The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  Viktor’s schoolroom has a window looking out towards the building site where they were finishing the university, with its rational series of columns telling the Viennese that knowledge is secular and new. For years every window in this new family house on the Ringstrasse looked out onto dust and demolition. And while Charles talks to Mme Lemaire about Bizet in the salons of Paris, Viktor sits in this schoolroom in the Palais Ephrussi with his German tutor, the Prussian Herr Wessel. Herr Wessel made Viktor translate passages of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from English into German, taught him how history worked from the great German historian Leopold von Ranke, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’ – history as it actually happened. History was happening now, Viktor was told; history is rolling like wind through fields of wheat onwards from Herodotus, Cicero, Pliny and Tacitus through one empire to another, to Austria-Hungary and on towards Bismarck and the new Germany.

  To understand history, taught Herr Wessel, you must also know Ovid and you must know Virgil. You must know how heroes encounter exile and defeat and return. So after history lessons, Viktor must learn parts of the Aeneid by heart. And after this, as recreation I suppose, Herr Wessel teaches Viktor about Goethe, Schiller and von Humboldt. Viktor learns that to love Germany is to love the Enlightenment. And German means emancipation from backwardness, it means Bildung, culture, knowledge, the journey towards experience. Bildung, it is implied, is in the journey from speaking Russian to speaking German, from Odessa to the Ringstrasse, from grain-trading to Schiller-reading. Viktor starts to buy his own books.

  Viktor, it is understood in the family, is the bright one and must get this kind of education. Viktor, like Charles, is the spare son and will not have to be the banker. Stefan is being groomed for this, just like Léon’s eldest son Jules. In a photograph of Viktor a few years later, he is just twenty-two and looks like a good Jewish scholar with his neatly trimmed beard, already slightly plumper than he should be, a high white collar and a black jacket. He has the Ephrussi nose, of course, but what is most noticeable are his pince-nez, the mark of a young man who wants to become a historian. Indeed, in ‘his’ café, Viktor is able to discourse at length, as his tutor has taught him, on this moment in time and how the forces of reaction must be seen in the context of progress. And so on.

  Every young man has his own café, and each is subtly different. Viktor’s was the Griensteidl, at the Palais Herberstein close to the Hofburg. This was a meeting place for young writers, the Jung-Wien of the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler. The poet Peter Altenberg had his post delivered to his table. There were mountains of newspapers and a complete run of Meyers Konversations-Lexicon, Germany’s answer to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to provoke or answer arguments or fuel journalistic copy. You could spend your whole day here, nursing a single cup of coffee under the high vaulted ceilings, writing, not-writing, reading the morning newspaper – the Neue Freie Presse – while waiting for the afternoon edition. Theodor Herzl, the paper’s Paris correspondent with his apartment in the rue de Monceau, used to write here and argue his absurd idea of a Jewish state. Even the waiters were rumoured to join in the conversations around the huge circular tables. It was, in a memorable phrase of the satirist Karl Kraus, ‘an experimental station for the end of the world’.

  In a café you could adopt an attitude of melancholic separation. This was an attitude shared by many of Viktor’s friends, the sons of other wealthy Jewish bankers and industrialists, other members of the generation that had grown up in the marble Palais of the Ringstrasse. Their fathers had financed cities and railways, made fortunes, moved their families across continents. It was so difficult to live up to the Gründer that the most one could be expected to do was talk.

  These sons had a common anxiety about their futures, lives set out in front of them on dynastic tram-lines, family expectations driving them forward. It meant a life lived under the gilded ceilings of their parents’ homes, marriage to a financier’s daughter, endless dances, years in business unspooling in front of them. It meant Ringstrassenstil – Ringstrasse-style – pomposity, over-confidence, the parvenu. It meant billiards in the billiard-room with your father’s friends after dinner, a life immured in marble, watched over by putti.

