Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  The benefits for Moriz were immense. His employment by Auer in 1892 enabled Moriz to marry Hermine, who came with a substantial dowry, in 1893. His position also entitled him to a spacious apartment above the gas mantle showroom that probably came rent-free because Auer owned the building. Moriz’s salary in 1900 was between 35,000 and 40,000 crowns, the equivalent of about $400,000 today. He acquired shares in the Gas Glowing Light Company, which returned big dividends. He became a significant industrialist in his own right by investing in several other companies while still working for Auer. He became part of Vienna’s “second society,” the city’s economic and bureaucratic elite who were eclipsed only by its “first society” of old aristocratic families with entrée at the imperial court.

  One of Moriz’s first big investments was in the Hamburger family company, which sold its brewery because of competition from bigger companies but continued to prosper as it produced malt, yeast, and spirits in Freudenthal and powdered milk in the neighboring towns of Fulnek and Hagenburg. When Hermine’s father, Nathan, retired at the age of sixty-five in 1906, Moriz and Adolf each acquired one-fifth of the company, which had a staff of 160. Moriz also joined the board of a railway company, which constructed a new line in the south of the Hapsburg Empire between Trient and Malé. But Moriz’s main involvement was in other lighting companies. Most likely, he sometimes lost heavily in companies involved in developing new technologies that failed. But Moriz also reaped spectacular profits from companies that brought some of the world’s most successful new forms of lighting to Austria.

  The oldest of these companies was the German firm Julius Pintsch, which developed the first safe, reliable, and effective form of lighting railway carriages in the late 1860s using compressed gas. While initial demand for these lights was modest, by the early 1900s Pintsch’s lights dominated the global market. In the intervening years, members of the Pintsch family came to have close links with Auer, and hence with Moriz, by investing in Auer’s first Austrian company, buying the rights to produce the first version of the mantles in Germany, and continuing to support Auer after these mantles failed to sell. When Pintsch established a branch in Vienna to supply Austria’s railways, Moriz acquired one-third of the company, which soon had three hundred employees.

  Moriz became even more involved with another German company, the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, which was first to exploit the invention by the German scientist Otto Mannesmann of “inverted” gaslights with mantles below, rather than above, the burners. The great advantage of these lights, which the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft produced from 1905, was that they did not cast shadows on the floor. They were also much more efficient than earlier burners and cheap to install, simply requiring the adaptation of old fittings rather than the purchase of new ones. When the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft almost immediately began reaping huge profits in Germany, Moriz founded its Austrian branch and retained half of its shares.

  Moriz was also a major investor in Watt, an electric lightbulb manufacturer with a factory outside Vienna and a showroom in the city. While some of Watt’s bulbs were used for ordinary electric lighting, its speciality was small bulbs known as Monowatts, because they used just one watt per candle. When the invention of these bulbs coincided in 1908 with the invention of small dry-cell batteries, they were used together to produce the first effective small flashlights, which immediately proved popular, precipitating great demand for Watt’s bulbs.

  Moriz’s stake in the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft was particularly problematic given his positions as a board member and commercial director of Auer’s Gas Glowing Light Company. In 1911 Moriz recognized this conflict of interest and opted to keep his stake in the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft while preparing to quit the Gas Glowing Light Company. But his departure was complicated because all three Gallia brothers had been so close to Auer for so long. When Wilhelm died in 1912, he was still running the Hungarian branch of the company that he had established almost twenty years before. As recalled by one of his granddaughters, Wilhelm regarded Auer as his best friend. Adolf’s association with Auer not only started much earlier but lasted much longer as he rejoined the board of the Austrian Gas Glowing Light Company in 1913 just as Moriz quit. When Moriz sold almost all his shares in the company, resigned as director of its commercial operations, and stepped down from its board, Auer saw it as a betrayal.

