Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  Gretl was even happier a week later because the army postponed Norbert’s call-up until mid-July. When a dove flew into her room and dropped a feather, she took it as an omen that Norbert might yet escape the front. But Norbert knew he would have to serve. When he left his job in Vienna at the end of June 1915, he expected to be in Italy soon, while his workmates looked forward to postcards from him recording Austria’s conquest of Milan. “Heil und Sieg!” one farewelled him. “Hail and Victory!”

  One of the most virulent, popular pieces of propaganda in Germany and Austria at the start of the war was the Hassgesang gegen England, or Song of Hatred Against England by the poet Ernst Lissauer. When Italy declared war on Austria, the Viennese writers Arthur Löwenstein and Grete von Urbanitzky tried in vain to emulate Lissauer’s success with a Song of Hatred Against Italy, set to music by the composer Attilio Bleibtreu. When the Gallias went as usual to spend the summer in Alt Aussee and Norbert visited them for a week at the start of July, he gave Gretl the new Song of Hatred to play for him on the family’s baby grand in the Villa Gallia.

  Gretl gave Norbert several presents after they were engaged. One was a traveling alarm clock with an illuminated radium face. Another was an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen that Gretl selected both because it was a beautiful production and because of her own taste for fairy tales. A third came from the Wiener Werkstätte, where the Gallias shopped more than ever after Moriz became one of its directors. When Gretl and Norbert celebrated Easter together, she gave him a black WW briefcase—a lavish gift when one of the Werkstätte’s handkerchiefs cost more than the weekly wage of a trained dressmaker.

  Norbert gave Gretl many more presents in keeping with convention, though he could rarely afford to make them as luxurious. He not only brought her something almost every time they saw each other but also sometimes sent her gifts in between. On the whole, he gave her flowers—violets, lilies, snowdrops, white, pink and red carnations, red tulips, dark red rhododendrons, long, dark red roses. But occasionally he gave her jewelry, knickknacks, books, and music. She was delighted one Tuesday when, instead of the flowers she expected, he had her sent a selection of handbags so she might choose her favorite. Whatever she received, Gretl was thrilled by these marks of his devotion.

  Gretl found being alone with him “beyond words,” “beautiful,” even “godlike”—but they required permission to retire together and had to be careful not to absent themselves for too long or they would be reprimanded for exceeding the bounds of propriety. Their most frequent opportunities occurred at the Wohllebengasse, where Norbert visited much more often than Gretl went to Mrs. Stern’s apartment. Gretl was so grateful for one of these occasions that she exclaimed, “Mother is an angel.” She was thrilled another night when Hermine allowed Norbert and her to retire twice. They also had some time alone when they visited Gretl’s aunt Ida, who celebrated their engagement with an afternoon tea that, Gretl wrote, was even grander than the one staged by Hermine at the Wohllebengasse. Gretl was especially touched that Ida’s tea was the first at which she used her newly acquired service of Flora Danica, a mark of how Ida and Adolf’s patterns of consumption remained unaffected by the first months of the war. Yet the highlight of this tea for Gretl was that Ida unexpectedly allowed Norbert and her to retire briefly together.

  Their first outing by themselves was a month after they were engaged, when Norbert met Gretl at the apartment of her grandparents, Nathan and Josefine Hamburger, who had just moved from Freudenthal to the fashionable outer Viennese suburb of Hietzing. Because Norbert was on his way to a lecture, he had only an hour. By the time he had engaged in the usual formalities of greeting and saying good-bye to her grandparents, Gretl and he had little more than half that. They used it to see the newly completed villa that Hoffmann had designed for the landowner and industrialist Robert Primavesi and his companion, Josephine Skywa. If Norbert and Gretl had to justify this outing, they probably explained that Hoffmann was the Gallia family’s architect and Norbert had a professional interest in his work. But Gretl did not mention Hoffmann in her diary. Instead, what excited her was that Norbert and she were “alone together for the first time on the street.”

