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