  These young men were seen as either Jewish or Viennese. It doesn’t matter that they may have been born in the city: Jews had an unfair advantage over the natural-born Viennese, who had gifted liberty to these Semitic newcomers. As the English writer Henry Wickham Steed said, this was:

  Liberty for the clever, quick-witted, indefatigable Jew to prey upon a public and a political world totally unfit for defence against or competition with him. Fresh from Talmud and synagogue, and consequently trained to conjure with the law and skilled in intrigue, the invading Semite arrived from Galicia or Hungary and carried everything before him. Unknown and therefore unchecked by public opinion, without any ‘stake in the country’ and therefore reckless, he sought only to gratify his insatiable appetite for wealth and power…

  The Jews’ insatiability was a common theme. They simply did not know their limits. Anti-Semitism was part of common day-today life. The flavour of Viennese anti-Semitism was different from Parisian anti-Semitism. In both places it happened both overtly and covertly. But in Vienna you could expect to have your hat knocked off your head on the Ringstrasse for looking Jewish (Schnitzler’s Ehrenberg in The Way into the Open, Freud’s father in The Interpretation of Dreams), be abused as a dirty Jew for opening a window in a train carriage (Freud), be snubbed at a meeting of a charity committee (Émilie Ephrussi), have your lectures at the university disrupted by cries of ‘Juden hinaus!’ – ‘Jews out!’ – until every Jewish student had picked up his books and left.

  Abuse also came in more generalised ways. You could read the latest pronouncements by Vienna’s own version of Édouard Drumont in Paris, Georg von Schönerer, or hear his thuggish demonstrations churning their way along the Ring under your window. Schönerer came to prominence as the founder of the Austrian Reform Meeting, declaiming against ‘the Jew, the sucking vampire…that knocks…at the narrow-windowed house of the German farmer and craftsman’. He promised in the Reichsrat that if his movement did not succeed now, ‘the avengers will arise from our bones’ and ‘to the terror of the Semitic oppressors and their hangers-on’ make good the principle ‘“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”’. Retribution against the injustices of the Jews – successful and affluent – was especially popular with artisans and students.

  Vienna University was a particular hotbed of nationalism and anti-Semitism, with the Burschenschaften or student fraternities leading the way with their avowal of kicking the Jews out of the university. This is one of the reasons why many Jewish students considered it necessary to become exceptionally expert and dangerous fencers. In alarm, these fraternities instituted the Waidhofen principle, which meant there could be no duelling with Jews, that Jews had no honour and should not be expected to live as if they did: ‘It is impossible to insult a Jew; a Jew cannot therefore demand satisfaction for any suffered insult.’ You could still beat them up, of course.

  It was Dr Karl Lueger, the founder of the Christian Social Party, with his amiability and Viennese patois, his followers with their white carnations in their buttonholes, who seemed even more dangerous. His anti-Semitism seemed more carefully considered, less overtly rabble-rousing. Lueger made his play as an anti-Semite by necessity rather than conviction: ‘wolves, panthers, and tigers are human compared to these beasts of prey in human form…We object to the old Christian Austrian Empire being replaced by a new Jewish Empire. It is not hatred for the individual, not hatred for the poor, the small Jew. No gentlemen, we do not hate anything but the oppressive big cap ital which is in the hands of the Jews.’ It was Bankjuden – the Rothschilds and Ephrussi – who had to be put in their place.

  Lueger gained huge popularity and was finally appointed mayor in 1897, noting with some satisfaction that ‘Jew-bait
ing is an excellent means of propaganda and getting ahead in politics’. Lueger then reached an accommodation with those Jews he had assailed in his rise to power, remarking smugly that ‘Who is a Jew is something I determine.’ There was still considerable Jewish anxiety: ‘Can it be considered appropriate for the good name and interests that Vienna be the only great city in the world administered by an anti-semitic agitator?’ Though there was no anti-Semitic legislation, the penalty of Lueger’s twenty years of rhetoric was a legitimisation of bias.

  In 1899, the year that the netsuke arrived in Vienna, it was possible for a deputy in the Reichsrat to make speeches calling for Schussgelder – bounties – for shooting Jews. In Vienna the most outrageous statements were met with a feeling from the assimilated Jews that it was probably best not to make too much fuss.

  It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about anti-Semitism.

