The Warburgs

Chernow’s third banking history follows five generations of a German-Jewish family whose members ended up on opposite sides of the century’s central events. Max ran M. M. Warburg in Hamburg and stayed in Germany until 1938; his brother Paul emigrated, married into Kuhn, Loeb, and became a principal architect of the Federal Reserve; Felix ran the New York philanthropic side; Aby abandoned the bank for art history and built the library that became the Warburg Institute. The book uses the family as an instrument for reading assimilation — how completely a Jewish banking dynasty identified with Germany, how that identification survived the First World War and did not survive the Nazis, and what happened to the firm, the fortune and the family when the country they had financed expelled them.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s biography section reads institutions through the people who built them, and this is the longest-running case of a family business held across four generations and two countries — including the part where the political environment, not the balance sheet, decides the outcome.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography — 137 entries across six numbered sections. Kyle saved it as two X posts that between them photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came from the source PDF. Li Lu lists it as Random House, 1993, with the author’s name given as “Ron Chernow”.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Ron Chernow — the author; The House of Morgan and Titan are already carded.
• Banking — the family business, across two financial systems.
• World War II — the event that ends the German half of the story.