Passionate Publishers: The Founders of the Black Star Photo Agency

By Phoebe Kornfeld

Passionate Publishers traces the lives of the German Jewish refugee-émigré founders of the Black Star photo agency—Ernest Mayer, Kurt Safranski, and Kurt Kornfeld—whose expertise helped ignite a revolution in photojournalism.
The first half of the book lays the groundwork for understanding how Black Star’s founders could play such a key role in photojournalism. The author reconstructs their history in Germany before and during World War I and details their accomplishments in Berlin’s dynamic Weimar-era publishing industry.
The journey into exile of Safranski, Mayer, and Kornfeld, their influence on the editors of Life, the first decade of Black Star, and the most notable post-World War II experiences of the photo agency’s founders are the focus of the second half of the book.
Family and governmental archives provide extensive new information about the three men and reveal harrowing investigations by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which believed Black Star’s founders to be spies or agents of a foreign government. The author argues that the refugee-émigrés successfully contested the never substantiated allegations on account of their strong views relating to the freedom of the press and the malevolence of discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665709057

Phoebe Kornfeld

Phoebe Kornfeld is a retired international lawyer and a granddaughter of Black Star cofounder Kurt Kornfeld. She received her Bachelor of Arts in government and German from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Her PhD in political science is from Duke University, and her Juris Doctor degree is from Duke University School of Law. She subsequently conducted legal research in Berlin with a German Chancellor Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Copyright © 2021 Phoebe Kornfeld.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-0906-4 (sc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913352

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/09/2021

To the women

who preserved memories

of the Black Star founders.

Without them, this book could not have been written.

CONTENTS

Introduction

A Note on Family Archive Sources

Cast of Characters

List of Photographs

Part 1: Life Begins in Germany

Chapter 1 Coming of Age in Imperial Germany

1. Introduction

2. Kurt Safranski: We are young and that is beautiful

3. Ernest Mayer: From the Rhineland to International Businessman

4. Kurt Kornfeld: Heir Apparent as Publisher and Bookseller

5. Conclusion

Chapter 2 Four Years of War

6. Introduction

7. Ernest Mayer Crisscrosses Europe in the Alpine Corps

8. Kurt Safranski: I am war-weary, March 1918

9. Kurt Kornfeld: Naval Artillery Adjutant Attending to the Regiment’s Needs with special warmth

10. Conclusion

Chapter 3 Forging Careers and Starting Families in Weimar Germany

11. Introduction

12. Ernest Mayer: Interested in literature . . . and in books and publishing

13. Kurt Safranski: Ullstein Art Advisor, Magazine Division Director, Board Member

14. Kurt Kornfeld: Publisher, Widower, Literary Agent

15. Conclusion

Part 2: BLACK STAR IS BORN

Chapter 4 The Path from Berlin to New York

16. Introduction

17. Where is the way out? Mania Safranski

18. Mayer Joins Safranski in the New World

19. Kornfeld, Too, Opts for New York Over London

20. The Families Settle in New Rochelle, New York

21. Conclusion

Chapter 5 Black Star:The First Decade

22. Introduction

23. It took us ten years to really get on our feet. Ernest Mayer, 1978

24. Safranski Lures Kurt Korff to New York

25. Safranski and Korff devised the formula for what is today LIFE Magazine Richard Berlin, 19

26. Black Star Takes Root in Manhattan

27. International Networking, a Beachhead in London, Staff Photographers

28. Conclusion

Chapter 6 J. Edgar Hoover’s War against Black Star’s Founders

29. Introduction

30. A Federal Grand Jury, but No Indictment

31. America at War Restokes the Prejudice

32. Black Star . . . operated by German-Jewish refugees . . . a subterfuge frequently employed by German Agents. FBI to Nelson Rockefeller, 19422

33. The Investigations Preserve a Snapshot of the Black Star Business

34. Conclusion

Part 3: Time Marches On

Chapter 7 Passionate to the End

35. Introduction

36. Kurt Safranski: The ghost in the fairy tale

37. Kurt Kornfeld: Americans are younger by heart and initiative

38. Ernest Mayer on Black Star’s Raison d’Être: It wasn’t only that it was successful moneywise, but was worthwhile.

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Appendix I Chronology

Appendix II Kurt Safranski: Illustrations, Artwork, and Writings

Appendix III Books Published By Mauritius Verlag, and Books and Magazines Containing Mauritius Photo Credits

Appendix IV Photographers and Companies Represented by Mauritius

Appendix V Kurt Kornfeld Publications 1919-1934 and Authors Represented by Kornfeld as Literary Agent

Appendix VI Composite List of Sources of Black Star Photos 1935–1963

Selected Bibliography

Photographic Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Leaning forward, thoroughly engaged in the conversation, eighty-five-year-old Ernest Mayer spoke of himself and his Black Star cofounders Kurt Safranski and Kurt Kornfeld as three different people, very different people.¹ Mayer was sitting in his favorite armchair at home in Riverdale, north of Manhattan, speaking to the PhD student C. Zoe Smith who was hanging on his every word with her tape recorder running. Smith interviewed Mayer in 1978 and 1979 for her doctoral dissertation research into the contributions to American photojournalism by émigré photographers and the Black Star photo agency.² The elderly Mayer and the young student spoke for many hours on several occasions. Even if certain dates Mayer referred to in those interviews were clouded by the passing of time, the essential elements of his story remained clear.

