The Red Countess Helene von Racowitza: From
the Promise of Emancipation to Suicide in 1911
Forthcoming in a volume on the 200th anniversary of the 1812 Edict in Prussia,
edited by Dr. Irene Diekman of the Moses Mendelssohn Center, University of
Potsdam, Germany, to be published by the Olms Verlag.
Deborah Hertz
University of California at San Diego
I
In the first page of her memoir, published two years before her
death in 1911, Helene von Racowitza warned her readers that her memories
are intended for an audience of “emancipated people.” She explains that
those who are emancipated have “reached the pinnacle which stands above all
conventions, [and] look forward to the time when each one will be free to form
his own life according to his individuality, untrammeled by social or family
prejudices.”1 In a word, Racowitza expects personal emancipation from her
readers. In this article I explore the life of Racowitza, whose peers called her
“the Red Countess, and the “Amazon of the Drawing Room.”2
Her public
persona may have been aristocratic, but the fact was that by descent Helene
1 Princess Helene von Racowitza, An Autobiography (New York, 1911), at 3. In
German, see Von Anderen und mir: Erinnerungen aller Art (Berlin, 1909). See also her memoir
volume Meine Beziehung zu Ferdinand Lassalle (Breslau, 1879).
2 For a contemporary usage of the term to refer to her, see Stephen Bonsall, “Death
Ends the Strange Career of the ‘Red Countess,’” New York Times (October 8, 1911). The label
“red countess” has also been used as a nickname for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Katrinka
Andrässy Karolyi, and Marion Dönhoff, and Ferdinand Lassalle’s intimate friend Sophie von
Hatzfeldt. The “Amazon” label is mentioned by Helene herself in her Autobiography at 227.
1
von Racowitza was half-Jewish, and, in a magnificent irony, she was the greatgranddaughter of the maskilic writer Saul Ascher. For Ascher, emancipation
meant Jewish equality, a struggle which looked stalled and embattled when he
died in 1822. For his great-granddaughter Helene, emancipation meant
freedom from her aristocratic family, emancipation meant becoming an
actress or a physician or a writer, emancipation meant the right to enjoy love in
and out of conventional marriage. Explaining how it was that Ascher’s greatgranddaughter enjoyed the privilege of rebelling against an aristocratic family is
the aim of this article.
The life narrative of Racowitza helps us understand how, only
three generations after Saul Ascher’s time, Jews could not just dress, speak
and act like Christians, not just convert to officially become Christians, but
also be welcomed into noble families and raise children not seen as Jewish by
their contemporaries. Hers was certainly not a typical pathway, to be sure.
Still, explaining the twists and turns of Helene von Racowitza’s heritage and
her complex social position expands our understanding of Jewish history in
the century after the Edict of Emancipation in 1812.
Helene von Racowitza is at best a shadowy figure to students of
nineteenth-century German history. If she is known at all, it is because of her
role in the death of the socialist intellectual Ferdinand Lassalle. When he was
39 and she was 21, in 1864, Ferdinand and Helene fell in love and wished to
marry. In a fury because her parents refused to accept him as an acceptable
husband for their daughter, Ferdinand challenged Helene’s father to a duel.
2
Three days later he was dead of the wounds he suffered from the pistol of his
opponent, a great loss to the socialist movement.3 Helene went on to marry
three husbands, attain some success as an actress, translator and writer, as
she wandered from Munich to Vienna to St. Petersburg to New York City. One
of her acquaintances remarked that she had known “intimately” an entire
“forest of celebrities.”4
In 1911, she was back in Munich, in poverty and
mourning the very recent death of her third husband Serge von Schewitsch,
and she took her own life.5
The social world of Helene von Racowitza recalls the mixed society
of the Berlin salons of the old regime, frequented so often by Jews and nobles.
Hannah Arendt argued that the salons and the scandalous intermarriages of
several salon women were made possible by economic and status exchanges
between wealthy Jews and down-at-their-heels aristocrats.6 Arendt argued
that the nobility was the only class into which the wealthy Jewish elite ever
truly entered.
Our exploration of Helene’s society suggests that bonds
between nobles and Jews lasted far into the nineteenth century, and that
Berlin was not the only city where we find noble-Jewish mingling.
Helene was
The major biographies of Lassalle are: Eduard Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle as
a Social Reformer (London, 1893; rpnt. Greenwood, Connecticut, 1969); Hermann Oncken,
Lassalle (New York, 1971); Schlomo Na’aman, Ferdinand Lassalle: Deutscher und Jude
(Hannover, 1968); David Footman, Ferdinand Lassalle: Romantic Revolutionary (New Haven,
1947); Georg Brandes, Ferdinand Lassalle (London, 1911; rpnt. New York, 1968); and most
recently, Hans Peter Bleuel, Ferdinand Lassalle (Munich, 1979). It is rare for historians to
argue that his death was not a loss for the socialist movement; for a very different view of his
legacy, see the 1980 play by Christoph Hein called Lassalle fragt Herrn Herbert nach Sonja.
4
See James Gibbons Huneker, Steeplejack , Volume Two (New York, 1920), at 28.
5
For a contemporary obituary, see Stephen Bonsall, “Death Ends the Strange
Career of the ‘Red Countess,’” New York Times (October 8, 1911).
6
The current edition in English is: Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York, 2009).
3
3
raised in this ambience, and she found parallel social worlds wherever she
wandered. After Lassalle died in the 1864 duel, she gravitated to leftists of one
sort or another. And in these circles the conversations were far different from
the topics of discourse in the salons of the old regime. Yet we note that the
radical circles, like the salons, often attracted Jews and nobles.7
From the French Revolution all the way to the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917, from Paris to Berlin to St. Petersburg, we find many nobles
drawn to left movements. The names of Jenny von Westphalen Marx,
Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt, Malvyda von Meysenbug, Bettina von Arnim,
Olympe de Gouge, Leo Tolstoy, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Alexander
Herzen and Countess Bertha von Suttner are among the most famous
examples. The noble activists often lent their fortunes, their homes, their
social networks, and their lawyers to the cause. The noble activists often fell in
love with their less well-born comrades, creating some odd couples. But let us
now move directly into the life tale of Helene von Racowitza, tossed as she was
between classes, religions, husbands, occupations, cities and political causes.
II
Helene’s great-grandfather Saul provided a very impressive
legacy. His writing and publishing were bold and iconoclastic in a setting
7
To assemble precise social history details on not just the old regime
salons but also nineteenth-century salons, see Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Die Berliner Salons
(Berlin and New York, 2000) and her Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New
York, 1989), as well as the museum catalogue, Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of
Conversation, edited by Emily Bilski and Emily Braun (New Haven, 2005).
4
where Jewish emancipation was a volatile issue. Just how controversial Saul
Ascher was in his lifetime is illuminated by the fate of one of his books at the
Wartburg Festival in October of 1817.
