Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  This visit to Prague changed Gretl’s sense of what it had been like to be a European Jew. The cemetery contained Jews who had died as “martyrs to their beliefs,” Gretl observed. “There must have been shocking persecutions of Jews in Prague.” Yet Gretl continued to display her ignorance of Jewish tradition. When she had first visited her grandparents’ grave in the Jewish cemetery in Bisenz with Moriz, they had laid wreaths, in keeping with the Catholic tradition of floral tributes. If Gretl had visited the grave of her uncle Wilhelm in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery, she would have known that, like many neighboring Jewish graves, it came with a flower box. She discovered that Jews generally did something different in Prague, prompting her to record, as something new to her, “Jews visiting graves leave pebbles as a form of tribute.”

  Her exchanges with “Engineer Stern,” as she reverted to calling Norbert, continued in Vienna when she sent him another parcel containing the rest of his gifts and he sent her three more filled with the rest of hers. Meanwhile, Moriz and Hermine ensured that Gretl went out more than ever to keep her busy and to show that she was not embarrassed by what had occurred. At her most frenetic she attended six performances in eight nights, including three of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. She also reestablished herself within her old circle in Vienna, despite initially expecting difficulties. “I know the Mandls, Klingers, von Engels, and company will cut me,” she wrote of some of the families whose balls she had attended after finishing school. But the only ones to do so were the von Engels, who were related to the Sterns.

  Gretl saw Norbert once more by chance in November 1915, when Moriz and Hermine took her to the Vienna Woods. As the Gallias walked through the park at Neuwaldegg, where Mrs. Stern had her villa, they encountered Norbert, who was wearing his new Austrian infantry uniform. While he had snubbed one of Gretl’s cousins a few weeks before when they encountered each other in Vienna, Norbert greeted Moriz, Hermine, and Gretl. Their perfunctory exchange gave Gretl even more confidence in her decision. Although it was just four months since they had last seen each other in Alt Aussee, Norbert appeared like a stranger to her. “I had to ask myself how I could have fallen in love with a man like him,” she wrote. “He has an angry face and I realize now that people must have talked behind my back about my lack of taste.”

  It was just one of many entries in which she focused on her good fortune in escaping Norbert and told herself that she was no longer concerned about their breakup. Her marriage, she wrote, would have lasted at most a few years. It could have seen her in the mental asylum, Steinhof, on the edge of the Vienna Woods. Friends and family similarly dwelled on Gretl’s prospects by suggesting millionaires she could marry. They emphasized Norbert’s idiosyncrasies by telling Gretl how he was the only man not to wear black at her aunt Henny’s funeral. Her father, Moriz, declared Gretl very lucky. Her brother, Erni, expressed his delight by getting drunk. The one exception was Käthe, who declared that Gretl shared Norbert’s character and temper and, by implication, was just as flawed. While this barb was typical of Käthe, Gretl was still shocked. “I would never have thought,” she observed, “my own sister could be so tactless.”

  6

  Death

  Austria was in crisis throughout 1918. Just as most of its troops were malnourished, so were a majority of its civilians. When the government announced at the start of the year that it was cutting the daily flour ration from seven ounces to five ounces, ten thousand workers at the Daimler armaments plant in the industrial town of Wiener Neustadt downed tools, triggering the one big Austrian working-class revolt of the war. Vienna was brought to a standstill as two hundred thousand workers, including many clerical staff and shop assistants, joined the protest. While Gretl usually ignored political events, she started her diary entry for January 17 with “Strike!”

  The food shortages prompted Hermine to acquire one of the first Austrian austerity cookbooks. Published by the magazine Wiener Mode, it had a fashionable silk cover embellished with stylized floral sprays, resembling a product of the Wiener Werkstätte, which gave no hint that Austria was at war. Its text dwelled on how to use less flour, rather than how to do without. While emphasizing the need to use more vegetables, it still expected its audience to be eating meat. The pencil markings in this book suggest the family’s cook used it regularly.

