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

by Edmund de Waal

  On a much later visit to Tokyo, Jiro gave me a small card that he had found: ‘Baron I. Leo Ephrussi begs to announce his association with Dorothy Couteaur Inc. formerly of Molyneux, Paris’. The address is 695 Fifth Avenue and the phone number Eldorado 5-0050. It seems appropriate. Fashion was El Dorado for Iggie: he has dropped the Ignace bit for Leo, but kept the Baron in place.

  Iggie’s invitation, 1936

  For Dorothy Couteaur Inc. – a name straight out of Nabokov with its mocking, drawling version of couture – Iggie designed ‘The Free-Swinging Coat’, shown ‘posed smartly over a diagonally tucked sheer crêpe frock in beige, with beige also the background color of the novelty silk crêpe coat patterned in brown swallows’. It is very brown indeed. Iggie mostly designed ‘Sophisticated gowns for the smart American woman’, though I did find a reference to ‘Smart Accessories shown for the first time in California. Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry and Compacts’, which shows either his financial straits or his astuteness. In Women’s Wear Daily for 11 March 1937 there was ‘an important type of evening ensemble that makes a point of an interesting fabric alliance, the gown reflecting Grecian influence in mother-of-pearl satin jersey, the coat in the gayest red chiffon, with pin-tucks for surface decoration. The scarf can be worn as a girdle on the coat, giving a redingote suggestion.’

  ‘An interesting fabric alliance’ is a wonderful phrase. I look at the illustration for a long time for the ‘redingote suggestion’.

  It was only when I found his design of cruise-wear based on US Navy signal flags that I realised just how much fun Iggie was having. It shows girls dressed in shorts and skirts being run up the rigging by magnificent swarthy sailors, while the code helpfully informs us that the girls are wearing signals for ‘I need to have personal communication with you’, ‘You are clear of all danger’, ‘I am on fire’ and ‘I cannot hold out any longer’.

  New York was full of newly impoverished Russians, Austrians and Germans escaping Europe, and Iggie was one of many. His minute allowance from Vienna had finally petered to nothing and his earnings from his designs were meagre, but he was a happy man. He found his first great love: Robin Curtis, a dealer in antiques, slightly younger, slim and fair. In a domestic picture in their apartment shared with Robin’s sister on the Upper East Side, with both men in pin-striped suits, Iggie perches on the arm of a chair. There are joint family photographs on their mantelpiece behind them. In other pictures they are larking around on a beach in their trunks, in Mexico, in LA: a couple.

  Iggie really did get away.

  Elisabeth wouldn’t sanction moving back to Vienna. But when the finances became intolerable – clients had let Henk down, promises had not been fulfilled, et cetera – she took the boys off to a farmhouse in Oberbozen, a beautiful village in the Italian Tyrol. The village had its own cacophonous band of drums on feast days, and meadows of gentians. It was beautiful, and the air was marvellous for the children’s complexion, but above all it was very, very cheap with none of the expenses of a Parisian lifestyle. The children went briefly to the local school, before she decided to teach them herself. Henk stayed in Paris and London trying to retrieve the losses of his Trading Company. ‘When he came to see us,’ my father recalled, ‘we were told to be very quiet as he was very, very tired.’

  Sometimes Elisabeth took the children back to Vienna to see their grandparents and their uncle Rudolf, now a teenager. The chauffeur took Viktor and the grandchildren out in the back of the long black car.

  Emmy was not terribly well – a heart condition – and had started to take pills. She looks much older in the few pictures of her from these years, and slightly surprised by middle age, but is still beautifully dressed in a black cloak with a white collar, a hat pinned at an angle to her grey curls, one hand on my father and another on my uncle’s shoulder. Anna must be looking after her well. And she still falls in love.

  She says she is not ready to be a grandmother, but she sends my father a series of colourful postcards from the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, ‘The Swineherd’, ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Dozens of cards each with a short message, one every week without fail, each one signed ‘with a thousand kisses from Your Grandmother’. Emmy still cannot resist telling stories.