  It was the Emperor who held out against this agitation. ‘I will tolerate no Judenhetze in my Empire,’ he said. ‘I am fully persuaded of the fidelity and loyalty of the Israelites and they can always count on my protection.’ Adolf Jellinek, the most famous Jewish preacher of the time, pronounced that ‘The Jews are thoroughly dynastical, loyalist, Austrian. The Double Eagle is for them a symbol of redemption and the Austrian colours adorn the banners of their freedom.’

  Young Jewish men in their cafés had a slightly different view. They were living in Austria, part of a dynastic empire, part of a stifling bureaucracy where every decision was endlessly deferred, where everything aspired to be ‘kaiserlich-königlich’, k & k, imperial and royal. You could not move in Vienna without seeing the double-headed Hapsburg eagle or the portraits of the Emperor Franz Josef, with his moustaches and sideburns and his chest of medals, and his grandpaternal eyes following you from the window of the shop where you bought your cigars, over the little desk of the maître d’ in the restaurant. You could not move in Vienna if you were young, wealthy and Jewish, without being observed by a member of your extended dynastic family. Anything you did might end up in a satirical magazine. Vienna was full of gossips, caricaturists – and cousins.

  The nature of the age was much discussed around these marble café tables and between these earnest young men. Hofmannsthal, the son of a Jewish financier, argued that the nature of the age ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy’. It can rest only, he said, on ‘das Gleitende’, moving, slipping, sliding: ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende’. The nature of the age was change itself, something to be reflected in the partial and fragmentary, the melancholy and lyric, not in the grand, firm, operatic chords of the Gründerzeit and the Ringstrasse. ‘Security,’ said Schnitzler, the well-off son of a Jewish professor of laryngology, ‘exists nowhere.’

  Melancholy fits with the perpetual dying fall of Schubert’s Abschied, ‘Farewell’. Liebestod, the love of death, was one response. Suicide was terribly common among Viktor’s acquaintances. Schnitzler’s daughter, Hofmannsthal’s son, three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers and Gustav Mahler’s brother would all kill themselves. Death was a way of separating oneself from the mundane, from the snobbery and the intrigues and the gossip, drifting into das Gleitende. Schnitzler’s list of reasons for shooting yourself in The Road into the Open encompasses ‘Grace, or debts, from boredom with life, or purely out of affectation’. When, on 30th January 1889 the Crown Prince, Archduke Rudolf, committed suicide after murdering his young mistress Marie Vestera, suicide gained its imperial imprimatur.

  It was understood that none of the sensible Ephrussi children would go as far as that. Melancholy had its place. A café. It shouldn’t be brought home.

  But other things were brought home.

  On 25th June 1889 Viktor’s sister, the long-faced, belle laide Anna, converted to Catholicism in order to marry Baron Herz von Hertenreid. She has a long list of possible husbands, and now she has found a banker and a baron who comes from the right kind of family, even if he is Christian. The Herz von Hertenreids are a family that – approving tones from my grandmother – always spoke French. Conversion was relatively common. I spend a day looking up the records of the Viennese Rabbinate in the archives of the Jewish community next to the synagogue in Judengasse, the names of every Jew born, married or buried in Vienna. I’m searching for her when an archivist turns. ‘I remember her marriage,’ she says, ‘1889. She has the firmest signature, confident. It almost goes through the paper.’

  I can believe this. Anna seems to have been able to create trouble wherever she went. On the family tree my grandmother made for my father in the 1970s, there are pencil annotations. Anna has two children, she writes, a beautiful daughter who marries and then flees with her lover to the East, and a son who is ‘not married, did nothing’. ‘Anna’, she continues, ‘witch’.

  Eleven days after Anna’s wedding to her banker, Stefan, the heir-apparent – groomed for the life of the bank, with his fantastic waxed moustaches – elopes with his father’s Russian Jewish mistress Estiha. Estiha only spoke Russian – this is written on the annotated family tree – and broken German.

  Stefan was immediately disinherited. He was to receive no allowance, live in no family property, communicate with no member of the family. It was a proper Old Testament banishment, admittedly with the particularly Viennese slant of marrying your father’s lover. One sin piled on another: apostasy on filial disgrace. And linguistic incompetence in a mistress. I’m not sure how to read this. Does it reflect badly on father or son, or both?

