An Ode to Old Bay, the Great American Condiment

Gustav Brunngasser wasn’t born anywhere near the Chesapeake Bay, and he didn’t meet a blue crab until he was almost fifty years old. A Jewish businessman who would later shorten his name to Brunn, he was born in Bastheim, a small town in Bavaria, in 1893. Brunn attended school until he was thirteen, when his family could no longer afford tuition. He became an apprentice at a tannery and, after saving up money by selling skins and hides to a wholesaler in Wertheim-am-Main, he bought that business, an older company that specialized in rawhide and furs but had a sideline of spices. By the end of the First World War, spices had proved to be the more lucrative and less laborious side of the business, and along with pure spices Brunn was selling seasoning mixes he blended and packaged himself.

But Brunn’s success collided with the rise of the Nazi Party, and soon enough his two children were being targeted by some teachers and fellow-students, his Gentile bookkeeper quit, and more and more customers stopped buying “Jewish” spices. In an oral history collected and archived by the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Brunn’s wife, Bianca, remembered how one day all the stores in Wertheim-am-Main had signs in the windows saying “Jews Not Wanted Here.” Hoping that they would be better off in a bigger city with a larger Jewish community, the Brunns moved to Frankfurt, in 1935. But antisemitism was spreading everywhere, and not even removing the labels from his spices allowed the merchant to circumvent the commerce laws restricting the purchase of Jewish goods. By 1937, recognizing that both their livelihoods and their lives were in danger, Brunn contacted a relative living in Baltimore, applied for a visa, and prepared to leave for the United States.

Before the Brunns could depart, though, Jews around Germany were targeted during the November pogroms, culminating in Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when their homes, businesses, and synagogues were savagely attacked by the Sturmabteilung, the S.S., Hitler Youth, and civilians who followed their violent lead. Around a hundred Jews were killed and thousands of Jewish properties were destroyed. In an interview with the Baltimore Jewish Times, Brunn’s son, Ralph, remembered how the family survived. “Fortunately for us, they made a mistake,” he said. “We were living in Frankfurt in an apartment on the second floor. They picked the wrong house—there weren’t any Jews living there.” The Brunns’ good luck didn’t last for very long. When Gustav attempted to comply with a new order requiring Jews to forfeit any firearms, and went to the police station to turn over his hunting rifles, he was detained. Later that night, he was taken by cattle car to Buchenwald.

But Brunn’s wife had heard that there might be a way to get him out. “There was a lawyer in Frankfurt known to the Jewish community,” their son remembered, a man who required “five thousand marks at the beginning and five thousand marks once ‘the merchandise’ was received. If the second five thousand marks wasn’t received, ‘the merchandise’ went right back where it came from.” After sixteen days in the concentration camp, and within a week of Bianca’s providing the funds, Brunn was reunited with his family, and together they fled the country. They weren’t able to bring much of anything with them to America, but Gustav did tuck a small spice mill into their luggage...