The festival attracted over 500
students, who all climbed the Wartburg mountain, where Martin Luther
resided while he translated the New Testament from Latin to German three
centuries before. The date was a double anniversary, since it was also four
years since the victorious German battle against the French at Leipzig in
October of 1813.8
At the festival, the young radicals, many of whom had been soldiers
fighting the French in the War of Liberation, sang Protestant songs and
listened to political speeches around a bonfire. Into the fire they threw a
corporal’s cane, a wig pigtail, a copy of the Napoleonic Code, and a copy of Saul
Ascher’s recently published book, called Germanomania.9 Indeed, Ascher’s
nemesis, Turmvater Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the iconoclastic founder of the
patriotic gymnastics movement, was the most prominent organizer of the
Festival.10 Although for the last two centuries Ascher’s work has been utterly
See Deborah Hertz, Wie Juden Deutsche Wurden: Die Welt jüdische Konvertiten vom
17. Bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2007, 203-204.
9 Germanomanie is included in the collection by Saul Ascher, edited by Peter Hacks,
Vier Flugschriften (Berlin, 1991). For Ascher’s own report on the Wartburg Festival, see his Die
Wartburgs-Feier (Leipzig, 1918). See also the new complete editions of his work, edited by
Renate Best (Köln, 2010) and by André Thiele (Mainz, 2011). For commentary in English, see
Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, 2002), as well as the
essay on Ascher in Walter Grab, Radikale Lebensläufe (Berlin, 1980).
10
For further research on Jahn, see Günther Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn:
Volkserzieher und Vorkämpfer für Deutschlands Einigung (Göttingen, 1992); the bibliography
collection edited by Peter Rohrlach, et al. (Berlin, 1978), and the biography by Franz Wilhelm
Beck (Frankfurt, 1952). See also Marco Puschner, Antisemitismus im Kontext der politischen
Romantik (Tübingen, 2008). For an interpretation of these developments from the persective of
gender, see Karen Hagemann, “Military, War, and the Mainstreams,” Gendering Modern
German History: Rewriting Historiography (New York and Oxford, 2007), 63-85 and her
8
5
obscure, in recent years his publications are receiving new attention and
appearing again in print. In a fascinating development, intellectuals in the
German Democratic Republic brought wider attention to Ascher as a
prophetic voice from the era. In the early 1990s the DDR author Peter Hacks
took up the cause of Ascher. He argued in his 1991 essay that Johann Fichte,
Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn had been mistakenly celebrated
as patriotic heroes in the historiography written by DDR historians. Hacks
lavished praise on Saul Ascher because his writings provide vivid testimony to
the antisemitic stream of early German nationalism.11
At the time of the Festival, Ascher was already 50, and was the
author of 16 books, including several novels, five translations, and scores of
articles and leaflets, often published under pseudonyms. He had been born
into a wealthy Berlin Jewish family, had married well, and for decades worked
as a publisher and bookseller. In his first years he concentrated on Jewish
themes, but soon enough turned to analysis of contemporary politics. He
tackled the most controversial topics imaginable, and his views were utterly
idiosyncratic for the time. Unlike many other intellectuals who turned
against Napoleon and the French Revolution after Germanic lands were
invaded in 1792, Ascher remained loyal to the Napoleonic program.
‘Mannlicher Muth und teutsche Ehre:’ Nation, Militär, und Geschlecht zur Zeit der
Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002).
11
See the first volume in the three-volume collection edited by Peter Hacks, Ascher
gegen Jahn: Ein Freiheitskrieg, Three Volumes (Berlin, 1991). For background on the
reputation of Peter Hacks today, see “In Berlin, A Peter Hacks Renaissance,” New Yorker
(November 9, 2009). Of great relevance is the campaign at the University of Greifswald to
remove the name of Ernst Moritz Arndt from the university name, the campaign “Uni ohne
Arndt.” See “Immer mit dem Finger in die Wunde---Sebastian Jabbusch verlässt Greifswald,”
on the internet site webMoritz.de (May 24, 2010).
6
Ascher was brave enough to defend French values at a time
when early German nationalists were struggling to rid their lands of foreign
domination and culture. During and after the French occupation of German
towns and states, contemporaries often lamented that Napoleon and his local
German supporters had legislated improvements in Jewish civic status
without authentic support from local populations. Many radicals could not
sustain admiration of values identified as French with the new nationalism
that Jahn and his followers created. Nationalists such as Fichte, who had once
been secular and left-wing at the time of the French Revolution, turned against
their former views and instead integrated Christian values, representations,
songs and symbols into nationalist rituals. For myriad reasons still not well
understood, hostility to Jewish emancipation entered the nationalist program
in this setting. Ascher’s writings provide eloquent contemporary witness to the
view that the nationalism born in the Napoleonic era was “racist and antiSemitic from the very beginning.”
12
Ascher died a neglected figure in his own time. Alas, the
younger Jewish intellectuals who followed him in the next generation might
have been expected to take up his causes, but few did. The glamorous Jewish
and ex-Jewish celebrities who came to extraordinary prominence in the middle
decades of the nineteenth century, including Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne,
Eduard Gans and Karl Marx, definitely did not continue Ascher’s battle to
This claim was penned by Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), at 369. For further background, see George Mosse, Nationalization
of the Masses (New York, 1975).
12
7
include Jewish emancipation in the nationalist program. Indeed, the more
successful former Jews tended to ignore the hostility to Jews which emerged
among left-wing patriots in the early decades of nationalist activism.
These
brilliant and very public intellectual stars were known to be Jewish by their
friends and their many enemies. But the truth is that because of a toxic stew
of family tensions, occupational barriers and the repression of reform
Judaism, the best and the brightest intellects of the era often departed Jewish
families and Jewish practice and indeed any formal association with Judaism.
This was the path chosen by Ascher’s descendants, to whose fates we now
return.
III
When Ascher died at 55 in 1822, Prussian Jewish policy was at a
turning point. The Edict of Emancipation was only a decade old, but already
its terms were being retracted in letter and in spirit. To begin with,
critics at the time and later complained that unlike the Emancipation of
French Jewry legislated in 1791 and 1792, the premise of the Prussian Edict
was that equality would have to be earned. The existential spirit of the Edict
was that the state would encourage and reward religious reform within
Judaism as a kind of preparation for full emancipation.13 In the years after
See Herbert Strauss, “Pre-Emancipation Prussian Policies towards Jews
1815-1847,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Volume 11 (1966) and for a more recent perspective,
Robert Liberles, “Was there a Jewish Movement for Emancipation in Germany?” Leo Baeck
Institute Year Book Volume 31 (1986), 35-49.
13
8
his death in 1822, Prussian officials turned against the emerging trend of
alternative reform services held in the home of Amalia and Jacob Herz Beer.
Ironically enough, the push to shut down theses services was encouraged by
the traditionalist rabbis who militantly opposed any change in ritual. The
consequence of the repression of reform, at least in Berlin, was that more Jews
chose baptism in the middle decades of the baptism.14 That conversion rather
than reform would be the functional version of emancipation allowed in midnineteenth century Prussia was a very serious turn of events.
We return to Helene’s ancestry to see these trends illuminated
by her own history. Her great-grandfather Saul Ascher and his wife Rachel
Reichel Spanier had one child, called Wilhelmina, born in 1795. In 1815,
when she was 20, Minna, as she was called by her friends and family, married
very well indeed, to Joseph Wolff, son of a wealthy family of wool
manufacturers.15 Wilhelmine and Joseph had six children, and their only
daughter was Franziska, Helene’s mother, born in 1819. Franziska converted
in 1841, when she married the historian and statesman Wilhelm von Dönniges.
