by Tim Bonyhady
Gretl around the time of her two ball seasons. (Illustration Credits ill.29)
The Hoffmann apartment was designed for these occasions. Had construction gone according to schedule, it would have been ready in September 1913, enabling the family to use it through the ball season, which started a couple of months later. But wet weather slowed progress, so the family could not occupy the apartment until the end of the year, and even then work continued since the Wiener Werkstätte did not finish the last of the Hoffmann light fittings until March 1914. Moriz and Hermine were not willing to wait that long before entertaining. In December 1913, a pianist named Blum provided the music for a soiree on Saint Stephen’s Day for thirty-eight people, which Gretl considered small but attractive while fearing that the Gallias were being slighted by those with more social status, if less wealth. Gretl was particularly disturbed that one of their invitees failed to tell them he would not be coming, another declined their invitation but came regardless, and a third maintained that Erni had told him the wrong time when he arrived three hours late. While Gretl often arrived an hour or two late at other families’ dances, she thought three hours unacceptable and the explanation infuriated her. “If the idiot cannot come up with better excuses, he should stay at home,” she fumed. “We will never invite him again.”
Erni caused the family much greater concern as he struggled with the privileges and expectations that came with being Moriz and Hermine’s eldest child and only son. Their decision to send him to the Theresianum, Vienna’s most prestigious gymnasium, initially intended only for boys from the aristocracy, marred his childhood. While Jews constituted on average over 30 percent of the students of Vienna’s other Gymnasien, they comprised less than 1 percent of the Theresianum’s students. Just two of its boys were Jews and they were both nobility, sons of Vienna’s Baron Rothschild. Despite his conversion long before he started there, Erni was treated like a Jew.
Erni’s difficulties with Latin and Greek made his schooling even more traumatic because of the prospect of his failing his Matura, which would force him to do two years of compulsory military service as an ordinary soldier rather than one year as an officer trainee, permanently diminishing his social status. When Erni graduated in June 1913 with the help of a private tutor who lived with the family during his final school year, Moriz and Hermine rewarded Erni by buying him his first car. But because he passed only with Stimmenmehrheit, which meant some of his teachers thought Erni should fail, Moriz and Hermine made him leave the car in Vienna that summer. Much as Freud discussed in his Interpretation of Dreams, Erni never lost his fear of failing this examination, experiencing recurrent Matura dreams.
Erni’s military training, which he started in October 1913 in an artillery regiment based in Vienna, proved at least as difficult when he was confined to barracks for a fortnight as a punishment just before Moriz and Hermine were due to hold another soiree in January 1914. While the family was embarrassed by Erni’s absence that Saturday, they were more concerned that their ball for the season was to take place a week later and everyone who attended would discover the family’s humiliation. Although Moriz and Hermine had sent out the invitations and organized the food, music, entertainment, and decorations, they considered canceling the ball. “What will happen is still quite uncertain!” Gretl exclaimed. “I am very anxious!!!!!!!”
Gretl’s entry three days later conveys the family’s horror—as well as their pride in their reputation and identity as Gallias, which Moriz and Hermine began developing as they prospered in Vienna in the 1890s. “Good God!! The shocking has happened,” Gretl wrote, as if Erni had only just been imprisoned and she had not already written about it. “Our Erni, a Gallia, has been confined to barracks for fourteen days. He will never become an officer and must serve as a common soldier! He, a Gallia! It is unbelievable! And why? Because of his laziness and because he owed a crown to a common soldier and failed to pay despite repeated (four) warnings. Mama fainted when she heard the news. Both Papa and she have not slept for three nights. It is too dreadful, so beyond belief!”
Gretl was so eager for the ball to proceed that she thought of writing secretly to Erni’s commanding officer, Colonel Czerny, to beg for lenience. Moriz, whose wealth and status as a Regierungsrat gave him significant influence in Vienna despite his Jewish origins, was unable to secure Erni’s immediate release but ensured that Erni’s misconduct went unnoted on his military record and he remained an officer trainee. Three weeks later, Moriz and Hermine rewarded Czerny by taking him to a performance of Parsifal at the Hofoper, then entertained him until early in the morning at one of Vienna’s best cafés. In between, the family’s ball proceeded without the prodigal.
