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

by Edmund de Waal

  In a photograph a young man in his shiny jacket oversees the middle-aged women on their knees in the soapy water. And he has rolled up his trouser legs to make sure they do not get damp. It is all about the dirty and the clean.

  The house has been breached. And that morning, as my great-grandmother and great-grandfather sit in silence in the library, there is Anna picking up the photographs of cousins from the floor, sweeping the broken fragments of porcelain and marquetry away, straightening pictures, trying to get the carpets clean, trying to close the door that has been opened.

  All that day squadrons of Luftwaffe planes fly low over Vienna. Viktor and Emmy do not know what to do. They do not know where to go, as that Sunday morning the first German troops cross the border to be met with flowers and crowds. The story is that Hitler is returning home to visit the grave of his mother.

  All that day there are arrests – arrests of anyone who has supported any previous political party, prominent journalists, financiers, civil servants, Jews. Schuschnigg is in solitary confinement. That evening there is a torchlit procession through the city led by the NSDAP. There is the din of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ sung in the bars. It takes Hitler six hours to make the journey from Linz to Vienna. It takes this long because of the crowds.

  On Monday 14th March Hitler arrives: ‘before the shadows of the evening sank over Vienna, when the wind died down and the many flags fell silent in festive rigidity, the great hour became reality and the Führer of the united German people entered the capital of the Ostmark’.

  The Cardinal of Vienna has ordered the bells of Austria to ring, and the bells of the Votivkirche opposite the Palais Ephrussi start pealing in the afternoon, and the noise of the Wehrmacht as it grinds round the Ring makes the house shake. There are flags: flags with swastikas and old Austrian flags with swastikas painted on them. There are kids climbing the linden trees. There are already maps in the bookshop windows showing the new Europe: one solid German nation stretching from Alsace-Lorraine to the Sudetenland to the Baltic to the Tyrol. Half the map is Germany.

  On Tuesday 15th March the crowds start early past the Schottengasse, past the Palais Ephrussi, along the Ring, all going in one direction, towards the Heldenplatz, the Place of Heroes, the huge square outside the Hofburg; 200,000 people are jammed into the square and the streets. They cling to the statues, to the branches of trees, to railings. There are figures on the parapets silhouetted against the sky. At eleven o’clock Hitler comes onto the balcony. He can hardly be heard. As he comes to his peroration, the noise prevents him speaking for minutes on end. You can hear it all the way to the Schottengasse. Then: ‘In this hour I can report to the German people the greatest accomplishment of my life, as Führer and Chancellor of the German nation and the Reich, I can announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.’ ‘The scenes of infatuation at Hitler’s arrival defy description,’ writes the Neue Basler Zeitung.

  The Ring is made for this, the massed crowds, the parade ground of emotion, the uniforms. As a student in 1908, Hitler had planned two huge arches to complete the Heldenplatz, an architectural climax: ‘an ideal spot for mass marches’. Long ago he had watched the imperial pageantry of the Hapsburgs. And now once again the Ringstrasse becomes ‘an enchantment out of “The Thousand-and One-Nights”’, but one of those stories where someone is transfigured before your eyes into something terrible, morphing out of control as you say the wrong words.

  At half-past one Hitler returns to review the massive display of marching soldiers and trucks, while 400 planes fly overhead. It is announced that there will be a plebiscite – another one, this time legitimate. ‘Do you acknowledge Adolf Hitler as our Führer and the reunion of Austria with the German Reich which was effected on 13th March 1938?’ On the pale-pink ballot there is a huge circle for Ja and a diminutive one for Nein. To encourage Vienna to think hard about this vote, trams are sheathed in red bunting, and St Stephen’s Cathedral is draped in red, and Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter, is shrouded in Nazi flags. In this proper plebiscite, Jews are ineligible to vote.

  There is terror. People are picked up off the streets and bundled into trucks. Several thousand activists, Jews, troublemakers are sent to Dachau. In these first few days there are messages from friends who are leaving, desperate phone-calls about people who have been arrested. Emmy’s cousins Frank and Mitzi Wooster have left. Their closest friends, the Gutmanns, have gone, leaving on the 13th. The Rothschilds have gone. Bernhardt Altmann, a business colleague of Viktor’s, a friend from countless dinner-parties, has left already: it takes something to walk out your door and leave everything.

  Vienna, 14th March 1938. View along the Ringstrasse from the Parliament and Opera towards the Palais Ephrussi

  Sometimes it is possible to get people out of police-stations with money. Viktor helps a couple of cousins who need to get across the border to Czechoslovakia, but he and Emmy seem incapable of a decision. Friends tell them to go. It is Viktor who has frozen. He cannot leave this house, his father’s and grandfather’s house. He cannot leave the bank. He cannot just leave his library.

  Others have left the household. Who wants to be associated with the Jews? There are three servants left. The cook and Anna, who make sure that there is still coffee for the Baron and Baroness, and the porter, Herr Kirchner, who has the little room by the gate and no known family.

