Kissinger family

Kissinger family

The Meyer Loeb (Kissinger) family tree goes back to 1746.

Meyer Löb Kissinger was born in 1760 (other sources say 1767) in Kleineibstadt near Bad Königshofen. He died on August 9, 1838 in Rödelsee. His first wife died during the birth of his second child. He then married his sister and on October 29, 1818 Abraham Kissinger was born in Rödelsee.

Meyer Löb later worked as a teacher in Bad Kissingen and Rödelsee. He was the first to adopt the name "Kissinger". Due to the provisions of the Bavarian Jewish Edict of 1813, Jewish families were obliged to adopt family names. Place names were then often added to the first name.

Abraham Kissinger had nine children with his wife Fanny (née Stern), all of whom were born in Rödelsee. None of the children stayed in their birthplace. Most of them were teachers and went to other communities and towns.

David Kissinger (grandfather of Henry)

David Kissinger (born June 13, 1860 in Rödelsee, died July 23, 1947 in Sweden) was a teacher and rabbi by profession.

He married Karolina "Lina" Zeilberger, who was three years younger and came from a wealthy family. Before the wedding, however, David Kissinger first had to acquire citizenship rights in the town of Ermershausen, in accordance with the laws of the time. As the daughter of a wealthy farmer brought a dowry of 10,000 gold marks into the marriage, the authorities were "accommodating". On July 13, 1884, David Kissinger was granted citizenship in the Lower Franconian town of Ermershausen, near Haßfurt. A short time later, David and Lina Kissinger marry. The marriage produced a total of seven children: Jenny, Ida, Selma, Fanny, Karl, Arno and Louis.

David Kissinger is described as a cheerful person with a keen sense of humor. After every Shabbat on Saturday evening, David Kissinger would meet up with the local master tailor and shoemaker to play a cheerful game of cards in the village pub. Although David Kissinger belonged to the Orthodox community, there is much to suggest that he was more of a "man of the modern age". The Kissinger family was also one of the first families in Ermershausen to have their own telephone connection.

Louis Kissinger (father of Henry)

Louis Kissinger (born February 2, 1887 in Ermershausen, died March 19, 1982 in New York) was a teacher by profession and the father of Henry Kissinger. Louis Kissinger was born the second eldest son of David and Lina Kissinger. Louis spent his youth carefree in Ermershausen in Lower Franconia, a small community near Haßfurt. Louis is the first Kissinger to break a family tradition, so to speak, by no longer exclusively learning the profession of the so-called "Jewish teacher", but instead wants to become a teacher in the civil service and thus also teach non-Jewish children.

Training and apprenticeship

In 1900, Louis Kissinger attended the royal preparatory school in Arnstein at the age of just 13. At the turn of the century, the preparatory school was a kind of lower level of elementary school teacher training. By 1901, he was already one of the "best of his class". His annual report also lists other positive qualities, including the following: "Through his many intellectual talents, ... his commendable homework, combined with zeal and attention in the classroom, he has earned the satisfaction of his teachers in all subjects. His religious, moral and disciplinary behavior was absolutely blameless".

Kissinger's professional life in Fürth

At the age of 18, Louis Kissinger applied for a teaching position for the first time and thus came into contact with Fürth for the first time. He applies to the Vereinigte Heberlein'schen und Arnstein'schen Institut, which was founded in 1848 by Simon Geiershöfer as a private institute for girls and merged with the private Heberleinsche Töchterschule in 1883. It was the first private girls' secondary school in Fürth, originally founded for daughters from Jewish homes. Around the turn of the century, pupils of the Christian faith were also admitted, so that half were Jewish and the other half Christian, mostly Protestant. After almost 60 years, the school closed its doors in 1907.

Henry Alfred Kissinger (born May 27, 1923 in Fürth as Heinz Alfred Kissinger)

Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger into a Jewish family at Mathildenstraße 23 in Fürth in central Franconia. His father Louis Kissinger (1887-1982) taught history and geography at the Fürth Lyceum, his mother Paula Kissinger (née Stern) (1901-1998) was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish cattle dealer from Leutershausen near Ansbach. The surname had been adopted by his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb (1767-1838) from Kleineibstadt in Lower Franconia in 1817 and refers to the town of Bad Kissingen.

Henry Kissinger spent his childhood with his brother Walter Bernhard (1924-2021), who was one year younger, in Fürth, where the family lived at Marienstraße 5 from 1925 to 1938. Kissinger had been a big soccer fan since his childhood and played in the youth team of SpVgg Fürth (now SpVgg Greuther Fürth), of which he is still a fan today. He later vividly recalled how, as a nine-year-old in 1933, he was told that Adolf Hitler had been appointed German Chancellor, which would prove to be a fundamental turning point for the Kissinger family.

When Kissinger was 15 years old, he fled Germany with his family in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. Several relatives of Kissinger's family were later murdered by the National Socialists. After emigrating, the family stayed in London for a short time before arriving in New York City on September 5, 1938. Kissinger went to George Washington High School with his brother Walter in New York City, in the then German-Jewish district of Washington Heights in Manhattan. He never lost his pronounced German accent in English and his Franconian dialect in German - according to his own statement, due to his youthful shyness.

Kissinger became a US citizen on June 19, 1943, after being drafted into the U.S. Army in the same year. In 1944, Kissinger met the then 36-year-old lawyer and political scientist Fritz G. A. Kraemer at Camp Claiborne (Louisiana), who, like him, was serving in the 84th US Infantry Division and was also a German emigrant.

This encounter became formative for Kissinger's future path. "Over the decades that followed, Kraemer influenced my reading and thinking, influenced my choice of university, sparked my interest in political philosophy and history, inspired my academic theses (both my undergraduate and my graduate theses), and became an integral and indispensable part of my life in general. [...] His inspiration has stayed with me even over the past 30 years, when he no longer wanted to talk to me," Kissinger explained after Kraemer's death in 2003.

The house in which the Kissingers lived in Rödelsee was at the end of the former "Judengasse" (now Zehntgasse)

The gravestones of the great-grandparents are still visible today in the cemetery in Rödelsee. Unfortunately, the inscription is barely recognizable. But from the records and cemetery registers, it is possible to trace the assignment.

Peter Hess