The seventy-one guests—twenty-five more than the year before—included one baroness, eight “vons,” one professor, and one doctor. Although the Hoffmann rooms, other than the boudoir, were all more than 540 square feet, it was a challenge to feed so many with style. Gretl’s diary indicates that everything went well. The table in the Hoffmann dining room ordinarily seated eight, but it came with eighteen chairs and could be extended to fit them in comfort. On this occasion the family sat twenty-seven there, then seated forty-nine more in the smaller smoking room. If the guests did not know why Erni was absent when they arrived, they soon found out, but Gretl was too happy to care.
Their entertainer was the nineteen-year-old Oskar Karlweis, whose father wrote several of the plays Hermine and Moriz saw at the start of the century. While Karlweis was a guest at a number of the balls that Gretl attended in her first season, by 1914 he was acquiring a reputation as an actor and finding work at private balls, which soon saw him become a success onstage and on-screen. To Gretl’s delight, Karlweis arranged to perform with the twenty-year-old Ernst Marischka, who had already written the screenplay for one successful film and was to write and script dozens more, winning fame for his 1950s Sissi trilogy about Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
In between conversations that Gretl thought insanely good, she danced until four in the morning. As usual, her parents employed Blum to play the family’s Steinway. Most likely, their servants pushed the piano into a corner of the salon to make more space for dancing, rolled up the Hoffmann carpet, and moved the Hoffmann furniture to the edges of the room, thereby highlighting the three massive Hoffmann gilt-metal and glass-bead chandeliers that the Wiener Werkstätte had installed only the day before. Because there were so many guests, the adjoining hall probably became yet another dance floor.
Gretl received twenty-two bouquets, more than ever before, but danced almost all night with just three partners. One was Ernst Marischka, who ate and danced with the guests as well as performed with them. Another was Oskar Karlweis, who did the same. The third was First Lieutenant Balberitz, an officer in the 6th Dragoons, one of Austria’s most prestigious cavalry regiments. Although Marischka was a bad dancer and Karlweis little better, Gretl was happy to dance with them because of their cultural cachet. She most enjoyed her turns around the floor with Balberitz, who was the best dancer present. She was thrilled when he arrived first and led her for most of the evening.
The new dance that season was the tango, which originated in Argentina, where it was condemned as a “pornographic spectacle,” a dance “belonging distinctly to ill-famed clubs and to taverns of the worst repute never danced in tasteful salons or among distinguished people.” In Europe it became a dance of the upper classes after being modified to make it more modest. At the start of 1913, the dance that young men especially wanted with Gretl was the quadrille, which had become popular in Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of 1913, it was the tango. She was typically good at it, winning second prize at one ball for both the old waltz and the new craze.
As this passion continued into 1914, one Argentinean observed that for Europeans the tango was “no more than a vaguely sinful exotic dance, and they dance it because of its sensual perverse elements and because it is somewhat barbaric.” Because of its popularity, the
tango was a high point of the Gallias’ ball. While the three officers present, including Lieutenant Balberitz, had to sit it out because Franz Joseph had prohibited his soldiers from dancing it in uniform, Gretl did the tango in the family’s Hoffmann salon hung with their Klimt landscape.
Other families entertained even more lavishly than the Gallias, whether because they were richer or because they were readier to spend. Just as the city’s public balls culminated with the Opera Ball at the Hofoper, so the seasons of private balls attended by Gretl grew ever more extravagant. She thought a ball staged by the family of her best friend Lili Pollak in mid-February 1914 could not be surpassed. Gretl recorded that when she made her entrance—characteristically late at nine-thirty—everyone was talking and she had outstanding conversations. A supper followed at which the guests chose where they sat, to Gretl’s delight, providing her with even better company. Then, at last, the dancing began to music from Blum and continued for hours, stopping only for a raffle of rococo puppets. Gretl remained on the floor until she was exhausted. It was “outstandingly beautiful,” she observed after arriving home at four, “the most beautiful ball for the season.”
