Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  These stories could come out only because what one generation suppressed, the next generally discovered and was eager to talk about. This generational divide was articulated by the New York writer Kati Marton, who was raised as a Roman Catholic with no awareness of her family’s Jewish past, but discovered for herself, at the age of twenty-nine, that her parents were both born Jews and one of her grandparents died in Auschwitz. Soon after the Albright story broke, Marton observed: “As my parents saw it, there were problems enough in being a refugee; why compound them by adding ‘Jewish’ to the list of things we had to overcome? They had too much history. I did not have enough. They felt that to be American meant not having a past, or at least having the freedom to choose what to remember. I felt the opposite. To me, America means the freedom to unabashedly embrace your heritage, whatever it might be.”

  Anne did not want to write about her life when I asked her. One of her earliest drafts begins, “Tim has asked me to write my story. I think that it is a rather average tale and that I have no claim to fame. But somehow it interests him and perhaps provides him with a link with the past that he seems to want in quite a different way from me.” She also found the writing difficult, since it led her to confront her childhood in a way she had not done before and, while she did not like what she discovered, felt obliged to record it, particularly her sense of her own failings. “I am starting to wonder whether I really want to write this story,” she began another draft. “When Tim asked me,” she admitted in another, “I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.”

  Anne persevered because it was something I wanted and because she believed in finishing what she started. She would write, show me drafts, and I would press for more, filling the margins of her drafts with queries and suggestions. When she finally stopped after more than a year, with many of my questions still unanswered, “Anne’s Story,” as she titled it, ran to over seventy single-spaced typed pages but did not cover a quarter of her life. It concluded in 1939, when she was seventeen, which I thought was because she neither wanted to write about her adult life nor wanted me to read about it. In fact, she wrote more but was unable to give this material the same shape or polish and did not show it to me until just before she died.

  Anne would have liked to change almost everything about her childhood. If given a choice of her place of birth, parents, religion, and financial status, she would have kept only her mother. While her attachment to the landscape of her childhood saw her watch The Sound of Music whenever it was shown on television and hang one of her own paintings of the Karlskirche in her bedroom, she rejected Vienna as “too conceited” and “too full of lies about its past.” Despite writing in Canberra, a national capital one-sixth the size, she embraced the commonplace that Vienna was “too provincial.” She went on: “I would have loved a father whom I liked or no father at all. I would certainly never have chosen to be Jewish. It certainly would have been better for me had we been less wealthy and isolated by our wealth.”

  Anne looked on her childhood in Good Living Street as the worst part of her life—even more traumatic than her experience after the Anschluss under the Nazis. Her account of her first fourteen years until Hermine died is imbued with not just resentment, fear, and anxiety but also a keen sense of the enduringly damaging consequences of how she was raised. Her account of life under the Nazis conveys the shock and horror of suddenly being persecuted and forced to flee. She also acknowledged that her attitude toward other people had been colored by her “Hitler experience.” Otherwise, she treated this experience as of no great account both because so many Nazi victims had suffered so much more and because of her good fortune in escaping the wars, genocides, and persecutions that kept recurring. She wrote: “This is a frightening world full of hatred and methods of destruction. I have personally experienced hardly any of this.”

  Like many other refugees, Anne believed that her forced departure was a godsend. The only good that came from her Jewishness, she wrote, was that it made her go to Australia. For all her attachment to European culture and the European landscape, she was intensely grateful for the chance to start a new life—the opportunity, as she saw it, to be herself. She concluded her story by declaring that she was much happier in Australia than she would ever have been in Austria. Until the government of John Howard began making political capital out of refugees, gaining electoral popularity through its mistreatment of boat people from Afghanistan and Iraq trying to reach Australia from Indonesia, she was proud to be Australian.

  This attachment was manifest in 1990 when Austria introduced monthly pensions for surviving refugees who had fled as children as a belated mark of responsibility for what had happened to them. Anne did not apply for years, as she did not want to feel indebted to Austria in any way. Then she decided that this pension provided an opportunity to take from the society that rejected her and give to the one that welcomed her. For the rest of her life, she distributed her pension among Australian charities. She did the same with the small lump-sum payments she received from the National Fund for the Victims of National Socialism created by the Austrian government in 1995.

  Anne’s decision to redistribute this money was also part of her rejection of her opulent past. As Mizzi once noted, Anne struggled with “the stigma of coming from a rich family” and was intent on living differently, taking conscious delight in how Hermine would have been appalled by much that she did. Even when Anne was in her sixties and seventies, she continued to travel with a rucksack. Until the last years of her life, she stayed in cheap hotels. She avoided good restaurants because she was uncomfortable being waited on. Her last home unit was so modest that, when she died, the government bought it for use as public housing.

  One of Anne’s enduring ambitions was to be inconspicuous. After working assiduously to get rid of her accent when she arrived in Australia, she was appalled in the last months of her life when taxi drivers began asking where she came from. For more than sixty years she had been indistinguishable in the crowd. Now she was identifiable as a foreigner. She looked on this change as one of the greatest manifestations of her decline caused by a stroke. As much as she was appalled by her diminished, malfunctioning, awkward body, she abhorred her new voice.

