by Tim Bonyhady
A fortnight later an anonymous telephone caller asked whether she could congratulate Gretl on her engagement, then hung up before Gretl could reply. Then the caller rang back to say that rumor had it that Gretl and Norbert were engaged even though he was unable to support a family. This time Gretl responded that it was impertinent to repeat such baseless stories, then she herself hung up. While she could not identify the caller, she suspected one of the young women whom she sometimes invited to the Wohllebengasse. She thought it had to be one of her guests from Saint Stephen’s Day, as only they had seen her with Norbert.
Gretl was young to be engaged at eighteen but not especially so. Her aunt Henny married when she was nineteen, her cousin Melanie when she was twenty, her cousin Friedl when she was twenty-one, Hermine when she was twenty-two. Norbert was the right age to marry at twenty-nine. It was only when men turned twenty-five that they reached the age of majority and were likely to have the means to support a wife and children, though Norbert could not do so on his salary of 3,000 crowns, or about $24,000 in today’s money. In the parlance of the day, he was “keine gute Partie,” not a good catch, as the traditional bourgeois emphasis on economics as the basis for marriage remained strong in Vienna, despite the rise of romantic love.
Moriz and Hermine did not appear to care as they joined with Adolf, Ida, and Mrs. Stern in chaperoning Norbert and Gretl on one excursion after another. Their usual destination was the Vienna Woods, where they went by tram or train but never by car, as the Austrian military found itself desperately short of vehicles almost as soon as the war started, prompting Moriz to give his Gräf & Stift to the army. While they usually went walking, they once skied and once inspected a villa and duplex designed by Norbert in the village of Pötzleinsdorf, which led Gretl to admire him as “not only a rare, dear, good human being but also a very skilled architect.”
Hermine tried to constrain Gretl just once, when Norbert and she were to accompany Adolf and Ida to Baden. Because one of Hermine’s servants was on holiday, she asked Gretl to stay home so she could help Hermine dust the front rooms of the apartment. The result, according to Gretl, was a “hard battle,” which saw her escape the dusting and go to Baden. While she knew Hermine would protest that she had been forced to clean until midnight and Moriz would admonish her for attending too many balls in one year and going on too many excursions the next, Gretl was triumphant. She wrote: “For a few days, they will berate me and whatever I do will be bad but no one can deprive me of the memory of such a beautiful outing.”
These occasions fueled Gretl’s excitement. She was astounded that such a wise, educated, intelligent man could enjoy talking to someone so young and stupid. She preferred Norbert’s simplicity and honesty to the flattery of a “Salonmensch” adept in the ways of fashionable society. She believed Norbert when he told her that she was his “dear one,” despite her father’s always telling her that men would want to marry her for his money. Her goal was to have Norbert to herself as much as possible so they could talk uninterrupted.
She was delighted to be alone with Norbert when Mrs. Stern and he were among the guests at a dinner party at the Wohllebengasse that March. While Gretl liked to think she was adroit at creating these opportunities without anyone noticing, she owed this one to Ida. Norbert and Gretl were in the smoking room when their conversation turned to the anonymous phone calls she had received at the start of the year and Norbert asked whether she would mind if the rumors proved true. When Gretl blushed and said no, Norbert declared she must have realized that he loved her and asked whether she liked him a little and might be willing to give it a go with him. She said yes, and thus they were secretly engaged.
Norbert’s only concerns were that the times were so ominous—war and love might not go together—and that she had been spoiled by the lavish environment of the Wohllebengasse and would struggle to adjust to a much more modest married life. When he called the next morning, he addressed her as “Du” rather than “Sie,” a mark of their new intimacy. He also reported that he had told his mother and they had her blessing. They agreed to talk about everything in more detail that Sunday, just two days later, when they were supposed to go on an excursion. Then Norbert would ask Moriz and Hermine for permission to marry her.
