Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  A photograph of Hermine, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene, taken in late 1917 or early 1918, is revealing. Hermine is looking surprisingly similar to her Klimt portrait, with the twins on either side of her, dressed in identical clothes with identical hair. Hermine’s attachment to them is underlined by how she leans her head on Käthe, who also leans slightly toward her, a small smile of delight on her face, while Lene also leans in to the center, framing her mother and focusing attention on her. All three look at the camera, unlike Gretl, on the far right, whose face is in profile. Gretl’s relationship with her mother and sisters is suggested by how marginal she is to the photograph. If she were cropped, we would not miss her.

  Lene, Hermine, Käthe, and Gretl, late 1917 or early 1918. (Illustration Credits ill.33)

  Gretl’s uncle Otto was her closest relative to flout conventional morality. When his wife Henny died in 1913, Otto recorded that only their “faithful maid” Dagmar and Henny’s doctor were with him. Before long, Dagmar was not only Otto’s housekeeper but also his lover, and by 1915, when Otto was serving as an officer in the Austrian army, she was pregnant. Rather than stay in Vienna, Dagmar returned to her native Denmark to have their baby, Gudrun, and then remained there at Otto’s insistence. He did not want his family and friends to know that his housekeeper had borne him a child.

  Gretl’s diary suggests that Dagmar’s status with Otto’s family in this period was more than that of a servant. When Dagmar occasionally visited Vienna while Otto was on leave, they went out together, accompanied sometimes by Otto’s son from his first marriage, Robert. Just before Christmas 1917, Otto, Robert, and Dagmar, as Gretl always listed them—not only separating Dagmar from Otto but also putting her last—visited Otto’s parents. Early in the New Year, Otto, Robert, and Dagmar came to the Wohllebengasse for dinner. That June, Otto and Dagmar again visited his mother and father before going with Robert to visit the Gallias.

  All this occurred while Otto persisted in telling his family nothing of Gudrun. He probably had little opportunity to see her until she was two because of his service in the army. He also saw little or nothing of her after the war, when Dagmar and he went to live in Bruntal, as Freudenthal was renamed after the war when it became part of the new Czechoslovakia. As Otto and Dagmar purported to live in Bruntal as master and servant rather than as man and mistress, they left Gudrun in Denmark with Dagmar’s mother until late 1919 or early 1920, when Hermine discovered what had occurred.

  Her ideal would have been for Otto to emulate his brother Guido by finding a wife such as Nelly Bunzl, who was Christian, came with a big dowry, and had the social graces and cultural accomplishments of the middle class. After Guido and Nelly started married life in their Hoffmann apartment in Vienna, they moved to Fulnek, in northern Moravia, where Guido grew wheat and raised livestock until the Czech agricultural reforms of the mid-1920s, managed the Hamburgers’ powdered-milk factory, and owned a sawmill and crate-making plant. The family’s sixteen-room, three-story villa was maintained by a large staff, including a governess and chauffeur. Guido and Nelly mixed with local aristocracy, kept hounds, and went hunting.

  The family member’s fear of being wed for their wealth is patent in a story recounted by my mother over seventy years later about Hermine’s youngest brother, Paul. He was one of many Jewish converts to Christianity in central Europe who thought of himself as marrying down to find a Christian partner. The Gallias and Hamburgers focused instead on the ambitions of his wife, Felizitas, usually known as Fely. “It was said,” my mother wrote, that Otto’s son from his first marriage, Robert, “courted Fely and possibly had an affair with her but that she, coming from a lower-middle-class family, preferred the wealthier Paul.” Fely was “a very pretty, poor girl who wanted a rich husband.”

  If Otto had not been attached to Dagmar, the solution would have been simple. Like many middle-class men who fathered illegitimate children, he would have sent his mistress away, making some financial contribution to their child’s upkeep. But Otto wanted Dagmar with him as a companion and lover while avoiding the shame of marrying his housekeeper. Hermine objected; she believed that Gudrun should be raised by her parents. While dismayed at how the family’s reputation would be damaged by one of her brothers’ marrying in such circumstances, Hermine demanded that Otto marry Dagmar and, because he was increasingly dependent on Hermine’s wealth, Otto complied and brought Gudrun to Bruntal but left behind Dagmar’s mother because she would provide even more proof of how badly he had married.

