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

by Edmund de Waal

  This is not unusual in Vienna. It is slightly different from Paris. This is a city of chambres séparées at restaurants, where you can eat and seduce as in Schnitzler’s Reigen or La Ronde: ‘A private room in the restaurant “Zum Riedhof”. Subdued comfortable elegance. The gas fire is burning. On the table the remains of a meal – cream pastries, fruit, cheese etc. Hungarian white wine. The HUSBAND is smoking a Havana cigar, leaning back in one corner of the sofa. The SWEET YOUNG THING is sitting in an armchair beside him, spooning down whipped cream from a pastry with evident pleasure…’ In Vienna at the turn of the century there is the cult of the süsse Mädel, ‘simple girls who lived for flirtation with young men from good homes’. There is endless flirtation. Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with its text by Hofmannsthal – in which changing costumes, changing lovers and changing hats are all held in suspended amusement – is new in 1911 and is wildly popular. Schnitzler has problems, he confides in his journal of his sexual congresses, in keeping up with the demands of his two mistresses.

  Emmy dressed as Marie Antoinette in the salon of the Palais Ephrussi, 1900

  Sex is inescapable in Vienna. Prostitutes crowd the pavements. They advertise on the back page of the Neue Freie Presse. Everything and everyone is catered for. Karl Kraus quotes them in his journal Die Fackel: ‘Travelling Companion Sought, young, congenial, Christian, independent. Replies to “Invert 69” Poste Restante Habsburgergasse’. Sex is argued over by Freud. In Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, the cult book of 1903, women are, by nature, amoral and in need of direction. Sex is golden in Klimt’s Judith, Danaë, The Kiss, dangerous in Schiele’s tumbled bodies.

  To be a modern woman in Vienna, to be comme il faut, it is understood that your domestic life has a little latitude. Some of Emmy’s aunts and cousins have marriages of convenience: her aunt Anny, for instance. Everyone knows that Hans Count Wiltschek is the natural father of her cousins, the twin brothers Herbert and Witold Schey von Koromla. Count Wiltschek is handsome and extremely glamorous: an explorer, the funder of Antarctic expeditions. A close friend of the late Crown Prince Rudolf, he has had islands named after him.

  I’ve delayed my return to London – I’m finally on the track of Ignace’s will and want to see how he divided his fortune. The Adler Society, the genealogical society of Vienna, is only open to members and their guests on Wednesday evenings after six o’clock. The society offices are through a grand hall on the second floor of a house just down from Freud’s apartment. I duck through a lowish door and into a long corridor hung with portraits of Vienna’s mayors. Bookcases with box-files of deaths and obituaries to the left, aristocrats, runs of Debrett’s and the Almanach de Gotha to the right. Everything else and everyone else, straight on. At last I see people at work on their projects, carrying files, copying ledgers. I’m not sure what genealogical societies are usually like, but this one has completely unexpected roars of laughter and scholars calling out across the floor, requesting help in deciphering difficult handwriting.

  I ask very delicately about the friendships of my great-grandmother Emmy von Ephrussi, née Schey von Koromla, circa 1900. There is much collegiate joshing. Emmy’s friendships of a hundred years ago are no secret, all her former lovers are known: someone mentions a cavalry officer, another a Hungarian roué, a prince. Was it Ephrussi who kept identical clothes in two different households so that she could start her day either with her husband or her lover? The gossip is still so alive: the Viennese seem to have no secrets at all. It makes me feel painfully English.

  I think of Viktor, son of one sexually insatiable man, brother of another, and I see him opening a brown parcel of books from his dealer in Berlin with a silver paper knife at his library table. I see him reaching into his waistcoat pocket for the thin matches he keeps there for lighting his cigars. I see the ebb and flow of energy through the house, like water running into pools and out again. What I cannot see is Viktor in Emmy’s dressing-room looking down into the vitrine, unlocking it and picking out a netsuke. I’m not sure that he is even a man who would sit and talk to Emmy as she got dressed, with Anna fussing around her. I’m not sure what they really talk about at all. Cicero? Hats?

