Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  The contemporary term for such conversions was Karrieretaufe, or “career baptism.” The implication, always derogatory, was that Jews sacrificed their faith and tradition to increase their economic, social, and cultural prospects. While many Jews conformed to this pragmatic image, they often acted more for their families than for themselves. Mahler’s sister, Justine, who served as his housekeeper until he married, was unusually explicit about how she converted to improve Gustav’s prospects in Vienna. Justine described herself as acting out a piece of theater, likening her instruction in Christianity to learning “a poem in a foreign language” and boasting that she “did not believe a word.” Yet for all of Gustav’s pragmatism, Alma recognized that he was a far better Christian than she because of his deep-seated religiosity, which encompassed both Judaism and Catholicism.

  Hermine, at about sixteen, c. 1886. (Illustration Credits ill.8)

  Hermine was one of many converts deeply affected by Christianity. Her attraction to Catholicism started when she was a girl in Freudenthal, where the small Jewish community lacked many of the institutions of Moriz’s birthplace of Bisenz. While Hermine’s parents wanted their children to be observant Jews, they also wanted them to be as assimilated as possible. Because education was a prime means of achieving this end, Nathan and Josefine sent Hermine to the local convent run by nuns from the Order of German Knights.

  Her parents hoped to safeguard Hermine’s faith by refusing to let her go to Catholic services or to attend the nuns’ classes devoted to religious instruction, but the nuns were not so easily stymied, as revealed by Hermine’s oldest surviving possessions—a collection of more than seventy merit certificates, which date from 1879, when she turned nine. While some of these certificates simply say “Reward” or “Distinction” or contain morals such as “Industriousness yields rewards,” the majority carry Catholic imagery and Catholic texts, combining pictures of Jesus, saints, angels, and sacred hearts with homilies such as “God’s Angel guards you day and night” and “Jesus is your Lord on earth.” The nuns even gave Hermine one certificate ready for display, placing the image of a guardian angel within a decorative surround of curled paper and glass beads inside a glass-fronted frame.

  One of the many merit certificates that the nuns in Freudenthal gave Hermine. (Illustration Credits ill.9)

  Hermine’s “dear parents,” as she always described them, were a great constraint when she considered converting twenty years later. Much as Hermine’s uncle Eduard Hamburger played a prime role in the construction of a new synagogue in the Moravian city of Olmütz, so Nathan Hamburger took a key part in establishing the Jewish cemetery in Freudenthal and headed the association responsible for its prayer room. Moriz was in an easier position, as his parents were both dead, but he also would have been conscious of breaking tradition and subject to family pressure since all of his siblings, apart from his brother Adolf, remained Jews. The surviving evidence suggests that Moriz was much more ambivalent about converting than Hermine—that it was something he did for her and their children, an issue on which she led and he followed, one of many markers of her influence over him.

  A sharp increase in conversions at the start of the new century made it easier for Moriz and Hermine to leave the Kultusgemeinde. While the annual number remained less than half of 1 percent of Vienna’s Jewish population, this figure still made Vienna the city where Jews were abandoning their religion faster than anywhere else in the world. Moriz and Hermine would have known many of the converts, as a disproportionate number were wealthy. Those who joined this exodus went in three directions: a quarter took the smallest step of becoming konfessionslos—literally faithless, identifying with no organized religion; another quarter, including Hermine’s brother Otto, became Protestant (which was the dominant religion in Denmark, where Otto and his family were living when they began converting); and the other half became Roman Catholic, the Austrian state religion. Moriz, Hermine, and their four children were among them, as were Hermine’s other brothers, Guido and Paul.

