In early December there is a serious meeting in the dressing-room. Elisabeth is to be allowed to choose the style of her own dress for the first time. She has had many dresses made for her before, but this is the first time she is allowed to make the decisions. This is a moment that has been much anticipated by Emmy and Gisela and Iggie, all of whom love clothes, and by Anna, who looks after them. In the dressing-room on the dressing-table is a book of swatches of fabrics and Elisabeth comes up with an idea for a dress that has a spider’s-web pattern over the bodice.
Iggie is absolutely appalled. Seventy years later in Tokyo he recounts how there was complete silence when she described what she wanted: ‘She simply had no taste at all.’
On 17th January 1917 there is a new edict, which states that the names of convicted profiteers will be printed in a list in the newspaper and on notice-boards in home districts. There has been some pressure to bring back the stocks. There are many names for profiteer, but increasingly they elide: hoarder, usurer, Ostjude, Galician, Jew.
In March Emperor Karl institutes a new school holiday to be held on 21st November to commemorate the passing of Franz Josef and his own ascension to the throne.
In April Emmy goes to a reception at Schönbrunn given for a committee of women who organise something to do with widows of soldiers who have fallen in defence of the Empire. It is unclear to me exactly what is going on. But there is a splendid photograph of this gathering of a hundred women in their best in the State Ballroom, a great arc of hats under the rococo plasterwork and mirrors.
In May there is an exhibition of 180,000 toy soldiers in Vienna. All summer everything in the city is helden, heroic. All year there are white spaces in the newspapers where the censors have struck out information or comment.
The corridor between Emmy’s dressing-room, the room with the netsuke, and Viktor’s dressing-room seems to get longer and longer. Sometimes Emmy does not appear at the dining-table at one o’clock and her place has to be removed by a maid while everyone pretends not to notice. Sometimes it is removed again at eight o’clock.
Food is an increasing problem. There have been queues for bread and milk and potatoes for two years, but there are now queues for cabbage and plums and beer. Housewives are exhorted to use their imaginations. Kraus pictures an efficient Teutonic wife: ‘Today we were well provided for…There were all kinds of things. We had a wholesome broth made with the Excelsior brand of Hindenburg cocoa-cream soup cubes, a tasty ersatz false hare with ersatz kohlrabi, potato pancakes made of paraffin…’ Coins change. Before the war, gold kronen were minted, or silver ones. After three years of war they are copper. This summer they are iron.
Emperor Karl receives fervent acclaim in the Jewish press. The Jews, says Bloch’s Wochenschrift, are ‘not only the most loyal supporters of his empire, but the only unconditional Austrians’.
In the summer of 1917 Elisabeth stays in Altaussee at the country house of Baroness Oppenheimer with her best friend Fanny. Fanny Loewenstein has spent her childhood living all over Europe and speaks the same run of languages as Elisabeth. They are both seventeen and very keen on poetry: they write constantly. To their great excitement, both the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the composer Richard Strauss are staying too, as are Hofmannsthal’s two sons. The other house-guests include the historian Joseph Redlich, who, Elisabeth wrote sixty years later, ‘impressed us very unfavourably with his predictions of the impending defeat of Austria and Germany while Fanny and I still believed the official communiqués of a victorious outcome’.
In October the Reichspost claims that there is an international conspiracy against Austria-Hungary and that Lenin and Kerensky and Lord Northcliffe are all Jews. President Woodrow Wilson is also acting ‘under the influence’ of the Jews.
On 21st November, the anniversary of the late Emperor’s demise, all schoolchildren get a day off.
In the spring of 1918 things are very difficult indeed. Emmy, ‘the dazzling centre of a distinguished society circle’, according to Kraus in Die Fackel, is more dazzling than ever. She has a new lover, a young count in one of the cavalry regiments. This young count is the son of family friends, a regular guest at Kövecses, where he brings his own horses. He is also extremely good-looking and is far closer to Emmy in age than to Viktor.
In the spring a book is published for the schoolchildren of the Empire, Unser Kaiserpaar. It describes the new Emperor and his wife and son at the funeral of Franz Josef. ‘The illustrious parental couple arranged it that their first-born child was introduced at the hand of his mother. From this picture arose quite magically a bond of understanding between the ruling pair and the people: the tender gesture of the mother captivated the empire.’