  Gretl breached convention much more profoundly than her uncle. As with her engagement to Norbert Stern, she wrote at length about what happened in her diary. Her entries describing how she came to have sex before marriage were her prime reason for instructing Anne to destroy her diaries when she died. These entries were also why Anne kept Gretl’s first three diaries and destroyed those that followed. Gretl’s affair with Dr. Erich Schiller was the episode in her life that she was most ashamed of. She would have been especially upset that it should be revealed by one of her grandsons, whom she taught to be a “little gentleman.”

  The only surviving accounts of Gretl’s affair were written by Anne, who otherwise knew nothing about Schiller. Her accounts follow the cliché of the experienced man and innocent woman, the predatory male and vulnerable female, of men wanting sex and women obliging them. In an early draft of her story, Anne wrote that Schiller “enticed Gretl to come to his apartment and seduced her.” In her final version, Anne elaborated: “Schiller seems to have seduced her while promising to marry her. (It was probably not possible to celebrate an engagement while in mourning, and mourning for a father was worn for a year.) I am guessing that he may have suggested to her that waiting for more than a year was very painful to him. As she loved him, she gave in. After he had achieved his aim—I do not know how long the affair lasted—he declared that she was immoral and that he would have nothing further to do with her. She would, in fact, have made an excellent wife, it was just that she was totally inexperienced and unprepared for life.”

  The official period for mourning may not have been quite the obstacle that Anne suggested. As Gretl’s relationship with Schiller seems to have developed in the first half of 1919, they would only have had to wait until August before getting engaged and could have married soon thereafter. But Moriz’s death almost certainly shaped what occurred by making Gretl even more vulnerable and volatile than usual—especially because of the intensity with which the family went about mourning Moriz. As Gretl recorded, they marked Christmas 1918 by visiting his grave six times in ten days.

  Gretl may also not have been as ignorant about sex as Anne implied. In a lecture in 1905, Hermine’s friend Elisabeth Luzzatto considered it self-evident that women of the future would fully understand the physiological side of marriage. At a meeting in 1906 chaired by Luzzatto, the speaker declared it much better for children—both girls and boys—to have proper sex education than receive more or less bad instruction on the street, from servants, or through illicit books. When Hermine and Moriz saw Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in 1908, it was widely understood to be preaching the same message. Far from mothers corrupting their daughters by informing them about conception, they had a responsibility to instruct them.

  Yet knowledge of sex was one thing for young women; having it was another. Erni exemplified the enduring double standard for men and women. When he was trying to act as my brother’s de facto father after our parents’ divorce, Erni drew on his own experiences as a young man in order to introduce Bruce to the ways of the world. He recounted how, as a young officer during World War I, he was often billeted with poor farming or peasant families and almost always had sex with their daughters—a typical instance of middle-class men of this era exploiting lower-class women. For Erni, these successes, as he looked on them with pride, were a normal precursor to married life.

  Insofar as Moriz and Hermine knew about Erni’s conduct, they do not appear to have minded, considering it acceptable for unmarried me
n to have a string of affairs. Gretl was in a different position. Had her affair with Schiller become public, her reputation would have been ruined and her prospects of marriage destroyed, regardless of her dowry. As it was, the loss of her virginity was a private disgrace. Anne wrote, “The family had not been able to prevent it and she now had to find a husband in what was regarded as her dilapidated condition.” Hermine was scandalized. For all her appetite for representations of the “woman question” at the theater, she was appalled to be confronted by this question in her own household.

