The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
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His plan was to pass by train over the Buchs border into Liechtenstein and Switzerland. From Zurich he would send the manuscripts by diplomatic courier to Washington before proceeding via Paris to the port of Le Verdon in western France, where he hoped to board the SS Manhattan bound for New York. But, on the Austrian side of the border in Vo-rarlberg, his train was brought to a halt. Enthusiastic Gestapo and Grepo (border police) ran up and down the carriages searching through all the passengers' bags. When they found the manuscripts at the bottom of Ji's suitcase he was hauled off the train and was still being interrogated as it pulled out of the station without him. In an account of this exploit penned many years later Ji recalled:
I was bright enough to assert loud and clear that only idiots would try and remove such valuable manuscripts from the Reich and that each one was a neat and beautiful modern copy. The Gods of Olympus kept their hands over me and the dolts believed me and allowed me, ungraciously, as an American of importance, to take the next train in 6 hrs to Zurich.
If this is to be believed then the customs officers and border police really were the thickest of dolts, for they were trained in the very task of stopping valuables from being smuggled out of the Reich. They must have heard the "these-are-only-copies" excuse a thousand times and presumably had recourse to experts in case of doubt. That three or more of these men could have examined Ji's manuscripts and agreed among themselves that they were no more than "beautiful modern copies" is unlikely; more probably is that the border police made some quick inquiries and discovered that, as far as Berlin was concerned, Ji Stonborough was "an American of importance."
He was held at the border for six hours, during which time he was invited to take a walk with a man who had been pulled off the same train and who claimed to be a baker from St. Gallen, but whom Ji suspected of being a Swiss intelligence officer. On their long stroll together, Ji apparently told him nothing, but only talked about the weather. This, at least, was his version of events. If true, it was not typical of him, for in general he could not easily refrain from boasting. No sooner had he arrived safely back in America than the gossip columnist Dudley Harmon reported in her column for the Washington Post that: "The liner Manhattan, which docked at New York Saturday positively bulging with passengers, brought back several Washingtonians, among them John Stonborough who is fascinating his friends at cocktail time with tales of the difficulties of getting out of Europe."
Whether Ji revealed anything to the Swiss baker is not known. The Grepo, however, turned out to be a little less doltish than he claimed, for no sooner had he passed with his precious cargo over the border than his mother, still in Vienna, was visited by the Gestapo. This time they went through her inventories with a fine-tooth comb and, learning about the six manuscripts that she had smuggled into England for Ludwig's safekeeping in June 1938, promptly threatened her with criminal prosecution for the illegal export of national treasures. Once again, with the aid of Dr. Indra, she was able to negotiate her way round the trouble. Indra recommended that she offer for sale to the state both her own and Ji's manuscripts for a "reasonable price" in return for immunity from prosecution. These were the manuscripts that had been confiscated from her home at the time of her arrest and placed in the National Library. They included Gretl's holographs of symphonies by Bruckner and Wagner, Ji's manuscripts of Brahms's Piano Quintet and a quintet by Weber, other pieces by Brahms and Schubert and an autograph letter by Beethoven. Dr. Indra requested that, in return for selling these treasures to the library at a knockdown price, she be allowed to export just one of them--the manuscript of the Brahms Third Symphony (which had once belonged to the conductor Hans von Bulow and was now owned by her reprobate son Thomas)--free of tax.
It was this last suggestion that prompted the Austrian officer in charge of the case, Friedrich Plattner (head of the Department of Education, Culture and National Instruction at the Viennese Ministry for Internal and Cultural Affairs), to seek advice from higher authority in Berlin. On January 9, 1940, he wrote to the notorious head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, explaining how the "threat of prosecution" had inspired the widow Stonborough to offer her own and her sons' manuscripts to the National Library for just 50,000 RM. The letter continues:
In order to lend particular weight to this offer, the Stonborough family draws attention to the fact that, during the negotiations which are shortly to take place about how the remaining assets of roughly 1 million Swiss francs in Zurich are to be divided up, the family will be in a position either to bring about or to prevent the transfer of this sum in favour of the German Reich; further emphasis has recently been given to this fact by a representative of the Reichs bank through intervention in favour of the Stonborough family on the part of the Central Heritage Protection Agency in Vienna. Also worth mentioning is the possibility that the Stonborough family--Dr. John Stonborough has an allegedly influential position in the Labor Department in Washington--might, possibly through diplomatic channels, be able to bring some pressure to bear for the Brahms symphony to be exported without anything being given in return.