On 18th April Elisabeth and Emmy go to see Hamlet at the Burgtheater with the impossibly handsome Alexander Moissi in the title role. ‘Der grösste Eindruck meines Lebens’ – the most impressive thing in my life – Elisabeth notes in her green notebook. Emmy is thirty-eight and two months pregnant.
It is in this spring that there is good family news. Both Emmy’s younger sisters are engaged to be married. Gerty, twenty-seven, is to be married to Tibor, a Hungarian aristocrat with the family name of Thuróczy de Alsó-Körösteg et Turócz-Szent-Mihály. Eva, twenty-five, is to be married to Jenö, the less fantastically named Baron Weiss von Weiss und Horstenstein.
In June there is a wave of strikes. The flour ration is now just 35 grams a day, enough to fill a coffee-cup. Numerous bread trucks are ambushed by large crowds of women and children. In July milk disappears. It is meant to be saved for nursing mothers and the chronically sick, but even they find it difficult to get hold of. Many Viennese can only survive by foraging for potatoes in the fields outside the city. The government debates the carrying of rucksacks. Should city dwellers be allowed to carry them? If they do, should they be searched at the rail stations?
There are rats in the courtyard. These are not ivory rats with amber eyes.
There are also increasing numbers of demonstrations against the Jews. On 16th June there is a German People’s Assembly that meets in Vienna to swear fealty to the Kaiser and reaffirm the goal of pan-German unity. One speaker has a solution to the problems: a pogrom to heal the wounds of the state.
On 18th June the prefect of police asks permission of Viktor to station men in the courtyard of the Palais, where the car stands, unused for want of petrol. The police will be on hand in the case of unrest, but out of sight. Viktor agrees.
Desertions multiply. More of the Hapsburg army surrender than want to fight: 2,200,000 soldiers are taken prisoner. This is seventeen times the number of British soldiers who are prisoners of war.
On 28th June Elisabeth receives her end-of-year report from the Schottengymnasium. Seven ‘sehr gut’s for religious study, German, Latin, Greek, geography and history, philosophy and physics. One ‘gut’ for mathematics. On 2nd July she gets her matriculation certificate, stamped with the head of the old Emperor. The printed word ‘he’ is crossed out and ‘she’ has been inscribed in blue ink.
It is hot. Emmy is five months pregnant, with the summer ahead of her. A baby will be loved and cherished, of course – but the bother of it.
August in Kövecses. There are only two old men to tend the gardens, and the roses on the long veranda are unkempt. On 22nd September Gisela, Elisabeth and aunt Gerty go to hear Fidelio at the Opera. On 25th they go to see Hildebrand at the Burgtheater and Elisabeth notes the Archduke in the audience. Brazil declares war on Austria. On 18th October the Czechs seize Prague, renounce the rule of the Hapsburgs and declare independence. On 29th October Austria petitions Italy for an armistice. On 2nd November at ten in the evening there is news that there has been a breakout of violent Italian POWs from an internment camp outside Vienna and that they are swarming into the city. At 10.15 the news becomes more graphic – there are 10,000 or 13,000 of them, and they have been joined by the Russian prisoners. Messengers start appearing in the cafés along the Ringstrasse ordering officers to repor
t to police headquarters. Many do so. Two officers shout to those leaving the Opera to return home and lock their doors. At eleven o’clock the police chief consults with the military about defending Vienna. By midnight the Minister of the Interior announces that reports have been greatly exaggerated. By dawn it is admitted that it was another rumour.
On 3rd November the Austro-Hungarian Empire is dissolved. The next day Austria signs the armistice with the Allies. Elisabeth goes to the Burgtheater and sees Antigone with cousin Fritz von Lieben. On 9th November Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates. On 12th November Emperor Karl flees to Switzerland, and Austria becomes a republic. There are crowds surging past the Palais all day, many with red flags and banners, converging on the Parliament.
On 19th November Emmy gives birth to a son.
He is blond and blue-eyed and they call him Rudolf Josef. It is difficult to think of a more elegiac name to give a boy just as the Hapsburg Empire crashes around them.