  Rudolf, growing up at home, without his sisters or his brother from one year to the next, is tall and handsome and in one picture he is dressed in riding breeches and an army greatcoat, framed by a doorway in the salon of the Palais. He plays the saxophone. Its echo must have sounded glorious in the increasingly empty rooms.

  Elisabeth and the boys spent a fortnight in Vienna at the Palais in July 1934, the weeks in which there was an attempted coup led by the Austrian SS, in which Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated in his office, the signal for a Nazi uprising. It was put down with heavy casualties, and the new Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was sworn in against a real fear of civil war. My father remembers waking in the nursery in the Palais and running to the window to see a fire-truck rattling down the Ring with its bells ringing. I have tried to get him to remember more (Nazi demonstrations? armed police? crisis?), but he is not suggestible. A fire-truck is the alpha and omega of his 1934 Vienna.

  Viktor hardly pretends to be a banker any more. Perhaps as a consequence of this, or the competence of his deputy, Herr Steinhausser, the bank is doing well. He still goes to the bank every day, where he studies long, closely printed catalogues from Leipzig and Heidelberg. He has taken up collecting incunabula, early printed books, and his particular passion – more intense since the crumbling of the Empire – is for Roman history. The books are kept in the library overlooking the Schottengasse in a tall bookcase with a mesh door, and the key is kept on his watch chain. Early printed Latin histories seem a characteristically abstruse thing – and an expensive thing – to collect, but he is interested in empires.

  Viktor and Emmy holiday together at Kövecses, but since the death of her parents it is a strangely diminished place, with only a couple of horses in the stables and fewer gamekeepers and no great weekend shoots any more. Emmy walks down to the bend in the river, past the willows where you can get the breeze, and back before dinner as she used to with the children, but with her heart problem she is quite slow. The swimming lake has been let go. Its edges are susurrating reeds.

  The Ephrussi children are dispersed. Elisabeth is still in the Alps, but has moved to Ascona in Switzerland and comes to Vienna with her boys when she can. Anna makes a great fuss of them. Iggie is now designing cruise-wear in Hollywood. And Gisela and her family have had to leave Madrid for Mexico because of the Spanish Civil War.

  By 1938 Emmy is fifty-eight years old and is still very handsome, her rope of pearls looping around her neck and down to her waist. Vienna is a chaotic place to be living in, but life in the Palais is strangely immobile. There are eight servants to keep this stasis perfect. Nothing really happens, though the table is set in the dining-room for one o’clock, and again for dinner at eight, but this time it is Rudolf who does not appear. He is out, she says, at all hours.

  Viktor is seventy-eight and looks exactly like his father – and like the portrait of his cousin Charles printed with his obituary. I think of Swann in his old age, when all his features have become larger: the Ephrussi nose is resplendent. I look at a picture of Viktor with his neatly trimmed beard and realise that he looks like my father does now, and wonder how long I’ve got before I too start to look like this.

  Viktor is so anxious that he reads several of the papers each day. He is right to be anxious. There have been years of overt pressure and covert funding by Germany of the Austrian National Socialists. Hitler has now demanded that the Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, release members of the Nazi Party from prison and let them participate in government. Schuschnigg has complied. The pressure has increased and now he has had enough. He has decided to hold a plebiscite on Austria’s independence from the Nazi Reich on 13th March.

  When Viktor goes to the Wiener Club on t
he Kärtner Ring on Thursday 10th March for lunch with his Jewish friends (out the door, turn left, 500 yards on the left) the afternoon disappears in smoky debate about what is happening. History is not helping Viktor.

  Part Three

  VIENNA, KÖVECSES, TUNBRIDGE WELLS, VIENNA 1938–1947

  24. ‘AN IDEAL SPOT FOR MASS MARCHES’

  On 10th March 1938 the hopes for the plebiscite were high. The previous evening in Innsbruck the Austrian Chancellor had given a ringing speech invoking an old Tyrolean hero: ‘Men – the hour has struck!’ It was a gorgeous winter day, bright and clear. There were leaflets everywhere, scattered from trucks, and posters illustrated with a dramatic ‘Ja!’ on them. ‘With Schuschnigg for a free Austria!’ There were the crosses of the Fatherland Front painted in white on the walls of buildings and on pavements. There were crowds in the streets and columns of youth groups chanting ‘Heil Schuschnigg! Heil Liberty!’ And ‘Red-White-Red until Death!’ The radio played endless broadcasts of Schuschnigg’s speech. The Israelitische Kultusgemeinde put up the huge sum of 500,000 schillings – $80,000 – to help towards the campaign of support: the plebiscite was a bastion for the Jews of Vienna.