  I see him moving his hand across his face as he readjusts himself before he goes every morning to his office. Viktor goes out onto the Ring, turns right, first right into the Schottengasse, first left and he is there. He has begun to take his valet Franz with him. Franz sits at a desk in the outer office, so that Viktor can read undisturbed inside. Thank God for clerks who can tabulate all those banking columns correctly, as Viktor makes notes on history in his beautiful slanting handwriting. He is a middle-aged Jewish man, in love with his young and beautiful wife.

  There is no gossip about Viktor in the Adler.

  I think of Emmy at eighteen, newly installed with her vitrine of ivories in the great glassed-in house on the corner of the Ring; I remember Walter Benjamin’s description of a woman in a nineteenth-century interior. ‘It encased her so deeply in the dwelling’s interior,’ he wrote, ‘that one might be reminded of a compass case where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet, folds of velvet.’

  18. ONCE UPON A TIME

  The children in the Palais Ephrussi have nurses and nannies. The nurses are Viennese and kind, and the nannies are English. Because the nannies are English, their breakfast is English and there is always porridge and toast. There is a large lunch with pudding, and then there is afternoon tea, with bread and butter and jam and small cakes, and after that is supper, with milk and stewed fruit ‘to keep them regular’.

  On special days the children are required to be part of Emmy’s at-homes. Elisabeth and Gisela are dressed in starched muslin dresses with sashes, while poor Iggie, who is on the plump side, has to wear a black velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with an Irish lace collar. Gisela has big blue eyes. She is a particular pet of the visiting ladies, and Charles’s little Renoir gypsy when they visit the Chalet Ephrussi, so pretty that Emmy (tactless) has her portrait done in red chalk, and Baron Albert Rothschild, an amateur photographer, asks for her to be brought to his studio to be photographed. The children are driven in the carriage for a daily walk with the English nannies in the Prater, where the air is less dusty than on the Ringstrasse. A footman comes too, walking behind in a fawn greatcoat and wearing a top hat with an Ephrussi badge stuck into it.

  There are two set times when the children see their mother: dressing for dinner and Sunday mornings. Half-past ten on a Sunday morning marks the moment when the English nanny and governess leave for morning service at the English church and Mama visits the nursery. In her brief memoir, Elisabeth described ‘Those two divine Sunday morning hours…She had made haste that morning with her toilette and was dressed very simply in a black skirt, down to the ground of course, and a green shirt-waist with a high stiff white collar and white cuffs, her hair beautifully piled up on top of her head. She was lovely and she smelt divinely…’

  Together, they would take down the heavy picture books with their rich maroon covers: Edmund Dulac’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sleeping Beauty and, best of all, Beauty and the Beast with its figures of horror. Each Christmas brought the new Fairy Book of Andrew Lang, ordered from London by the children’s English grandmother: Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Rose. A book could last a year. Each child would choose a favourite story: ‘The White Wolf’, ‘The Queen of the Flowery Isles’, ‘The Boy Who Found Fear at Last’, ‘What Came of Picking Flowers’, ‘The Limping Fox’, ‘The Street Musician’.

  Gisela and Elisabeth, 1906

  Read aloud, a story from the Fairy Books is less than half an hour long. Each story starts with ‘Once upon a time’. Some stories have a cottage on the edge of the forest, like the birch and pine forests at Kövecses. Some of the stories include the white wolf, like the one shot by the gamekeeper near the house, and shown to the children and their cousins on an early autumn morning in the stable yard. Or the bronze wolf’s head
on the door of the Palais Schey, whose muzzle gets rubbed every time they pass it.

  There are strange meetings in these stories, encounters with the bird-charmer with a flock of finches on his hat and arms – like the one you see standing in a circle of children on the Ringstrasse outside the gates of the Volksgarten. Or with pedlars. Like the Schnorrer with his basket of buttons and pencils and postcards hanging from his black coat, who stands by the gates out onto the Franzensring and to whom they have been told by their father they must be polite.

  Lots of stories include the Princess getting dressed in her gown and tiara to go to the ball, like Mama. Lots of stories have a magic palace in them with a ballroom, like the room downstairs that you see lit with candles at Christmas. All the stories finish with ‘The End’ and a kiss from Mama, and then no more stories for another whole week. Emmy was a wonderful story-teller, said Iggie.