The description of the Black Star founders as very different people was not meant to conjure up their contrasting physical appearances—Mayer himself tall, lanky, and debonair, always with a mustache, and with soft gray eyes able to ease the otherwise notable intensity of his personality; Safranski, also tall and handsome, but with a corpulence reflecting the pleasure he derived from good food and wine, while his ever-present smile and friendly blue eyes projected his joyful spirit; and Kornfeld, much shorter in stature, but remembered by so many for the lively twinkle in his blue eyes and his prodigious warmheartedness.

Mayer was more likely thinking about the three men’s different and difficult temperaments, so-called by Safranski, although he, too, did not elaborate.³ Both Safranski and Mayer would have been contemplating the distinctiveness of the men’s principal interests that at one and the same time led to synergies when they collaborated but could cause fireworks if their partnership was not tended with care. Normally very even-tempered, each was capable of the occasional explosive outburst when advocating a strongly held point of view. Mayer’s deep voice could boom if he were angered; Safranski was subject to being too easily excited, as he himself would say; and Kornfeld’s rise in blood pressure eventually would make him reach for the heart medication he was prescribed.

The same differences that could cause friction between the three men fueled their partnership’s success. Safranski was first and foremost the ideas man, a gifted artist, a philosopher, and an executive publisher. In Germany he made good use of his visionary artist’s eye and his sensitivity to the interests of different audiences throughout society to become the director of the magazine division and a board member of the country’s largest pre-World War II publishing company, the Ullstein Verlag (German for Ullstein publishing house). Mayer was a tried and true businessman who was trained as an investment banker and had a sophisticated intellectual interest in literature, music, and publishing. He built the Mauritius Verlag, collaborated with the renowned publisher Ernst Rowohlt as an investor and editor, and then created the Mauritius photo agency in Berlin late in the 1920s. Kornfeld was the lay psychologist and peacekeeper, widely read like Mayer and Safranski, but energized by personal interactions and involvement with the fast-paced world of the press. He inherited Fischer’s medicinische Buchhandlung (Fischer’s Medical Bookseller), which published medical materials, and the Carl Duncker Verlag that he used for the publication of books about the press and as a literary agency placing serialized fiction in newspapers and magazines.⁴ All three men were passionate about publishing, leading their professional lives in ceaseless dynamic collaboration with newspaper and magazine editors, always with an eye to the interests of the reading public.

The Black Star founders, all born to Jewish parents, came of age in post-Bismarck Imperial Germany. Safranski and Kornfeld were born and raised in metropolitan Berlin, Mayer in small-town Bingen am Rhein (Bingen on the Rhine). There was nothing in their early lives to indicate that their paths would cross, much less that they would eventually converge when the men were in their forties as they made plans to flee Nazi Germany.

During World War I, Mayer and Safranski fought in the Kaiser’s army, Kornfeld in the navy. For four years they led lives largely deprived of the comforts to which they were accustomed while they served as part of the vast war machine set in motion by a multitude of nationalist and imperialist forces. Upon their return home to a defeated Germany, the men faced a new reality of a diminished and isolated Germany struggling to pay reparations and progress a post monarchic democratic government while coping with strident forces from the Communist left and the National Socialist right. The success of the three men in navigating those minefields of war and its aftermath fueled their strength and confidence to repeat the feat of starting anew when confronted by prejudice and discrimination in Germany in the 1930s.

Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld were all active in the maelstrom of life in interwar Berlin where they started families and forged careers in Weimar Germany’s often challenging and difficult socioeconomic environment. That story is told in Chapter III of this book, and the chronology in appendix I provides an overview of important milestones in their lives.

The three men considered themselves to be German, but they quickly understood the need to leave the country of their birth upon Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Some of the first steps taken to crush democracy in the Third Reich involved destroying freedom of the press in the country. On account of their Jewish heritage, no matter how assimilated the men were into German culture, their roles in the publishing industry were eliminated by the National Socialist focus on turning the country into a racially pure Aryan nation. Anti-Nazi convictions and the desire to move their families out of harm’s way propelled the three men forward. The disdain they felt for Hitler and the Nazis remained visceral for the rest of their lives.

