yet there was surely more to the courtship than starry-eyed attraction alone. These years saw arranged marriages drift out of style, if not practice; accordingly, family lore was more likely to record the affections than the arrangements when, as occurred often enough, a so-called surprise meeting between a potential couple was deliberately orchestrated by parents. The Kahn-Eberstadt case left a fairly suggestive hint of parental influence because, as family tradition tells it, Emma’s father made Bernhard promise to stay in Mannheim before giving his daughter’s hand. Ferdinand Eberstadt was motivated, they say, by love and parental attachment, yet the Kahns and Eberstadts would both benefit from keeping the couple nearby. The Kahns could tie Bernhard’s impending inheritance to this marriage, which they considered a good one, and keep their eldest son around to care for his mother should she be widowed (which she was in 1861). The Eberstadts, in turn, might have thought the groom’s future more secure if he were to stay in Mannheim. That was not the case when their daughter Elizabeth (“Betty”) Eberstadt (1844–1931) married in 1867. She was allowed to make her married household in London with her husband George Lewis, an eminent English solicitor of Sephardic origin and friend of Edward, Prince of Wales. Another sister, Maria Johanna Eberstadt (1845–?), married in Mannheim in 1862 and emigrated to London. But in 1872, when the youngest Eberstadt sister, Bertha (1850–1913), married Emil Hirsch, a noted Mannheim corn wholesaler, hers seemed to be a match much like that of Bernhard and Emma, in that the Hirschs stayed in Mannheim.

The Kahn-Eberstadt union was itself an interesting alliance of complements rather than equals. Both families were new to Mannheim, but the Eberstadts were from Worms and therefore not as recently provincial as the Kahns, who, unlike the Eberstadts, were also not yet wealthy enough to support their sons in professions other than the family business. Perhaps too much should not be made of those differences, because, with the whole of the new bourgeoisie emerging rapidly, similarities of class, ethnicity, and politics could be more prominent than the differences. Indeed, the two families’ similarities had likely brought them together before the betrothal of their children. Nevertheless, the differences still had an impact for Otto Kahn, whose mother had a more impressive lineage than his father. Emma Eberstadt’s mother, Sarah Zelie Seligmann Eberstadt (1816–85), was the daughter of a merchant, descended from one of the first Jews to be a university-trained physician. Elsewhere in her family tree were the Anspachs, who may have been among the Court Jews, as Jewish financial advisers to the nobility of Central Europe were known; a niece from that family had married into the Parisian Rothschilds, but Sarah Zelie’s own marriage was also one of regional distinction. Her husband, Falck “Ferdinand” Eberstadt (1808–88), came from a wealthy, patrician household, and the Eberstadts were one of the most cultured Jewish families of Worms, the city where they had lived since the seventeenth century.

Ferdinand Eberstadt was a principal in his father’s textile and dry-goods wholesale house, but he was drawn to politics. In March 1849 he became mayor of Worms, perhaps the first Jewish mayor in any German state. He was also a democratic partisan who managed to survive the counterrevolution and served as mayor until 1852, though afterward Eberstadt’s political life in Worms unraveled, presumably as right-wing reaction advanced. Returning to business he quarreled with his brother, then arranged to be bought out of the family firm. By the end of 1857, Ferdinand and Zelie Eberstadt had moved with their ten children to Mannheim, still the center of liberalism in Baden, where they opened a new firm. Their social, cultural, and political connections fast established the Eberstadts as one of the leading Jewish families in Mannheim. Ferdinand’s ongoing political interests, and a financial stake in the local newspaper, Neuen Badischen Landeszeitung, would make it easier for Bernhard Kahn to resume his own political career. In a way, his marriage to Emma Eberstadt gave Bernhard Kahn the best of all benefits possible from the failed revolution. He became a citizen of Mannheim on September 5, 1860, six weeks before his marriage. Nonetheless, whether out of neglect, concern for his political safety, or doubt about his marriage, Bernhard Kahn kept his American citizenship for several more years.⁹

The death of Michael Kahn in 1861 brought the family to another turning point. When the estate was divided, Leopold and Hermann Kahn moved to Frankfurt, where they opened the banking house of Kahn & Co. Bernhard and Emil stayed in Mannheim, with Emil running the featherbedding factory while Bernhard specialized in the family’s latest venture, the banking house of M. Kahn Söhn, established on August 11, 1867, only six months after the birth of Otto Kahn. By 1870 Bernhard Kahn was a Mannheimer of considerable standing, a member of many local organizations, and the owner of an elegant new residence in the stylish section of town. A few years later he became a city councilman, a position that he kept for better than two decades before retiring to a vil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Otto Kahn Art, Money, & Modern Time
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Locating Otto Kahn
• Chapter One: Foundations
• Chapter Two: Metropolitan Scenes in the Harriman Cycle
• Chapter Three: Rupture and Renewal
• Chapter Four: Seniority without Authority
• Chapter Five: Protocol of Patronage
• Chapter Six: Tears and Bears
• Chapter Seven: The Third Act
• Chapter Eight: Endings on the Horizon
• Chapter Nine: Style and Substance
• Chapter Ten: Missing Otto Kahn
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index