  Neither the Gas Glowing Light Company nor the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft was flourishing by then because of the ascendancy of electric lighting. It prevailed in Vienna because of the invention of the tungsten-filament bulb and because of the extension of the city’s electric grid across all of its nine inner districts. The lights that Moriz and Hermine chose for their own house in the Wohllebengasse were indicative. While they installed gas mantles where their servants lived and worked, they placed electric lights in the building’s foyer, the front rooms of their apartment, and all the family’s bedrooms. Although Moriz had made the bulk of his fortune out of gas lighting, most of his own lights in Good Living Street were electric.

  4

  Family

  “Ganz mutterseelenallein,” not just “all alone” or “all by myself” but “utterly abandoned” or “godforsaken.” It was February 1908 and Hermine had just been to a dramatization of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at Vienna’s Hofburgtheater and was recording the evening in her opera, theater, and concert book. While its column for “Bemerkungen,” or “Observations,” was intended for comments about each performance, Hermine usually used it to list her companions. On this occasion, having none for what seems to have been the first time in her life, she thought her lack of company equally worth recording.

  The extremity of her language is striking. “Mutterseelenallein” was how the Brothers Grimm described the seven-year-old Snow White after the huntsman took her into the great forest and left her there rather than kill her, as her wicked stepmother had ordered. In conceiving herself in these terms, the clear implication is that the thirty-eight-year-old Hermine did not plan to be at the theater alone. Someone had let her down. Most likely, Hermine had found out only at the last moment, giving her no opportunity to find another companion. She could have wasted her ticket, missed the performance, and stayed at home. Instead, she went by herself—a mark of her independence as a modern woman as well as her eagerness to go. Yet her diary suggests that she was highly uncomfortable doing so. She probably was acutely embarrassed as she entered Vienna’s most prestigious theater by herself and, even worse, was by herself during the intermission. I imagine her thinking that everyone was looking at her, wondering why she was alone.

  A month and eight performances later, Hermine was again out by herself. The attraction was the Polish piano virtuoso Leopold Godowski, who was the highest-paid soloist in Europe in the early 1900s. His concerts so excited Hermine that she saw him six times in two years, more than any other individual performer. Had Hermine had company when Godowski performed in March 1908 at Vienna’s Musikverein, she probably would have declared the concert “inspiringly beautiful” and likened it to “heavenly light” as usual. Instead she thought her lack of companions more noteworthy. When she described herself as “ganz allein,” or “completely alone,” she implied that she would have preferred company. But the relative restraint of her remark suggests that she was more comfortable than at the performance of Anna Karenina. Before long, she might have even become accustomed to going out alone, but because family and friends were always available, it seems she never did.

  Hermine’s marriage should have been unhappy. The standard image of fin de siècle Vienna, shaped above all by Arthur Schnitzler’s stories and plays, is of loveless unions entered into with wealth and social respectability primarily in mind, resulting in adultery, separations, and divorces. Several of Klimt’s other sitters fitted this image. Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann was already remarried when Klimt painted her. Gertrud Loew remarried just a couple of years later. Margarete Wittgenstein separated from her husband. The marriage of Sonja Knips was n
otoriously unhappy. That of Adele Bloch-Bauer was “based on mutual respect rather than love.” But Hermine was different, despite her marriage partly being a product of her father’s wealth and Moriz’s financial success.

  A photograph taken at the villa of Adolf and Ida Gallia in Baden, most likely by Adolf himself in about 1898, when Hermine and Moriz had been married five years, suggests their happiness. This stereograph shows Moriz and Hermine at the villa’s front entrance, smiling into each other’s eyes as they kiss, their bodies touching, their hands stiffly by their sides as they resist their impulse to hold each other. Hermine’s opera, theater, and concert book conveys more of their relationship. Her ways of describing the rare occasions when she went out with just Moriz, rather than a larger group of family and friends, express her pleasure in having him to herself. “Wir beide allein,” “just the two of us,” she would record, or “allein mit Schatz,” “alone with my darling.” Her habit of explaining why Moriz was not with her when she went out with other members of the family is even more suggestive. “Schatz Berlin,” she wrote almost every time.