  Before dawn on Friday 11th the head of the Vienna police woke Schuschnigg to tell him of troop movements on the German border. Rail traffic had been stopped. It was another bright and sunny morning. It was the last day of Austria, a day of ultimata from Berlin, desperate attempts from Vienna to see if London or Paris, or Rome, would support them against the increasing German demands for the Chancellor to resign in favour of a pro-Hitler minister, Artur von Seyss-Inquart.

  On 11th March the IKG added an extra 300,000 schillings to Schuschnigg’s campaign. There were rumours that columns of troops had crossed over the border from Germany, rumours that the plebiscite might be postponed.

  The radio – a huge English radio – brown and impressive, with a dial with names of capital cities on it, is kept in the library, and Viktor and Emmy spend the afternoon there, listening. Even Rudolf joins them. At half-past four Anna brings in Viktor’s tea in a glass with the porcelain dish bearing a slice of lemon and the sugar, and Emmy her English tea and the little blue Meissen box with the pills for her heart condition. There is coffee for Rudolf, who is nineteen and contrary. Anna puts the tray on the library table with its book rest. At seven o’clock Radio Vienna reveals the postponement of the plebiscite and then, a few minutes later, the resignation of the entire cabinet except for the Nazi-sympathising Seyss-Inquart, who is to stay on as Interior Minister.

  At ten to eight Schuschnigg broadcasts: ‘Austrian men and women! This day has brought us face to face with a serious and decisive situation…The government of the German Reich presented an ultimatum to the Federal President demanding that he choose a candidate chosen by the Reich government to the office of Chancellor…or…German troops would begin to cross our frontiers this very hour…We have, because even in this solemn hour we are not willing to spill German blood, ordered our army, in case an invasion is carried out, to pull back without any substantial resistance to await the decisions of the next few hours. So in this hour I take my leave of the Austrian people with a German word and a heartfelt wish: God protect Austria.’ Gott schütze Österreich. And then the music plays for the ‘Gott erhalte’, the Austrian national anthem.

  It is as if a switch has been thrown. There are runnels of noise down the street, the Schottengasse echoing with voices. They are shouting, ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ and ‘Heil Hitler, Sieg Heil!’ And they are screaming ‘Jude Verreke!’ – Perish Judah! Death to the Jews!

  It is a flood of brown shirts. There are taxi horns blaring and there are men with weapons on the streets, and somehow the police have swastika armbands. There are trucks rushing along the Ring, past the house, past the university towards the Town Hall. And the trucks have swastikas on them, and the trams have swastikas on them, and there are young men and boys hanging off them, shouting and waving.

  And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening?

  Some friends pack a suitcase and go out into the street, push through these swirling, eddying masses of ecstatic citizens of Vienna to get to the Westbahnhof. The night train to Prague leaves at 11.15, but by nine it is completely packed. Men in uniforms swarm through the train and pull people off.

  By 11.15 Nazi flags are hanging from the parapets of government ministries. At half-past midnight President Miklas gives in and approves the cabinet. At 1.08 a.m. a Major Klausner announces from the balcony ‘with deep emotion in this festive hour that Austria is free, that Austria is National Socialist’.

  There are queues of people on foot or in cars at the Czech frontier. The radio is now playing the ‘Badenweiler’ and the ‘Hohenfriedberger’, German military marches. These are interspersed with slogans. The first Jewish shop windows are broken.

  And it is on that first night that the sounds of the street become shouting in the Ephrussi courtyard, echoing around the walls and off the roof. Then there are feet pounding up the stairs, the thirty-three shallow steps to the apartment on the second floor.

