Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  The long-standing Viennese preoccupation with the “schöne Leich,” literally the “beautiful corpse” but in fact the “beautiful funeral,” shaped how Gretl described what followed. Much as her uncle Otto described his wife Henny as “having died beautifully,” so Gretl recorded that, after washing Moriz’s body, they dressed him in his best businessman’s garb and laid him out “beautiful and smiling!” When his coffin arrived that afternoon, they placed Moriz in it. “He lay there in his black suit so beautifully,” Gretl repeated. Then Erni and Otto accompanied his coffin to the Hietzing cemetery together with Adolf and Ida, while Hermine, Gretl, and the twins stayed home. Gretl ended her diary that day by addressing him. “Live well, but not for always!” she wrote, confident they would meet again in another life. “Aufwiedersehen!”

  The following day and the next, Gretl went to the cemetery and was struck again by how peaceful and relaxed Moriz looked in his coffin, which had glass at one end so his face remained visible. Meanwhile, Hermine bought a triple plot in the cemetery’s Catholic section that could accommodate Moriz and her and their four children, if not also their husbands and wives, so the family would be together in death, just as Moriz and she had wanted them in life in the Wohllebengasse. Moriz’s funeral was held on August 20. While the “schöne Leich” usually involved an elaborate, even pompous funeral, Moriz did not want one. In his will, Moriz asked for his funeral to be simple because “even in life I was no friend of formalities.” In a codicil he went further, specifying that his funeral be private and announced only afterward. “It was beautiful and festive,” Gretl wrote after it took place as Moriz had instructed. “We all cried for Papa.”

  The lead obituary in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse the following day provided a short account of Moriz’s career, devotion to art, and illness. The notices recording his death and funeral and announcing his Requiem Mass were much bigger, filling almost a page and a half of the newspaper, more than anyone else who died that year. The family’s notice identified Moriz as a Regierungsrat and a great industrialist. The three other notices, taken out by the Hamburger family company, the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, and Johann Timmels-Witwe, identified him not only as a director of these companies and the Trient-Malé railway but also as chairman of the Wiener Werkstätte.

  Gretl’s diaries suggest that the family’s formal Catholic observance remained negligible. When she listed a series of family principles, she noted, “One uses Sunday to be rested for the week,” rather than for churchgoing. In the first seven months of the year she had attended Mass and taken Communion just once at the Karlskirche, Vienna’s finest baroque church, a few blocks from the Wohllebengasse. Moriz’s Requiem Mass was celebrated there, too, because it was the family’s local church and could hold the vast gathering of Moriz’s friends, acquaintances, business associates, and employees. Afterward, a small group of relatives joined Hermine, Erni, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene at the Wohllebengasse for supper.

  The following night Hermine called all four children together. They knew that Moriz had taken out insurance policies that entitled each of them to 100,000 crowns. While Gretl’s policy had matured in 1916, when she turned twenty, the other policies were due to mature in 1919, when Käthe and Lene turned twenty and Erni, twenty-four. But Erni, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene were unaware that while Moriz had left the bulk of his estate to Hermine, he had given each of them an additional 400,000 crowns. This sum had constituted a fortune when Moriz made this provision in 1912—bringing each of their entitlements to about $4 million in today’s money—but by the time Moriz died it had been slashed by inflation, so the children’s individual entitlements were the equivalent of about $290,000.

  The only other beneficiaries were charities. Moriz’s four bequests of 1,000 crowns were token given the size of his estate and the collapse in value of the crown, but these bequests were still revealing: none went to Catholic organizations, while two went to the Jewish communities in Bisenz and Vienna, confirming Moriz’s enduring attachment to Jewish institutions. Hermine divided another bequest of 20,000 crowns (or $58,000) among three charities, including the Jewish Institute for the Blind, as Moriz would have wanted.

  Hermine returned to the cemetery the day after the funeral, together with all her children and both her parents. The next day they all went again, and then the next. It was too much for Nathan Hamburger, who had never recovered from a series of heart attacks late in 1917, prompting Hermine, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene to visit Nathan at least every second day at his apartment, while he never went to the Wohllebengasse. When Nathan died on August 26, Hermine had lost her husband and father, the children their father and grandfather, within nine days.