  Anne was typically reticent about her past when, in 2000, she gave her last public talk at the National Gallery of Australia. When she described how she had come to assist in the preparation of an exhibition of Secessionist art being staged by the gallery, she simply said, “I was allowed to help because of my knowledge of German and because I had some contacts with the Secession movement before.” She did not explain that she had grown up with a much richer Secessionist collection than the gallery was exhibiting. Her account of the response of Viennese Jews to the rise of Hitler was similar. She had her family in mind when she described how “those who were hated by the National Socialists had no idea what was in store for them should the Nazis come to power. After all, in their own eyes, they had done nothing wrong. They were comfortable in Vienna, and attached to it.” She did not reveal that she had been there, let alone that she had been more perceptive.

  Anne, Canberra, 2002, photographed by Jon Rhodes. (Illustration Credits ill.51)

  Anne was always loath to reveal that she had any Jewish connections because she feared further persecution. As she thought anti-Semitism would never go away, she believed Jews should never draw attention to their identity. If they would not abandon their Judaism, they should suppress it. Anne was delighted that Bruce and I both had children with partners who were not from Jewish backgrounds. She encouraged us to hide our origins to such an extent that Bruce recalls being fearful when he told his future wife, Rae. Anne thought it inflammatory for successful Jews to flaunt their wealth and power and was appalled when they acted dishonestly or meanly. It fueled her view that they had not learned from history. She feared they would visit even more anti-Semitism on everyone of Jewish origin.

  She could not deny the Gallias’ Jewish past because her depar
ture from Vienna in 1938 identified her as a refugee. But she led everyone, including Bruce and me, to believe that since Gretl had converted to Roman Catholicism as a girl, she herself had been born and raised a Catholic. I learned that she had been a Jew until she was sixteen only when I asked her to write about her life. Had she not felt compelled to be as honest as she could in her story, she might not have told me. She never told my father, Eric, her husband for fifteen years, or her oldest friend, Gerty, whom she knew for even longer. Eric and Gerty both found out only after her death when I told them. It was something they never suspected. Anne had been so secretive about her past in her attempt to escape it.

  A performance of Lohengrin was particularly tempting when I picked up the week’s opera and theater program after landing at Vienna airport. While Anne had turned Bruce and me into avid operagoers on our first visit to Europe in 1971, Wagner was the notable exception. Whereas we went to all of Mozart’s major operas and most of those by Verdi, the only Wagner that we saw was Tristran und Isolde in West Berlin, where Anne found the five-hour performance interminably long, the plot inane, and the singers offensively Aryan. In the thirty-four years since, I had seen none of Wagner’s work, which I had come to regard as irredeemably tainted by his anti-Semitism. I knew it would be good for this book if I went.

  A day later, I spotted an alternative. While Lohengrin was at the opera, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde was presenting a cantor concert in Vienna’s main synagogue to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Befreiung, or liberation, from the Nazis, in 1945. If I went to this concert, it would be my first experience of Jewish music. It would be the first occasion, other than a sightseeing tour, when I would attend the synagogue where Moriz and Hermine had been married more than 110 years before. It would be an opportunity to join in the commemoration of the destruction and the celebration of the survival of Vienna’s Jewish community. I chose the synagogue.

  The week went quickly. I saw The New Austria, an exhibition at the Belvedere staged to mark the much more popular fiftieth anniversary of the “liberation from the occupiers” in 1955, which saw the United States, the USSR, France, and England leave Austria. I visited the Leopold Museum, where I found that Leopold, characteristically, had retained just half the pictures he bought from Anne—and still wished this half elsewhere because of his manipulation of her and acquisition of Schiele’s portrait of Wally when he knew it had been looted. I went to the Wohllebengasse, where I found that Viennese developers, who had acquired the building from the Russian insurance company, had gutted its interiors, destroying most of its Hoffmann features. After making so many visits to Vienna with Anne without talking to anyone Viennese, I met historians, curators, dealers, and journalists.

  The cantor concert was on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary by Saint Anne, a public holiday in Vienna. While that meant that libraries and archives were all closed, I still had too much to do because it was my last day before returning to Australia. For once I gave precedence to present buying. I spent the morning at the Spittelberg market in Vienna’s Seventh District and the Christkindlmarkt in front of the Rathaus on the Ringstrasse and did well at both. Then I had to decide what to do about visiting the grave.

  The Hoffmann grave of Henny Hamburger in Grinzing was gone—removed by the cemetery authorities who took out many old graves to make room for new burials. That still left the shared grave of Moriz, Hermine, Gretl, Kathe, and Lene in Hietzing and those of the Herschmanns, Bonyhadys, and Wilhelm and Eugenia Gallia in the Central Cemetery. When I arrived in Vienna, I expected to go to one cemetery one day and visit the other a day or two later. But I left the cemeteries until last, just as Anne had often done, and then had time only for one. My choice was between Catholics and Jews, between family who were always part of my life and family who I discovered only through this writing.

