The Fortunes of the Mendelssohns: History of a German Family

This richly illustrated family history describes for the first time the world of the Mendelssohns over five generations from the eighteenth century to 1938. Author Thomas Lackmann knowledgeably tells the fate of this large German family caught between tradition and innovation, power and morality, talent and luck.

The story begins with the beggar student Mausche, a 14-year-old Talmud scholar-in-training from Dessau who came to Berlin as an educational migrant. Under the name Moses Mendelssohn (d. 1786), one he invented for himself, he established himself as a successful silk merchant and achieved European fame during his lifetime as a Jewish Enlightenment philosopher. Over two and a half centuries, his family tree branched out into a bourgeois dynasty of merchants, artists, and scholars. Whether his favorite daughter Brendel (who would later become the Romantic author Dorothea Schlegel), his musically gifted grandchildren Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, or Franz von Mendelssohn, the prominent economic leader of the Weimar Republic, the Mendelssohns have shaped German culture more extensively and over a longer period of time than any other middle-class family. At the center of this family chronicle is a restless traveler and searcher of his identity: Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the son of the philosopher Moses and father of the composer Felix.

In thirty-six lively portraits, Lackmann offers a microcosm of German-Jewish history--showing how the Mendelssohns influenced the self-image and assimilation of German Jews but also impacted the majority Christian society through their contributions as writers, intellectuals, scientists, musicians, painters, bankers, and entrepreneurs.