  The Gallias and the Hamburgers in 1903, when all the adults remained Jews but all the children had been baptized. Standing from left are Hermine and Moriz followed by Henny Hamburger, Otto Hamburger, and Guido Hamburger. Seated from left are Erni, Josefine Hamburger, Robert Hamburger, Nathan Hamburger, and Gretl. In front are the twins, Käthe and Lene. (Illustration Credits ill.10)

  Many adults began by having their children baptized when they were small so that Christianity would always be part of their identities. In keeping with this practice, Moriz and Hermine had their oldest child and one son, Erni, baptized in 1902, when he was six, followed by their three daughters in 1903, when Gretl was six and Käthe and her twin sister, Lene, were four. While Austrian law required children to have the same religion as their parents, Moriz and Hermine avoided this obstacle by traveling across the Austro-Hungarian border to the city known in Hungarian as Pozsony, in German as Pressburg, and in Slovak as Bratislava, just an hour by train from Vienna. The church they chose was, typically, the grandest—the great Gothic cathedral of St. Martin’s. On each occasion, the children’s godfather was Carl Moll.

  Father Alexander Gaibl, a canon at St. Martin’s, not only presided over this process by officiating at the Gallias’ baptisms and first communions but also saw the family on other occasions. An opera, theater, and concert book kept by Hermine reveals that she and Moriz celebrated New Year’s Day in 1908 with Gaibl at the Hofoper seeing Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila—a peculiarly appropriate choice for a priest converting Jews to Christianity, as the opera’s subject was the killing of the Hebrew strongman Samson because of his betrayal by the Philistine Delilah. In 1910 Gaibl officiated again when the forty-year-old Hermine and the fifty-two-year-old Moriz were baptized together at St. Martin’s and the Gallias became a family of one religion for the first time in eight years.

  The leaders of Vienna’s Jewish community tried to discourage such conversions by publishing weekly lists of those who quit the Kultusgemeinde in the city’s Jewish newspapers in an attempt to shame the apostates and ensure that Jews ostracized them. But these lists did nothing to stop the conversions and may even have added to them by advertising how many prominent Jews were abandoning their faith. When Moriz and Hermine were baptized, he remained close to his Jewish siblings just as she stayed close to her Jewish parents. They also retained many Jewish friends.

  My mother thought these conversions were “some sort of wish fulfillment” for Hermine. While cynical about almost everything Hermine did, Anne was sure Hermine’s baptism was an act of genuine conviction. She imagined that, as Hermine “always stayed in touch with the nuns who had taught her and whom she had loved,” she “went and told the nuns about her baptism and they were very pleased.” But while Moriz soon took on more Catholic responsibilities by becoming godfather to one of the sons of Guido and Nelly Hamburger, the family’s attendance at church was sporadic at best. While Hermine’s diary for 1911 lists what they did in great detail, it mentions neither mass nor confession.

  3

  Gaslights

  The family’s wealth owed much to the Austrian scientist Carl Auer von Welsbach, who employed Moriz for twenty years. While Austria’s contribution to global culture in the fin de siècle is typically conceived in terms of art, music, literature, architecture, design, and ideas, Auer put Austria at the forefront of basic science and the most innovative technology. He discovered and isolated two of the rare earths that form the bottom section of the periodic table. He identified another two elements, though another scientist determined their atomic weight before he did. He played a pivotal role in the development of new forms of lighting, both gas and electric. Although it is commonly assumed that electricity’s superiority was as obvious as its triumph was inevitable, once Thomas Edison first demonstrated his electric bulbs in 1879, the reality was very different. For another twenty, even thirty years, it was not clear whether electric or gas lighting would prevail, largely because of Auer, who was
the one inventor to revolutionize both technologies.

  Auer began by building on the work of the German scientist Robert Bunsen, who had taught him. Bunsen’s great invention in 1855 was the Bunsen burner, which opened up a vast array of uses for gas as a fuel by mixing it with air before it ignited to produce a clean, intense flame. Auer’s great invention in 1885 was a knitted sleeve, or mantle, that he impregnated with a fluid made out of rare earths. Auer found that, when he heated this impregnated sleeve with a Bunsen burner, it became incandescent, generating much more light than the best existing gaslights while using much less fuel. One name for the mantle was the Gasglühlicht, or gas-glowing light. Otherwise, just like the Bunsen burner, it was named after its inventor—known in German as the Auerlicht, in French as the Bec Auer but called the Welsbach mantle across the English-speaking world because Auer was thought too difficult for English-speakers to pronounce.