Gretl expected her parents to put up more opposition than Mrs. Stern. They would declare her too young, stupid, and impractical. They would say that Norbert did not have a secure job and could not support her in the manner to which she was accustomed. She would respond that she loved Norbert so much that she was ready to curb her expenditure. She would tell them that he was such a “gentleman”—one of many English words that she continued to use in her diary, despite a wartime prohibition on the use of English in public—that he had never asked about the Gallias’ wealth, leading her to think him oblivious to it.
Sunday was too far away for Gretl. After talking to Nobert on Friday morning, she could not contain herself. Before the day was out, she “confessed everything” to Moriz and Hermine, who seem not to have objected. Yet Gretl almost despaired on Sunday when the weather was so bad that an excursion was unthinkable and Norbert did not call. When he rang on Monday evening, she told him to come to the Wohllebengasse as soon as possible. When he rang the following morning to ask whether he could come that afternoon, she said the sooner the better.
Gretl received Norbert in her mother’s boudoir, which was dominated by the Klimt portrait of Hermine and the Andri portrait of Moriz and filled with the Hoffmann white-and-gold furniture. Had Gretl and Norbert thought it appropriate, they could have sat together on the Hoffmann sofa or the suite of Hoffmann armchairs. Instead, they sat apart, opposite each other, in an inglenook created by Hoffmann in which the two built-in seats were separated by an occasional table and false fireplace. There Gretl and Norbert had the kind of formal discussion that she considered proper, confirming they would marry. Then, for the first time, they kissed. “Norbert gave me the engagement kisses,” Gretl wrote, “and overcome with happiness, everything went black before me.”
Moriz and Hermine were in the smoking room with the twins, who realized what was afoot as soon as Norbert and Gretl emerged. Norbert’s mother, whom Gretl observed was now also her mother, transformed from Mrs. Stern into Mama Luis, was by the telephone in her apartment waiting to hear their news. “Everybody saw it coming,” Gretl observed, “but never thought it would happen so fast.” Norbert and she had seen each other fifteen times in the five months since he first visited the Wohllebengasse.
Not everybody had seen it coming, however, as became clear when Gretl told Adolf and Ida. Although Ida had facilitated Norbert’s courtship of Gretl and was an old friend of Mrs. Stern’s, she was shocked. “Say that again!” Ida exclaimed. “You must be mad!!” But Gretl was too happy to worry or to take offense. She wrote of her engagement: “It happened so quickly and I am overjoyed. Today for the first time I slept.” As she was washing her face the following day, a large bouquet of white lilacs arrived from Norbert with the message: “Good morning!”
Eighteen-year-old Gretl gave a copy of this photograph to Norbert Stern when they became engaged, March 1915. (Illustration Credits ill.30)
Norbert was immediately making plans. He suggested they should be married that August. He wanted to honeymoon in Switzerland, which had maintained its traditional neutrality at the start of the war, and Italy, which had dishonored its Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria in August 1914 by declaring its neutrality. They should start in St. Moritz, the most famous alpine resort, then head south to Lake Como and Venice. Meanwhile, they exchanged rings and photographs. That of Gretl shows her in clothes exceptionally plain. She appears sweet, eager, and hopeful. She does not look her age. She seems too young to marry.
4
War
Most Austrians welcomed the war as they wanted to avenge the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. But Jews and recent converts to Christianity were particularly enthusiastic because they saw the war as an opportunity to counte
r the heightened anti-Semitism of the late 1890s and early 1900s. They wanted to show that they were exemplary citizens, displaying their gratitude to Emperor Franz Joseph for introducing the laws that allowed them to move to Vienna and succeed there. When the imperial government counted the Jews in its forces in 1916, in response to accusations that Jews were evading military service, it found a disproportionately high number in its army.
Like women around the world, Gretl was soon contributing to the war effort by knitting—not only when she was by herself at home but also when she went out. Her first knitting afternoon was at the apartment of family friends in November 1914. The next was a fortnight later, when Hermine and she first visited the Sterns’ apartment in the Second District. After that Gretl wrote only once about knitting. Most likely, she refrained from mentioning it because these afternoons had become too commonplace to mention, rather than because they had stopped.