  Most Viennese suffered profoundly as staples such as butter and rice disappeared from legal trade, and ersatz products (such as meat containing pulverized bark of birch trees) proliferated. The city’s shops often could not even supply the meager rations of flour, meat, potatoes, jam, and fat to which all Viennese were entitled. While several suburbs experienced food riots, a man who had bought potatoes outside the city was kicked to death by several would-be purchasers enraged at having been turned away empty-handed. Yet as the novelist Thomas Mann observed in Germany, “It was thought an impeccable, respectable thing to break the law, live beyond one’s rations, and pay insanely for what had been acquired illicitly.” Erni, who took part in spectacular advances, terrible retreats, and protracted trench warfare on the eastern front before Moriz possibly intervened and he was deployed behind the lines training new recruits on account of poor eyesight, was the Gallias’ procurer when he was in Vienna. One day he secured fifteen pounds of veal and forty-eight pounds of potatoes, another day 250 eggs.

  The silver wedding anniversary of Moriz and Hermine in May 1918 reveals how little the Gallias were affected, at least when it came to major occasions. The celebratory lunch in the Wohllebengasse was five courses, a feast compared to what most Austrians were eating. The entrée was Einmachsuppe, a soup based on a roux of fat and flour with a piece of calf’s head as its main ingredient. One of Hermine’s favorite dishes, it was served with ordinary bread rolls as well as the long salt sticks known as Salzstangerln. Duck liver pâté in aspic followed and then roast fillet of beef with rice and bacon salad. The first dessert was Hindenburgtorte—one of many manifestations of the cult of the Supreme Commander of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, Paul von Hindenburg. The second dessert, a compote of pears and peaches, was a creation of Austria’s newest enemy, America. Everyone drank champagne.

  Just as Moriz and Hermine continued to reserve the best seats at the opera and theater, so they still shopped at the Wiener Werkstätte, which became even more of a family concern when Moriz began chairing its board in 1915. While the Gallias’ WW collection had been diverse when they moved into the Wohllebengasse, they came to own objects made of almost every material used by its workshops, including gold, silver, sheet metal, enamel, leather, ceramics, beads, lace, and fabrics. Like the Werkstätte’s other main patrons, the Gallias were surrounded by WW objects at home and often wore and carried WW products when they went out. Gretl went to the Werkstätte as often as three times a week. She also received at least one piece of WW every birthday with the occasional gift in between, as she continued to be lavished with presents despite the war. One birthday it was a WW purse and WW book stamp. Another year it was a WW silk box. Yet another it was a small WW bag and travel case.

  The work of the Werkstätte in this period was even more decorative and less functional than before. The artist whom the family employed most was Fritzi Löw, whose speciality was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scenes populated by men in top hats, frock coats, and stockings and women in bonnets carrying parasols. After Löw joined the Werkstätte in 1916, Moriz and Hermine immediately commissioned her to produce a book stamp showing a young woman in a ruff playing a lute, a reference to Gretl’s musical interests, which they gave to Gretl on her twentieth birthday. They also bought a set of Löw’s watercolors, many of her postcards, and a mirrored, glass-topped box that had one of Löw’s bonneted young women on its lid.

  Klimt’s funeral at the Hietzing cemetery, February 9, 1918. Moriz is toward the back in the top left, just visible over the shoulder of a bearded man. Emilie Flöge and Josef Hoffmann are at the head of the procession on the lower right. (Illustration Credits ill.
32)

  This attachment to the Werkstätte took many other forms. When the workshop’s fashion department began to design costumes for Viennese theaters late in 1915, Moriz, Hermine, and Gretl went to one of the earliest productions at the Residenztheater, where Ida Roland wore WW in the title role of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. When the Werkstätte opened a new outlet in the Palais Esterházy on the Kärntnerstrasse, the family attended concerts it staged in the palace’s large empire hall, where it otherwise presented fashion parades.

  Käthe’s diary confirms that the Werkstätte was the family’s favorite place for present buying. When the twins turned nineteen in April 1918, they each received a WW pendant and chain from Hermine’s parents, a WW brooch from Gretl, and a WW pearl bag containing an ebony comb from Moriz and Hermine, who also gave Käthe a WW manicure set. When Moriz and Hermine had their silver wedding anniversary that May, the twins commissioned Fritzi Löw to design the book stamp celebrating their parents’ marriage, while Hermine’s brothers combined together to buy a much grander present—a silver coffee service designed by Hoffmann—which was the Gallias’ most significant acquisition of his work since they moved into the Wohllebengasse.