Lammers, not unnaturally, refused permission for the last symphony autograph score by Brahms remaining in the Reich to be exported, and commanded Plattner to enforce the sale of the manuscripts to the library and demand the million Swiss francs in return for Gretl's immunity from prosecution. This million was the same million that Ji had sworn to Paul would be held aside as an emergency fund for Hermine and Helene in the event of their needing to emigrate. That money would now have to be found elsewhere.
COLD WAR
In Switzerland Paul had occupied himself extensively with the case of Daniel Goldberg, a Viennese doctor who had looked after Hilde and the children in Vienna. He and his Aryan wife had fled to Paris in August where they were living in a squalid hotel on the outskirts of the city. When Paul discovered this he sent large sums of money and campaigned with friends in England and America to find the doctor a position. Gretl too made vigorous efforts to save old family friends from Nazi anti-Semitism and succeeded in bringing two of them first to Cuba and later into America; but by 1940 she had played out all her cards and was decidedly persona non grata with the German authorities. As soon as her deal with the National Library was concluded she was required to leave the country. Of her two properties at Gmunden the National Socialists commandeered the larger and would soon occupy her Viennese mansion as well. Dr. Indra helped, in the hours before her emigration, to bury various of her treasures in the garden at Kundmanngasse. To him she entrusted full power of attorney during her absence and left, full of sorrow, for the port of Genoa. On February 8, 1940, she arrived in New York on board the SS Washington. This was her second, forced emigration from Austria and it left her, once again, feeling listless and depressed. To Ludwig she wrote: "There is no place I can find rest and I cannot be of any use to anyone. So God willing I will find a meaningful occupation."
In the end she occupied these barren months by selling off her possessions. In October two massive sales of furniture, paintings and Oriental artifacts, described as "The Property of the Estate of the Late Jerome Stonborough," were held at the Parke-Bernet Galleries on 57th Street. Pi-cassos, Corots, Gauguins, Matisses, a twenty-foot coromandel lacquer Pekingese screen, ancient Roman statuary, Athenian vases, horses, jugs and bibelots from the days of Tang, Ming, Yuan and Sung. These treasures cannot have come from New York since Gretl had no fixed abode there. Extant passenger lists give Jerome's U.S. address in February 1937 as the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. A year later, Gretl gave hers as 44 Wall Street--the office of her son's stockbroker. The sale catalogue states that the items were all collected by Jerome in Paris. It is not known whether she succeeded in negotiating an export license for any of her artworks in Vienna. The manager at Parke-Bernet Galleries gave the Stonboroughs an estimate for the paintings of between $59,015 and $91,615. But the sale was a disappointment. The highest price for a single item was paid for Lot 71, Nature morte by Henri Matisse, which went for
$10,400. No more than $5,200 was paid for Toulouse-Lautrec's severe portrait of La Femme au noeud rose; $4,100 for Gauguin's Le Violoncelliste and $3,800 for Picasso's 1921 Le Chien. Almost everything else went for under $2,000, including a splendid Modigliani portrait, La Femme au collier, for $400, whose sister picture La Femme au collier vert was valued by Christie's, New York, in May 2007 at between $12 million and $16 million. The picture sale raised a total hammer price of $56,705. It was a bad time to sell.
Several months later Ji sold cheaply all the manuscripts that he had smuggled through the border at Buchs to the Clarke-Whittall Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington. Some of the money was put into offshore accounts in Bermuda and some into an investment trust in the joint names of John Stonborough and Abraham Bienstock.