Like other countries, Austria funded its military primarily through special war bonds scheduled for repayment a decade later. The response to these bonds was so great that the government supported its army without significantly raising taxes. In all, two-thirds of Austrian households subscribed, whether out of patriotism, the lure of unusually high interest rates, or public pressure. Moriz did not acquire any of the first series issued in the autumn of 1914, but then spent heavily on the second, third, and fourth series, investing 510,000 crowns, the equivalent of about $4 million.
The government raised more money by encouraging women to donate their jewelry. The most conspicuous, common response was for married women to give their gold wedding rings in return for iron bands provided by the government inscribed “Gold gab ich für Eisen 1914”—“I gave gold for iron 1914”—which publicly testified to their patriotism in relinquishing one of their most personal possessions for a standard issue. Hermine retained her wedding ring, a simple gold band engraved on the inside with her wedding date, but donated a much more valuable piece, the spectacular gold brooch with two solitaire diamonds that she had worn when Klimt painted her.
Moriz and Hermine also demonstrated their patriotism through the Wiener Werkstätte, which was soon doing what it could to promote the war effort—designing posters promoting war bonds, selling these bonds in its stores, and putting war imagery onto its wares. Hermine bought one of the Werkstätte’s first pieces of war jewelry—a square enameled brooch produced in August 1914 that included the flags not only of Austria and its German and Turkish allies but also of Italy, in recognition of the still just extant Triple Alliance. She also acquired several of the Werkstätte’s main war products, its war glasses, which were adorned with the figures of soldiers and the national colors of Austria and Germany.
Erni ordinarily would have entered the civilian workforce in one of Moriz’s companies late in 1914 and become a member of Austria’s military reserve after completing his year’s training as an officer trainee, but the war kept him in the army as a full-time soldier. After recuperating from his appendix operation at the Sanitorium Loew, he left Vienna before the new year to join his artillery unit at Bärn in northern Moravia, where Moriz and Hermine visited him regularly before he telegrammed in May 1915 that he was about to return to the front, prompting them to rush to Bärn so they could see him before he saw action again.
Norbert was in a different position because he suffered from severe astigmatism, prompting his exemption from compulsory military service when he finished school and further exemption following Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. But as Austria’s peacetime army was decimated in the first months of the war, it became desperate for more men. By one account, “Only the physically handicapped, civil servants, priests, farmers, and war-industries producers escaped service.” Norbert’s eyesight was so bad that the military rejected him again in November 1914. “It is really wonderful,” Gretl wrote, “that my dearest and kindest friend remains in Vienna!!”
One of the Gallias’ war glasses made by the Wiener Werkstätte. (Illustration Credits ill.31)
Other Viennese diarists wrote almost exclusively about the war during these months, filling their entries with observations on Austria’s campaigns. Gretl ignored the war for weeks on end because she was preoccupied with Norbert and because her diary was always more personal than political. The war was also slow to affect Vienna’s wealthiest citizens, as revealed by the frequency with which Gretl continued to eat in style at the city’s most expensive hotels while the first food shortages occurred and the government instructed the city’s bakers to use rye, barley, corn, and potato meal instead of wheat flour. But Austria’s military campaign in the southeast was such a disaster that Gretl wrote about it. She was distressed to learn that after the Hapsburg troops announced they were laying Belgrade at Franz Joseph’s feet, having finally taken the Serbian capital on their third attempt, they proved so overstretched, ill equipped, and outnumbered that the Serbs immediately retook Belgrade, inflicting huge losses on the Austrians. Gretl was all the more upset that this humiliation occurred on Emperor’s Day, which marked the anniversary of Franz Joseph’s ascendancy to the throne sixty-six years before. She wrote: “God grant that the war soon have an end.”