Clear-thinking men, willing and able to make tough decisions and to act quickly, Black Star’s founders were also able to build long-lasting partnerships. Each of these attributes would be important to their success and to their survival, and the question these men quickly asked themselves was not whether to leave Berlin but where to go. Well advanced in their careers, the men sought a destination where they would have the best chance of landing on their feet professionally and preserving what they valued most. They focused on protecting their families, their integrity, and their books.

London and New York were thought to be the most likely places where these refugees could hit the ground running. They explored both possibilities while at the same time packing up their households in preparation for the departure from Germany. Facing the need to uproot themselves and their families, the men turned the situation on its head. They seized the opportunity to collaboratively create an innovative business that would significantly contribute to their common field of interest in publishing. The paths of the three men had initially intersected at different times during the early decades of the twentieth century. Having come to know each other well enough, they were willing to temper their differences to form a partnership as they began their new lives as refugee-émigrés. In December 1935 they established Black Star Publishing Company in New York.

As a photo agency, Black Star became instrumental in bringing images of life around the world into the living rooms of many across America in the era preceding the age of television. One aspect of the work was collaboration with many magazine and newspaper editors, including those at Time, Life, Look, National Geographic, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Parade.⁵ Despite their noticeable accents, the three men rather easily managed to make themselves understood thanks to the force of their intellect, character, and personality. Howard Chapnick, who worked closely with the Black Star founders for many years, referred to Safranski as a brilliant theoretician, Kornfeld as gregarious, ebullient, and full of continental charm, and Mayer as having a keen business mind and a Renaissance intellect with little tolerance for the superficial.⁶

Black Star’s founders built a reputation for supplying photographs and photo stories relating to breaking news and the history behind it. This entailed both support for promising photographers and persistent advocacy on their behalf vis-à-vis magazine and newspaper editors. Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld championed the philosophy that the combination of multiple quality photographs and informed text can be a most effective means for conveying the news to a wide audience. They understood that photojournalism could communicate a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Similarly, the combination of their strengths in the Black Star partnership accomplished more than any one of them could have achieved on his own in the circumstances they faced during such difficult times.

Many photographers who were at the forefront of bringing the truth to people through documenting events in interwar Europe were forced to flee Germany. Quite a few refugee-émigré photographers, as well as their talented American counterparts, entered the field of photojournalism in the United States through Black Star and the mentorship of its founders. No Black Star records have been preserved to identify the members of the whole cohort of first-generation photographers the agency represented while it was managed by its founders from 1935 through the end of 1963. That information must be painstakingly sought in newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as in biographies and autobiographies. In some cases a photographer’s obituary provides an important insight, such as that for Fred Ward, which describes how he parked outside the Kennedy White House and dashed in to pick up his Black Star press pass.⁷

Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld created the connection between the photographers and the publications in which their photos appeared. Some photographers had already met one or another of the photo agency’s founders prior to their emigration to the United States. Others were identified as potential talent once Black Star had been established. Some remained on contract with the agency for just a year or two, others much longer. Black Star sold their photos across a wide spectrum of subject matter, including: political events or everyday life; notable personalities involved in affairs of state, in fashion, or in film; the lives of people from near and far corners of the world where a camera had never before penetrated; and man-made machines or natural phenomena from the colossal to the nano in size.

An A to Z of the photographers Black Star’s founders represented reads like a who’s who of elites in the field, from Brassaï, Robert Capa, Germaine Krull, and John Launois, to Kosti Ruohomaa, Walter Sanders, Emil Schulthess, W. Eugene Smith, Roman Vishniac, Dr. Paul Wolff, and Werner Wolff. A list of the first-generation Black Star photographers, including more than two hundred not referred to in the largest comparable compilation to date, can be found in appendix VI. Perhaps someday an even more complete list with relevant information about each photographer can be compiled.

As they grew their business, Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld encountered considerable obstacles. One involved seemingly anticompetitive activity from within the publishing industry restraining the men’s ability to freely negotiate pricing for the photos they distributed. Another was years of investigations by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Documents disclosed pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request depict a sustained hounding of Black Star by the FBI from 1939 until 1945. Despite a grand jury’s failure to support indictment of Black Star or its founders, and despite attempts by Department of Justice prosecutors to close the files due to lack of evidence, the FBI time and again instructed that further leads should be pursued, determined to prove that Black Star and its German founders were acting as spies or as unregistered agents of the German government. The men spent years firmly refuting the false allegations while they struggled to keep their business afloat. Eventually, early in 1945, the Department of Justice closed the files with no charges ever having been brought. In an ironic twist of fate, the extensive FBI investigations and record keeping preserved otherwise lost information about Black Star’s business during its early years that can again see the light of day for the first time in this book.