  There are fists on the door, someone leaning on the bell, and there are eight or ten, a knot of them in some sort of uniform – some with swastika armbands, some familiar. Some are still boys. It is one o’clock in the morning and no one is asleep, everyone is dressed. Viktor and Emmy and Rudolf are pushed into the library.

  This first night they swarm through the apartment. There are shouts from across the courtyard, as a couple of them have found the salon with its French ensembles of furniture and porcelain. There is laughter from someone as Emmy’s closet is ransacked. Someone bangs out a tune on the piano keys. Some men are in the study pulling out drawers, roughing up the desks, pushing the folios off the stand in the corner. They come into the library and tip the globes from their stands. This convulsive disordering, messing up, sweeping off is barely looting; it is a stretching of muscles, a cracking of the knuckles, a loosening up. The people in the corridors are checking, looking, exploring, working out what is here.

  They take the silver candlesticks held up by slightly drunken fauns from the dining-room, small animals in malachite from mantelpieces, silver cigarette boxes, money held in a clip from a desk in Viktor’s study. A small Russian clock, pink enamel and gold, that rang the hours in the salon. And the large clock from the library with its golden dome held up by columns.

  They have walked past this house for years, glimpsed faces at windows, seen into the courtyard as the doorman holds the gate open while the fiacre trots in. They are inside now, at last. This is how the Jews live, how the Jews used our money – room after room stacked with stuff, opulence. These are a few souvenirs, a bit of redistribution. It is a start.

  The last door they reach is Emmy’s dressing-room in the corner, the room with the vitrine containing the netsuke, and they sweep everything off the desk she uses as a dressing-table: the small mirror and the porcelain and the silver boxes and the flowers sent up from the meadows in Kövecses that Anna arranges in the vase, and they drag the desk out into the corridor.

  They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolf against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with a sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below.

  This desk – the wedding-present from Fanny and Jules, from Paris – takes a long time to fall. The sounds ricochet off the glass roof. The broken drawers scatter letters across the courtyard.

  You think you own us, you fucking foreign shit. You’ll be fucking next, you shit, you fucking Jews.

  This is a Wilde, unsanctioned Aryanisation. No sanction is needed.

  The sound of things breaking is the reward for waiting for so long. This night is full
of these rewards. It has been a long time coming. This night is the story told by grandparents to grandchildren, the story of how one night the Jews will finally be held accountable for all they have done, for all they have robbed off the poor; of how the streets will be cleaned, how light will be shone into all the dark places. Because it is all about dirt, about the pollution the Jews brought to the imperial city from their stinking hovels, the way they took what was ours.

  All across Vienna doors are broken down, as children hide behind their parents, under beds, in cupboards – anywhere to get away from the noise as fathers and brothers are arrested and beaten up and pulled outside into trucks, as mothers and sisters are abused. And across Vienna people help themselves to what should be theirs, is theirs by right.

  It is not that you cannot sleep. You cannot go to bed. When these men go, when these men and boys finally go, they say that they’ll be back, and you know they mean it. Emmy is wearing her pearls and they take them off. They take her rings. Someone pauses to spit handsomely at your feet. And they clatter down the stairs, shouting until they reach the courtyard. One takes a run to kick the debris, and they are out through the doors onto the Ring, a large clock under an overcoated arm.

  Snow is on its way.

  In that grey dawn, on Sunday 13th March, when there should have been the plebiscite for a free, German, independent, social, Christian and united Austria, there are neighbours on their hands and knees scrubbing away at the streets of Vienna – kids and the elderly, the man who owned the newspaper kiosk on the Ring, the orthodox, the liberal, the pious and the radical, the old men who knew their Goethe and believed in Bildung, the violin teacher and her mother – surrounded by SS, by Gestapo and by NSDAP (Nazi Party) members, by policemen and by the people they have lived next to for years and years. Jeered at, spat at, shouted at, beaten, bruised. Scrubbing away at the Schuschnigg plebiscite slogans, making Vienna clean again, making Vienna ready. We thank our Führer. He’s created work for the Jews.