  Convention dictated that the dead required attendance. As Moriz’s grave in Vienna had to be visited and Nathan wanted to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Freudenthal, which he had established, Hermine divided her family. Erni accompanied Hermine to Freudenthal for Nathan’s funeral. Gretl, Käthe, and Lene stayed in Vienna to visit Moriz’s grave every day, each of them always carrying a spray of aster, the flower that Austrian Catholics most often used for commemorating the dead. It provided a stark white contrast to their black clothes and veils.

  Like other Viennese architects, including Adolf Loos and Franz von Krauss, Josef Hoffmann accommodated his clients not only in life but in death. When Henny Hamburger died in 1913, Hoffmann designed her grave in Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery. When Nathan died in 1918, his grave in Freudenthal was designed by Hoffmann, too. But Hermine, surprisingly, decided against giving Hoffmann another commission for Moriz’s grave in Hietzing. Instead, she had a temporary stone erected.

  Twenty-two-year-old Gretl was devastated by Moriz’s death. She knew her place at home and in society would never be the same. She wondered what would become of her in a household headed by her mother. “It was the worst that could happen to us,” she lamented at the end of August. “My only dearest father is dead. I have lost my best friend, my dear father, my greatest advocate, who has always helped and supported me.”

  Her entry a few days later was most turbulent. She railed that Käthe should have suggested that Gretl was simply playing the part of a grieving daughter. She accused Käthe of projecting her own lack of grief onto her. She recognized that, since Moriz’s death, she had become “shockingly bad and vengeful.” She concluded, quite bereft, “Father lost, everything lost.”

  She used the rest of her diary to transcribe her pocket diary from the end of 1917, as she had done with Norbert’s letters after she broke their engagement. As Gretl revisited what had occurred, she underlined the critical points in Moriz’s illness. She also gave her entries for 1918 a new title, which, even if she was thinking only of the deaths of Moriz and Nathan, had much broader application because of Austria’s defeat in the war and the loss of its empire, as well as the deaths of Klimt and Schiele, which ended Vienna’s extended period of artistic greatness. She looked on 1918 as “Das Unglücksjahr,” “the year of misfortune.”

  7

  Sex

  Gretl was unhappy even before Moriz fell ill, acutely envious of her siblings. Erni was generally with his regiment, but when he was in Vienna he spent most of his days at Johann Timmels-Witwe and was out most nights. Käthe and Lene belonged to the first generation of Austrian women to attend university, studying chemistry together, having benefited from the new educational opportunities for girls in Vienna that allowed them to graduate from a gymnasium. Gretl was still waiting to be married, with no prospects and fewer social opportunities than ever because of the war. She was also recording her weight regularly as she exercised with some effect.

  Two of her most exciting invitations gave her rare opportunities to mix with Vienna’s “first society.” One was an afternoon tea at which almost all the women were “Excellenzen,” or “your Excellencies,” and Gretl thought—she was not sure—that one was even a niece of the emperor. The other invitation was a supper for twenty-eight, where, Gretl recorded with amazement, the lowliest men were
Hofrats, while all the others were either “vons” or members of the aristocracy, and they paid exceptional attention to her because, apart from Maria Mayen, a star of the Hofburgtheater, she was the only young woman present.

  Her one suitor was Fritz Bunzl, a relative of Guido Hamburger’s wife Nelly. After one encounter in 1910, Gretl described him as disgusting. When he came to the Wohllebengasse several times after Gretl broke her engagement with Norbert, she thought him much nicer and immediately sensed his interest. “Fritz would like to … but he can’t or rather does not yet dare,” she observed. As he became more forward, she enjoyed flirting with him but thought him too conceited, knew he got on her parents’ nerves, and suspected his motives. “I have no intention of getting married for my father’s money,” she declared.