  The city is metamorphosing hour by hour as more German army personnel appear, men in uniforms on every street corner. The currency is now the Reichsmark. Jude is painted on Jewish-owned shops, and customers are targeted if they are seen going in or coming out. The huge Schiffmann department store, owned by four Jewish brothers, is systematically emptied by the SA as crowds look on.

  People are disappearing. It is increasingly difficult to know where anyone is. On Wednesday 16th March, Pips’s old friend, the writer Egon Friedell, jumps out of the window of his flat when he sees storm-troopers arrive and question the porter in his apartment building. There are 160 suicides of Jews in March and April. Jews are dismissed from theatres and orchestras. All state and municipal employees have been sacked; 183 Jewish teachers have lost their jobs. All Jewish lawyers and public prosecutors are relieved of office.

  In these days, the wild quality of release, the helping yourself to Jewish property, the random beatings of Jews on the streets change into something more steely. It becomes clear that there has been a lot of planning and that there are orders. On Friday 18th March, two days after his arrival in Vienna, the young SS lieutenant Adolf Eichmann takes matters personally in hand by participating in a raid on the IKG in the Seitenstettengasse during which documents linking the Jewish community to the Schuschnigg plebiscite campaign are confiscated. This is followed by the confiscation of the IKG library and archive itself. Eichmann is concerned to get the best material of Judaica and Hebraica for the planned Institute for Research into the Jewish Question.

  It becomes clear that there are plans for the Jews of Vienna. On 31st March Jewish organisations are no longer recognised under public law. The chaplain of the little English church is baptising Jews. If you convert, you may have more options for escape. There are queues outside the presbytery. He curtails instruction into the Christian faith to ten minutes to help more desperate people.

  On 9th April Hitler returns to Vienna. His motorcade goes through the city and onto the Ring. At noon Goebbels steps out onto the balcony of the Rathaus, the town hall that now stands in Adolf Hitler Platz, to declaim the results of the plebiscite. ‘I proclaim the day of the Greater German Reich’: 99.75 per cent have voted yes to legitimise the Anschluss.

  On 23rd April a boycott of Jewish shops is announced. That same day the Gestapo arrive at the Palais Ephrussi.

  25. ‘A NEVER-TO-BE-REPEATED OPPORTUNITY’

  How can I write about this time? I read memoirs, the journals of Musil, look at the photographs of the crowds on this day, the following day, the day after that. I read the Vienna newspapers.
On Tuesday the Hermansky bakery is baking Aryan bread. On Wednesday Jewish lawyers are sacked. On Thursday non-Aryans are excluded from the football club Schwarz-Rot. Goebbels gives out free radios on Friday. Aryan razor blades are on sale.

  I have Viktor’s passport with its stamps and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk. I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring. I have folders of notes from the archives. But I realise that I can’t do this from London, from a library. So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais.

  I stand on the balcony of the second floor. I have bought a netsuke back with me, the pale-brown one of three chestnuts with the small white grub in ivory, and I realise that I’m worrying away at it in my pocket, tumbling it round and round. I hold the balcony rail hard and look down to the marble floor and think of Emmy’s dressing-table falling. I think of the netsuke undisturbed in their vitrine.

  And I hear a group of businessmen come in down the passageway from the Ringstrasse for a meeting in the offices, a knot of talk and laughter, and I hear how the faintest echo of the street comes in with them. It is those voices that make me remember Iggie. He said that the old doorkeeper, Herr Kirchner, who used to swing the gates of the Palais Ephrussi open with a flourish and a low bow to amuse the children, had conveniently gone out and left the gates to the Ringstrasse wide open on the day the Nazis came.

  Six members of the Gestapo, in perfect uniforms, walk straight in.

  They start out quite polite. They have orders to search the apartment as they have reason to believe that the Jew Ephrussi has supported the Schuschnigg campaign.

  Searching. Searching means this: every single drawer is wrenched open, the contents of every cupboard pulled out, every single ornament is scrutinised. Do you know how much stuff there is in this house, how many drawers in how many rooms? The Gestapo are methodical. They are in no hurry. This is no Wilde. The drawers in the little tables in the salon are rifled through, papers scattered. The study is taken apart. The filed catalogues of incunabula are swept through for evidence, letters winnowed. Every drawer in the Italian cabinet is probed. Books are pulled off the shelves in the library and examined and dropped. They reach deep into the linen closets. Pictures are taken off walls and the stretchers are checked. The tapestries in the dining-room where the children used to hide are jerked away from the wall.

  After they have searched the twenty-four rooms in the family apartment, the kitchens and the servants’ hall, the Gestapo request the keys to the safe, to the silver-room and to the porcelain store where the plates are stacked, service by service. They need the key to the boxroom in the corner, where all the hatboxes, the trunks, the crates with the children’s toys, the nursery books, the old Andrew Lang fairy stories are kept. They need the keys for the cabinet in Viktor’s dressing-room where he keeps his letters from Emmy, from his father, from his old tutor Herr Wessel, the good Prussian, the man who taught him about German values, made him read Schiller. They take Viktor’s keys to the office at the bank.