  8

  Marriage

  A common image of Jews who converted to Christianity in turn-of-the-century Austria is that they expected not just to change their identity but to do so immediately. One day they would be members of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, part of the Jewish community, a widely despised minority; the next they would be Catholics or Protestants, accepted as complete members of the Christian faith, freed from prejudice and discrimination, incorporated into the dominant culture. When this acceptance did not occur, they felt even more rejected and alienated than before they converted. Yet could these men and women have expected their baptisms to achieve so much so fast? For all the outrage that their actions excited among some Jews, the converts’ ties to the Jewish community, if not the Jewish religion, ran too deep. The process of exchanging one identity for another was too complex. Anti-Semitism in Austria was too intense. When these men and women converted, their hopes were probably much more modest. They knew their baptisms were simply a first step toward securing a Christian identity.

  Their choice of spouse was vital in this process. If they married Christians, as Hermine’s three brothers did, it reinforced their new religion. If their partners were Konfessionslos, or Jews, it undermined their conversions. Hermine wanted her children to marry Catholics and give her Catholic grandchildren. But Gretl failed to do so when she finally married in 1921, as did Erni when he married a few months later. Their spouses both came from families who were also part of the great Jewish influx into late nineteenth-century Vienna but, unlike Moriz and Hermine, retained their religion.

  Erni and Mizzi, around the time of their marriage, 1921. (Illustration Credits ill.34)

  When I started this book, I knew that Erni met Marie Jacobi (known as Mizzi) during the summer of 1920 when she was visiting one of the many Jewish families who owned and rented villas in Alt Aussee. I also knew that, like Käthe and Lene, who were the same age, Mizzi was a student at the University of Vienna, although she discontinued her studies when she married Erni, in keeping with convention. She expected that she would never put her degree to use because, as a married woman, she would never enter the workforce. She thought it would embarrass Erni if she were Frau Dr. Gallia when he was Herr Gallia. Yet I knew nothing about the Jacobi household in Vienna and, when I began wondering about it, I thought my questions would all go unanswered. Who could I find sixty-five years later to remember anything about how the family lived in Vienna? On my brother’s fiftieth birthday, in 2004, we visited Mizzi’s one surviving cousin in Melbourne, Hans Low, who, it turned out, not only had occasionally been to the Jacobis’ apartment in Vienna, but his sister Lore had lived with them for a few years in the 1930s and his sister Katia had also visited them. Hans offered to put my questions by e-mail to Lore in Slovakia and Katia in England, then translate their responses.

  Only about one in ten of Vienna’s 215,000 Jews was strictly observant. The Jacobis were among the majority who were not. They may not even have observed the High Holidays, attending synagogue only for weddings, funerals, and b’nai mitzvah. They did not keep a kosher household. Yet as Hans’s sisters remembered it, their household still felt Jewish because Mizzi’s mother, Anna, was a typical “Yiddishe Mama” who appeared concerned only for the well-being of her husband and three children. They recalled that Anna had no outside interests, never attending the theater or cinema, coffee shops or bridge parties. Her main conversation was: “Have some more.… Can I give you another piece of … You must have some.… Don’t you like my cooking?”

  The Jacobis’ wealth was Mizzi’s great redeeming feature. Mizzi’s father was an industrialist who, while not as successful as Moriz, made good in Vienna. Adolf Jacobi’s company manufactured corrugated cardboard and cigarette papers. He also owned a vast block of land in the Piaristengasse in the Josefstadt or Eighth District, a wealthy bourgeois area where Jews were almost as rare at the start of the century as in the Fourth District, but gradually became more common. The front of the block was occupied by a modern apartment building where the Jacobis lived on the Nobelstock. The other eighteen apartments and the two factories were tenanted. Two factories lay behind.

  Paul Herschmann, whom Gretl married, came from a much less prosperous family. They met during Gretl’s second ball season, when Paul was doing his compulsory military service after completing a chemistry degree in the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau. “Dr. Horschmann,” a misspelling suggesting that Gretl had just been introduced to him, first appears in her diary at a “thé dansant” held by another family in December 1913, where he came last in a list of five men whom Gretl danced with and did not feature among those she particularly enjoyed talking to. “Dr. Herschmann,” correctly spelled, was at the Wohllebengasse for the Gallias’ soiree that Saint Stephen’s Day. He was there again for their ball the following January, although, as Käthe later described it, all Paul remembered was “two small pink things running around”—in other words, Lene and Käthe herself, then aged thirteen, both wearing pink because it was Hermine’s favorite color. Gretl, occupied with her Officer of Dragoons, was oblivious to Paul.