  Gustav Klimt, who suffered two strokes at the start of the year, also remained important to them. On January 23, when Klimt’s health was still a matter of private interest rather than public discussion, Gretl recorded that Carl Moll’s wife, Anna, had told Hermine that Klimt’s prospects were bleak. On February 6 Gretl noted that he had died at six that morning. Three days later, Moriz attended Klimt’s funeral in the Hietzing cemetery while Hermine stayed in bed with a severe cold. In the one surviving photograph of the cortege, Moriz is the bald, mustachioed man toward the upper left of the procession led in the lower right by Emilie Flöge and Josef Hoffmann.

  The only major contemporary publication about Klimt contained fifty spectacular elephant folio collotype prints of his most significant pictures, including the portrait of Hermine and the family’s beech forest landscape. While the first edition of Das Werk von Gustav Klimt was published by Carl Moll at the Galerie Miethke between 1908 and 1914, a second edition was published in 1918 by Hugo Heller, who succeeded Moll as one of Vienna’s great cultural entrepreneurs. This portfolio became Klimt’s last work when its printing, which he supervised, was completed on the day his strokes saw him confined to Vienna’s Sanitorium Fürth. Its cheapest edition sold for 500 crowns (now about $290); the most expensive, which came in a boar spear–backed box with silk endpapers and included an original Klimt drawing, cost three times as much. If Klimt had not died, he would have signed the title page and all the plates. As it was, Heller had to make do with a facsimile of Klimt’s signature. When Hermine and Moriz celebrated their silver wedding anniversary, she gave him one of the thirty-five copies.

  The majority of Klimt’s patrons, including Moriz and Hermine, did not buy the work of the next generation of Viennese artists. The first one-man exhibition of Egon Schiele—held by Moll at the Galerie Miethke in 1911, when Schiele was just twenty—attracted almost no purchasers. Schiele’s conviction in 1912 for displaying indecent drawings where children could see them fueled his reputation for immorality. But by the end of the war, Schiele’s status had changed as his old work found more admirers and his new work became less confrontational. When Schiele compiled a three-page address book in 1918, Moriz was in it. When Schiele organized an exhibition of Austrian art at the Kunsthaus Zürich that May, which the imperial government hoped would bolster its image in neutral Switzerland by countering widespread reports of Austrian barbarism, Moriz lent two paintings.

  The Secession’s forty-ninth exhibition that March was also organized by Schiele, who again made it Vienna’s most exciting contemporary gallery. His poster for the exhibition showed him at the head of a table of artists—in effect, as leader of the Secession—with one chair vacant, symbolizing the death of Klimt. He filled the main room of the exhibition with forty-eight of his own paintings, watercolors, and drawings. The result, Schiele declared triumphantly, was “an unbelievable interest in new art.” While critics acclaimed his extraordinary draftsmanship, collectors competed for his work and the public flocked to see it. Gretl went three times.

  The Secession’s next exhibition, that April, was remarkable for one monumental painting by Albin Egger-Lienz, the greatest Austrian painter of the war. To the Nameless Ones was part of a series of battlefield pictures in which Egger-Lienz went from depicting swaggering, individualized, heroic soldiers to crouching, faceless, anonymous figures and then fields of the slain. If not for the war, the Secession would have held special festivities to mark the exhibition, which was its fiftieth. Instead, it simply held a private view one Saturday morning, which Gretl went to with Moriz. Twenty years after he started patronizing the Secession, Moriz was still attending its openings.

  If only Moriz had been well. In December 1917, Gretl came home one afternoon to find her fifty-nine-year-old father in bed with a sore throat and “Schüttelfrost,” or shivers. The following day Moriz was still there and, even though he got up a day later and soon seemed his usual self, he began experiencing renewed shivers and fevers early in the new year. As he continued working regardless, he occasionally went to the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, which was trying to make up for the declining market for its gas mantles by selling other gas appliances, including cookers, ovens, and heaters. He usually went to Johann Timmels-Witwe, a producer of liqueurs, spirits, punch, vinegar, and methylated spirits, with two factories but just nineteen employees, which he had bought when he stopped working for Auer von Welsbach. At the start of March Moriz stayed in bed for over a week. By late March Gretl was keeping a daily record of his temperature, which was low almost as often as it was high.