That very year Wilhelm, then 27, had just been appointed a professor of
political theory at the University of Berlin. He had been born into a Junker
family down on their luck, and was a brilliant historian of medieval Hapsburg
history trained by the preeminent historian Leopold von Ranke.16
See Hertz, Wie Juden Deutsche Wurden, 249-260.
Joseph Wolff was born in 1792, and he should not be confused with the
contemporary author Sabattia Joseph Wolff, 1756-1832.
16
On Wilhelm von Dönniges, see the article on him in the Allgemeine Deutsche
Bibliographie, Volume Five (Leipzig, 1877), 339-341.
14
15
9
Six years after their marriage, in 1847, when Helene was
still an infant, Wilhelm took up a position as a tutor to Crown Prince
Maximillian of Bavaria. When Maximillian succeeded King Ludwig a year
later, in 1848, Wilhelm became a high official in King Maximillian’s close circle,
and was soon appointed to the diplomatic service of Bavaria. When Helene
was 12, in 1862, her family moved to Geneva, where her father served as the
Bavarian Ambassador. It was in these years that Helene also began to
spend quite a bit of time living with her Grandmother Minna back in Berlin.
In her memoir, Helene called her grandmother a well-educated aesthetician,
which may well have meant a salonière. 17 In the same passage, Helene
actually openly confessed to her Jewish heritage, when she noted that “my
mother belonged to one of the old and highly cultured Jewish families in
Berlin.” She added that “my family was as proud as any noble one of its pure
Semitic blood.”18 Helene’s 1910 description of her family’s pride in their
Jewish “blood” seems inconsistent with the actual history of the family, as
each generation departured further and further from Jewish practice and
identity. We must wonder whether she penned these lines when she was in
17 Further research into Minna Wolff’s social life would clarify how mixed her
friends were, while she and her husband remained Jewish. Among her close friends were the
Baron Emanuel Karl Heinrich von Korff, who was married to Blanka Meyerbeer, the daughter
of Giacomo Meyerbeer; Karl Christian Hierzenmenzel and Aurel von Holthoff. Since it was
through her grandmother’s friends that Helene was introduced to Ferdinand Lassalle, yet her
family considered him an unacceptable marriage partner, there was an obvious slippage
between the social world of Grandmother Minna in Berlin and the marriage eligibility
requirements of Franziska and Wilhelm von Dönniges.
18
Racowitza, Autobiography, 7.
10
her middle age, but might not have made such a confession at an earlier time
when she sought to hide her Jewish origins.
In her memoir Helene remembered her parents as having been
very much in love and happy in their Munich and their Geneva years.
Franziska led a kind of salon and was known for her social charisma. From
afar it may look as if Franziska and Wilhelm an utterly charmed life. But up
close, the edifice of their aristocratic position was actually somewhat shaky. As
a Protestant in a Catholic land, married to a wife of Jewish descent, his
position was always less than secure.19 The sexual norms of the court society
in which Helene came of age were exceedingly permissive. When she was 12,
her parents arranged her engagement to an older Italian man, but Helene was
vehemently opposed to the marriage. Indeed she later claimed that the forced
engagement was simply a ploy so that her mother could enjoy a flirtation with
her intended groom.20 In the judgment of one chronicler of the family history,
in this marriage scheme Helene’s parents were actually “selling” her to the
older Italian.21 Helene’s grandmother back in Berlin argued to her daughter
Franziska that the engagement should be cancelled, which it was.
It was in 1862, during one of her visits to Grandmother Minna in
Berlin, that Helene met Friedrich Lassalle. Ferdinand Lassalle was quite the
unusual and very notorious socialist intellect in the German states. Two years
19
Further research could clarify how widely Franziska von Dönniges’ Jewish origins
were known at the time. Helene does not discuss this theme in her memoir.
20
See Racowitza, Autobiography, at page.
21
This is the judgment of Schlomo Na’aman, Ferdinand Lassalle: Deutscher und
Jude (Hanover, 1968). [need page]
11
after that first acquaintance, Helene and Ferdinand fell in love, after Helene
contrived a meeting with him in Geneva.
By then he was 39 years old, a self-
taught lawyer and published scholar of Greek philosophy. During the
previous year, Lassalle had become the dynamic leader of the Allgemeiner
deutsche Arbeiterverein, called the ADAV, the first workers’ political party in
Europe.22 His appearances at rallies across Germany had been wildly
successful. Indeed historians today judge him to have been “a charismatic
mass orator, probably the first in Prussian history.”23 At the juncture when
they met in Geneva, Lassalle was at the height of his considerable powers.
Indeed, during the year before his death his plans to organize a worker’s party
with state support caught the attention of the new Prussian Chancellor, Otto
von Bismarck. Lassalle and Bismarck met for several productive meetings in
the spring of 1863.24
Ferdinand Lassalle fit precisely the qualities of a Trotzjude. This
label describes someone who remains Jewish because they reject the hypocrisy
of conversion, not because they have a dedication to Jewish practices,
identities, or causes.25 Ferdinand Lassalle was never active in any Jewish
institutions, nor did he make an intellectual contribution to Jewish culture.
22
See Robert Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International
1864-1872 (Cambridge, England, 1965); Detlef Lehnart, Sozialdemokratie zwischen
Protestbewegung und Regierungspartei 1848-1983 (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).
23
Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (New York, 2011), at 203.
24
A good summary of the Lassalle meetings with Bismarck can be found in
Steinberg, Bismarck, 199-207. For a volume written at the end of the nineteenth century
featuring Lassalle, see William H Dawson, German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle: A
Biographical History of German Socialist Movements During This Century (London, 1899).
25
For an example of the use of the term in a recent scholarly work, see Karlheinz
Schneider, Judentum und Modernisierung: Ein Deutsch-amerikanischer Vergleich 1870-1920
(Frankfurt, 2005O, at 40.
12
Like his on-again-off-again friend Karl Marx, in his letters and in his diary, he
could be quite vicious about other Jews.26 Yet unlike many of his generation
and their older cohort, Lassalle’s parents never baptized him as a child, nor did
he ever convert as a teen or an adult to become a Lutheran. Baptism often
seemed a reasonable price to pay to become a professor, a lawyer, a civil official
or to marry a Christian in this setting. To refuse baptism on principle, as
Lassalle claimed he was doing, it was useful to enjoy lavish financial resources,
which he did. Certainly his claim that it was against socialist principles to
convert because socialists never gave in to hypocrisy was not a view shared to
all socialists of Jewish origins in his day or since.27
Ferdinand’s family history contains many fascinating episodes
which illuminate the tensions inside the family about remaining Jewish in their
setting. Ferdinand’s sister Rieckchen married an ambitious cousin, Ferdinand
Friedländer, who subsequently was ennobled and became Ritter Ferdinand von
Friedland. Friedland was a successful entrepreneur, a pioneer in providing gas
used for street lamps in Prague and Breslau. Eventually his father-in-law
Heyman Lasal and Ferdinand too became investors in the Breslau gas works.
In Prague, the von Friedland couple made lavish donations to high culture and
26
For discussion on this theme, see the chapter on Lassalle in Robert Wistrich,
Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (London, 1976); Georg Brandes, Lassalle (Berlin,
1881) [need to clarify whether this is the same book in German of the English-language
biography by Brandes noted in footnote 3 above.] For fascinating interpretations of the parallel
issue in the Jewish identity of Karl Marx, see Frank Manuel, A Requiem for Karl Marx
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995).
