When Henriette Herz founded the first literary salon in Berlin, she was only 16 years old. It was the year 1780, she had just got married and invited a number of society ladies to her apartment in Mitte for tea.
Her friend Brendel Mendelssohn, who was the same age, brought her a gift from her father Moses, which made her particularly happy: a new book by her favorite poet, Goethe, from which she was then immediately read.
She continued to run the salon in the Nikolaiviertel for 23 years. Many prominent Berliners came to visit, including the sculptor Johann Schadow, the poet Friedrich Schlegel and above all the adored brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
Hebrew against boredom
The latter even asked the hostess to teach him Hebrew and praised her for putting him out of the boredom of the family castle north of the city. After the death of her husband, Henriette Herz was unable to continue running the salon and had to earn her living with private lessons.
After all, Alexander von Humboldt convinced King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to pay the salonière a pension in old age until she died at the age of 83.
Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn, shaped social life in Berlin in a different way. Already as a teenager she delighted the guests of the house with her piano playing. She surprised her father Abraham at the age of 14 at his birthday party. She played him all 24 preludes from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by heart.
Even then, the father suspected that his talented daughter would suffer, that her great talent would only ever be an ornament, never a real job like his son’s. In fact, Fanny’s songs were published under her brother’s name, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
Liszt and Schumann in the audience
It was the time when wealthy Jews in Berlin often converted to Christianity, also in order to be able to make a better social career. The siblings were also baptized.
As the wife of the painter Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny was finally able to give concerts, albeit only for an audience of 300. After all, Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann were listening to her. And before she died of a stroke at the age of 42, she even managed to publish her own collection of songs under her married name.
Adolf Jandorf was a daredevil when he came to Berlin at the age of 22 and introduced himself to the established businessman Alfred Mannheimer. A brilliant idea gave him the financial basis for the marriage.
A million-selling pillow with the inscription “Just a quarter of an hour” laid the foundation for the career that culminated in the Department Store of the West, which he built for the city’s elite.
In 1926 he sold his business to Hermann Tietz’s nephew. He died in 1932 before the National Socialists seized power.
The author of the book, in which the stories of young Jewish Berliners are told, is the Tel Aviv-born poet Ronen Altman-Kaydar, who now lives in Berlin and, in addition to his writing, also works as a tour guide.
Ronen Altman Kaydar in Berlin.
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