The course of the war in the northeast also engaged her. When the Austrian army retreated westward before the much larger Tsarist army in 1914, the one town that the Austrians retained was Przemy´sl, the site of their biggest fortress, which they protected with 30 miles of new trenches, 650 miles of extra barbed wire, and two hundred batteries. The Austrians rightly thought it capable of withstanding any attack; an extended siege was a different matter. Three days after Gretl and Norbert became engaged, the Austrian commander began butchering his horses, firing almost all his remaining artillery shells, blowing up his big guns, and destroying most of his defenses so the Russians would capture as little as possible. When he surrendered along with 120,000 officers and men in March 1915, Franz Joseph was reduced to tears. Gretl observed, “This unfortunate war is the one thing that disturbs our happiness.”
Gretl was even less interested in a counterattack by the Austrians and Germans two months later, which saw the combined force break through the Russian lines and begin pressing east, rapidly taking thirty thousand prisoners. Gretl wrote about this victory only because when Hermine decided to celebrate it, she had such trouble raising the Hapsburg flag over the family’s apartment that she left Norbert and Gretl alone for a wonderful half hour. Gretl was much more concerned by the actions of Italy, which was looking to gain territory from the war. When Austria refused to agree to a dismemberment of its empire, which would have secured Italy’s continued neutrality, everyone knew Italy would declare war, forcing Austria to fight on a third front to the southwest, requiring even more soldiers. “God give me the great good luck that they do not call up my dear one!” Gretl exclaimed on May 17. Then struck by her unprecedented reliance on God, she added: “One grows so pious now! What don’t I pray for every evening!” She still continued, “God grant all my wishes be fulfilled! Let us stay at peace with Italy.”
Gretl was even more fearful two days later because Norbert had decided to volunteer. “I could accept a separation but not the possibility that they would send him to the front,” she wrote. “If he is sent there, God help me.” When the Italian parliament met to vote in favor of war on May 20, the Gallias and Sterns waited at the Wohllebengasse for a special edition of the newspaper reporting Italy’s decision to fight its former partners in the Triple Alliance. Like most Austrians, Gretl’s sense of betrayal was intense. Austria’s chief of staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, likened Italy to a snake. Gretl railed: “The Italian swine have declared war on us.”
Karl Kraus wrote as if Austrians with good connections could easily avoid military service. In The Last Days of Mankind he included an exchange between two draft dodgers who both “went up and got it fixed, of course,” escaping the army altogether. More often these men were taken by the military but received special treatment. So Egon Schiele’s patrons secured him a p
osition in the Department of Supply that allowed the artist to continue painting and organizing exhibitions. The writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal was even more privileged. After a stint at a desk job far from the front, Hofmannsthal returned to civilian life through the joint intervention of the principal adviser to Austria’s foreign secretary, one of Austria’s regional governors, and two leading Austrian politicians.
Moriz hoped to use his status as a Regierungsrat and industrialist to protect Norbert, just as he had used it to maintain Erni’s position as an officer cadet a year before. When Norbert went to the Ministry of War to report sick the day after Italy declared war, Moriz accompanied him, but the ministry advised them to wait and see what happened when the army recalled Norbert for another examination. As they waited, Gretl developed her own version of the Lord’s Prayer, which concluded: “Give us peace and victory and us two especially luck and happiness and ensure that, when they call up Norbert, they either reject him or employ him as an engineer away from the front, Amen.”
The army decided to take Norbert in early June as flags flew across Vienna to celebrate the retaking of the fortress of Przemy´sl. When Norbert heard he had to start training immediately and would be in an infantry division at the front within four months, Gretl drew on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Vienna’s Hofburgtheater persisted in staging by interpreting an imperial ban on the performance of all British works as applying only to living authors. As Gretl contemplated the prospect of Norbert’s being killed at the front, she despaired and, in her misery, imagined herself as “a second Ophelia,” ready to die without crying. Moriz revived her hopes. After he again went to the ministry to contest the army’s decision, Gretl’s admiration reached new bounds. “Everything has not been lost,” she exclaimed. “Papa is an angel and a genius!”