27
See Shlomo Na’aman, Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen
Arbeiterbewegung 1848-1918 (Tel Aviv, 1977).
13
seem to have tried to pass themselves as Christians to their new friends.28 A
revealing episode shows how his father viewed the act of hiding one’s Jewish
origins. One night in 1853, Ferdinand’s father Heyman Lasal was visiting
from Breslau. As a guest at a dinner party at their Prague home, in front of all
the guests, he declared that Riekchen and Ferdinand Friedland were Jewish.
His words that evening were “I will not purchase by deceit the honor of dining
with you.”29 In other words, he “outed” his own daughter in her own home.
Before he met Helene in 1862, Ferdinand had certainly enjoyed a
lively romantic life. He usually chose women with a noble heritage, who seem
to have welcomed him into their beds. His deepest personal relationship was
with Sophie von Hatzfeldt, which began back in 1846, when Ferdinand was
21. Since they lived in the same home [in Dusseldorf] for several years, gossips
at the time presumed they were lovers. To this day, the precise details of their
physical relationship remain in dispute.30 The status, financial, personal and
political exchanges between Sophie and Ferdinand were immensely
complicated. The project that initially brought them together was his legal
assistance in her eight year struggle to win a divorce from her husband, Count
blank von Hatzfeldt, a blank describe him, who [for what reasons] refused to
grant Sophie a formal divorce.31 Sophie introduced Ferdinand to many well-
28
For the relevant letters, see Eduard Bernstein, Intime Briefe Ferdinand Lassalles
an Eltern und Schwester (Berlin, 1905; rpnt. Bremen, 2012).
29
This quote is cited in Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (New York and
London, 1898), at page.
30 For a sharp critique of how contemporaries and other biographers assumed
physical details without good evidence, see Bleuel, Lassalle, at page.
31 For recent research on Sophie von Hatzfeldt, see Helmut Hirsch, Sophie von
Hatzfeldt (Düsseldorf, 1981) and Christiane Kling-Mathey, Gräfin Hatzfeldt (Bonn, 1989). For
14
born friends, and gave him political advice and the aura of her noble status.
Indeed possessing noble status and publicly fighting against its abuses seems
to have been a familiar combination for Lassalle. Relying on his legal pleas
both written and oral he succeeded in negotiating her divorce, and in the
settlement she agreed to pay him a lavish yearly allotment of 4000 talers. But
before 1854, when the divorce was finalized, it was Ferdinand’s father and
brother-in-law who were loaning Sophie needed funds. He also nurtured her
intellectual and political talents and she became an activist in her own right.
Even after the intensity of their personal relationship became less intense,
Sophie remained involved as an advisor and maternal figure for Ferdinand.
From the beginning, Helene’s parents in Geneva ruled Lassalle
out as a possible husband. His various defects included his public Jewish
identity and his relationship with Countess von Hatzfeldt. Understandably,
they were not at all pleased with his spectacular success as a socialist
organizer. Moreover, Helene’s sister Margarethe had just become engaged to
Count Eugen von Keyserling, and a marriage with Lassalle might have caused
him to break off that engagement. Her brothers worried that if she married
Lassalle they could never become officers. We need to grasp the very real
consequences of a noble family accepting a Jewish son-in-law, perhaps
especially because Franziska von Dönniges was of Jewish heritage and indeed
her children were from the Jewish perspective half-Jewish themselves.
an older assessment, see Gustav Mayer, “Grafin Sophie von Hatzfeldt…[get rest of article title],”
Historische Zeitschrift 34, Heft 1 (1926), 17-56.
15
If Lassalle had not been so proud, he and Helene could have
eloped immediately, before she even presented him to her parents as a suitor.
But he found elopement humiliating, worried about the consequences for his
political career, and was confident that soon enough he could charm her
father. During the month of August, letters were written, hidden, and burned
as Helene, her parents, Ferdinand and a large cast of characters debated over
her fate. To get to the bottom of Lassalle’s humiliation that summer, we must
contrast how Lassalle saw himself as a potential husband for Helene and how
her family saw him.
From afar Lassalle looks like an acceptable match for the
von Dönniges clan. In Berlin he was a popular host with many well-born
friends. Indeed as Friedrich Engels observed, Lassalle “had a mania for forcing
his way into distinguished circles.”32 For the eight years before 1864, he had
been enjoying an enviable standard of living in his [Bellevues strasse] home in
Berlin.
A much more likely barrier was his open Jewish persona. The extant
biographies and memoirs are more than elusive about the touchy issue of who
knew what when about Helene’s half-Jewish lineage. It is just about
impossible for the contemporary observer to imagine that Ferdinand did not
know that Helene was half-Jewish by descent. Her grandmother, with whom
she was living when they met in Berlin in 1862, was a well-known wealthy
Jewish personality in Berlin. Alas, the published sources give no insight into
how her Jewish descent was discussed by Helene and Ferdinand and their
This quote is cited by Leopold Schwartzchild, Karl Marx the Red Prussian (New
York, 1947), at 232. Of the 24 total number of social visitors to Lassalle’s home, 7 were noble
and two were Jewish. See Adolph Kohut, Ferdinand Lassalle (Berlin, 1902), page.
32
16
hangers-on and family members. We must consider the likelihood that Helene
decided not to include the precise content of some very private exchanges
between them on this delicate subject when she sat down to write her memoir
in blank year.33
After weeks of wrangling, Lassalle, who was insulted that
Wilhelm von Dönniges did not accept him as a mate, challenged him to a duel.
This was an interesting turn of events in his own history. Years before,
Ferdinand had challenged Sophie’s husband Count von Hatzfeldt to a duel,
only to be mocked when he told his friends there was no need to respond to
“this silly Jewish boy.”34 Perhaps Lassalle was testing to see if a noble would
accept his very demand for a duel, to measure if his status in that contest had
increased. As for his ideals, he had previously announced that dueling was
against his socialist principles.35
Ferdinand’s readiness to risk his life may
also have been a reaction to some financial and health setbacks of the years
just before August 1864.36 Helene’s father was considered too burdened with
public and private responsibilities to enact the duel. The family requested the
young Hungarian student to whom Helene was actually engaged, Count Jacko
The novelist Stefan Heym, then living in the German Democratic Republic,
published Lassalle. Ein biographischer Roman (Munich, 1969). As a novel historians must of
course beware. However one of the imaginary conversations constructed by Heym is
fascinating. The conversationalists included Ferdinand’s sister Rieckchen, Helene, and
Helene’s Grandmother Wolf. The topic is the Jewish identity of the various parties to the
dispute. Rieckchen says to Helene “you are only half a shiksa.” [add page]. See her own
memory of the small role hostility to his public Jewish identity at the time, in her
Autobiography at 29-30.
34
See Steinberg, Bismarck, page.
35
This is noted by Footman, Romantic Revolutionary, at 96.
36
We can learn the details of his financial crisis in a letter to Sophie von Hatzfeldt
from [blank date] March of 1862, as quoted in Footman, Romantic Revolutionary, at 162-163.
33
17
von Racowitza, represent the von Dönniges family. Although he was an
experienced marksman and Racowitza had no experience, Lassalle fell in the
duel and died three days later.