  I knew the Jews particularly needed visiting. When I first went to Vienna to work on this book and told an acquaintance that I would be going to the Central Cemetery, he told me its old Jewish section was very “romantisch,” or “romantic,” a place of “wilde Tiere,” “wild animals.” I had no idea what he meant until I went a few days later. When I found an almost abandoned domain—a realm of overgrown, sunken graves, fallen stones, and forgotten paths—it was clear how the area could be considered romantic. Yet I was left wondering about the wild animals until I looked up and for a moment in the distance saw two deer with enormous antlers, completely at home in this wilderness.

  The contrast with the adjoining Christian part of the Central Cemetery was a terrible expression of the destruction of the Jewish community, which would otherwise have cared for the graves, a stark indictment of the Austrian government and the City of Vienna for refusing to accept this responsibility when the German government had done so already in the 1950s. Yet the contrast between the Herschmann grave in the Central Cemetery and the Gallia grave in Hietzing also troubled me. While the Herschmann grave had suffered as a result of decades of neglect, the Gallia grave was a model of order as a result of Bruce and my continuing payments that Anne had made for its maintenance. After first visiting the Central Cemetery, my immediate response was that Bruce and I should get the Herschmann grave restored. I wanted to show that at least the occasional person still cared in this landscape of neglect. I felt that we should not be taking care of one side of the family while ignoring the other. But I had not done anything a year later, when I had to decide which graves I would visit. My loyalty to Anne and attachment to Gretl saw me go to Hietzing.

  My last visit there had been the previous year, late one November afternoon when the light was beginning to fail. As I made my way into the cemetery, I was pleased, just like Anne in 1971, to find the grave with ease. As I walked toward it, I saw two flickering red lights. Bruce, who was in Vienna at the time, had not only been there earlier in the afternoon but had repaired the two glass candleholders on either side of the gravestone and bought candles for them for the first time in almost seventy years. While I was there alone, the candle was a bond between us, a symbol he had left for Moriz, Hermine, Gretl, Kathe, and Lene that also became one for me. It was wonderfully comforting in the gloaming.

  When I returned, I meant to repeat what Bruce had done but struggled by myself, so I decided instead to light candles that night in St. Stephen’s Cathedral on my way to the synagogue. Because I was early, I stopped at the Jewish Museum to look at its Mahler exhibition, with the recording of Mahler performing his own piano transcription of the first movement of his Fifth Symphony playing in my ears. I walked to the cathedral, dipped my hand in the holy water as I had learned to do on my first European trip, made the sign of the cross, bought the candles, and sat before them without praying.

  I continued to the synagogue, where I was accustomed to finding police at both the bottom and the top of the street to reduce the risk of attack. I expected that, as usual, I would have to show my passport and go through metal detectors to gain access to the building. That night there were more police than ever, in case anyone thought to target the crowd queueing outside on the cobblestoned street. The questioning from the synagogue’s security guards was also unusually intense. How had I come to hear about the concert? Whom did I know in Vienna’s Jewish community? Why was I there?

  I should have struck up a conversation while waiting outside or sitting in the synagogue. I could have explained my connection to the Stadttempel and this celebration. I might have discovered why my neighbors were there. I sat in the synagogue gazing up at its sky-blue dome dotted with golden stars. I found my German stretched by speeches that dwelled on the latest developments in the payment of Holocaust restitution by the Austrian government. I listened to the cantors and wondered whether, as Wagner had argued, there was a distinctively Jewish voice. I felt no sense of community, but was glad that I had chosen the synagogue over the opera.

  The book stamp by Fritzi Löw of the Wiener Werkstätte showing Hermine and Moriz as a young courting couple.
(Illustration Credits ill.52)

  I found everything transformed at intermission. Instead of the only access being through metal detectors, all the doors on the street were thrown open so members of the crowd could go outside to smoke, just as they would at the opera. While the absence of controls made a mockery of the security before the concert, it was a relief to see the community displaying no fear, acting like any other, enjoying a freedom befitting the sixtieth anniversary of the Befreiung.

  I could easily have walked across the city back to my hotel in the Schleifmühlgasse, just a few blocks away from the old gas-glowing light showroom. Instead, I took the tram around the Ring so I could have a different view of the city by night. As the tram took me past the town hall, which had as usual been turned into a giant advent calendar for Christmas, and I alighted at the Opera so I could walk past the Secession to the Schleifmühlgasse, I wondered what Hermine, Gretl, and Anne would have thought of my day. I knew Hermine and Anne would, this once, have agreed. They would have been horrified to see me at the synagogue. I thought Gretl might have been more sympathetic.

  COLOR PLATES

  The poster by Heinrich Lefler that Moriz commissioned for Auer von Welsbach’s Gas Glowing Light Company. (Illustration Credits ill.53)