11. The Eisenburg Families
Marx, Stern, Kissinger and Eisenburg: four families in one
My Parents
My sisters’ and I grew up with an extended family coming both on the Stern side and my mother’s Kohnstamm side. We had not a clue how complex and wide our families were. People would turn up with surnames of Gottlieb, Stern, Bacharach, Kohnstamm, Cooper, I could go on and on. We found our parents heavily occupied with these wider families with us at times, at the bottom of the priority list.
I think that in our parents’ eyes, we were all OK so they could keep themselves occupied with people, that to us, were distant cousins and in many cases, complete strangers. This reflects the very strong ties felt by their parents and grandparents to their wider families and the importance of the connections that it brought.
Once in the mid-1970s I remember my parents noting something as they were sitting down to dinner at home one evening. Around the table were half a dozen people our age, none of whom were their own children, all either cousins or what we would term waifs and strays, who they somehow collected.
Which brings me back to discovering a complex relationship between the family of my great grandmother, Sara Stern and a family by the name of Eisenburg. I am taking a slight deviation here to highlight some of the cousins here as they come back into our story when two of my great uncles and my grandfather escape Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
Willy Marx’s in-laws
Starting at the end rather than the beginning, this becomes important because my great-Uncle Willy married a young woman called Erna Eisenburg. Erna came from the same family as Willy’s grandmother, Regina Stern (née Eisenburg). Not only did the Stern and Eisenburg families intertwine four generations apart, but so did the Eisenburgs themselves in a more remarkable way.
Brothers and Sisters
It all started when a brother and sister, married another brother and sister. Regina Eisenburg married Moses Wolf Stern and her brother Hess Eisenburg married Moses’ sister Sisle Stern, called Sette in the family.
Sara Stern, my great-grandmother was the daughter of Moses and Regina. Sara married my great-grandfather Ludolf Marx. As we know, they had four sons, the first Erich, being my grandfather and their second son was Willy. So far, all quite straightforward. Let’s move to Regina’s brother Hess.
Hess Eisenburg
Hess and Sisle Eisenburg had three children, a son Siegmund and two daughters Thekla and Sara. Unfortunately, Sisle died young at the age of 29. So Hess remarried a year later in July 1875 to 21-year-old Betty Rödelheimer. Betty and Hess had three children, two boys called Karl and Oscar and another who only survived a few hours after being born.
Tragically Betty died when she too was 29. Hess married again for the third time, to 28-year-old Regine Klein, some nine years later. Hess and Regine had a daughter Amalie. I can’t help but feel that Regine was taking a risk that she would also die at 29 but she outlived Hess who died in 1899 at the age of 63.
Back to Hess’s first marriage to Sisle Stern and their daughter Thekla Eisenburg. Thekla and my great-grandmother, Sara Stern were first cousins. At the age of 24, in May 1886, Thekla married a widower, Max Kissinger. They went on to have two sons, Ludwig who was transported and murdered in 1942, and Karl, known as Charles, who emigrated to New York.
Max Kissinger
Max brought three children with him from his previous marriage, one of whom was called Rosa Kissinger. Rosa was born in August 1875 and was 11 years old when her father married Thekla Eisenburg. At this point, she was introduced to all her cousins. Her step-uncle Oscar Eisenburg was one year older than Rosa and they fell in love and married in 1898.
By this marriage, Rosa became both a daughter and step-sister-in-law to her mother Thekla. She was also a first cousin by marriage, and a second cousin directly, to Sara, my great-grandmother. While causing some disruption to the generational order of the family, Rosa and Oscar Eisenburg went on to have two sons and a daughter called Erna Eisenburg born at the end of April 1900.
Stern-Marx and Eisenburg
Sara Stern, my great-grandmother was very close to her sisters and her mother’s family, the Eisenburgs. Indeed, as mentioned in a previous blog, Sara was staying with her Eisenburg family when she met Ludolf. It is thus inevitable that all the cousins meet and celebrate all sorts of events together.
Yet again cousins of differing generations were only months or a few years apart in ages. Sara Stern, by this time Sara Marx had four boys, the second of which was Willy, one year older than Erna Eisenburg. They fell in love and married intertwining the Marx-Stern family once again with the Eisenburg family. For exactitude Willy’s wife Erna became both a second and step-third cousin by marriage to her mother-in-law.
The family tree that follows joins all of the branches together and hopefully makes sense of the narrative!
Attributions:
Many of the documents and photographs here are, or at some time in the future will be, lodged as a family archive with the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Schenkung von Frau Anne Marx in liebevoller Erinnerung an ihren Mann Carl Theodore.
I have an entire line that originated from the same little village in West Prussia. In looking through birth records for a three-year period, nearly 80% of the births registered there were in some way related to my family, many through the complex relationships you portrayed in these families. I did a similar deep dive with another three-year period a decade later in time and the percentage was nearly the same. Fascinating complexity, thanks for pointing it out and sharing it.