  Moriz and Hermine kiss on the steps of Adolf and Ida Gallia’s villa at Baden outside Vienna, c. 1898. (Illustration Credits ill.12)

  The diary that Hermine began keeping in 1909 at the family’s new summerhouse in the small village of Alt Aussee, not far from Salzburg, paints a similar picture. Hermine called it a Wettertagebuch, as if her sole purpose was to record Alt Aussee’s notoriously fickle weather, and occasionally she did so, recording nothing but rain. Yet she usually kept a more extended log in which Moriz, whose work meant he could only escape the city for short holidays, was not just Hermine’s “Schatz” but occasionally also her “Schätzle,” a typical use of the diminutive to convey affection. After a relatively extended visit lasting five days in 1909, which saw Moriz and Hermine embark on unusually ambitious exercise, trying out the newly fashionable sport of mountaineering as they went close to reaching the summit of the Dachstein, the region’s highest peak, and crossed one of its glaciers roped to two guides, Hermine recorded Moriz’s return to Vienna with manifest emotion. “As always we found the parting very difficult.”

  Moriz’s one surviving letter to Hermine, written during the summer of 1913, when he was in Vienna and she was in Alt Aussee, is just as passionate. “My dearest heart,” he started. Hermine was his “Schatz” and “Schätzle,” he declared three times as he dwelled on how much he longed to see her. Yet this letter is most remarkable for how Moriz gave Hermine a detailed account of his business dealings, including payments and prices, suggesting that he was used to confiding in her and valued her judgment. His last will, which he finalized in 1917, was similar. While it was common for husbands to pay tribute to their wives in their wills, as part of expecting their wives to outlive them, Moriz was unusually fervent. Hermine had been a “faithful, brave, and hearty companion,” he declared, giving him “never-ending love and devotion.” According to family tradition, Moriz “adored and cosseted” Hermine.

  A book stamp that Käthe and Lene commissioned from the Wiener Werkstätte as a silver wedding anniversary present for their parents in 1918 provides another view of their marriage. For all the idealization and hyperbole appropriate on such anniversaries, the stamp is a testament to the strength of the relationship of Moriz and Hermine. It shows a man and a woman holding hands with two sprigs of flowers entwined above them in a lover’s knot. While both are stock seventeenth-century figures involving no attempt at likeness, they represent Moriz and Hermine, whose names appear in the box immediately underneath. To celebrate their parents’ twenty-five years of marriage, Käthe and Lene thought it appropriate to have Moriz and Hermine portrayed as a courting couple enjoying young love.

  Like most wealthy Viennese who had babies in the 1890s, Hermine employed wet nurses for her children—Erni, born 1895; Gretl, born 1896; and the twins, born 1899. The women who worked as wet nurses were generally unmarried mothers who, after a rigorous medical examination, left their own children in foundling homes and went to live in their employers’ apartments. There they were subject to much more scrutiny than other servants so that they did not compromise the well-being of their charges, but they enjoyed unusually good pay and conditions. While Hermine was never photographed with Erni when he was a small baby, the earliest photographs of him include four different wet nurses. The most revealing shows a wet nurse who neither looks at Erni nor engages with the camera but stares off into space, implicitly recognizing her role as a baby stand, there simply to hold Erni.

  Erni with one of his wet nurses, 1895. (Illustration Credits ill.13)

  If this photograph suggests a profound distance not just between Erni and his wet nurse but also between Erni and Hermine, the earliest studio portraits of Hermine as a young mother do not counter this impression. The reason is that these photographs were carefully staged by the Viennese studio of Carl Pietzner, whose many wealthy patrons included Sonja Knips, the subject of Klimt’s first major portrait. While the photographs of Hermine show how Pietzner’s Viennese studio thought the best way of suggesting a new mother’s devotion—and adoration—was to show her seated in profile with eyes only for her children, these photographs reveal nothing of Hermine’s relationship with Erni and Gretl.