  Their only other outings alone lasted just a couple of hours. The first was in a Fiaker, the traditional Viennese two-horse cab, to make brief calls on several members of the extended Gallia family. The second was to the grave of Norbert’s father on Whitsunday, the Christian festival commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost. Gretl recorded: “For the first time we went on our own to the grave of Papa Stern and brought him flowers. My darling must have been very devoted to his late father. I was also very affected by visiting his grave and prayed there with all my heart.”

  Otherwise Norbert and Gretl were always chaperoned and at most had a few minutes alone. The excursion that gave Gretl greatest pleasure was with Norbert’s mother to the baroque monastery of Melk on Ascension Thursday, a public holiday. The celebrated way of making this journey was to take the train from Vienna to Melk and return by steamer along the River Danube. Gretl, who had never made this voyage, described it as the most beautiful Ascension Day she had experienced. Norbert and she were “blissfully happy.” And her delight grew when they returned to the Wohllebengasse and Mrs. Stern waited downstairs in their taxi while Norbert took her inside, so they “could at least have a quick kiss on the stairs,” which she declared “better than nothing!”

  As a newly engaged couple, Gretl and Norbert were also expected to attend a host of special teas at the homes of relations and friends. Yet six weeks passed before one of these functions left her neither embarrassed nor distraught. She was horrified by all the advice she received about how to be a married woman. She was even more upset when Norbert and she had no time by themselves. Her refrain was that she did not benefit from Norbert’s presence because they were always with others. Gretl thought it an eternity to wait a week for the chance to be alone. Sometimes she had to wait a fortnight. Far from relishing her status as an engaged woman, it frustrated her.

  Her family caused her more grief. One “explosion,” as Gretl described it, climaxed with Hermine exclaiming in English: “When you’re married, I will surely have as much trouble from you as I usually had.” If Norbert knew how she sometimes behaved, Hermine continued in German, he “would leave her at the altar.” Another of Hermine’s outbursts saw her accuse Norbert in his absence of having no manners: he left the apartment without saying good-bye to Hermine’s mother. Yet another occurred after Moriz and Hermine invited Norbert to Wagner’s Parsifal at the Hofoper; he left before the second act and was indiscreet enough to tell Käthe that he had never wanted to go in the first place. Gretl began by being appalled at her family’s tactlessness in denigrating her fiancé in front of her. She soon feared that they were set on making her quarrel with him. If that was their aim, they succeeded one evening in late April when Gretl felt that Norbert paid more attention to the family’s dog than to her. When Gretl started to cry, she thought her parents and sisters were delighted.

  Norbert and Gretl began expressing their disappointment in each other a few days later with the “best understanding.” He was surprised to find her so sensitive; she was surprised to find him such a dunderhead. While Norbert apologized the following day and declared his criticisms unjust, only a few days later he was labeling her a coquette and a spendthrift, and Gretl was accusing him of being inattentive and parsimonious. Her ideal was her father, she confided to her diary. “Someone like Papa exists just once in the world,” she wrote. “I pray every evening that Norbert might become as much like him as possible.”

  His family’s dog soon also had them arguing. While Norbert wanted it to live with them when they married, she did not. “I made my first request of him and he did not immediately agree!” she recorded. Norbert’s failure to comply was “the bitterest disappointment” of her life. Rather than keep this quarrel to themselves, Norbert immediately informed his mother, who announced she would keep the
dog, but Gretl was not placated. A thorn remained, a thorn that stung, she wrote, adopting the language of fairy tales. That night, Hermine told Gretl that Moriz and she, but especially Moriz, feared Norbert was the wrong man for her.

  By then Gretl was full of remorse, aware that she had responded disproportionately and sure that she was largely to blame for their quarrels. When Hermine asked whether she was certain she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Norbert, Gretl did not hesitate. “Despite everything, I immediately answered yes with complete conviction,” she recorded. “I expect other people to be more considerate to me than I am to them,” she observed the following morning in one of those flashes of self-knowledge that punctuated her diary. If Norbert’s dog was so important to him, Gretl would let him have his way, albeit grudgingly. Her sacrifice would be “very great,” she maintained, “far greater than anyone, especially Norbert, recognized.”

