Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The Fortunes of the Mendelssohns narrates the lives of five generations of the German-Jewish Mendelssohn dynasty from its founder, Moses Mendelssohn, who left the ghetto to become a successful silk merchant, an influential figure in the early development of Prussian business institutions, a major thinker of the German Enlightenment, and the model of Jewish assimilation in Germany. Among his famous cultural progeny were the Romantic writer Dorothea Schlegel and the sibling composers Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel, while further generations include university professors, scientists, professional performers, generous patrons of the arts, and many talented amateurs. His business family included the founders of the Mendelssohn Bank, an anchor of the Prussian banking system through the First World War, and other members of Prussia’s wealthiest elite who served as government advisors and major philanthropists. The book contextualizes the lives of these many Mendelssohns against the tensions on all sides around the assimilation of Jews into German culture, against the political and historical background of the rise of Berlin and Prussia in the reign of Frederick the Great, the Napoleonic Wars, the Revolutions of 1848, the founding of the German Empire, the modernization of Russia, the Nazi regime, two world wars, and their aftermath. It provides richly detailed views of the daily lives of the Mendelssohns, the domestic and public spaces that they inhabited, their vacations and travels, and above all, the changing face of the city of Berlin that was their home.</jats:p>