It is very, very difficult. The influenza is raging, and there is no milk to be had. Emmy is ill: it is twelve years since Iggie was born, eighteen years since her first child. Being pregnant during a war is not easy. Viktor is fifty-eight and surprised by fatherhood again. Amongst all the complexities and the surprise at this little boy being born – and these complexities are manifold – Elisabeth is mortified to find that most people think the baby is hers. She is eighteen after all, and her mother and grandmother had children early. There are rumours. The Ephrussi are keeping up appearances.
In her short memoir of the period she writes of the unrest, ‘I remember very little of the details, only our great anxiety and fear.’
But, ‘Meanwhile,’ she adds in the final, triumphant line, ‘I had registered at the university.’ She had escaped. She had made it from one side of the Ringstrasse to the other.
21. LITERALLY ZERO
It was a particularly cold winter in Vienna in 1918 and the white porcelain stove in the corner of the salon was the only fire that could be kept going all day and night. Everywhere else – the dining-room, library, bedrooms and the dressing-room with the netsuke – was freezing. Acetylene lamps gave off a noxious smell. That winter Viennese were seen cutting trees in the woods for fuel. Rudolf was barely a fortnight old when the Neue Freie Presse reported that ‘Only the merest shimmer of light can be seen behind some of the windows. The city lies in darkness.’ Almost unthinkably, there was no coffee, ‘only an unnameable mixture tasting of…meat extract and liquorice. Tea, milkless and lemon-less, of course, is slightly better if you can accustom yourself to the permanent taste of tin.’ Viktor refused to drink it.
When I try to imagine life in the family in the weeks after the defeat, I see the paper blowing along the streets. Vienna had always been so tidy. Now there were posters and placards, leaflets and demonstrations. Before the war, Iggie remembered dropping the paper wrapping from an ice-cream cone on the gravel walks in the Prater and being scolded by his nanny and reprimanded by a succession of men with epaulettes. Now he kicked his way to school through the detritus of this convulsive, noisy, hectoring city. The advertising kiosks, cylinders ten feet high topped with a small turret, had become places where the fractious Viennese would tack up letters to the Christian Inhabitants of Vienna, to Fellow Citizens, to Brothers and Sisters in the Struggle. And all these screeds would be torn down and replaced. Vienna was anxious and loud.
Emmy, with her new baby, struggled in these first weeks and both she and Rudolf became weaker and weaker. The English economist William Beveridge, visiting Vienna six weeks after the Austrian defeat, wrote that ‘A heroic effort is being made by the mothers in nursing their own children to keep them alive for their first year, but this is now done only at the expense of the mothers’ own health, and is largely done in vain.’ There was talk of trying to get Emmy and Rudolf out of the city and away to Kövecses, even of taking Gisela and Iggie away too, but there was no petrol for the car and the trains were in chaos. So they stayed in the Palais in the marginally quieter rooms with their backs to the Ringstrasse.
At the start of the war the house had felt very exposed, a private house surrounded by public spaces. Now, the peace seemed more frightening than the war: it was not clear who was fighting who, and it was not clear whether or not there was going to be a revolution. Demobilised soldiers and prisoners of war returned to Vienna with first-hand accounts of the revolutions in Russia and of the workers’ protests in Berlin. There was plenty of ‘free firing’ – random gunfire – at night. The new flag of Austria was red, white and red, and some of the younger and more riotous element found that, with a quick rip and stitch, you could make a good red flag.
From every corner of the old Empire imperial civil servants with no country came to Vienna to find that whole imperial ministries to which they had sent their careful reports had closed. There were many Zitterer on the streets – men trembling and shaking from shell shock – as well as amputees with medals pinned to their chests. Captains and majors were to be seen selling wooden toys on the streets. Meanwhile large bundles of imperial monogrammed linen somehow found their way into the households of burghers; imperial saddles and harnesses were found in the markets; and, it was said, security detachments had found their way into the cellars of the palace and were drinking with decreasing speed through the Hapsburg wine-vaults.