Since Hermine and Helene's so-called emigration fund had been paid to the Nazis Gretl and Ji resolved to make it up in other ways, both writing to Ludwig to ask him to release the manuscripts deposited at Barclay's Bank in Cambridge, so that they too could be offered for sale in Washington. At least one of them (Mozart's Piano Concerto K 467) actually belonged to Paul. Ludwig wrote to Ji to dissuade him from selling at a time when the market was low, to which Ji responded with a "damned aggressive" letter in which he accused his uncle of "going off half-cock." "I have done fairly well in the administration of 2 and a half fortunes since approx '39," he wrote, "and I am entitled to more regard for my opinions and decisions in financial matters than you have shown me."
A FAMILY REUNION
In Switzerland young Hilde's life was far from easy, for with time-limited visas she, the children and Fraulein Rolly were under imminent threat of extradition. At the beginning of March 1939 she received instructions from Paul's lawyer to pack everything and proceed to Genoa by overnight train. Tickets were booked on the Italian liner Rex bound for New York. When they got there they found a riot of desperate people hoping to clamber aboard. Their luggage was loaded, only to be unloaded again when it was discovered that their immigration papers were not in order.
For two and a half weeks they waited at Genoa before securing places on board a smaller boat bound for Panama and Valparaiso. The Virgilio, built for no more than 640 passengers, was packed with a needy, dispossessed rabble of over 1,100 people fleeing Hitler's Europe. Hilde, who had never been on board a ship before, was feeling sick with longing for Austria by the time she had reached the Straits of Gibraltar. The journey took them via the Canaries, Venezuela, the Isthmus of Panama and the twin cities of Cristobal and Colon (where they were caught in a dramatic fire that burned down half the city) and eventually to Havana, where they bought Cuban visas, took a house by the sea and waited, for a year and a half, for Paul to come and rescue them.
He could do nothing immediately, for by leaving America Paul risked not being allowed back in. Only when his visitors' visa had finally expired in August 1940 was he able to fly to Havana. For seven months he stayed in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba on the San Lazaro Cove visiting his mistress and his children at weekends. At every turn his attempts to secure both his and their permanent visas for the U.S. were thwarted and for a while he considered moving with his family to Argentina.
Hilde, by nature, was religious. She had been brought up in the Catholic faith and longed for her relationship with the father of her children to be dignified by marriage. In the past few years she had suffered and sacrificed much, confronting each new difficulty with courage and fortitude. She had persuaded Paul, despite his antipathy to the Catholic Church, to allow their daughters to be baptized in Vienna and now, on August 20, 1940, in Havana, Cuba, he and she became man and wife in a private, formal, Catholic ceremony.
In New York, Gretl and Paul had made no attempts to meet one another, but Gretl learned about her brother through information supplied by a shared acquaintance. "I would go to see him with joy if it would be of any use," she wrote to Ludwig, "but I know that I am the last person he could stand. I understand it so well." During the war she was forced to write to her youngest brother in English to avoid the suspicion of the censors. This she found uncomfortable, but it was the only way that Ludwig could obtain news of his brother: "Paul's friend (with her children) is now in Cuba & he will bring her here & marry her as soon as he can get the permission. In the old days I used to think of such a possibility as being about the greatest misfortune that could befall him, but now!--I look at you & we say: 'naturally' May his soul rest in peace."
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
In April 1934 Paul had performed Ravel's Concerto with Hermann Scherchen conducting at the ISCM Festival in Florence. In the audience sat the twenty-year-old English composer Benjamin Britten, who had come to hear his own Phantasy Quartet performed on the following evening. The Times critic regarded Paul's performance as the best of the whole festival, but Britten was so taken by Scherchen's thirteen-year-old son Wulff (later the inspiration behind his music for "Young Apollo") that he may not have been concentrating especially hard. As a schoolboy in Norfolk he had heard Strauss's Parergon on the radio and had written in his diary: "In the afternoon after a lie down I listen to the wireless, a concert, orchestra and Paul Wittenstein (I think that's his name, the left handed pianist). Quite good, tho' I didn't like the programme very much."