  A diary, which Hermine started when Gretl was born, reveals more of Hermine as a mother. It was one of many baby books that publishers began producing in the late nineteenth century for the upper middle class. The sixty-eight pages of Unser Kind, or Our Child, were divided into dozens of different categories, starting with a genealogical page for recording the names and dates of birth of the child’s forebears and ending with five pages for recording the child’s first school years. The obvious purpose of this record-keeping was to provide a child such as Gretl with an account of her life until she was able to maintain her own diary. But the book was also designed to encourage mothers and fathers, who were both addressed in the publisher’s introduction, to engage in the scientific observation of children’s development. The catalyst for this was Wilhelm Preyer, a German professor of physiology, who published the foundational work of developmental psychology in 1882 based on observations of his own son. In keeping with Preyer’s work, Unser Kind had sections devoted to amusing incidents, remarkable sayings, and signs of good and bad character.

  Hermine, with Gretl in her arms and Erni on a table, 1897. (Illustration Credits ill.14)

  Käthe and Lene, 1901. While Hermine had herself photographed with Erni and Gretl when they were little, she never had herself photographed with the twins. (Illustration Credits ill.15)

  Some women maintained these books for years. The most famous example is Martha Arendt, the mother of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, born in Berlin in 1906. Until Hannah was eight, Martha used Unser Kind to chronicle her physical, emotional, and intellectual development, recording many small incidents as well as Hannah’s response to the most profound events, such as the death of her grandfather and father. Hermine wrote much less. She did not record anything amusing that Gretl said or did and wrote nothing of Gretl’s emotional development. Her main interest was Gretl’s growth, which she recorded weekly for a year and a half on a page that the diary’s publishers, anticipating a Christian audience, intended for recording Gretl’s baptism. All Hermine otherwise noted was Gretl’s receipt of her first doll as a six-month-old, the arrival of a new wet nurse when Gretl was eight months, her first experience of children’s soup at the age of eleven months, and the appearance of her first tooth a month later.

  Moriz with Erni on his shoulders and Hermine with Gretl on her lap, c. 1898. (Illustration Credits ill.16)

  The most compelling evidence of Hermine’s joy in her children is in the series of photographs probably taken by Adolf Gallia at his villa in Baden in about 1898. In one, Hermine holds Erni’s hand while taking him for a walk on the villa’s extensive grounds. In another, Hermine holds Gretl, who is sitting on a table next to Erni. In a third, Hermine sits on the front step
s with Gretl on one knee and Erni next to her. A fourth shows both Hermine and Moriz delighting in parenthood. A beaming Hermine has Gretl on her knee while an unusually casually attired Moriz in jacket, waistcoat, and cravat has Erni on his shoulders.

  The way in which Moriz chose to celebrate his birthday is similarly revealing. Rather than go out just with Hermine or other adults, he chose to take his children. He began on his forty-second birthday in 1900, when he went with Hermine and the five-year-old Erni and four-year-old Gretl to the Circus Tivoli. Two years later Hermine and he took all four children to a matinee of ballets at the Hofoper, even though the twins were only four years old. A year later, as part of the weekend when Moriz and Hermine spent Saturday attending the private view of the Klimt Kollektiv at the Secession, buying their Klimt landscape, and seeing Franz von Schöntan’s Maria Theresa at the Volkstheater, Moriz and Hermine celebrated his forty-fifth birthday on Sunday by taking all four children to another matinee at the Hofoper.

  Elisabeth Luzzatto sparked my curiosity because of her repeated appearance in Hermine’s opera, theater, and concert book. In the early 1900s Elisabeth and her husband, Maximilian, went out with Hermine and Moriz four times as often as any of their other friends. While Maximilian was another successful industrialist who owned an engineering works in Vienna’s Tenth District, Elisabeth was a supporter and at least occasional patron of the best in modern Viennese design. Like Moriz, Maximilian acquired a title, albeit Italian rather than Austrian. The Luzzattos were married in 1895, just two years after Moriz and Hermine, and had children at the same time. They, too, were of Jewish origin but had become Protestants before they married.