  Cut off, this couple went first to Odessa, where there were still friends and a name to use. Then on to Nice. Then a succession of progressively less smart resorts along the Côte d’Azur as their money ran out. In 1893 an Odessa newspaper notes that the Baron Stefan von Ephrussi has been received into the Lutheran Evangelical faith. By 1897 he is working as a cashier in a Russian bank for foreign trade. A letter comes from a shabby Paris hotel in the 10th arrondissement in 1898. They have no children, no heirs to complicate Ignace’s plans. I wonder, in passing, if Stefan kept his fine moustaches as he travelled downwards with Estiha through these circles of shabbier hotels, waiting for a telegram from Vienna.

  And Viktor’s world stopped still as a slammed book.

  Café mornings or not, Viktor was suddenly going to be in charge of a very large and complex international business. He was to be blooded in stocks and shipments, sent to Petersburg, Odessa, Paris, Frankfurt. Precious time had been lost on the other boy. Viktor had to learn quickly what was expected of him. And this was just the start. Viktor also had to marry, and he had to have children: specifically he had to have a son. All those dreams of writing a magisterial history of Byzantium were lost. He was now the heir.

  I think it might have been at around this point that Viktor developed his nervous tic of taking off his pince-nez and wiping his hand across his face from brow to chin, a reflex movement. He was clearing his mind, or arranging his public face. Or perhaps he was erasing his private face, catching it in his hand.

  Viktor waited until she was seventeen and then proposed to the Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla, a girl he had known since her childhood. Her parents, Baron Paul Schey von Koromla and the English-born Evelina Landauer, were family friends, business associates of his father’s, neighbours on the Ringstrasse. Viktor and Evelina were close friends, as well as contemporaries in age. They shared a love of poetry, would dance together at balls and go on shooting parties to Kövecses, the Scheys’ Czechoslovakian estate.

  The young scholar: Viktor, aged 22, 1882

  Viktor and Emmy were married on 7th March 1899 in the synagogue in Vienna. He was thirty-nine and in love, and she was eighteen and in love. Viktor was in love with Emmy. She was in love with an artist and playboy who had no intention of marrying anyone, let alone this young decorative creature. She was not in love with Viktor.

  Alongside appropriate wedding-presents from all over Europe, laid out after the wedding breakfast in the library, was a famous rope of p
earls from a grandmother, the Louis XVI desk from cousin Jules and Fanny, the two ships in a gale from cousin Ignace, an Italian Madonna and Child nach Bellini in a huge gilt frame from uncle Maurice and aunt Béatrice, and a large diamond from someone whose name is lost. And, from cousin Charles, there was the vitrine containing the netsuke lined up on the green velvet shelves.

  And then, on 3rd June, ten weeks after the wedding, Ignace died. It was sudden: there was no malingering. According to my grandmother, he died in the Palais Ephrussi with Émilie holding one hand and his mistress the other. This must have been another mistress, I realise, a mistress who was neither his son’s wife nor one of his sisters-in-law.

  I have a photograph of Ignace on his deathbed, his mouth still firm and decisive. He was buried in the Ephrussi family mausoleum. It is a small Doric temple that he had built with characteristic foresight to hold the Ephrussi clan in the Jewish section of the Vienna cemetery, and where he had his father, the patriarch Joachim, reinterred. Very biblical, I think, to be buried with your father, and to leave space for your sons. In his will he left legacies to seventeen of his servants, from his valet Sigmund Donnebaum (1,380 crowns) and the butler Josef (720 crowns) to the porter Alois (480 crowns) and the maids Adelheid and Emma (140 crowns). He asked Viktor to choose a picture for his nephew Charles from his collection, and suddenly I see a tenderness here, a remembrance from an uncle of his young bookish nephew and his notebooks forty years before. I wonder what Viktor found amongst all the heavy gilt frames.

  And so Viktor, with his new young wife, inherited the Ephrussi bank, responsibilities that laced Vienna together with Odessa and St Petersburg and London and Paris. Included in this inheritance was the Palais Ephrussi, sundry buildings in Vienna, a huge art collection, a golden dinner service engraved with the double E, and the responsibility for the seventeen servants who worked in the Palais.