In 1940 Britten was living in America where he had arrived shortly before the outbreak of war, having left England to escape his intricate entanglements with Wulff. Paul, unsure if he liked Britten's music, approached the matter of a commission gingerly. Britten's boyfriend Peter Pears recorded: "We went and had a long talk with him [Wittgenstein]. He was rather stupid, couldn't understand Ben's music(!), & Ben nearly got terribly cross, but just managed to contain himself." A few days later Paul invited the young composer and his publisher, Hans Heinsheimer, to his apartment on Riverside Drive to discuss the possibility further. When they left the matter was still undecided. Eager for a firm commitment (the fee was $700) Heinsheimer rang him the next day and reported back to Britten:
I called Mr. Wittgenstein once more this morning and asked him if he could please make up his mind quite clearly and sincerely. He said that this is exactly what he did yesterday and if it sometimes looked a little bit strange, the reason was that he wanted to be as sincere as possible. He didn't see this meeting as the proper occasion or the proper opportunity to pay nice compliments, but as a sort of meeting of a doctor and a patient, where the utmost sincerity should be applied. He apologises if he made the impression of being a little too persistent and he really thinks that your music would be the right thing for him. He highly appreciates your offer to show him parts of the work before the deal is completed ... I think I should encourage you to try it.
Within a matter of days Britten had completed his first sketches and took them to Paul for approval. After a good "Austrian" supper, he was able to report: "I pulled off the deal with Wittgenstein. I had dinner with him, which was much more pleasant than I'd feared. He's much easier to manage alone! I've even started the piece which I think may be quite nice." And to his sister Britten wrote, "I've been commissioned by a man called Wittgenstein ... he pays gold so I'll do it."
For a while relations between composer and patron ran smoothly. Britten finished the work in sketch form by August 12, just over a week after Paul had arrived in Havana. By October Paul was playing the piano part by heart and seemed pleased with it, but the two men were separated--Paul unable to enter the U.S. and Britten afraid of visiting Cuba lest he too be denied reentry to the States. This situation frustrated the pianist more than the composer. Britten arranged a private performance on two pianos for the distinguished conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Goossens, who was so impressed that he wrote immediately to Heinsheimer: "This is a truly amazing work and confirms again one's knowledge of the fact that Britten is the outstanding young man in the world of creative music today."
Paul (aged fifty-three) flew from Havana to Florida on February 10, 1941, leaving Hilde (twenty-five), his daughters Elizabeth (five)
and Johanna (three) and Fraulein Rolly (fifty-five) to follow on by boat three days later. On the landing papers next to Hilde's name is scribbled in the rough hand of an immigration official: "Husband shows from statement that he has $200,000 but she a marked deficiency of vision almost to complete blindness." On arrival she and the girls moved to a comfortable house at Huntington, Long Island. "A nice place," Paul called it, "with a view to the bay and a charming garden where I shall plant some strawberries and redcurrants. Most important thing about it is that it is only ten minutes from the beach." For the rest of her married life Hilde lived with the children on Long Island while Paul stayed at his apartment on Manhattan's Riverside Drive, visiting them at weekends and for part of the school holidays.
At Huntington Hilde proudly announced that she was pregnant once again and Paul, who longed for a son, was delighted by the news. With Britten, however, his relationship was starting to become strained. As with Strauss, Korngold, Ravel and Schmidt, Paul once again accused the composer of making his orchestra far too loud. Britten, he said, was a typically modern composer who "feels unwell" if he is not allowed to over-score; "playing against the noise of your orchestra is a hopeless strife," he wrote, "a roaring like a lion ... a deafening noise ... No human strength on the piano can be a match for 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and double woodwind, all making noise at the same time." The young composer stood his ground at first, refusing to make any changes. The premiere of the piece, which would eventually be called Diversions, was set for January with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the Hungarian conductor Eugene Ormandy. Britten wrote to his English publisher: "I'm having a slight altercation with Herr von Wittgenstein over my scoring--if there is anything I know about, it is scoring so I am fighting back. The man really is an old sour puss." Peter Pears unsurprisingly agreed: "Wittgenstein is being stupid and recalcitrant about the scoring of the Diversions and has been trying to get Ormandy on his side. It means a series of tactful but firm letters from Ben."