  The first version of these lights, which went into production in Europe and North America in 1887, failed because these mantles proved to be expensive and fragile, their light was no match for electric bulbs, and the mantles were positioned above the burner, which consequently cast a shadow on the surrounding environment. But a second version, which emitted a much whiter, longer-lasting light using even less fuel, was a triumph. Just as owners of old gaslights immediately began replacing them with mantles, so many households and businesses that had switched to electricity reverted to gas and used the mantles, too. By the end of 1891, Auer’s Austrian company was marketing the mantles from a showroom in the Schleifmühlgasse in Vienna’s Fourth District as well as from outlets in eleven other cities across the Hapsburg Empire. Although the German gas mantle company was most successful—returning 65 percent of its capital in its first year and 130 percent in its second year—all the gas mantle companies generated huge profits.

  Sigmund Freud, who saw himself as another scientist making one discovery after another about the human mind, was envious of his compatriot. As Auer built a castle for himself in 1899 on a vast estate in Carinthia, Freud was living, by his own account, in fear of poverty in Vienna. Still a lowly lecturer at its university, his Interpretation of Dreams would sell only 351 copies over the next six years. When he summarized his ideas in an essay, “On Dreams,” in 1901, he drew on an example from his own experience involving Auer to explain his concept of association. Freud recounted how he had been on a train one day, holding a glass cylinder, which got him thinking of the gas mantle. “I soon saw,” Freud wrote, “that I should like to make a discovery that would make me as rich and independent as my fellow-countryman Dr. Auer von Welsbach was made by his.”

  Electric light companies were soon undertaking new research to improve their bulbs. Because Thomas Edison’s original carbon filaments were short-lived, inefficient, and produced a yellow light, the challenge was to replace them. Although Auer had little or no reason to advance the technology that was the main rival to his gaslights, he joined hundreds of scientists around the world looking to do so. In 1898, he developed the first metal filaments made of osmium, which produced a long-lasting white light using half as much electricity, but they were very brittle and expensive. By 1900, these bulbs were on show at the Universal Exposition in Paris and illuminating Franz Joseph’s office in Vienna. By 1902, they were in mass production in Austria and Germany, where 2 million bulbs sold over the next four years.

  The gas mantle was much more successful. Its global reach is suggested by an advertisement in the Sydney Bulletin taken out in 1905 by the local Welsbach Light Company. “You all do know this mantle,” the advertisement began, “its brilliant incandescence now gleams in every country and every clime, establishing its reputation as the brightest and most softly illuminating medium that human ingenuity has yet devised.” The scale of production was prodigious. The Australian company manufactured up to 12,000 mantles a day, or close to 2 million a year, at its plant in Sydney. The British company made up to 30 million a year in London. The American plant in Gloucester City, New Jersey, produced up to 40 million a year.

  The impact of the mantles not only in buildings but also on the streets of the world was profound. While Bombay was first, other cities soon followed, especially in Germany, where the number of streetlights using the mantles increased by 1,300 percent between 1895 and 1905. New York was not far behind. Its residents observed a great improvement in 1904 when 16,000 streetlights in Manhattan and the Bronx were fitted with mantles. A decade later, “Gotham by Gaslight” was the stuff not just of fiction but of reality. Over half of New York’s 82,000 streetlights were lit with mantles as annual global production reached 300 million.