When World War II ended, the Black Star founders had survived persecution in Germany and in the United States. Part Three of Passionate Publishers traces the main events in the men’s lives after 1945. Among them was an ultimate rift between Mayer and Safranski, undoubtedly caused by their different and difficult temperaments. The men continued at Black Star for as long as they could. Safranski stepped out of the partnership due to poor health in 1957, at the age of sixty-seven. Mayer was seventy years old and Kornfeld would soon turn seventy-seven when they retired at the end of 1963. By the time the three founders left the company, they had ensured that Black Star’s legacy would long outlive them.

The outsider refugee-émigré status of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld was counterbalanced by closeness to the loved ones who shared their lives, and the three men remained future-oriented, active, and strong individuals. As a granddaughter of a Black Star cofounder, I was raised in a household replete with magazines such as Life and National Geographic as well as strikingly memorable photo books of far-flung places from China and Africa to Antarctica and Switzerland. At the same time, however, there was little or no discussion about Black Star’s origins or the lives of its founders prior to their emigration from Berlin to New York. The past was largely a void. The present and the future were all that mattered.

Curiosity about the culture from which my father and grandfather originated compelled me to learn German in school. As an adult, I lived in Europe for many years, not infrequently wondering whether I was walking in my grandfather’s footsteps, and sometimes certain that I was. However, I found the key to unlocking the story of Kurt Kornfeld’s past not in Europe, but in the attic of the house I grew up in on the north shore of Long Island outside of New York City. There, in a few dust-covered boxes, were the remaining mementos of my grandfather’s life in Germany. Reading through those materials allowed me to begin to collect details about Kurt Kornfeld and his family in a way that previously had been impossible and led me to meet first Kurt Safranski’s granddaughters and then Ernest Mayer’s. In their families, too, only superficial information about life in Germany, the emigration to the United States, and Black Star’s history had been discussed. The common gaps in information fueled my interest in knowing more. The granddaughters of Safranski and Mayer generously shared information with me, including their own memories and documents from their family archives. Gradually, the thick fog that had obscured any view of the past started to dissipate.

This is not the first book to consider Black Star’s contributions to the use of photographs in the illustrated press. Hendrik Neubauer’s Black Star: 60 Years of Photojournalism magnificently presented many notable Black Star photos and provided a trilingual commentary about Black Star and its founders.⁸ The most striking gap in Neubauer’s incomparable tome is the absence of any photos of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld themselves. In 2013 Michael Torosian stepped into that breach with his smaller gem, the hand-press volume Black Star that includes tipped-in images of the company’s founders provided by their descendants.⁹

Both Neubauer and Torosian acknowledge the ground-breaking work of C. Zoe Smith, whose 1983 PhD dissertation and published articles provided an important blueprint for understanding the Black Star story.¹⁰ Smith was ahead of the curve in identifying the company’s contribution to photojournalism, and that enabled her to conduct interviews with people who had known Black Star’s founders. Her writings have formed the basis for much of the available information regarding Black Star’s early years. In the summer of 2017 I reached out to Smith to let her know that I was writing this book and that I highly value her unique contribution to the world’s knowledge about Black Star. She was genuinely pleased to hear that I planned to add to that body of information and shared with me the tapes of the interviews she had conducted for her dissertation research. The material on those tapes has greatly enriched my understanding of Black Star’s origins. Equally as important is the profound personal satisfaction I have experienced in hearing for the first time in more than half a century the voice of Ernest Mayer and knowing that this book can be a mouthpiece for more of his thoughts.

The existing publications about Black Star, as good as they are, were written without adequate knowledge about the lives its founders led prior to their arrival in New York City. This book traces the events of those significant years, providing information that is necessary in order to understand how the three men were able to succeed in exile when many did not.

It was not just the professional accomplishments of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld in Germany that sustained them as refugee-émigrés. Their close friends, mentors, and muses also were essential to the men as sources of strength and motivation, one confirmation of which is found on the bookshelves containing the small remnants of their once large libraries. The only book that their remaining libraries have in common is a short volume of poetry, Wir fanden einen Pfad (We Found a Path), by an early-twentieth-century German poet, Christian Morgenstern.¹¹ Morgenstern spent much of his adult life at death’s door having been diagnosed with tuberculosis to which he succumbed in 1914 just months before the publication of Wir fanden einen Pfad. The book’s title originates from the poem An den Andern (To the Other), an ode that strikingly encapsulates an important spirit that propelled Black Star’s founders through their personal and professional lives and is thus worth setting out here:

There is no formal photograph of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld together, much less one of them with those important others they met on the paths they traveled through life, but with the photos that do exist and the information now available, the story of their lives will be traced here as never before.