  The other time that the children regularly see her is when she is dressing to go out and they are allowed into her dressing-room.

  Emmy would change out of her day-clothes, in which she had received or visited friends, into her clothes for dinner at home or, the opera, or a party or, best of all, a ball. Dresses would be laid out over the chaise longue and there would be a lengthy discussion with the expert Anna over which one to wear. The eyes of my great-uncle Iggie used to fire as he described her animation. If Viktor had Ovid and Tacitus – and his Leda – at one end of the corridor, then at the other end Emmy could describe dresses that her mother had worn season by season, how lengths were changing, how the weight and fall of a gown altered the way you moved, the differences between a muslin, gauze or tulle scarf across your shoulders in the evening. She knows about Paris fashion and what is à la mode in Vienna, and how to play the two. She is especially good on hats: a velvet hat with a huge ribbon on it to meet the Emperor; a fur toque with an ostrich feather, worn with a column dress trimmed in black fur; the best hat in the line of Jewish ladies at a charity do in a small ballroom somewhere. Something very wide indeed with a hydrangea on its brim. From Kövecses, Emmy sends to her mother a postcard of herself wearing a dark Makart hat: ‘Tascha shot a buck today. How is your cold? Do you like my newest affected pictures?’

  Dressing is the hour when Anna brushes her hair and laces corsets, fastens innumerable hooks and eyes, fetches variant gloves and shawls and hats, when Emmy chooses her jewellery and stands in front of the three great panels of mirror.

  And this is when the children are allowed to play with the netsuke. The key is turned in the black lacquer cabinet and the door is opened.

  19. TYPES OF THE OLD CITY

  The children in the dressing-room choose their favourite carving and play with it on the pale-yellow carpet. Gisela loved the Japanese dancer, holding her fan against the brocade gown, caught in mid-step. Iggie loved the wolf, a tight dark tangle of limbs, faint markings all along its flanks, gleaming eyes and a snarl. And he loved the bundle of kindling tied up with rope, and the beggar who has fallen asleep over his begging bowl so that all you see is the top of his bald head. There is also a dried fish, all scales and shrunken eyes, with a small rat scuttling over it proprietorially; its eyes are inlaid jet. And there is the mad old man with his bony back and bulging eyes, gnawing on a fish with an octopus in his other hand. Elisabeth, contrary, loved the masks with their abstracted memory of faces.

  You could arrange these carvings, ivory and wood, all the fourteen rats in one long row, the three tigers, the beggars over there, the children, the masks, the shells, the fruits.

  You could arrange them by colour, all the way from the dark-brown medlar to the gleaming ivory deer. Or by size. The smallest is the single rat with black inlaid eyes chewing his tail, little bigger than the magenta stamp issued to celebrate the sixtieth year of the Emperor’s reign.

  Or you muddled them up, so that your sister can’t find the girl in her brocade robes. Or you could stockade the dog and her puppies with all the tigers, and she would have to get out – and she did. Or you could find the one of the woman washing herself in the wooden bathtub, and the even more intriguing one that looked like a mussel shell, until you opened it up and discovered the man and woman with no clothes on. Or you could scare your brother with the one of the boy trapped in the bell by the witch-snake, with her long black hair trailing round and round.

  And you tell stories about these carvings to your mother, and she chooses one and starts a story about it to you. She picks up the netsuke of the child and the mask. She is good with stories.

  There are so many that you can never really count them, never know that you have seen them all. And that is the point of these toys in their mirrored cabinet, extending onwards and onwards. They are a complete world, a complete space to play in, until the time comes to put them back again, until Mama is dressed and choosing her fan and her shawl, and then she gives you a goodnight kiss and you have to put the netsuke back now.

  They go back into the vitrine, the samurai with the sword half out of the scabbard as the guard at the front, and the small key is turned in the lock of the cabinet. Anna rearranges the fur tippet around Emmy’s neck and fusses at the fall of her sleeves. The nursemaid comes to take you down to the nursery.