  Again they made up, though Gretl lacked the words to convey how sorry she was. Norbert and she promised each other to treat their quarrel as a bad dream. He brought her a particularly gorgeous bunch of long-stemmed red roses. That night she reflected at unusual length about the kind of marriage she wanted: “I do not want the type of husband who accedes to all his wife’s wishes,” she declared, as if such men were easily found in Vienna in 1915. “I need to respect and look up to my husband as I can with Norbert,” she continued, prepared to accept his superiority. “I do not want to be a decorative doll,” she went on, probably with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in mind. Her goal—influenced both by her parents’ marriage and by contemporary feminism—was equality. Gretl hoped Norbert and she might be “true comrades for life.”

  Gretl began to think that her engagement might be a mistake when she began arguing with Moriz, which particularly disturbed her because they had always been so close. Because she sensed Moriz’s opposition to her engagement was the cause, she asked him what he thought. While Moriz avoided declaring himself against Norbert, he acknowledged that he was not for Norbert either. Economics was the key. Moriz would have preferred Gretl’s husband to be able to keep a wife and family. He warned that Norbert would watch his money more than she liked. “Now I am full of doubt and regret,” she concluded, “having been so happy until now.”

  A question of etiquette caused more conflict. When Hermine turned forty-five that June, Norbert sent a four-pound box of chocolates with a card that read, “With all good wishes Architect Norbert Stern.” Hermine had no complaints about the chocolates, but she was “enraged,” Gretl recorded, not only by the “strange and impersonal” wording of the card but also because it had been written by a shop assistant rather than Norbert himself. When Norbert arrived later in the day, bringing a large bunch of flowers for Gretl as usual, oblivious to the outrage he had provoked, she had the “frightful task” of reprimanding him on behalf of Hermine, who was visiting her parents in Hietzing.

  This situation was compounded because Gretl, for the first time, felt that Hermine had “good reasons” to be incensed. Norbert refused to concede he had erred, accusing Hermine and Gretl of being ridiculously sensitive and challenging their conception of good manners. He also questioned Gretl’s love for him, which was too much for her. As she later described it, she could not contain herself. “Ich bin ich”—“I am I”—she wrote, “and was terribly angry.” Although Norbert begged her forgiveness and telephoned Hermine to apologize to her, Gretl identified their exchange as something she would not forget. “The sting remains,” she declared. “A hidden wound hurts most of all.”

  Her parents confronted Gretl a few days later. When Hermine warned Gretl that nothing good would come from her, Gretl was unmoved. “As if I had not long known that!!!” she observed sardonically. The same was true when Hermine exclaimed, “That such a person should marry! When her behavior was so immature!” But then Hermine advanced into new territory by dwelling on her financial sacrifices in letting Gretl buy on credit on her accounts. She stung Gretl for being overweight and having a stupid face. Above all, Moriz spoke as if his agreement to Gretl’s marriage had always been reluctant, predicting that he would live to regret having “given in and let her have her way.”

  5

  Hoffmann

  Many Viennese families chose to live close to each other at the turn of the century, often occupying apartments in the same building. The Gallias and Hamburgers followed this pattern. When Hermine’s brothers Otto and Guido moved to Vienna, they lived in the Schleifmühlgasse. When Moriz and Hermine erected their building in the Wohllebengasse, they expected that as Erni, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene married, each of the children would occupy a floor so the entire family would always be under the one roof. But Mrs. Stern upset this plan because she had similar ambitions for her house in Vienna’s Second District, or Leopoldstadt. When she offered Norbert and Gretl the upper floor of her two-story building on the Untere Augartenstrasse, they accepted, though Gretl was yet to see this apartment.

  The location was an issue. The Second District was the site of Vienna’s seventeenth-century ghetto and, as the city’s Jewish population swelled in the late nineteenth century, again became its most Jewish district and a ghetto in the popular imagination. While the families who lived on its main streets, such as the Untere Augartenstrasse, were generally prosperous, most of its residents were poor. In 1880 almost half of the city’s Jews lived there. In 1910 more than one-third did. Moriz and Hermine would have been against any of their family living there even before they converted, let alone afterward. They did not want Gretl’s new home to be where a high proportion of stores closed for the Sabbath, Yiddish was widely spoken, and many men and women dressed in accordance with Jewish tradition.