A NOTE ON FAMILY ARCHIVE SOURCES

The women in the lives of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld played a fundamental role in preserving their family histories. The men’s mothers, wives, daughters, a daughter-in-law, and now their granddaughters gathered and saved memories and records. Due to their actions, it is possible today to reconstruct much of the story of what brought these three men together and enabled the Black Star contribution to a revolution in the way that news would be communicated through the use of published photographs.

Kurt Safranski’s mother began writing a memoir in the autumn of 1918 while she waited anxiously in Berlin for news of her three sons as World War I ground on into its fifth year.¹³ She completed the manuscript after recording her second grandchild’s birth in 1926. Anna Szafranski related the story of her early years in small-town Grevesmühlen in Mecklenburg in northern Germany prior to her move to Berlin when she married the love of her life, Hermann Szafranski. Anna juxtaposed her relatively truncated education with her older brother’s experience of having been sent away to continue his schooling, but her role as family historian is a testimony to the strength of her intellect, her attention to detail, and her emotional intelligence.

Relying in part on records gathered with help from a local rabbi, Anna set down on paper as much as she knew about her family’s ancestry, reaching as far back as 1705. Anna described her trip to a cemetery in Rehna, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where she visited her great grandparents’ graves and deciphered the text on their headstones. A clearly labeled photograph, faded to shades of sepia, shows that small Jewish cemetery in Rehna behind a thatched farmhouse with the graves towered over by a lone leafless skeletal tree (fig. 1). Since the cemetery no longer exists, that old photograph is in many respects invaluable.¹⁴ When she started writing her memoir, Anna had already been widowed for almost a decade. Due to the ongoing war, she was no longer able to access Hermann Szafranski’s small hometown of Strelno, outside of Posen, 170 miles east of Berlin. Anna nonetheless detailed what she knew about her late husband’s family based in part on earlier trips to Strelno that she and Hermann had made.

In the second half of her memoir, Anna Szafranski walked through the seemingly never dull years in the ever-changing metropolis of Berlin as the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century began. Anna recounted the arrival of electric lighting, indoor plumbing, and the telephone as well as the births of her three sons and other momentous family occasions. She portrayed her life in Berlin as having been centered on caring for the health and well-being of her husband and sons and tending to the running of the household. It was not the purpose of Anna’s record to provide a biography of Kurt Safranski, but from the story she did tell, more information about Safranski’s youth can be gleaned than from any other source. In addition, Safranski’s daughter and granddaughters preserved other materials that add context to certain events in Safranski’s life, including family photographs, files with correspondence, and two portfolios with samples of Safranski’s art from Germany.

Ernest Mayer’s mother, Mathilde, also wrote a memoir that she finished in 1951, in exile in the United States.¹⁵ In recording her past, Mathilde provided a wide range of commentary on her life and times growing up in the small town of Bingen am Rhein. She described her marriage to a local businessman who was in the wine trade, her life while raising Ernest and his two siblings there, and the loss of her husband in 1934. She had asked her brother Isidor Gross for his input about their ancestors, and he responded with details reaching back to their grandparents on both sides of the family, information that Mathilde included in her memoir.¹⁶ Ernest Mayer well understood the value of his mother’s chronicle, and he carefully handed it to his eldest granddaughter when she was old enough to appreciate the gift despite her inability to read the German language in which it was written. She treasures it still, and all the more so now that she can understand the contents.

No such convenient accounting of Kurt Kornfeld’s family history exists, but after his death, his daughter-in-law gathered together and preserved the few mementos of his life in Germany that Kornfeld had brought with him to the United States and retained over the years. Along with a few dozen postcards and photos from his youth, there was a wedding album that his wife turned into a family scrapbook after their marriage. Pasted into the album were photos, letters, postcards, and newspaper clippings about important events in the lives of their friends and family members. Kornfeld had also kept a guest book that he and his wife had at their home in the Tempelhof district of Berlin, and one from a weekend house in Geltow, near Potsdam, from 1929 until September 1935. Both shed new light on the life Kornfeld was leading in Weimar Germany as does a diary written by Kornfeld’s eldest son about his travels in Germany before he was sent to boarding school in England in 1935. Finally, Kornfeld’s daughter-in-law preserved a few of his books that made it possible to begin tracing his professional activities as a publisher and literary agent.

Studying the materials preserved by the three families led to an understanding of the otherwise inexplicable confidence shown by Kornfeld, Mayer, and Safranski that together they could create a photo agency as a sustainable business in New York when they fled Nazi Germany. Black Star’s founders were relying on their complementary expertise and their shared passion for publishing.