  Moriz’s doctors were Vienna’s best. Friedrich Piniles was a Galician Jew, closely connected with many of the city’s cultural elite, who became Vienna’s foremost specialist on nerves and glands, resulting in his appointment as a professor at the university. Otto Zuckerkandl, the senior surgeon at Vienna’s Jewish hospital, the Rothschild, shared Moriz’s artistic taste. While Otto had his smoking room designed by Hoffmann and became a shareholder in the Wiener Werkstätte, his wife, Amalie, was painted by Klimt. When Piniles and Zuckerkandl first examined Moriz together, they thought he was simply suffering from a nervous condition.

  They were wrong, but a host of other doctors were no more able to diagnose Moriz’s condition than cure it. Moriz occasionally had better days, when he went for short walks in the gardens of the Belvedere across the road from the Wohllebengasse. More often he had worse days, when he could not get up, let alone leave the family apartment. By early April, he was largely confined to his sickbed, from which he tried to control his companies by giving instructions to his senior employees and saw friends such as Maximilian Luzzatto, Carl Moll, and the architect Franz von Krauss. When Hermine and Moriz had their silver wedding anniversary in May, they restricted their celebratory lunch to their immediate family due to his illness and Moriz went to bed as soon as it was over. By then, Gretl was recording his temperature up to five times a day.

  The start of summer saw Moriz and Hermine abandon their usual practice of going to the Villa Gallia with Gretl, Käthe, and Lene. Instead, they went alone to the Kurhaus Semmering, a sanitorium outside Vienna that Franz von Krauss had designed a few years before the Wohllebengasse. This sanitorium was an immense, luxurious establishment, including a music room, reading room, billiard room, and gaming room among its five floors, which promoted itself as a site of winter and summer cures, offering dietary and medicinal treatments under the supervision of three resident doctors. When Moriz and Hermine went there, they hoped the mountain air and sunshine would succeed where Vienna’s best doctors had failed, enabling them to spend the rest of the summer at Alt Aussee.

  There was no cure. When Moriz arrived at the sanitorium, he was still able to write in a firm, clear hand and oversee Johann Timmels-Witwe by dictating detailed instructions to Hermine for
the twenty-three-year-old Erni, who had gotten leave from his regiment in order to run the company. A month later, Moriz did not even want to talk about his investments. As Hermine and he spent day after day on the terrace of the sanitorium, which offered a spectacular alpine view of the Semmering, Moriz lay in his deck chair, his eyes closed even when he was not asleep, wanting only to be left alone. In a letter to their children, Hermine acknowledged that he would never fully recover.

  Gretl observed this decline when she made three day-trips from Vienna to the Semmering to see Moriz, to whom she otherwise wrote every day and talked to on the telephone, which still seemed to him a “wonderful discovery.” Yet Gretl was dismayed when Moriz returned to the Wohllebengasse in early July to find him so weak, short of breath, and shrunken. Where he had set out by taxi, he came home by ambulance. Soon miserable days were followed by awful nights and times of crisis when Moriz’s doctors—two, three, even four at a time and thirteen in all—wondered whether he would survive. It was “furchbar,” Gretl wrote, “frightening,” especially as his doctors remained unsure what was wrong beyond their discovery of two bacteria, diplococcus and streptococcus.

  Wealthy Viennese in a critical condition were beginning to be institutionalized rather than stay home. Gustav Mahler died in 1911 in the Sanitorium Loew, the preferred domain of the well-to-do. Moriz’s brother Wilhelm died there in 1912. Hermine’s sister-in-law Henny Hamburger died there a year later. After Moriz’s sharp decline in the Kurhaus Semmering, he remained in the Wohllebengasse, where his doctors oscillated between prescribing sedatives and stimulants, sometimes trying morphine, sometimes caffeine. From late July, Moriz often was only semiconscious. On August 12 he went on a lung support system and a day later he lost consciousness. He died on the morning of August 17 with Hermine, Erni, Gretl, Käthe, Lene, and Hermine’s brother Otto at his side. The official cause of death was heart failure. He was fifty-nine.