Leseprobe

10 Arrival in Dresden The Salzburg Family By 1865, Dresden, capital of the Kingdom of Sax­ ony, was not merely a city with an illustrious past but an aspiring industrial city of roughly 150,000 inhabitants. Rapid industrialization in the second third of the 19th century had brought 90,000 new residents in the space of just three decades. Entre- preneurs came flocking to the city from far and wide, hoping to set up profitable businesses. Among them was a young merchant called Abra- ham—better known as Adolph—Salzburg. Origi- nally from the Prussian Province of Posen, Salz- burg had left home around 1860, going first to Berlin, where he completed a business apprentice- ship, and then to Dresden. An entry for 27 October 1865 in the commercial register of the Dresden District Court lists him as one of the joint owners of the wholesale textile and clothing company Salzburg & Eisenreich. The newly founded com- pany imported English textiles and had its busi- ness premises on the first floor of 23 Schlossstrasse in Dresden’s historic town centre. Abraham Salzburg (he adopted the Germanic name Adolph at a later date) was born on 11 September 1838, the second of six children of textile merchant Israel Simon Salzburg1 and his wife Röschen. The family lived in the Prussian town of Schönlanke, now Trzcianka, about 90 kilometres northwest of the city of Posen (present-day Poznań). Artisan textile weaving had been an important industry in this small town since the 17th century and enjoyed a heyday in the 18th century. After 1820, however, Schönlanke began to go into economic decline. This was chiefly because of the increasing use of mechanized looms, but matters were made worse by the disappearance of the eastern export market after 1822, when Russia imposed punitive tariffs on imported textiles. By the mid-19th century, Schönlanke was economically impoverished. The town’s residents at this time numbered around 3,700 and over a fifth of them, including the Salz- burg family, were Jewish. As in other states of the German Confederation, Jews in the Province of Posen were discriminated against and did not en- joy the same rights as other German citizens until shortly before the founding of the German Reich in 1871. The Prussian Edict of Emancipation of 1812 improved the legal status of Jews in the rest of Prussia, granting them broad legal equality with the Christian majority, but the edict did not apply in Posen because it had not been part of The Salzburgs in 1887 with their English governess, Claire Virgin.