The Countess von Hatzfeldt wanted to tour his corpse around
Germany to celebrate Lassalle’s importance and build support for the
movement. But his mother was upset, considering that Jewish laws
mandated rapid burial. She intervened with the police to return her deceased
son’s body to his family. Before too many days had passed he was buried in
the Breslau Jewish cemetery.37 That two of the most important female figures
in his life would have such different attitudes to his corpse is emblematic of
Ferdinand’s complex identity during his lifetime.
Because fighting in a duel seemed so inconsistent with
socialist politics, just after his death that August, behind closed doors his
friends wrote rather nasty comments in their letters about the duel. Just days
after learning of Lassalle’s death, Friedrich Engels shared his reaction with
Karl Marx. “That could only happen to Lassalle, with his unique character,
part Jew, part cavalier, part clown, part sentimentalist,” Engels wrote. Engels
ruminated further, asking Marx “how can a politician of his caliber let himself
be shot dead by a Rumanian adventurer?”38
The riddle of why Lassalle
risked his life in a duel continued to preoccupy Engels. Several months later
his tone was absolutely hilarious. He wrote to Marx that “Lassalle’s fatal error
See the discussion in Kling-Mathey, Gräfin Hatzfeldt, at 147.
The letter is from September 4 1864, quoted in note 39 of Robert Wistrich,
Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (New York, 1976), at 56.
37
38
18
was obviously that he did not throw the hussy [Helene von Dönniges] on the
bed in the boarding house and deal with her appropriately.” Engels continued
“it was not his fine mind but his Jew’s pizzle (penis) that she was interested
in.”39
IV
After lingering on the complex conjuncture of the duel episode that
ended Ferdinand’s life, space will only allow a brief tour of Helene’s
experiences after his death. As her family wished, she soon married von
Racowitza, and they were moderately happy, although he had pulled the trigger
on the gun which killed Lassalle. He conveniently died of a lung infection a
mere 15 months into their marriage. As a young widow, she complained that
she was short of funds, which she blamed on her father for failing to help
protect her assets when she married von Racowitza. After a few years of
painful and fitful contact with her family, her alienation from them became
complete.40
After some wandering between the various European cities,
Helene settled in Berlin and entered an acting career which was quite
successful. Her theatrical ambitions had been problematic for her parents, so
39
Letter from Engels to Karl Marx, November 7, 1864, Marx Engels Collected Works
Volume 42 (New York, 1975), at 19. The word pizzle may sound Yiddish, but it is actually Old
English.
40 A recent biography allows us to track the significant milestones in Helene’s life.
See Andrea Hirner, Die Todesparzenschönheit: Helene Prinzessin Racowitza: Ein Münchener
Kind in der Fremde (Munich, 2011).
19
for her this work was an emancipation. She wrote in her memoir that “by
going on the stage I stepped out of the society in which my birth and my first
marriage had placed me, I broke off all connections that bound me to it.”41 By
1868, only three years after Jacko von Racowitza’s death, Helene had fallen in
love with the Jewish actor and theatrical producer Siegwart Friedmann.42
She and Siegwart performed together and during their years in Vienna, they
belonged to a prominent social circle of painters, actors, composer and writers.
One of their favorites was the newly-prominent Richard Wagner, whose texts
Helene often read aloud at social gatherings. For years to come, even when
they were no longer a romantic couple, he remained an intimate confidante
and theatrical mentor.43 In this marriage, as in her passion for Lassalle, she
had again chosen a man of full Jewish descent whose values and profession
were well outside of conventional Jewish society.
Helene’s sense of the style of life to which she felt entitled is
revealed in the financial claims she wanders into in her memoir. When writing
about this era in her life, she noted that her yearly income from theatrical
payments and royalties was 12,000 gulden, which she estimates to be 1200
41
Racowitza, Autobiography, at 231-232. For useful background, see Tracy Davis,
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London, 1991).
42
See Adolph Kohut, “Siegwart Friedmann,” in Bühne und Welt Jg. 14/II (1912).
For his memoir, see Siegwart Friedmann, Vertrauliche Theaterbriefe (Berlin, 1909).
43
The civil marriage to Friedman was never actually valid, so she did not need to
divorce him when they separated. When they married, she was technically a Romanian,
holding Ottoman citizenship through her marriage with Jacko von Racowitza. Friedmann was
a Hungarian with Austrian citizenship. A civil marriage was their only option, since she was
technically a Protestant and he was Jewish.
20
British pounds.44 While she was still in Europe, Helene felt so strapped for
funds that in order to earn the amount she felt she needed, she toured
constantly, because touring performances earned more income than repertory
theatre. After she and Friedmann had gone their separate ways, they
attempted to divorce, only to discover that technically they had never actually
been married! This certainly made her next marriage more elegant.
During an 1873 visit to the Bavarian health resort of Kissingen,
she was introduced to Serge von Schewitsch. Serge was five years younger
than Helene, from a Russian entitled family, employed with a prestigious
position in the civil service. As was increasingly common among the titled and
the wealthy, he was sympathetic to the radicals then agitating for social
change in Russia. Here again Helene was drawn to a combination of lene
certainly shared his double identity as aristocrat and radical, as had so many
of Ferdinand’s intimates. At the Kissingen spa [that summer of blank year],
no sparks flew between Helene and Serge. But two months later they met by
chance at the railway station in Salzburg, and conversed passionately about
topics of mutual obsession. Again, they lost contact. But two years later, in
1875, she needed a respite from her rigors of her acting regime, and although
her physician recommended Italy or Paris, instead she set off alone for St.
Petersburg.
44
As cited in her Autobiography at 230. A rough estimate is that 1200 British
pounds would be worth 89,000 pounds in 2011, using the calculations provided by the online
web site Measuring Worth. It is difficult to believe that she felt that a yearly income of this size
was inadequate and if she did, it sheds light on the standard of living she maintained from her
acting career.
21
Helene’s connections in St. Petersburg were impeccable, and
soon she wandered into the somewhat dangerous position of pleading with the
highest officials in the state service for the release of an imprisoned radical
physician. After several weeks living the high society life in St. Petersburg,
[add a little more here re their mutual feelings before she went to St P. maybe
some of this should be cut, actually.]
Serge discovered her whereabouts. She
later remembered that “the consummation of my Fate came tapping at my
door one day when I was sitting in my drawing-room alone, and a little
bored.”45 For the next three years Serge and Helene spent a great deal of time
together, sometimes in St. Petersburg, sometimes in Berlin, and ultimately in
Paris, where she travelled in order to forget him, convinced as she was that “his
love would pass, he would turn to someone else, and a nice true friendship
would remain to both of us.”46
Serge’s connections with local radicals in Russia were constantly
endangering his safety in Russia. It was an open secret at the time that the
populist activists, many of whom were to the manner born, were being
supported by a large cadre of their parents, relatives, and friends who provided
the activists with large homes, ample bank accounts, and legal services. Serge
had been involved in a protest which resulted in a mass arrest at a church in
St. Petersburg in December 1876. He thus decided he had best depart Russia
at once, without taking an official leave from his position or acquiring an up-todate passport.
45
46
Racowitza, Autobiography, at 274.
Racowitza, Autobiography, 290.
