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

by Edmund de Waal

  My time-management skills are seriously awry. I spent a week reading Adolf Loos on Japanese style as the ‘abandonment of symmetry’, and how it flattens objects and people: they ‘depict flowers, but they are pressed flowers’. I find that he designed the Secessionist exhibition of 1900, which included a huge collection of Japanese artefacts. Japan, I think, is inescapable in Vienna.

  Then I decided that I needed to look at the polemical Karl Kraus in detail. I bought a copy of Die Fackel from an antiquarian bookshop in order to look at the particular colour of its cover. It was red, as any fierce, satirical magazine calling itself The Torch should be. But I worried that the red had faded over ninety years.

  I keep hoping that the netsuke will be a key that unlocks the whole of Viennese intellectual life. I worry that I am becoming a Casaubon, and will spend my life writing lists and notes. I know that the Viennese intelligentsia like puzzling objects, and that looking intensely at one thing is a particular pleasure. At the moment that this vitrine is being opened every night by the children as Emmy dresses, Loos is agonising over the design of a salt-cellar, Kraus is obsessing over an advert in the newspaper, a phrase from an editorial in Die Neue Zeitung, Freud about a slip of the tongue. But there is no escaping the facts that Emmy is not a reader of Adolf Loos, that she managed to dislike Klimt (‘a bear with the manners of a bear’) and Mahler (‘a racket’), and that she did not buy anything from the Wiener Werkstätte at all (‘tat’). She ‘never took us to an exhibition’, says my grandmother’s memoir.

  I do know that in 1910 small things, fragments, are very now, and Emmy is very Viennese. What does she think of the netsuke? She has not collected them, she is not going to add to them. There are other things, of course, to pick up and move around in Emmy’s world. There are the bibelots in the drawing-room, the Meissen cups and saucers, bits of Russian silver and malachite on the mantelpieces. This is amateur stuff for the Ephrussi, background noise to go with the putti hovering like plump partridges overhead, not like aunt Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild commissioning clocks from Fabergé for her villa in Cap Ferrat.

  Emmy, however, loves stories, and the netsuke are small, quick, ivory stories. She is thirty: it is only twenty years since she was in a nursery further round the Ringstrasse, her mother reading her fairy stories of her own. Today she reads the lower part of the Neue Freie Presse, the daily feuilleton.

  Above the ruled line is the news, the news from Budapest, the latest pronouncement from the mayor Dr Karl Lueger, the Herrgott von Wien, the Lord God of Vienna. Below the fold is the feuilleton. Every day there is a charmingly phrased and sonorous essay. It could be on the opera or operetta, or about a particular building that is being demolished. It could be an arch memorialising of folk characters from old Vienna. Frau Sopherl, the Nachsmarkt seller of fruit, Herr Adabei the gossip-monger, walk-on parts in a Potemkin city. Every day there it is, mild and narcissistic, one filigree phrase twining around another, as adjectivally sweet as Demel’s pastries. Herzl, who starts out writing them, talked of the feuilletonist ‘falling in love with his own spirit, and thus of losing any standard of judging himself or others’, and you can see this happening. They are so perfect, a riff of humour, a throwaway, glancing look at Vienna, ‘a matter of injecting experience – as it were, intravenously – with the poison of sensation…the feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants,’ in the words of Walter Benjamin. In Vienna the feuilletonist renders the city back to itself as a perfect, sensationalised fiction.

  I think of the netsuke as part of this Vienna. Many of the netsuke are Japanese feuilletons in themselves. They depict the kind of Japanese characters written about in lyrical laments by visitors to Japan. Lafcadio Hearn, an American-Greek journalist, writes about them in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields and Shadowings, each short glimpse or gleaning essay a poetic evocation: ‘the cries of the earliest itinerant vendors begin – “Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!” – the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables. “Moyaya-moya!” – the plaintive call of the women who sell thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.’

  In the vitrine in Emmy’s dressing-room are the barrel-maker framed by the arc of his half-finished barrel; the street-wrestlers in a sweaty, tumbling embrace of dark chestnut wood; the old, drunk monk with his robes awry; the servant girl cleaning the floor; the rat-catcher with his basket open. When picked out and held, the netsuke are Types of Old Edo, just like the Types of the Old City who walk onto Vienna’s stage every day below the ruled line in the Neue Freie Presse.