  Her one infatuation was with Carl Lafite, who occupied a succession of prominent musical positions in Vienna, directing the Singakademie, running the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and playing the piano as the accompanist of celebrated singers, but was still forced to bolster his income by taking private pupils and performing at private parties. Gretl met Lafite in 1916 at a dinner held by the parents of her best friend, Lili Pollak, where Lafite accompanied several of the guests while they sang. After Gretl twice seized the opportunity to perform her favorite song, Schumann’s “Der Hidalgo,” to Lafite’s accompaniment, she declared the evening her most enjoyable since the start of the war, as if Norbert had never existed.

  Lafite was soon testing her voice and finding it worthy of further exploration. After six sessions, he was sure she should develop it. Before long she had completed her first exercises, then mastered her first song as she immersed herself in music in a way she had not done before. A few months later, he was no longer “Professor Lafite” in her diary but “La.” After he came to dinner at the Wohllebengasse, Gretl was full of exclamations, declaring him “charming,” “delightful,” and “divine.” She described herself as intoxicated with him, a sensation she had never recorded while engaged to Norbert. “It was,” she wrote, “as if I had drunk too much wine.”

  So she continued. When Gretl first saw Lafite accompanying the German bass Paul Bender in the Musikverein, she thought Lafite had eyes only for her as he entered the auditorium. “He looked at me so lovingly,” she recorded, prompting her to declare this concert the one she had most enjoyed that season. After seeing Lafite accompany Bender again, she cried and cried. After encountering him at another concert, she observed, “If La had not been there, I would have cried with disappointment.” After she saw him again at the Pollaks’, she declared him “a dear, good, noble human being,” just as she had described Norbert when they first met. “God, what an evening!” she exclaimed.

  The relationship between an acclaimed musician and his female pupils was the stuff of Hermann Bahr’s Das Konzert, which Moriz and Hermine saw in 1910. The play starts with the virtuoso pianist, Gustav Heink, about to leave for an illicit weekend with one of his students, arousing near hysteria among his other pupils, who are as riven by envy at her good fortune as they are appalled that she should be starting an affair when not yet married a year. Heink’s assumption is that such adulation—and adultery—is his due as a musical celebrity. His pupil imagines he may be the love of her life. His wife begins by tolerating his affair in return for domestic harmony but, by the end of the play, has put an end to it.

  Gretl was used to being in raptures over music and musicians. When she first experienced the work of Arnold Schönberg in February 1916, a week before she met Lafite, she was characteristically excited. It was a performance of Schönberg’s first major composition, Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night, from 1899, which initially provoked outrage because of its dissonance but soon appeared conservative when compared to Schönberg’s twelve-tone music. Although Schönberg and Klimt are generally seen to have been part of opposing modernist groups in Vienna, exemplified by how Schönberg was championed by Karl Kraus, who derided Klimt, Schönberg’s early works have occasionally been likened to Klimt’s paintings. After a performance by Vienna’s leading string group, the Rosé Quartet, Gretl exclaimed in her diary: “Schönberg is for me the Klimt of music. Transfigured Night is for me The Kiss by Klimt. Long Live the Rosé Quartet! Long Live Arnold Schönberg!”

  Another concert by the Rosé Quartet a week later prompted Gretl to express her emotion before the entire audience in the great hall of the Musikverein. As Gretl described it, she suddenly found herself on stage, holding a red tulip that she happened to have been given earlier that day, and pressed it into the hand of the cellist Friedrich Buxbaum. While embarrassed by her actions, Gretl still thought this experience “too beautiful.”

  Gretl told herself that her infatuation with Lafite was more of this “Musikrausch,” or “musical intoxication.” Gretl thought her infatuation was harmless because Lafite was twice her age and recently married to one of Vienna’s leading women journalists, Helene Tuschak, who was at the forefront of Austrian feminism. When Gretl encountered Tuschak during the interval at one of Lafite’s concerts—the first concert, Gretl recorded delightedly, she had ever attended alone—Tuschak and she talked together amicably. Lafite himself spoke to Gretl at their second dinner at the Pollaks’ like a father figure who had no designs on her. “He thinks that one of these days I will make a very good wife,” she recorded. “All I have to do is find the right husband.”