1 CZS/EM, May 22, 1978, Tape 2, Side B.

2 C. Zoe Smith, "Émigré Photography in America: Contributions of German Photojournalism from Black Star Picture Agency to LIFE Magazine, 1933–1938."

3 KS to EM and KK, December 17, 1950, SA.

4 Fischer’s medicinische Buchhandlung H. Kornfeld was at times referred to as Fischer’s medizinische Buchhandlung H. Kornfeld.

5 A current convention to cite LIFE, LOOK, and other English-language titles as Life, Look, etc., without the original capital letters is followed in this book. It is not applied to foreign-language materials in order that the historically accurate titles are presented to those who may be unfamiliar with them.

6 Howard Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism, 115–16.

7 Fred Ward. Photographer, 81, Philadelphia Enquirer, July 26, 2016.

8 Neubauer, Black Star.

9 Michael Torosian, Black Star.

10 Smith, Émigré Photography in America.

11 Christian Morgenstern, Wir fanden einen Pfad.

12 Morgenstern, Wir fanden einen Pfad, 32. This translation and others in the book are by the author unless otherwise noted.

13 Anna Szafranski, Mudding’s Story.

14 See this site accessed on September 6, 2016: http://www.jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/p-r/1634-rehna-mecklenburg-vorpommern.

15 Mathilde Mayer, Die Alte und die Neue Welt. The published text is not the complete original manuscript, which the Mayer heirs have kindly shared with me. If a citation only appears in the original manuscript, I note it as the unpublished manuscript.

16 Mayer, Die Alte und die Neue Welt, 11–21.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Very little is known about many of the people who play a role in this book. With that in mind, the following brief identification of key individuals may serve as a helpful reference. Where relevant, the original spelling of an individual’s name is noted in brackets.

Lucian Bernhard, born Emil Kahn (1883–1972): Graphic artist, designer, and architect. Kurt Safranski’s teacher and mentor.

Axel Juncker (1870–1952): Danish publisher active in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century and an important early facilitator of Safranski’s career as an illustrator.

Kurt Korff, born Kurt Karfunkel (1876–1938): Senior editor at Ullstein Verlag. A close collaborator with Kurt Safranski.

Alfred Kornfeld (1920–1946): Eldest son of Kurt Kornfeld.

Emma Kornfeld (1860–1928): Kurt Kornfeld’s mother, née Bernstein.

Hanna Kornfeld (1892–1925): Kurt Kornfeld’s wife, née Richter.

Heinrich Kornfeld (1856–1921): Kurt Kornfeld’s father.

Kurt Kornfeld (1887–1967): Cofounder of Black Star Publishing Company.

Peter Kornfeld (1921–2012): Kurt Kornfeld’s younger son and father of the author.

Clara Mayer (1909–1984): Ernest Mayer’s second wife, née Marcuse.

Ernest [Ernst] Mayer (1893–1983): Cofounder of Black Star Publishing Company.

Helene Mayer (1894–1945): Ernest Mayer’s first wife, née Hirschberg.

Marx Mayer (1858–1934): Ernest Mayer’s father.

Mathilde Mayer (1869–1969): Ernest Mayer’s mother, née Gross.

Dr. Willy Mayer-Gross (1889–1961): Clinical psychiatrist. Best friend of Kurt Kornfeld and brother of Ernest Mayer.

Kurt Safranski [Szafranski] (1890–1964): Cofounder of Black Star Publishing Company.

Mania Safranski [Szafranski] (1891–1978): Kurt Safranski’s wife, née Welkanoz.

Maximilian Soffner (1872–1948): Navy captain and mentor to Kurt Kornfeld.

Anna Szafranski (1864–1956): Kurt Safranski’s mother, née Aaron.

Hermann Szafranski (1843–1909): Kurt Safranski’s father.

Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935): Author, satirist, and critic of Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany. Friend of Kurt Safranski.

Herman [Hermann] Ullstein (1875–1943): One of the owners and directors of Ullstein Verlag and a mentor to Kurt Safranski.

Ernst Weil (1891–1966): Antiquarian bookstore owner and incunabulist. Friend of Ernest Mayer, brother-in-law and friend of Kurt Safranski.

Willi Wolfradt (1892–1988): Art critic, editor, and journalist. Friend of Ernest Mayer.