  As they sit on their green velvet shelves in Emmy’s dressing-room, these daily feuilletons are doing what Vienna likes to do, telling stories about itself.

  And fractious as this beautiful woman in this absurd pink Palais is, she can glance out of her window into the Schottengasse and start a story for her children about the elderly driver of the shabby fiacre, the flower-seller and the student. The netsuke are now part of a childhood, part of the children’s world of things. This world is made of things they can touch and things they cannot touch. There are things that they can touch sometimes and things they can touch every day. There are things that are theirs, for ever, and things that are theirs but that will be passed on to a sister or brother.

  The children are not allowed into the silver-room where the footmen polish the silver, and they are not allowed into the dining-room if there is going to be a dinner. They must not touch their father’s glass in its silver holder, out of which he drinks black tea à la Russe – it was grandfather’s. Lots of things in the Palais were grandfather’s, but this is special. Father’s books are placed on the library table when they arrive from Frankfurt and London and Paris in their brown paper parcels tied up with string. They are not allowed to touch the sharp silver paper-knife that also lies there. Later they are given the stamps from the parcels for their album.

  There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult’s sense of pitch. They hear the green-and-gold clock in the salon (which has mermaids on it) tick every slow second as they sit in starched immobility during visits from great-aunts. They can hear the shuffle of the carriage horses in the courtyard, which means they are finally off to the park. There is the sound of the rain on the glass roof over the courtyard, which means they are not.

  There are things that the children smell that are part of their landscape: the smell of their father’s cigar smoke in the library, their mother, or the smell of schnitzel on covered dishes as it is carried past the nursery for lunch. The smell behind the itchy tapestries in the dining-room when they creep behind them to hide. And the smell of hot chocolate after skating. Emmy makes this for them sometimes. Chocolate is brought in on a porcelain dish, and then they are allowed to break it into pieces the size of a krone and these dark shards are melted in a little silver saucepan by Emmy over a purple flame. Then, when it is glaucous, warm milk is poured over it and sugar stirred in.

  There are things that they see with complete clarity – the clarity of an object seen through a lens. There are also things that they see as a blur: the corridors chased along, corridors that go on for ever, one gilded flash of a picture after another, one marble table after another. There are eighteen doors if you run all the way round the courtyard corridor.

  The netsuke have moved from a world of Gustave Moreau in Paris to the world of a Dulac children’s book in Vienna. They build their own echoes, they are part of those Sunday mornings’ story-telling, part of The Arabian Nights, the travels of Sinbad the Sailor and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. They are locked into their vitrine, behind the dressing-room door, which is along the corridor and up the long stairs from the courtyard, which is behind the double oak doors with the porter waiting, which is in the fairytale castle of a Palais on a street that is part of The Thousand and One Nights.

  20. HEIL WIEN! HEIL BERLIN!

  The century is fourteen years old, and so is Elis
abeth, a serious young girl who is allowed to sit at dinner with the grown-ups. These are ‘men of distinction, high civil servants, professors and high-ranking officers in the army’ and she listens to the talk of politics, but is told not to talk herself unless she is talked to. She walks with her father to the bank each morning. She is building up her own library in her bedroom: each new book has a neat EE in pencil and a number.

  Gisela is a pretty young girl of ten who enjoys clothes. Iggie is a boy of nine who is slightly overweight and self-conscious about it; he isn’t good at maths, but likes drawing very much indeed.

  Summer arrives, and the children travel to Kövecses with Emmy. She has ordered a new costume, black with pleating to the blouse, for riding Contra, her favourite bay.

  On Sunday 28th June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo by a young Serbian nationalist. On Thursday the Neue Freie Presse writes that ‘the political consequences of this act are being greatly exaggerated’.

  On the following Saturday, Elisabeth writes a postcard to Vienna:

  4th July 1914

  Dearest Papa

  Thank you so much for arranging about the Professors for next term. Today it was very warm in the morning so we could all go swimming in the lake but now it is colder and it may rain. I went to Pistzan with Gerty and Eva and Witold but I didn’t like it very much. Toni has had nine puppies, one has died and we have to feed them with a bottle. Gisela likes her new clothes. A thousand kisses.