  And all these things, a world of things – a family geography stretching from Odessa, from holidays in Petersburg, in Switzerland, in the South of France, Paris, Kövecses, London, everything – is gone through and noted down. Every object, every incident, is suspect. This is a scrutiny that every Jewish family in Vienna is undergoing.

  At the end of these long hours there is a cursory consultation and the Jew Viktor Ephrussi is accused of having contributed 5,000 schillings to the Schuschnigg campaign and this has made him an enemy of the State. He and Rudolf are arrested. They are taken away.

  Emmy is allowed two rooms at the back of the house. I go into these rooms. They are small and high and very dark, and an opaque window above the door lets in a little light from the courtyard. She is not allowed to use the main staircase, not allowed to go into their old rooms. She has no servants. She has – at this moment – only her clothes.

  I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never asked Elisabeth or Iggie.

  It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also forbidden to shave or wash so that they look even more degenerate. This is because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. This process of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character – wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back. You are supposed to end up looking like a cartoon from Die Stürmer, Streicher’s tabloid that is now sold on the streets of Vienna. They take away your reading glasses.

  For three days father and son are in prison somewhere in Vienna. The Gestapo need a signature, there is a form that you sign, or you and your son get sent to Dachau. Viktor signs it away, the Palais and its contents and all his other properties in Vienna, the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions. And then they are allowed to return to the Palais Ephrussi, walk in through the open gates, across the courtyard to the servants’ staircase in the corner and up to the second floor to these two rooms that are now their home.

  And on 27th April it is declared that the property at number 14 Dr Karl Lueger Ring, Vienna 1, formerly the Palais Ephrussi, has been fully Aryanised. It is one of the first to receive such an accolade.

  As I stand outside the rooms that they were given, on the other side of the courtyard, the dressing-room and the library seem impossibly close. This is the moment, I think, that is the beginning of exile, the moment when home is with you and is very, very far away.

  The house wasn’t theirs any more. It was full of people, some in uniforms and some in suits. People counting rooms, making lists of objects and pictures, taking things away. Anna is in there somewhere. She has been ordered to help with this packing-up into boxes and crates, told that she should be ashamed of working for the Jews.

  And it not just their art, not just the bibelots, all the gilded stuff from tables and mantelpieces, but their clothes, Emmy’s winter coats, a crate of domestic china, a lamp, a bundle of umbrellas and walking-sticks. Everything that has taken decades to come into this house, settling in drawers and chests and vitrines and trunks, wedding-presents and birthday-presents and souvenirs, is now being carried out again. This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.

  To assess the value of art objects belonging to Jews, appraisal officers are appointed by the Property Transactions Office, who will methodically facilitate the stripping-out of pictures, books, furniture, objects from the houses of Jews. Experts from the museums appraise what is of value. In these early weeks of the Anschluss the museums and the galleries hum to the sounds of busy, focused work as letters have to be written and copied, lists created, queries entered about provenance or attribution, and every picture, every piece of furniture, every objet ranked. For every single thing there are competing levels of interest.

  As I read these documents I think of Charles as he was in Paris. Amateur d’art, passionate and diligent in his searching out and his listing, his life of scholarship, his vagabonding to piece together knowledge about his loved painters, his lacquer, his netsuke collection.

  Never have art historians been so useful, their opinions attended to so seriously, than in Vienna in the spring of 1938. And because the Anschluss means that all Jews lose their jobs in official institutions, there are exciting opportunities for the right candidates. Two days after the Anschluss, Fritz Dworschak, previously the keeper of medals, is made the director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the Museum of
Art History). The distribution of all this seized artwork, he announces, is a ‘singular, never-to-be-repeated opportunity for expansion…in a great number of areas’.

  He is correct. Most art objects are to be sold on or auctioned off to raise money for the Reich. Some items are to be bartered with dealers for other objects; some items are to be given to the Führer for his new museum that is being planned for his birthplace of Linz; others to the National Museums. Berlin closely monitors the situation. ‘The Führer plans to personally decide on the use of the property after its seizure. He is considering putting artwork first and foremost at the disposal of small Austrian towns for their collections.’ Some pictures, some books, some furniture are earmarked for the collections of the Nazi leadership.

  In the Palais Ephrussi this process of assessment is now under way. Everything in this great treasure-house is held up to the light and examined. This is what collectors do. In the grey light from the glassed-in courtyard all these objects from this Jewish family are held accountable.

  The Gestapo write rather acidly about the taste behind the collections, but note that thirty of the Ephrussi pictures are ‘museum-ready’. Three Old Masters are given directly to the ‘gallery for painting’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, six to the Austrian Gallery, one Old Master is sold to a dealer, two terracottas and three paintings traded to a collector, ten sold to another dealer in the Michaelerplatz for 10,000 schillings. And so on and on and on.

  Numerous ‘artistic and high-quality pieces that are unsuitable for office purposes’ go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Naturhistorisches Museum (the Natural History Museum). All other ‘unsuitable’ objects are taken to the ‘Depot of Moveables’, a huge storage depot from which other organisations can come and take their pick.