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

1. Jewish Cemetery in Rehna, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany

2. Leipziger Straße, Dönhoff Square, Berlin, in 1891

3. Kurt Safranski in his apartment in 1912

4. Safranski cover of the 1913 Karikaturisten Kalender

5. Portrait of Mania Welkanoz

6. Mania Welkanoz with her family and Kurt and Anna Szafranski

7. Kurt Safranski in Russia in 1915 with his railway regiment

8. Ernest Mayer in World War I

9. Mania Safranski and Ernest Mayer during Bingen’s 1921 grape harvest

10. Helene and Ernest Mayer in Germany

11. Portrait of Ernst Weil by Adolf Ziegler, 1925

12. Mayer’s family in Bingen in 1926

13. Ad for Mayer’s Mauritius photo agency

14. Kurt Kornfeld’s grandfather, Gerson Bernstein

15. Kurt Kornfeld with unidentified women on the Heuberg, Friedrichroda, Germany

16. Field Marshall Hindenburg reviewing troops at Ostende, Belgium

17. Kornfeld wedding photo in Buch, Berlin, September 30, 1918

18. Portrait of Hanna Kornfeld

19. Entry in the Kornfelds’ Tempelhof guest book by Erwin Sophron Krauss

20. Entry in the Kornfelds’ Geltow guest book by Kurt Safranski’s daughter

21. Mania and Kurt Safranski in Marienbad, September 1933

22. The Kornfeld home at Dorfstraße 32, Tempelhof, Berlin

23. Dorfstraße 32 destroyed by a bomb in World War II

24. Kurt Safranski and Kurt Korff in Manhattan

25. Black Star founders in New Rochelle at the end of 1936

26. Portrait of Kurt Safranski

27. Ernest Mayer at his Black Star desk, December 1936

28. Kurt Kornfeld at Black Star

29. Alfred and Kurt Kornfeld with Mania and Kurt Safranski, 1944

30. Telegram reporting the death of Alfred Kornfeld in Germany, 1946

31. Kurt Kornfeld looking at Black Star photos

32. Kurt Kornfeld and Willy Mayer-Gross

33. Ernest Mayer and his mother at his daughter’s wedding

34. Ernest and Clara Mayer

35. Kurt Kornfeld and his daughter-in-law

36. Ernest and Clara Mayer on vacation

37. Ernest Mayer speaking with C. Zoe Smith in 1979

38. Map of the families of the Black Star founders in the diaspora

PART ONE

LIFE BEGINS IN GERMANY

CHAPTER I

COMING OF AGE IN IMPERIAL GERMANY

1. INTRODUCTION

The accomplishments of Mayer, Safranski, and Kornfeld in New York were made possible by the lives they led before their forced emigration. The three men had so little in common in their early years, however, that the thought of them going on to create a transformational business partnership together in America was virtually unimaginable. Information about their youth preserved by the women in their lives shows that the milieu in which they were raised enabled them to determinedly pursue their interests in post-Bismarck Wilhelmine Germany, thereby laying the groundwork for their later success in the Weimar era and as refugee-émigrés in the United States.

The Black Star founders came of age in a country in transition politically, economically, and socially. Following his victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, King Wilhelm of Prussia gathered some twenty-five distinctive principalities into a German empire meant to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain, France, and Russia. Until 1890, the country’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, opportunistically pursued reforms within the newly formed country to forge a nation-state.¹ In 1885 he hosted a conference in Berlin and procured German access to colonial resources that were fueling the wealth of the other European states. By the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Wilhelm II saw to it that Germany was running neck and neck in the arms race with his relations ruling Britain and Russia.² As change swirled around them, the three Black Star founders levelheadedly built the foundation for their professional careers.

2. KURT SAFRANSKI: WE ARE YOUNG AND THAT IS BEAUTIFUL

When Anna Aaron and Hermann Szafranski married in 1883, Hermann surprised Anna by beautifully decorating the home where they would start their life together in the Berlin Mitte district.³ Stepping out the door of their apartment building in the Leipzigerstraße, they were surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the large Dönhoff Square marketplace (fig. 2). After the birth of their third child, Kurt, in 1890, the family eventually moved to a bigger home on Bülowstraße, in a quieter neighborhood in the Schöneberg district of the city.⁴

Hermann Szafranski had left his hometown of Strelno to join his older brother Agow in Berlin. After Agow’s small company in the garment industry was wound down while he was away fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, he worked with his Raphael cousins, who were also in the rag trade. Hermann had a job as a buyer for the clothing manufacturer V. Mannheimer.⁵ On February 1, 1878, Hermann and Agow cofounded a family business, Gbr. Szafranski (Szafranski Bros.), to manufacture and sell women’s coats.⁶ Their younger brothers, Moritz and Jacob, eventually joined the company that had offices and manufacturing facilities in the Jägerstraße, a few blocks from the Szafranskis’ home. Anyone who has read Theo Richmond’s book about the shtetl of Konin, just thirty miles south of Strelno, can understand why the Szafranski men migrated one after another to Berlin in search of opportunity.⁷ The once-buzzing Berlin fashion district where the Szafranski brothers set up shop is commemorated today at the entrance to the Hausvogteiplatz U-Bahn station with a memorial to the many Jewish lives and businesses destroyed during the Third Reich.