  And while the netsuke are playthings in this room in Vienna, they are being taken very seriously elsewhere. They are being collected across Europe. The first collections put together by the pioneer collectors are being auctioned for substantial amounts at the Hôtel Drouot. The dealer Siegfried Bing, now a force in Paris with his galleries, Maison de l’Art Nouveau, is putting netsuke into the best possible hands. He is the expert, the writer of prefaces to the sales catalogues of the collections of the late Philippe Burty (140 netsuke), the late Edmond de Goncourt (140 netsuke), the late M. Garie (200 netsuke).

  The first German history of netsuke, with illustrations and advice on how to care for them and even how to display them, is published in Leipzig in 1905. The best policy is never to display them at all, and to put them under lock and key and bring them out occasionally. But then, says the author, plaintively, we must have friends to share our interests, friends who can devote a few hours to art. This is not possible in Europe. So if you must have netsuke so that you can see them, then you should have a shallow glass case in which you can put two rows of netsuke, and a mirror or green plush should be placed in the back of the cabinet. Without knowing it, the vitrine in the dressing-room overlooking the Ringstrasse obeys many of the strictures of Herr Albert Brockhaus in his huge and magisterial book. ‘It is advisable,’ he writes:

  to keep them from being exposed to dust by putting them into glass cases with glass edges. Dust fills up the holes, makes the raised work coarse, kills the gloss and takes away from the carving a great deal of the charm. When Netsukes are placed together with curios, trinkets and other objects on the mantel pieces, there is a danger of their being broken by careless domestics, swept away, or even carried to an unknown destination in the folds of a woman’s dress upon the occasion of a friendly visit. One of my Netsukes one evening made such a trip unbeknown to the lady who carried it through the streets until she finally discovered it and returned it to me.

  The netsuke could not feel safer than they are here. Careless domestics do not last long in Emmy’s Palais: she snaps at the girl who spills the cream jug on the tray. A broken harlequin in the salon means dismissal. In her dressing-room one of the other servants dusts the furniture, but only Anna is allowed to open the vitrine for the children, before she lays out her mistress’s clothes for the evening.

  The netsuke are no longer part of salon life, no longer part of a game of sharpened wit. No one is going to comment on the quality of their carving or the pallor of their patina. They have lost any connection to Japan, lost their japonisme, are suspended from critique. They have become true toys, true bibelots: they are not so small when they are picked up by a child. Here, in this dressing-room, they are part of the intimacy of Emmy’s life. This is the space where she undresses with the help
of Anna, and dresses for the next engagement with Viktor, a friend, a lover. It has its own kind of threshold.

  The longer Emmy lives with the netsuke and sees her children playing with them, the more she realises that they are too intimate a gift to have on display. Her closest friend, Marianne Gutmann, has a few of these netsuke – eleven, to be exact – but only in her country house. They have laughed about them together. But how could you explain the sheer number of these unconventional and rather overwhelming foreign carvings to the ladies from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde committee – all wearing a small dark ribbon on their dress – who gather to help Galician girls from the shtetls get honest jobs. It would be impossible.

  It is April again and I am back in the Palais. I look out of the window of Emmy’s dressing-room through the bare branches of the lindens, past the Votivkirche, along Währinger Strasse, and it is the fifth turning to Dr Freud’s house at Berggasse 19, where he is writing up the notes on Emmy’s late great-aunt Anna von Lieben as the case of Cäcilie M., a woman with a ‘hysterical psychosis of denial’, severe facial pains and memory lapses, sent to him ‘because no one knew what do with her’. For five years she had been in his care, talking so much that he had to persuade her to start writing: she was his Lehrmeisterin, his professor in the study of hysteria.

  There are all the cases and cases of antiquities behind his back, as he writes. Rosewood and mahogany and Biedermeier vitrines with wooden shelves and glass shelves, with Etruscan mirrors and Egyptian scarabs and mummy portraits and Roman death-masks, wreathed in cigar smoke. I realise at this point that I am beginning to obsess hopelessly about what is fast becoming my very special subject, the vitrines of the fin de siècle. On Freud’s desk is a netsuke in the form of a shishi, a lion.