  Auer’s principal legal adviser was Moriz’s brother Adolf, the first Gallia to go to university. When he moved from Bisenz to Vienna in 1870, Adolf studied law, the profession that Jews most often pursued and quickly dominated. Before long he was one of Vienna’s leading patent lawyers and Auer was his most important client, generating so much work that Adolf had little time to represent anyone else. He advised Auer about how best to protect and exploit his rights around the world. He became a director and then vice president of the Austrian Gas Glowing Light Company. He helped to establish the German Auergesellschaft.

  This association was integral to Adolf’s rise to riches, which saw him acquire spectacular real estate with his wife, Ida. Their first purchase in the 1890s was an imposing summer villa in Baden, the nearest spa town to Vienna. They followed in 1903 by erecting two adjoining five-story apartment buildings in Vienna’s First District. While one was on a relatively modest block on the Biberstrasse, which Adolf owned by himself and was all rented, the other was on a vast corner block extending to the Ringstrasse, which Adolf bought with Ida and developed in a much more imposing fashion appropriate to its location. This building, which became best known for its ground-floor Café Prückel, was where Adolf and Ida lived in the grandest apartment, Adolf had his chambers, and his initials adorned one of the street entrances.

  In the most influential account of fin de siècle Vienna, the historian Carl Schorske argued that with the triumph of the Christian Socials in the 1890s, Vienna’s Liberal bourgeoisie abandoned political engagement. Adolf acted very differently when Auer and he invested in Die Zeit, which went from being a weekly magazine to a newspaper in 1902, with the goal of providing daily, independent, radical commentary on social and political issues. In doing so, Adolf became a target of Karl Kraus, whose aspirations for his weekly Die Fackel were almost identical. As part of lambasting Die Zeit for being compromised by the financial interests of its investors, Kraus decried the newspaper’s failure to report that the English Welsbach company had been forced to reduce its capital by 50 million crowns, with disastrous consequences for many of its small investors. “Baron Auer von Welsbach and Dr. Gallia could surely have given Die Zeit all the necessary information,” Kraus snidely observed, “just as they were rumored to have given Die Zeit a third million.”

  Adolf’s association with Auer was also the making of the two other Gallia brothers—Wilhelm, who was a year older than Adolf and spent much of the 1880s working as a merchant in Troppau or Opava in Silesia, and Moriz, who was six and a half years younger than Adolf and lived with him from 1891, when he moved to Vienna looking for work. When Auer employed both Wilhelm and Moriz, the gas mantle was already generating such big profits that he would have found it easy to attract capable businessmen to run his companies. The distinguishing qualification of Moriz and Wilhelm was that they were Adolf’s brothers. Thirty-three-year-old Auer began at the start of 1892 by employing thirty-three-year-old Moriz as the director of the commercial operations of the Austrian Gas Glowing Light Company in Vienna. A year later, Auer employed forty-year-old Wilhelm to establish the Hungarian Gas Glowing Light Company in Budapest and be its managing director. Before long, even more members of the family were in the gaslight business as Moriz employed two of Hermine’s brothers, Otto and Guido Hamburger, who were also the nephews of Wilhelm, Adolf, and Moriz.
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br />   Moriz, thirty-four, and Hermine, twenty-two, after being married in Vienna’s main synagogue, 1893. (Illustration Credits ill.11)

  Moriz was responsible for marketing and supplying the gas mantles across Austria as well as in other European countries where no local company had acquired the rights to Auer’s patents. But Moriz’s main market was Vienna, where the opportunities were boosted by the growth in the city’s population from 800,000 in 1890 to 2 million in 1910, the unprecedented prosperity of the city through most of this period, and Karl Lueger’s investment in a new municipal gasworks while electricity lagged behind. Moriz was initially responsible for just the Gas Glowing Light Company’s showroom in the Schleifmühlgasse. By the late 1890s, he was distributing the gas mantles through a network of forty-five retailers spread across the city. While he reduced this network to seven in 1902, his corporate role grew as a result of Auer’s reconstituting the company’s board and making Moriz its vice president in 1905. In between he also promoted and sold Auer’s electric lights.