HAIFA, Israel — On March 1, 1881, in Russia, members of the People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. The murder, to which the Jews had nothing to do, triggered the largest wave of Jewish pogroms in the 19th century due to a blood libel against Jews falsely accused of complicity in the czar’s murder. The pogroms led to the mass emigration of Russian Jews. Jews crossed into Europe and sought the port of Hamburg, from which in 1881 the transport of emigrants on cargo steamships to the U.S. began.
Misfortune befell the persecuted Jews of Russia. They sought refuge in America. Their money flowed into the pockets of the middlemen and organizers of emigration from the Old World to the New one. On a pleasure boat not far from the port of Hamburg sailed a man who loved the sea and saw his country’s future in maritime trade. He watched this unstoppable stream of grief. That man, Albert Ballin, a 24-year-old Jew, the future general manager of the Hamburg-America Steamship Company, had the idea of transporting Jews on cargo ships. The flow of Jewish refugees to America created the first cash flow into the pockets of the steamship company director. The second cash flow that enriched Ballin came from his other fruitful idea—organizing sea cruises. The first cruise took place in 1891 on the Mediterranean Sea. The steamship became a huge, luxurious travelling hotel, a source of entertainment and pleasure. Before World War I, Ballin transformed Germany into a world leader in maritime trade and ocean travel.
Albert Ballin was born in Hamburg on August 15, 1857, to a large Jewish family. His father was a Danish Jew who became a shipping agent. Ballin’s native language was Danish. He spoke German with an accent and misspelled it. Ballin had no high school or college education, but he learned excellent English, which he perfected on business trips to England, and went through his father’s business school, a shipbroker. His father died when Albert was 17. Since then, Albert had been making money on his own. It was a lot of money, as he became the head of a steamboat company. The 13th child of poor Jewish immigrants with no education, he turned the Hamburg-America Company into the largest in the world and became one of the most important figures in the German Empire.
Ballin was a great German patriot. He regarded Germany as his fatherland and strove in everything to ensure its welfare. Germany became his love, his homeland, which he dreamed of seeing prosperous. Ballin’s ideal of Germany was England. Ballin did not know the country to which his parents had moved. He had not studied German history. The first books by racist anti-Semitic theorists in Germany appeared when he was 22. He saw the unpleasant trend, but preferred wishful thinking. He was a man of business, a successful businessman, accustomed to making deals in cold blood and calculating risks soberly, but in his patriotism he was a romantic. As a Jew, Ballin balanced on a fine line between his acceptance by German society and the nationalists’ contemptuous attitude toward him. His wealth and financial clout made him one of the most important magnates in the Second Reich. Both created popularity and hatred for the shipowner. Ballin reigned on sea and ocean, but on German land, on German soil, he was an unwelcome alien element.
Only one high-ranking German treated the magnate with great respect. It was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ballin had a separate telephone line to the Kaiser. Wilhelm visited the shipowner’s villa more than once and regularly congratulated Ballin on his birthday, expressing concern about his illnesses. Ballin was a patriot of the Second German Empire, a loyal Kaiser and a brilliant economic and political analyst. Understanding and appreciating Ballin’s intellectual level, the Kaiser consulted him on political and economic matters. Ballin belonged to the category of “imperial Jews”. The emperor was encouraged by his acquaintance with the magnate in 1906. They shared a common attraction to the sea and a desire to see Germany as a maritime superpower. He was perhaps the only “imperial Jew” whose friendship the Kaiser himself sought. Wilhelm and the empress liked to visit a private house on Feldbrunen Street 58 in Hamburg and dine in the company of Ballin and his wife. The Kaiser wanted to award the nobility to Ballin. But he refused, because he had to be baptized in order to receive the title. Many Prussian nobles criticized the Kaiser for his Jewish bias, which he later repented of in exile, blaming the wealthy Jews for the defeat of the First World War and the collapse of his empire.
The Kaiser’s military adventure to start World War I ruined William’s friendship with his “court Jew.” Ballin was a cosmopolitan, a liberal, and an advocate of international economic relations. He tried to convince the Kaiser that his hostility toward England and reluctance to achieve reconciliation with it stemmed from a simplistic worldview risky to their country’s future. In 1915 Ballin wrote to German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, “I understand the condition of a man who is accused, as Your Excellency is, of terrible responsibility for starting this war, which has cost Germany generations of brilliant men and will set it back 100 years.” Wilhelm II, the epitome of German militarism, did not accept his friend’s anti-war views. Ballin was horrified at the monstrous military adventure that threatened his country and endangered his business. Ballin was upset that the Hamburg-America steamer line was paralyzed and company buildings closed. Bernard Gutmann, a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung who communicated with the shipowner at the time, wrote, “No man I spoke to during the war was so despondent over the German tragedy.” Ballin was shaken by the fall of his friend the Kaiser and his flight to Holland. On November 9, 1918, two days before Germany surrendered, Ballin committed suicide.
In retrospect, the former Kaiser claimed that he should have appointed Ballin chancellor in 1914 because he could have prevented the conflict with England and thus the war and the collapse of the Second Reich. Wilhelm knew the late tycoon well and understood that he was a zealous German patriot and would do anything to save Germany. Ballin could not be a member of the government of the Second Empire, for he was a Jew, and he refused to be baptized to become a minister. According to Ballin in a letter to the chancellor in 1914, the war meant for Germany the loss of generations of its brilliant sons and set the country back 100 years. Ballin’s letter to the chancellor was a lament of Jeremiah.
Ballin was peace-minded, but such sentiments were alien on German soil, where he was labeled a “traitorous pacifist.” He embodied a dual identity: he was a German patriot and an influential Jewish figure. This duality reflected the traditionally strong involvement of Hamburg’s Jews in the economic, political and social life of the city. The war was a personal disaster for Ballin, for his business was collapsing: his ships were confiscated by the British and French, and the maritime communications his ships used were blockaded by England. But the date of Ballin’s passing shows what was most important to him: Having loved Germany faithfully and done so much for its good, he took his own life at the moment of the German defeat in World War I and the Kaiser’s flight to Holland. Emperor Wilhelm was left without an empire. Shipowner Ballin was left without his maritime empire. Albert Ballin’s odyssey of the maritime amateur ended with the end of the Second Reich.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.