  Your Elisabeth

  On Sunday 5th July the Kaiser promises German support for Austria against Serbia, and Gisela and Iggie write a postcard of the river at Kövecses: ‘Darling Papa, My dresses fit very well. We swim every day as it is so hot. All well. Love and kisses from Gisela and Iggie.’

  On Monday 6th July it is cold at Kövecses and they don’t swim. ‘I painted a flower today. Love and heaps of kisses from Gisela.’

  On Saturday 18th July mother and children return to Vienna from Kövecses. On Monday 20th July the British Ambassador, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, reports to Whitehall that the Russian Ambassador to Vienna has left for a fortnight’s holiday. That same day the Ephrussi leave for Switzerland: for their ‘long month’.

  The bathing lake at Kövecses

  The Russian imperial flag still flies from the boathouse roof. Viktor, worried that his son will grow up and have to do military service in Russia, has petitioned the Tsar to change his citizenship. This year Viktor has become a subject of His Majesty Franz Josef, the eighty-four-year-old Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, King of Lombardy-Venetia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria, Grand Duke of Tuscany, King of Jerusalem and Duke of Auschwitz.

  On 28th July Austria declares war on Serbia. On 29th July the Emperor declares: ‘I put my faith in my peoples, who have always gathered round my throne, in unity and loyalty, through every tempest, who have always been ready for the heaviest sacrifices for the honour, the majesty, the power of the Fatherland.’ On 1st August Germany declares war on Russia. On the 3rd Germany declares war on France, and then the following day invades neutral Belgium. And the whole pack of cards falls: alliances are invoked and Britain declares war on Germany. On 6th August Austria declares war on Russia.

  Mobilisation letters are sent out in all the languages of the Empire from Vienna. Trains are requisitioned. All Jules and Fanny Ephrussi’s young French footmen, careful around the porcelain and good at rowing on the lake, are called up. The Ephrussi are stuck in the wrong country.

  Emmy travels to Zurich to enlist the help of the Austrian Consul General, Theophil von Jäger – a lover of hers – to get the household back to Vienna. There are a lot of telegrams. Nannies, maids and trunks need sorting out. The trains are too crowded and there is too much luggage, and the railway timetable – the implacable k & k railway, as certain as Spanish court ritual, as regular as the Vienna City Corps marching past the nursery window at half-past ten every morning – is suddenly useless.

  There is cruelty in all of this. The French, Austrian and German cousins, Russian citizens, English aunts, all the dreaded consanguinity, all the territoriality, all that nomadic lack of love of country, is consigned to sides. How many sides can one family be on at once? Uncle Pips is called up, handsome in his uniform with its astrakhan collar, to fight against his French and English cousins.

  In Vienna there is fervent support for this war, this cleansing of the country of its apathy and stupor. The British ambassador notes that ‘the entire people and press clamour impatiently for immediate and condign punishment of the hated Serbian race’. Writers join in the excitement. Thomas Mann writes an essay ‘Gedanken im Kriege’, ‘Thanks Be for War’ the poet Rilke celebrates the resurrection of the Gods of War in his Fünf Gesänge; Hofmannsthal publishes a patriotic poem in the Neue Freie Presse.

  Schnitzler disagrees. He writes simply on 5th August: ‘World war. World ruin. Karl Kraus wishes the Emperor “a good end of the world”.’

  Vienna was en fête: young men in twos and threes with sprigs of flowers in their hats on their way to recruit; military bands playing in the parks. The Jewish community in Vienna was cheerful. The monthly newsletter of the Austrian-Israelite Union, for July and August, declaimed: ‘In this hour of danger we consider ourselves to be fully entitled citizens of the state…We want to thank the Kaiser with the blood of our children and with our possessions for making us free; we want to prove to the state that we are its true citizens, as good as anyone…After this war, with all its horrors, there cannot be any more anti-Semitic agitation…we will be able to claim full equality.’ Germany would free the Jews.