  Yet Gretl was sure that Lafite had eyes only for her, even when Tuschak was with him, and his response when they saw each other at yet another dinner party confirmed his interest. While Tuschak was present for the first part of the evening, she had left before the gathering broke up at three in the morning and Gretl needed to be escorted home. She recorded that when another married man wanted to take her, Lafite was very annoyed, made all sorts of claims, and prevailed, though he did not get to do so alone. Instead, the pair was accompanied by a niece of their hostess, whom twenty-one-year-old Gretl dismissed in a characteristic invocation of English as an “old maid.”

  Her most exciting evening in 1918 was a dinner held by her aunt Ida and uncle Adolf before Moriz’s illness. Gretl wore her red dress. The prime attraction was Flieger Rittmeister Fix, a member of Austria’s small air force, which was finding it even harder to replace its men than its machines as it lost all its officers every year. As Gretl described Fix, he was already divorced, a “Mordsflirt,” or “devil of a flirt,” but very nice and entertaining. Although one of her cousins had taken her to the dinner, Fix took her home—unchaperoned—and “courted her very much.” She thought the evening “brilliant.”

  Moriz’s sickness constrained her. After he fell ill, Gretl went to just two more concerts, one play, and a performance by one of Europe’s leading exponents of modern dance, the Swede Ronny Johansson who, Gretl observed, was not just a “dancing genius” but had “beautiful legs and a wonderful figure,” suggesting that, for all Gretl’s efforts, she would have liked to be thinner. She also went to one afternoon party, one dance concert, and one private ball before Moriz’s decline prevented her from going out.

  Otherwise Gretl had private tutoring in English and French and spent part of each day practicing them. She devoted even more time to music, learning the violin and flute early in the year and the guitar later on, while the piano remained her main instrument. Her teacher, Malwine Brée, was best known for her book Die Grundlage der Methode Leschetizky, published in English as The Groundwork of the Leschetizky Method, which drew on her experience as principal assistant of Theodor Leschetizky, the world’s most celebrated piano teacher, whose pupils included Ignacy Paderewski and Artur Schnabel. Until Moriz became seriously ill, Gretl had weekly lessons, practiced at least two hours daily, often played four hands, and occasionally played chamber music.

  She also did the occasional piece of work for Moriz as he indulged her long-standing desire to be his secretary. Moriz would usually dictate two or three letters that she would record using the shorthand she had begun learning as a girl and c
ontinued to practice. She would then type up these letters. After Moriz was confined to bed, she did more of this work, occasionally taking dictation from him all afternoon, until he was too sick to run his companies.

  Housework was almost entirely foreign to Gretl because the family had so many maids. But when the war led many women to leave domestic service for other work, reducing the Gallias’ number of servants, Hermine required Gretl to do much more. Gretl usually worked in the family’s front rooms, where she polished the floors, cleaned the windows, and treated the carpets with camphor to protect them against insects. She sometimes worked in the kitchen, where she did more cleaning, hung up the meat, and tidied the linen cupboard. She occasionally worked in the family’s attic, which housed their laundry, and in the cellar, which was their storeroom. “Twice in cellar,” she noted one morning as she began to think of herself unhappily as “very domesticated.”

  Hermine fueled this unhappiness. Where Gretl felt she deserved praise, Hermine criticized her and, when they quarreled, either yelled or refused to speak to her. The twins added their own barbs by emphasizing their superiority as university students on their way to obtaining doctorates, which meant they were largely exempt from helping around the apartment. Gretl’s exasperation was apparent that Easter, which she celebrated by preparing eggs and sweets but without going to church. “I would really like to know why I am alive?!” she exclaimed. “If I at least had a profession, it would be very different. But I am not allowed to work as a stenographer-typist. The family looks on my piano playing as something utterly superfluous. And to help Mama?! That also is not straightforward! Sometimes I wish with all my heart that I had married.”