  The apartment’s design created more trouble. Just as when Melanie Gallia married Jakob Langer in 1902 and Guido Hamburger married Nelly Bunzl in 1907, the convention was that wealthy couples occupied architect-designed apartments with custom-made furniture. Moriz and Hermine expected Gretl and Norbert to do the same. Because Hoffmann remained their favorite architect, they probably looked forward to his designing all their children’s homes. If the children stayed in the Wohllebengasse, their house could become the site of not just one Hoffmann apartment but an unprecedented quintuple stack.

  Norbert’s expectations were very different. As an aspiring architect, he wanted to design his own home and, within two days of his engagement, was planning it. Before long, Gretl and he were doing so together, to her delight. “My love for him is beyond words,” she wrote after their first design session, when she still had not seen the apartment. “I love my dear one more and more from day to day,” Gretl wrote after another session, when she had seen it. They soon had planned three rooms, incorporating furniture owned by Norbert’s grandmother to reduce the cost, but Moriz and Hermine were contemptuous. “I am terribly hurt,” Gretl wrote in late April. “The parents have absolutely no hope for the apartment.”

  Ten days later Moriz and Hermine staged a dinner attended by Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt and two of their biggest patrons, the Moravian banker Otto Primavesi and his wife, Eugenia. While the Primavesis employed Franz von Krauss to design their villa in Olmütz, Hoffmann furnished two of its rooms, redesigned the ground floor of their local bank, and designed their country villa in Winkelsdorf. The Primavesis also acquired five paintings by Klimt, including portraits of Eugenia and their daughter Mäda. They invested 100,000 crowns (now about $750,000) in the Wiener Werkstätte when it became a private company and soon replaced Fritz Waerndorfer as its principal underwriters.

  The invitation from Moriz and Hermine allowed the Primavesis to see something like what they had in Olmütz—a Krauss building containing Hoffmann rooms hung with Klimt paintings and filled with Wiener Werkstätte objects. Yet for all this similarity, when the Primavesis inspected the apartment in the Wohllebengasse, they identified just one familiar object, a small leather basket with a handle intended for house and pantry keys. Otto had commissioned the first of these baskets from Hoffmann fo
r Eugenia, whose monogram Hoffmann had placed on the handle. Hermine had a later version with no monogram.

  Gretl was distracted for much of the evening because Norbert and she had quarreled, but her excitement at the family’s guests that night was still manifest when she listed them with an exclamation mark. While Hermine and Moriz had entertained Klimt and Hoffmann before, this dinner was the first attended by Gretl as an adult. The way she described Klimt was revealing. As he did not have a title, Klimt’s admirers often gave him one. The Primavesis’ daughter Mäda referred to him as “Professor”—a position he aspired to but never secured. Gretl identified him as “Master”—a term of reverence for the greatest artists, writers, and musicians. She had no idea that, after Norbert and she retired, Moriz and Hermine offered Hoffmann a new commission. It was to design six rooms in Norbert and Gretl’s apartment—Hoffmann’s first commission in the Second District, which implicitly underlined how Gretl was defying the expectations of her class by moving there.

  Norbert and Gretl discovered what Moriz and Hermine had initiated when Norbert came to dinner three days later. Many sons-in-law-to-be would have been delighted to receive an apartment by Vienna’s most fashionable architect. Norbert took immediate offense because he had different taste, wanted to design the apartment himself, and Hoffmann’s commission would come out of Gretl’s dowry, which Norbert had been expecting would make up for his own lack of capital. The more Moriz talked, the more upset and quieter Norbert became. “No one leaves us alone even for a second,” Gretl lamented, after Norbert finally went home. “It was hideous.”

  This conflict resumed the following evening when Norbert again came to dinner, causing “disaster” for Norbert and Gretl. The twins also took such pleasure in picking on Norbert after he left that Gretl thought they “would only stop when they had torn him apart.” When Gretl started to cry, Moriz turned on her in a way that was utterly out of character, declaring her the most stupid person he had ever met.