  Gretl and Paul encountered each other again after the war, which he spent in the army. When Gretl went to see Käthe and Lene at the university one day, Paul happened to be there. When they met again at the Chemists’ and Technicians’ Ball, Paul escorted her home and, after seeing much more of her over the following months, he proposed. Their first extended period together was a trip to Berlin with Adolf and Ida as chaperones. A crisis, reminiscent of those punctuating Gretl’s relationship with Norbert Stern, occurred when Gretl received an “indifferent” letter from Paul that left her crying, but this time there was a rapid “correction.” Had his father not died in September 1920, they might have married sooner. As it was, they did not wait for the full year of mourning but married after six months in March 1921.

  In their own terms, the Herschmanns had made good. Paul’s paternal grandmother was a peddler in the Riesengebirge, the mountainous region on the border of Silesia and Bohemia, who had gone from town to town and market to market in order to support her children after her husband died young. Paul’s father, Ludwig, came to Vienna, where he ran a bookshop in the Leopoldstadt before establishing a leather business buying and selling hides, a common Jewish occupation. By 1878, the thirty-year-old Ludwig was in a position to marry another Bohemian Jew, Anna Schick. Paul, the fourth of their five sons, was the first Herschmann to go to university. His youngest brother, Otto, followed a few years later.

  Yet far from accruing the wealth to buy their own house in Vienna, like the Gallias and Jacobis, the Herschmanns rented their apartment in the Gredlerstrasse, a minor street in the Leopoldstadt where they lived from 1899. The family leather business was also relatively small and, when Paul’s father died, he left it to his five sons regardless of whether they worked in the business and at least two did not—Bernhard, who had tertiary syphilis, and Otto, who was still studying chemistry. Once the profits were divided between all five, Paul may have earned no more than Norbert Stern—and he had none of Norbert’s prospects of inheriting significant real estate.

  Bernhard’s illness was an embarrassment to Paul and a cause of fear and loathing among the Gallias. As Bernhard’s health deteriorated and he began engaging in inordinate expenditure and arguing violently with his family, the Herschmanns placed him in one of Vienna’s leading private clinics. A medical report reveals that he walked abnormally. His spee
ch was impaired. He prayed extravagantly in Hebrew for more decent people of Jewish faith. He damned his doctors, accusing them of betraying him. He thought he could work miracles. He believed that all of Tolstoy’s predictions had come true. He had become a sadist. He screamed. He ranted.

  Gretl later wrote that she was very much in love with thirty-year-old Paul, who was the right age to be her husband, was handsome, and had the prestige of a doctorate in a culture where titles continued to be taken seriously. Gretl was also keen to marry and have children and probably feared she otherwise would not, as she was twenty-five and growing as stout as her parents. But Paul’s antipathy toward Catholicism soon divided them. When he reluctantly attended the Gallias’ Christmas celebrations after Gretl and he were engaged, he looked on the family’s candlelit tree with a mocking smile, contemptuously lit a cigarette, and was generally scathing. While Gretl was hurt by his response, Hermine never forgave him.

  Gretl had reason to be more tolerant of Paul’s identity because of her enduring ties to Judaism. Her occasional use of Yiddish in her diaries was a mark of her origins. Another change in religion in the Gallia family was at least as significant. It involved her uncle Adolf, who was one of many Viennese converts to return to Judaism. Yet Gretl displayed clear signs of prejudice. Like Alma Schindler at the turn of the century, she disliked finding herself among too much Jewish company. After an evening at the opera, she observed, “All of Israel was there along with all of Aussee,” then added, “One does not exclude the other!” When she went to Le prophète by Giacomo Meyerbeer, who was one of the prime targets of Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music,” she declared the opera beautiful but still concluded, “I have no time for Jewish music!”