Her last ball that season was better again—“like a dream,” she wrote, “the Ball of Balls.” When she again arrived at nine-thirty, she was the ninety-second guest to check her coat. When she left at two-thirty, because her uncle Adolf and aunt Ida had come to collect her, the ball was still in full swing. In between, Blum played with a quartet, and an actress from the Hofburgtheater and an actor from the Volkstheater performed. The supper, served on tables strewn with red roses, was “as for grown-ups,” the seventeen-year-old Gretl observed delightedly, prompting her to record all its treats. Caviar was followed by bouillon, guinea fowl salad, chestnut-and-pineapple compote, goose liver bread rolls, and gelato served in the shape of roses and fruits, accompanied by sherry, red and white wines, and champagne. She was particularly gratified that the hostess, Frau Kern, declared her the most attractive, smartest dancer.
Had the men at these balls paid her such compliments, Gretl would have recorded them, too. But just as she expressed no particular interest in any of them, regardless of how long they danced and talked together, so these men seem not to have been particularly interested in her. The one exception was at a dinner in March 1914, after the season ended, when, Gretl wrote, she was courted in “a very amusing manner” by the only “von” who was present. She was particularly pleased because it made one of the other young women “jealous as a Turk.”
Meanwhile, her cousin Friedl, the youngest daughter of Wilhelm Gallia, made the kind of marriage that Moriz and Hermine wanted for Gretl. Friedl’s husband, Richard, was both a “von” and a Hofmannsthal, a cousin of the great Austrian poet, playwright, and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Richard was also a convert to Christianity and the director of a Danish petrol refinery. Yet Gretl was unimpressed when she met him at a New Year’s Eve party at Adolf and Ida’s apartment. After von Hofmannsthal dominated the occasion by singing in the “most horrible” fashion, Gretl declared him “disgusting.” She was delighted when he stopped, and Käthe and she made a much better start to the New Year by dancing a tango.
3
Love
The summer of 1914 started like any other for Gretl. She left Vienna in mid-June with the rest of the family for their holiday in Alt Aussee. At the Villa Gallia, they saw friends, read, went for walks, played tennis, and went on excursions in the family car. As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was being driven through Sarajevo on June 28 in his Gräf & Stift, first narrowly avoiding being killed by a grenade that destroyed the car behind, then being shot and killed as he went to visit those injured in the grenade attack, I imagine the Gallias’ chauffeur driving them around Alt Aussee in their Gräf & Stift.
The assassination did not immediately affect the family. While Hermine and the Gallia children stayed in Alt Aussee as usual, Moriz divided his time between the country and the city. Once the Austrian government declared war against Serbia and mobilized its armed forces, including Erni, in late July, the family abandoned their holiday like thousands of other Austrians and hurried back to the city, where Gretl had not spent a summer since she was a baby. As she looked for things to do and ways to escape the heat, one of her aunt Ida’s friends, Mrs. Stern, invited Gretl to her villa at Neuwaldegg on the edge of the Vienna Woods. Before long Gretl was there again at the invitation of Mrs. Stern’s son, Norbert, to play tennis. In mid-October Hermine reciprocated by inviting Norbert and his mother to the Wohllebengasse for afternoon tea.
The following day Gretl took out her diary for the first time in four months. “A scandal!” Gretl observed. “Nothing of the five weeks in Aussee, nothing of my birthday, nothing of our sudden departure from Aussee and our arrival in Vienna immediately after the mobilization, nothing about how we remained in Vienna all of August, only Papa returned to the villa to put it in order and Erni returned in mid-September with appendicitis.” Nothing, she might have added, about where Erni returned from—how since July he had taken part in Austria’s rapid advance east into Russian Poland, then its even quicker retreat west, which saw Austria suffer shocking casualties and abandon most of its granary in Galicia.