Anna Szafranski joined her husband only occasionally on his regular business trips to London and Paris, but the pair was frequently away for a week or more at a time for other reasons. Anna delighted in traveling with her husband in Europe and North Africa, either on vacation or at a health spa to treat one or another ailment. While their parents were away, the Szafranski boys were looked after by a nanny whom Anna had known for years. When Hermann and Anna were in Berlin, they enjoyed the cultural life of the city, including the opera, theater, and concerts. At least one New Year’s Eve was celebrated with their sons at the Wintergarten, an animated popular venue for such events.

The Szafranskis also escaped the city as a family, whether visiting Anna’s parents in Grevesmühlen, vacationing on the Baltic Sea, taking drives into the countryside around Berlin, or going out to their garden plot in Lankwitz, just south of the Berlin city center. Hermann had purchased a piece of land there at a time when the area was still countryside. By 1900, with the city growing quickly, half of the plot was expropriated to enable the Teltow Canal to be built.

The important decision about where the Szafranski children would be educated was made by their father, and Hermann chose the academically and socially prestigious Königliches Wilhelms-Gymnasium (King William’s Gymnasium) in Berlin. Subsequently, the two older boys were sent away to attend the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Königsberg in the Neumark, a town about halfway between Berlin and their father’s hometown of Strelno. Bruno, the eldest, earned his Abitur, his high school leaving exam, there in 1904.⁸ His younger brother Ernst was in the class behind him. After high school, Bruno trained as an engineer at the well-regarded technical college in Berlin and then took a job with the electrical engineering company AEG.⁹ Ernst entered an apprenticeship in the garment industry.

Kurt Safranski, however, was never sent so far away to school. He attended the Gymnasium in Berlin until his mid-teens and then went to Bernau for commercial training as preparation for joining the family business. At the Gymnasium, Kurt received the basics of a strong classical turn-of-the-century education and crossed paths with another boy his own age, Kurt Tucholsky.¹⁰ Tucholsky himself attested to having found the education at the Gymnasium insufferable.¹¹ He thought the teachers were completely average, and, although the students were not beaten into submission, nor were they taught anything of importance.¹² Rather than repeat a year, he studied with a tutor to sit for his Abitur before attending law school.¹³

Given that Kurt Safranski had left the Gymnasium before enrolling in the courses for the Abitur, it had seemed a safe assumption that he, like his friend, strained against the rigidity of the schooling there. For those two young men, the plodding nature of the traditional educational system would have tried their patience as they focused on the world modernizing around them. That conjecture regarding Safranski’s views about the Gymnasium greatly underestimated how much he had disliked the place. During Safranski’s first postwar visit to Berlin in 1953, he recorded briefly his thoughts about the school he had attended as he walked past its ruins on a spring day: Wilhelmsgymnasium. The gate is still standing. A piece of marble. I had wished SO much that the dammed Gymnasium would disappear.¹⁴ He had even more to say on the subject when he wrote from Berlin to his wife in the States describing his stroll along the Bellevuestraße: I walked farther—I was the only person in the whole street!—to what was the Wilhelms-Gymnasium, No. 15. How often I went through the gate there as a young boy with a heavy heart. How often did I probably wish at the time that this horrible school could disappear. But I never would have believed that my wish would be so completely fulfilled. It has always been said, though, that within the right wishes, there is hidden a formidable power.¹⁵

When Safranski made those comments, it had been more than forty-five years since he walked out the door of that school for the last time, but he still recalled the heavy heart that was his companion there. Despite such a bitterly despised educational experience in his youth, Safranski went on learning and thinking creatively throughout his life.

Following his formal schooling, Kurt Safranski spent time studying Japanese and developing an understanding of the silk trade as he prepared to visit Japan.¹⁶ In the end, that trip never happened, and neither Kurt nor Ernst would follow in their father’s footsteps. Hermann Szafranski passed away in the spring of 1909 at the age of sixty-six. Ernst had been about to take a break to see something of the United States, but he postponed his travel plans to stay at his grieving mother’s side for several months. With the business in the good hands of a family relation, Georg Isaac, who had been brought in as a partner to ease the burden on the aging Hermann Szafranski, Ernst did eventually board a ship to America. He rather quickly made California his permanent home, there being no indication that he ever returned to Germany.

As Ernst headed off to the United States, Anna’s two other sons began a year of training in the army reserves—Bruno as an engineer and Kurt in a railway regiment. It speaks volumes about Anna’s spirit and positive attitude toward life that she did not dwell on finding herself alone for the first time in more than twenty-five years. Instead, she emphasized how much she treasured the time she had spent with her husband and how fortunate she was to have experienced so much happiness sharing life with him and raising their three sons.

While Kurt was still participating in his military training, he