Vienna, with just under two million inhabitants, had gone from being the capital of an empire of fifty-two million subjects to a tiny country with six million citizens: it simply could not accommodate the cataclysm. Much of the talk was whether Austria was lebensfähig, viable, as an independent state. Viability was not just an issue of economics, it was psychological. Austria seemed not to know how to cope with its diminishment. The ‘Carthaginian Peace’ – harsh and punitive – formalised in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 1919 meant the dismemberment of the Empire. It sanctified the independence of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Istria went. Trieste went. Several Dalmatian islands were lopped off and Austria-Hungary became Austria, a country 500 miles long. There were punitive reparations. The army was reconstituted as 30,000 volunteers. Vienna, went the bitter joke, was a Wasserkopf, the hydrocephalic head of a shrunken body.
Many things changed, including names and addresses. In the spirit of the times, all imperial titles were to be abolished – there were to be no more von, no more Ritter, Baron, Graf, Fürst, Herzog. Every member of the post office and worker on the railways, had been able to add k & k (imperial and royal) to their title, but this had now ended. Of course, this being Austria, a country deeply devoted to title, other titles proliferated. You might be penniless, but you expected to be addressed as Dozent, Professor, Hofrat, Schulrat, Diplomkaufmann, Direktor. Or Frau Dozent, Frau Professor.
Streets changed, too. The von Ephrussi family no longer lived at 24 Franzenring, Wien 1, named for the Hapsburg Emperor. The Ephrussi now lived at 24 Der Ring des Zwölften Novembers, Wien 1, renamed after the day of liberation from the Hapsburg emperors. Emmy complained that this renaming business was a bit French, that they were going to end up on rue de la République.
Anything might happen. The value of the krone was so diminished that there was speculation that the new government might sell the imperial art collections for food for the starving Viennese. Schönbrunn ‘is to be sold to a foreign consortium and turned into a gambling palace’. The Botanical Gardens are to be ‘razed for the building of apartments’.
With the collapse in the economy, ‘loud-voiced people were arriving from all parts of the world to buy banks, factories, jewels, carpets, works of art or landed estates, and the Jews were not the last ones to come. Foreign sharks, swindlers and forgers poured into Vienna and a pest of lice came with them.’ This is the backdrop to the 1925 silent film Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street). Car headlights rake along the night-time queue outside a butcher’s shop. ‘After waiting all night many are turned away empty-handed.’ A hook-nosed ‘International S
peculator’ plots to destroy the value of the stock of a mining company, while a widowed civil servant (could there be a more pitiable Viennese stereotype?) cashes in his pension to buy shares and loses everything. His daughter, played by Greta Garbo, hollow-eyed, faint with hunger, is forced to work in a cabaret. Rescue comes from a handsome Red Cross official, a gentleman, the bearer of tinned food.
Anti-Semitism gained even more ground in Vienna during those years. You could hear the echo of the demonstrations, of course, with their rants against the ‘plague of Eastern Jews’, but Iggie remembered that they used to laugh at those, as they laughed at the mass displays of youth groups in their proud uniforms and of Austrians in peasant costumes of dirndl and lederhosen. There were lots and lots of these parades.
What was particularly terrifying were the Krawalle, brawls of savage ferocity, that took place on the steps of the university between the newly resurrected pan-German student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, and Jewish and socialist students. Iggie remembered his father white with anger when he and Gisela were caught watching one of these bloody fights from the window of the salon. ‘Don’t let them see you watching,’ he shouted – and this from a man who did not shout.
Under the slogan of ‘Keeping the Austrian Alps clean of Jews’, the German-Austrian Alpine Club expelled all their Jewish members. It was the club that provided access to hundreds of the mountain cabins in which you could spend the night and make coffee over a stove.
Like many of their peers, Iggie and Gisela hiked in the mountains during the early summer. They would take a train to Gmunden and then set off with a rucksack each, a walking stick and a sleeping bag, chocolate and a screw of coffee and sugar in brown paper: you could get milk and hard rolls and a crescent slice of yellow cheese from farmers. It was exhilarating to be free of the city. And once, said Iggie to me, hiking with a friend of Gisela’s, we were caught out at dusk high in the Alps. It was already cold, but there was a hut, full of students round the stove and cheerful noise. They asked us for our cards and then us told to get out, told us that Jews polluted the mountain air.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss Page 18