22
[the narrative is confusing here] [where] Helene and Serge
married in 1876, when she was 33 and he was 32, and they would spend the
next 35 years together. [still confusing] In the winter of 1877, they were
together as a newly married couple in Paris, both at loose ends, to be sure.47
When Helene asked Serge “what next?” he replied, “we will go to America.”
Helene recorded in her memoir that “I was perhaps for the first time in my life
absolutely and entirely happy.” On March 1 1877, they stepped off the Cunard
steamer, feeling that they were indeed “two free and happy people!” Helene
thus closed one large chapter in her life and in her memoir. In the first lines of
her new memoir chapter, she exulted, “behind us lay all conventions, all
European social bonds. Before us lay life and all its possibilities!”48 One of the
reasons why Helene felt so happy when she arrived in New York was that
however impoverished she may have felt, when she stepped off the boat in
1877 she had with her 14 trunks of dresses and her own maid.49
During their thirteen years in New York City and in Hoboken,
New Jersey, Helene and Serge thrived in so many ways. He became a
renowned orator on the socialist circuit, and earned his spurs as a writer in
several languages and as a publisher. She toured as an actress in the
German-American theatre. [after blank years doing this, she quit the stage.]
She hated the long separations from Serge and felt snobbish about her
Midwestern and western audiences. She later remembered that she “was tired
Racowtiza, Autobiography, 339. How did he get on the boat without a valid
passport? How did he enter the United States without one?
48 Racowitza, Autobiography, 295.
49
Racowitza, Autobiography, at 295.
47
23
of playing in the West to a public consisting of shoemakers, brewers and
bakers.” She continued that “we made a little joke that all these people were
more at home in a saloon than in a salon.”50
Inspired by their friends, the two-physician couple [give the
names……the Jacobis], [in blank year] she and Serge both enrolled in medical
school. Ever modest, she recalled in her memoir that she possessed the gift of
“rapid and sure diagnosis.”51 Serge soon returned to writing and publishing,
but she continued for four years until severe illness caused her to halt her
studies. The 1880s were the halcyon days of women’s entrance into the
medical profession, and midwifery was a common occupational goal for those
unable to become doctors.52 Next she turned with considerable success to
writing and publishing theatrical reviews, novels, and memoirs published in
German.53
While in New York, Helene and Serge enjoyed a wide social circle of
friends, most of them radicals, who earned a living as doctors, writers, and
publishers. Several of Helene’s closest friends, including notable women like
Auguste Lilienthal and the physician Mary Putnam Jacobi, were Christian
women married to Jewish men.54 [move this up…..With his spoken and written
Racowitza, Autobiography, at 335.
Racowitza, Autobiography, at blank.
52 She referred to her school as the New York Women’s University, which could
have been either the New York Medical College for Women, which opened its doors in 1870 and
closed in 1918, or it could have been the Women’s Medical College of New York Infirmary.
53
Need more detail here especially re the novels and the memoirs which are
separate from the memoir that I use for the rest of the article.
54 On Lilienthal, see Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 18701920 (Urbana, Illinois, 1981), and Lilienthal’s daughter’s memoir, Meta Lilienthal, Dear
Remembered World (New York, 1947).
50
51
24
command of English, French, Russian and German, as well as his good
connections with the Russian underground activists, Serge was a considerable
success as a journalist and speaker. At first he wrote for three Englishlanguage papers, The World, The Sun, and The Herald. In 1880, he was
appointed the editor of the leftist newspaper the New Yorker Volkszeitung. At
the time many of the radicals in New York City and beyond were readers of
German.55 Serge was quiet in daily life, but over his 13 years in New York City
he revealed his talents as a “burning enthusiastic inspired and inspiring
orator.” Helene saw him as a “born aristocrat” who was “heart and soul a
social democrat.”56]
Although Helene remained distant from actual political
organizing, she admired the freedoms enjoyed by many American women of
different regions and classes. Ever alert to the problematic of arranged
marriages, she was convinced that American young women were less
constrained by their parents in choosing whom to wed. To be sure, scrappy
immigrant organizers such as Emma Goldman had little truck with the
privileged Helene. When Emma Goldman met Helene and Serge, she was
impressed with Serge, but declared that “the haughty rigidity of his wife I found
disgusting, [because] she remained very aristocratic.”57 [rewr…..It is of
55 For historical background, see Dirk Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press in North
America (New York, 1987), as well as Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler, eds., Transit: German
Migrations in Comparative Perspective 1820-1930 (Cambridge, England, 1995).
56 Racowitza, Autobiography, at blank.
57
This encounter must have taken place in 1889 or 1890, since those would
the only years that Emma Goldman was in New York City and Helene and Serge would still
have been in town. This translation is mine, as cited in Hirner, Die Todesparzenschönheit, at
25
interest to those who follow the emerging conflicts between socialists and
anarchists that Serge and Emma Goldman belonged to a small circle called
Znamya. The [function/purpose of this group was…..] which included notables
such as Abraham Cahan, Hillel Solataroff and David Edelstadt.58 [need to talk
about Jewish half intellectuals and the various movements. Expand on this.]
Among Helene’s closest women friends in New York City and
Hoboken were two notable personalities on the radical scene, Helena Petrowna
Blavatsky and Ottilie Assing. Blavatsky [write a new sentence here which
introduces her overall] [roamed from place to place, and during the five middle
years of the 1870s, she lived in New York City.] Helene and Serge became quite
involved in Blavatsky’s theosophy movement, which included elements of
Indian mysticism, feminism, and spiritualism. Indeed Blavatsky proclaimed
“female virtue an agent of God’s will on earth.”59 Helene eventually wrote a
memoir about how the theosophy movement changed her life, entitled Wie ich
mein Selbst fand. She admired Blavatsky’s “contempt for and rebellion against
all social conventions,” as well as her “warm heart and open hand for someone
in poverty or rags, hungry and needing comfort.”60 All too soon Blavatsky left
New York City for India, but Helene and Serge remained committed to
241, note 36. Hirner seems to be citing the biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel, which
forms the Introduction to Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, 1969).
58
This group seems to be rather obscure in the contemporary scholarship. It
is noted in Havel’s Introduction to Goldman, Anarchism. For background, see Tony Michels, A
Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005); Paul
Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, 1988), Chapter Thirteen on “Jewish Anarchism in the
United States,” and Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New
York City 1880-1914 (Urbana, Illinois, 2007).
59 See Buhle, Women and American Socialism at 78, and Marion Meade,
Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (New York, 1980).
60
Racowitza, Autobiography, at 349.
26
theosophy in the years to come. [was it normative for socialists, feminists and
anarchists to belong to theosophy?]
A second intimate friend, whose origins and fate were
somewhat parallel to Helene’s situation, was Ottilie Assing, who lived then in
Hoboken New Jersey [add some detail.]
Sometime in 1879, Serge and Helene
made a call on Ottilie Assing, and it is understandable that Helene and Ottilie
forged an intense bond in the few years they both lived near New York. As
German-speaking intellectuals with a common Jewish background in Berlin,
with radical sympathies and adrift from their families, they had much in
common. She and her sister Ludmilla Assing were born into the same
idiosyncratic noble-Jewish world so familiar to Helene from her adolescent
visits to her grandmother Minna in Berlin. The two Assing sisters were the
children of David Assur, a Jewish physician, and his wife Rosa, the
Christian sister of the diplomat and writer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense.