As Gretl wrote, Moriz, Hermine, and Erni were on their way to the Sanitorium Loew so Erni could have his appendix removed. “I am now home alone,” Gretl recorded, disregarding the family’s servants, “and fear so much for Erni.” Yet it was not Erni but Norbert Stern, a qualified engineer eager to establish himself as an architect, who spurred Gretl to resume her diary. “He is extraordinarily engaging, surely the nicest human being (male) that I have met,” she began. “Already twenty-eight and three-quarters years old and not at all conceited!” she continued, suggesting that the eighteen-year-old Gretl was used to men his age patronizing her and did not like it.
As she recorded her ever more frequent encounters with Norbert in greater detail, Gretl created an almost daily chronicle of their relationship—a remarkable account of young love and courtship in early twentieth-century Vienna. She also revealed the Gallias’ hopes, fears, and values when they had only just moved to Good Living Street, though the onset of war meant they were no longer living as they had planned. As Gretl recorded their conduct, conversations, and conflicts, she left a rare description of how one of the main patron families of Viennese modernism lived in their new Hoffmann rooms.
Gretl saw Norbert twice that November. Her aunt Ida began by taking her to a lecture about Egypt so that Gretl and Norbert could sit next to each other. Then Moriz, Hermine, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene went with Norbert and Mrs. Stern to the Vienna Woods, one of the city’s most popular excursion grounds. “I have never enjoyed an outing so much,” Gretl recorded. “He is truly an unusually nice, good-natured human being—and so upright!!”
His Catholicism was one attraction, though Gretl’s religious observance was not strong. While she started her second diary in 1913 “Mit Gott!” or “With God!” and did the same when she started her first recipe book in 1914, that was simply a matter of convention. She recorded only one instance of churchgoing in 1914 and just one more in 1915 when Käthe and Lene were belatedly confirmed at the age of sixteen. Still, Gretl was delighted to discover that Norbert had converted from Judaism a few years before. Their common origins and shared religion were, she observed, “another starting point for conversation!”
Gretl was just as impressed when Ida brought them together again three weeks later for supper at her apartment. Gretl wrote, “It was beautiful, such good conversations, he is such a nice person.” After he went home, he telephoned her for the first time to ask her to call him Norbert rather than Herr Stern. “I wonder,” she wrote, “if I shall do that?!”
Had there been no war, she would soon have been dancing through her third season, but in keeping with a government edict banning public balls, there were no private ones. Gretl was oblivious because of Norbert. As they began exchanging presents, he gave her three anemones, which
she pressed into her diary, and one of his own engravings. She reciprocated with a portfolio in which to keep his work. But for his twenty-ninth birthday she sent only a letter. They also gave each other nothing for Christmas, though they saw each other immediately beforehand, when Moriz and Hermine invited Norbert to dinner for the first time, and immediately after, when Gretl invited him for afternoon tea on Saint Stephen’s Day.
Gretl was in the kitchen five days later, preparing for New Year’s Eve, when a parcel arrived with a bouquet of snowdrops attached to it. “Addressed to me?” she wrote. “Odd.” Then she recognized Norbert’s handwriting on the envelope, which contained a note suggesting Gretl, Käthe, and Lene share the two pounds of assorted chocolates in the parcel but instructed Gretl to keep the flowers. “I am so delighted!” she recorded. “This is the first time I have received flowers and sweets from a man!!!”
Moriz and Hermine were accustomed to ringing in the New Year in style with Adolf and Ida, but because they were at their villa in Baden, Moriz and Hermine stayed at home with Gretl, Käthe, and Lene. After toasting the New Year at nine o’clock, they engaged in the New Year’s ritual of Bleigiessen, dropping pieces of molten lead into cold water to predict the future by interpreting the shapes that resulted. By eleven o’clock Gretl was in bed, tired from drinking wine and punch. But she lay awake thinking of Norbert, not only because of his gift that morning but also because when she played Bleigiessen she saw a “Stern,” or star. “Was that coincidence?!” she wondered.