  Viktor thought otherwise. It was a suicidal catastrophe. He had dustsheets put over all the furniture in the Palais, sent the servants home on board wages, sent the family to the house of Gustav Springer, a friend, near Schönbrunn, then on to cousins in the mountains near Bad Ischl, and took himself to the Hotel Sacher to see out the war with his books on history. There is a bank to run, something that is difficult when you are at war with France (Ephrussi et Cie, rue de l’Arcade, Paris 8), England (Ephrussi and Co., King Street, London) and Russia (Efrussi, Petrograd).

  ‘This Empire’s had it,’ says the Count in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March:

  As soon as the Emperor says goodnight, we’ll break up into a hundred pieces. The Balkans will be more powerful than we will. All the peoples will set up their own dirty little statelets, and even the Jews will proclaim a king in Palestine. Vienna stinks of the sweat of democrats, I can’t stand to be on the Ringstrasse any more…In the Burgtheater, they put on Jewish garbage, and they ennoble one Hungarian toilet-manufacturer a week. I tell you, gentlemen, unless we start shooting, it’s all up. In our lifetime, I tell you.

  There were lots of proclamations that autumn in Vienna. Now that the war is properly under way, the Emperor addresses the children of his Empire. The newspapers print ‘Der Brief Sr. Majestät unseres allergnädigsten Kaisers Franz Josef I an die Kinder im Weltkriege’, a letter from His Majesty, our all-loving Franz Josef I, to the children in the time of the World War: ‘You children are the jewels of all the peoples of mine, the blessing of their future conferred a thousand times.’

  After six weeks Viktor realises the war is not going to end and returns from the Hotel Sacher. Emmy and the children are eventually brought back from Bad Ischl. The dustcovers are taken off the furniture. There is a lot of activity in the street outside the nursery window. There is so much noise from the demonstrating students – Musil notes ‘the ugliness of the singing in the cafés’ in his journal – from the marching soldiers, with their bands, that Emmy considers moving the children’s rooms altogether to a quieter part of the house. This does not happen. The house is poorly designed for families, she says – we are all on show here in one glass box, we might as well be living on the street itself, for all that your father does about it.

  The students’ chants change week by week. They st
art with ‘Serbien muss sterben!’, ‘Serbia must die!’ Then the Russians get it: ‘One Round, One Russian!’ Then the French. And it gets more colourful by the week. Emmy is worried by the war of course, but she is also worried by the effect of all this shouting on the children. They have their meals now on a little table in the music room, which opens onto the Schottengasse and is a bit quieter.

  Iggie attends the Schottengymnasium. This is a very good school run by the Benedictines round the corner, one of the two best schools in Vienna, he told me. The plaque on the wall that lists famous former poets indicates this. Though the teachers are Brothers, many of the pupils are Jewish. The school lays particular stress on the Classics, but there are also mathematics, algebra, calculus, history and geography classes. Languages are studied as well. Learning these is irrelevant for these three children, who switch between English and French with their mother and German with their father. They know only a smattering of Russian and No Yiddish. The children are told to speak only German outside the house. All foreign-sounding shops in Vienna have had their names pasted over by men on ladders.

  Girls are not taught at the Schottengymnasium. Gisela is taught at home by her governess in the schoolroom, next to Emmy’s dressing-room. Elisabeth has negotiated with Viktor and now has a private tutor. Emmy is opposed to this. She is so angry about this inappropriate, complicated arrangement for her daughter that Iggie hears her shouting and then breaking something, possibly porcelain, in the salon. Elisabeth scrupulously follows the same curriculum as the one boys her age are taught at the Schotten - gymnasium, and is allowed to go to the school laboratory in the afternoons and have a lesson by herself with one of the teachers. She knows that if she wants to go to the university, then she has to pass the final examination from this school. Elisabeth has known since she was ten that she must get from this room, her schoolroom with its yellow carpet, across the Franzenring to that room, the lecture hall of the university. It is only 200 yards away – but for a girl, it might as well be a thousand miles. There are more than 9,000 students this year, and just 120 of them are female. You can’t see into the hall from Elisabeth’s room. I’ve tried. But you can see its window, and imagine the tiered seating and a professor leaning over the lectern at the front. He is talking to you. Your hand moves in a dream across your notes.