Karl’s wife Rahel Levin had been the most prominent Jewish salonière of the
late eighteen and early nineteenth century decades in Berlin. When they were
young girls and in their early adolescence, Ludmilla and Ottilie [add detail.]
[in blank year, add detail…..emphasize the noble Jewish connection] After they
were orphaned, Ottilie and Ludmilla had moved in with their uncle and indeed
Ludmilla eventually became Varnhagen’s literary executor. [Karl’s death and
the separate fates of L and O.]
For the past twenty-some years, Ottilie had been the mentor and
sometime lover of Frederick Douglass, the most eminent African American
27
intellect and political leader of the time. Ottilie was then 60, living in Hoboken
New Jersey. Since she had arrived in New York in 1855, she had courageously
supported herself on a shoestring, working from time to time as a seamstress,
a journalist for German and American newspapers, as a tutor and
translator.61
By the time that Ottilie and Helene met, Ottilie’s life situation
had become very difficult. She was quarreling with her sister Ludmilla, then
living rather grandly in Florence. [what was the quarrel about?] but the most
awful blow came in blank month of blank year, after Douglass’ wife died.
Ottilie had been awaiting this moment for years. To her shock, he married a
younger white woman rather than taking the loyal self-sacrificing Ottilie as his
wife. She returned to Europe in 1881 to contest Ludmilla’s will, and [while
she was living in which city under which circumstances…….] soon was
diagnosed with breast cancer. Three years later, Ottilie took her life by poison
on a park bench in Paris in August of 1884.
Shortly after they came to know Ottilie, In 1881, after they had
been in New York for four years, radicals in St. Petersburg succeeded in
assassinating Czar Alexander II. It was then that Serge received the “hard
blow” that because of his rapid and unofficial departure from Russia back in
1877, Czar Alexander II had “sequestrated his possessions and fortune.” He
was informed that “he could not expect another ruble from home.”
The
situation improved gradually thanks to Serge’s eldest brother, who was
See Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick
Douglass (New York, 1999), 351-354, and in Helene’s memoirs, Racowitza, Autobiography, 368371.
61
28
Governor of Livland. His brother arranged for the sequester to be transferred
to a guardianship, and he himself was named the guardian. This process
took nine years, and it was not until 1890 that Helene and Serge were back
“in the money” and could return to Europe.62
Finally, after 13 years in New York, Helene and Serge were
able to return to Europe. The once “free and happy people” were eager to
return to Munich, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. She wrote “after much longing,
the time of our return home at last approached.” She later recalled that “the
idea was very welcome to me, because, with the exception of California, I had
never felt myself at home in America.” As for Serge, he would “have to quit the
field of his successful political activity to return to a country where he could
find everything---except, indeed, political freedom. But as we already had
suffered too much under the nightmare of pecuniary difficulties,” she was
prepared to leave. In her words, the American era had been good to her, for “I
went over there as a woman, hungering for life, restlessly seeking, never
knowing equipoise of soul, always hoping to find in the next day, or even in the
next experience, that which everybody can find within himself alone. It was
only in America that I went through the great school of practical life.”
63
[Need to finish the narrative of the two lives after the return to
Europe and swell on his death, finances, and her suicide. Then a bit on her
legacy.]
Need more detailed references and find the amount of money Serge
received in 1890.
63 Racowitza, Autobiography, 388.
62
29
V
That Helene von Racowitza was the descendant of Saul
Ascher is uncanny. Historians often look to prominent and accomplished
families to track patterns of assimilation across time. Historians continue to
discuss the ultimate historical relevance of the fact that four of Fromet and
Moses Mendelssohn’s six children chose baptism and went to their graves as
Christians. There are distinct limits to how much we can learn from analysis
of the well-known, the prominent and the well-documented, but as in the
Mendelssohn legacy, the irony of Saul Ascher begetting Helene von Racowitza
is dramatic.
In closing, let us focus on the process engaged in by three
generations of Minna Wolff, Franziska von Dönniges and Helene von Racowitza.
What we see here is a three-generational maternal line where each generation
of women moved further from Judaism. Whether or not their choices reflect a
deliberate family strategy or more a happenstance social and religious
evolution is difficult to know from a distance. The grandmother Minna, Saul’s
daughter, remained Jewish, married and remained married to a Jewish
husband. Her social circle in Berlin seems to have resembled the salon circles
of the Rahel Levin Varnhagen generation. [fix this to refer only to the second
salon and use petra wilhelmy to clarify the differences between the salons]. [I
30
will have provided details in the section above that will clarify/illuminate this
generalization.]
Minna’s friends were either Jewish by descent or Christians,
often noble Christians, who had married Jewish converts. Long past [doesn’t
Barbara Hahn contest this claim…..the official demise of the Jewish salons of
the emancipation era…means up to 1815?]……, and even well past Rahel Levin
Varnhagen’s death in 1833, the noble Jewish social affinity was still thriving.
[year and her age] When Minna’s daughter Franziska became a
Protestant in order to marry von Dönniges, [rewrite for clarity….she fit much
better into the conversion pattern of the late eighteenth century than to the
dominant kind of conversion in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.]
As a wealthy daughter of reform-minded Jewish parents, with a noble groom
waiting for her, the necessity of becoming a Protestant before the marriage to
Wilhelm was totally obvious. Wilhelm’s position in court society in Munich
was the perfect platform for her salon style of entertaining, as described by her
daughter Helene in her memoirs. Female converts and wealthy converts were
becoming less common as we move forward into the nineteenth century, for as
we move forward in time the more frequent type of convert after the 1820s was
a young man in his twenties.
To render their family narrative into a recognizable pattern, so as
to promote comparison to other families, it is useful to draw a little map of the
assimilation process. If we make the classic division between acculturation
and integration---often called assimilation----we see that Minna remained
mainly in the acculturated category. Franziska and Helene each moved much
31
further into the integrated category. In order to make our analysis of this
three-generation assimilation process even more clear, it is useful to analyze
the family history using my adaptation of the four-stage model proposed by
the law scholar Kenji Yoshino.64 Yoshino’s categories are designed to interpret
the behavior of gay individuals in contemporary America, but the subtlety of
his typology allows Jewish historians to vastly refine our standard ways of
dividing up our historical subjects.
In this model we have two very interesting categories of
behavior between traditional Judaism and complete inner and external erasure
of Judaism. This spectrum begins in Authentic Judaism, where the individual
feels Jewish on the inside and is at peace with being seen as Jewish on the
outside. The next stage is called Covering, which means the individual adapts
a less Jewish behavior but does not deceive anyone about their identity. The
third stage I call Passing, which means that their Jewish identity is intact on
the inside, but that other individuals do not know that they are Jewish. In the
final position, Total Transformation, the individual has no Jewish identity on
the inside and also succeeds in passing as a non-Jew to others.
Using this model, Helene’s mother Franziska may have thought she
was passing as a Protestant by descent, but others may have guessed that she
was merely covering that Jewish descent, which was known to them. What is
64
For an extensive description of this model and its adaptation to Jewish history,
see my “Masquerades and Open Secrets, Or New Ways to Understand Jewish Assimilation,” in
Lotte Lund et al., eds., Versteckter Glaube oder doppelte Identität? Das Bild des Marrantums im
19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 2011). My essay is an adaptation of the model proposed
by Kenji Yoshino, in his provocative Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New
York, 2006).
32
so helpful about this contrast between covering and passing is that it gives us
insight into the self-deception of Jews who were seen differently by their
friends and enemies from how they saw themselves. They may have imagined
or hoped that their Jewish heritage was no longer visible, that although they
still felt Jewish on the inside, that identity was their secret. But the truth may
well have been that their public identity was thoroughly Jewish and their
gestures of covering the identity were seen for what they were, mere gestures of
obeisance to the dominant society.
Helene, in her turn, during the 1850s and 1860s and beyond
moved much further away from any Jewish identity at all. We could place her
either in the passing category, or even in the total transformation stage of the
model. Lassalle was unacceptable because he chose to just cover his Jewish
descent with a revised spelling of his last name, elegant expensive clothing, and
a refined mode of eating, drinking, and socializing. But because he remained
openly Jewish and was a notorious figure of his age, in such a marriage her
half-Jewish descent would predictably become more visible. Lassalle did not
realize or did not accept that the von Dönniges family found a marriage with
him would utterly mark them with the stain they were laboring to remove.
I conclude with a contrast between Saul Ascher’s project of a
religiously emancipated society, and his great-granddaughter’s project of
individual emancipation from social and sexual norms. Ascher’s emancipation
required a vast re-arrangement of an entire society, and was only realized very
gradually and partially between his death in 1822 and Helene’s death in 1911.
33
[rewrite this….Her emancipation….as a woman from family marriage and
career constraints? Certainly I don’t mean as a Jew?.... was also rocky,
painful, and in the end costly for her own serenity and well-being.] We can well
doubt that great-grandfather Saul would have looked kindly on her
indifference to Jewish emancipation. Just why it was that her great
grandfather’s values found no place in either her grandmother’s, her mother’s,
or her own life is a burning question facing historians of nineteenth-century
German Jewry.
OUTLINES AND NOTES
Helene’s roots in the enlightened Jewish circles of the early nineteenth
century allows us to use her life to show how rapidly some Jewish families were
shedding Jewish qualities and connections. Helene’s mother and grandmother
left Saul Asher’s maskilic Judaism behind, as they climbed into the more
rarified social environment in which Helene was raised. Looked at from afar,
34
the dark secret of her life was that by descent she was actually half-Jewish,
although her interior and public identity was thoroughly Protestant and indeed
aristocratic. We must learn why families such as hers willed an end to their
Jewish lives, and how they were accepted as marriage partners for titled,
educated, and altogether prominent Christians.
Nor did her rebellions against her family help her financially, not at all.
Through all of these reinventions of herself she steadily became poorer. Her
wealthy family had cast her off after the Lassalle affair. She worked as an
actress and published novels and memoirs, but at the end of her life had no
means of income and huge debts.
[move an earlier sentence here for the conclusion]
Yet although she was irate that they had prevented her marriage to
Lassalle, whose Jewish identity was public but still immensely complex,
35
Helene scarcely viewed the world as a self-aware public Jew. Indeed, the few
comments in the memoir regarding Jews express outright disgust at others
whom she identifies as Jews. [give some quotes] The exception is an odd
comment, when she wrote that “my mother belonged to one of the old and
highly cultured Jewish families in Berlin, whose members, during the
eighteenth century, gave to the world philosophers and poets, ---such as the
Ashers, Mendelsohns, Beers, and even Heinrich Heine.” She continued that
“my family was as proud as any noble one of its pure Semitic blood, and could
boast of the ancient privilege of placing the ‘hands of blessing’ upon their
graves.”65 Her account of the Lassalle debacle is absolutely silent about her
own family’s anti-Jewish animus in rejecting Lassalle as a bridegroom for
her.
[perhaps begin or end the section with this discussion……]
[is
the story of H von D a morality tale for those who argued at the time that
Haskalah would be an entry point into complete assimilation. This was a
common critique from traditionalists within Germany and also from eastern
Europe. Scholem’s denunciation of the so-called symbiosis belongs with this
cynical view about how J was weakening, becoming thinner in this era.]
65
Princess Helene von Racowitza: An Autobiography (New York, 1911), at 7.
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Certainly the Mendelssohn and beer families trajectories seem to support this,
as does SA family. Should we be using individual family histories to track
larger structures and trends? Consider how the haskalah kept Jews Jewish in
later decades and places…..
Compare it with some of the left men; the main point is that they also had
great difficulties founding families. Lots of failed launches re family life. Was
that because of what David Biale describes as a collapse of racial pride leading
to a de-eroticization of the Jew of the other gender. Perhaps the women have to
sacrifice so much more when they leave Judaism and family and this
contributes to suicide rate. Was there a counter attraction, a revulsion
between J men and women moving out of Judaism, was it because of a mood of
racial suicide at the time?
Get the exact quote from David Biale book
Karl marx marries aristocratic woman but they are poor;
HHeine marries poor shopgirl;
Moses Hess ditto;
Ludwig Boerne has irregular relationship with J Wohl, a bachelor
37
The two Assing sisters have a very similar trajectory: father was J, mother
Catholic I think; are they the same age as Helene?
Start with Saul Ascher going to prison in 1811. He was pro-Napoleon, had just received his
PhD, pro-J reform, and militantly anti-nationalist.
Obscure today and why. [grab at 76: none of his publications were re-issued after his death…]
what is in print today?. He was not a great writer and not at the intellectual level of Heine or
Boerne. Like MM, tried to base jewish faith on general ethical principles of reason; unlike MM
and the other maskilim, he turned to topics current in german society and made pointed
critiques of romantic and Christian nationalism in a Jewish voice.
Part One: SA’s Berlin
His family background; his career as a bookseller; his work as a journalist, his
publications…..[from Grab 76]: born 1767, 40 years younger than MM and 20 years older than
Boerne; his family had been in bln several generations, had a schutzjudenpatent and
wohnrecht. His mother from a respected family from Frankfurt an der oder. Good education,
classical languages. He married 1789 to Rachel spanier.
Did not take active role in jewish community.
Was in the Gesellschaft der Freunde and in 1816 supported the decision to accept converted
members…..
More detail about 1812 emancipation law, take from conversion book; how much does the law
express the kind of emancipation that SA advocated? What would he have thought about the
Beer-Hardenberg connection behind the scenes?
GCTG, maybe refer to the Achim von Arnim/Levy duel episode;
The Wartburg Festival where his book was burned, I think 1817;
Overall the question of why romantic nationalists in this era turned anti-Semitic and how SA’s
political stance challenged this;
SA’s views: [this is from Grab at 75]: emancipation of Jews could only succeed when dogmas
of all religions rejected and destruction of borders between all nations. His politics are
identical to Ludwig boerne.
Peter hacks describes him as proponent of the progressive style of government at the time,
which was civil service bureaucratic state versus estate hierarchy state; classic and not
romantic; after a certain date he doesn’t publish on Jewish themes…..he is a maskil, but
critical of MM on certain points [are they important points?];
not in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, why not?
Find the document where he talks about his daughter, did she convert?
The Wolff family, his son-in-law;
38
Part two: descendants
On her memoir, S Na’aman says: FN 53 at 89: the document is a
valuable social historical portrait of her family and environment”
39