In his new post as “attorney general,” Dr. Preminger, as he had on a much smaller scale first in Czernovic and then in Graz, became the legal defender of the crown’s interests, prosecuting those suspected of instigating or conspiring in nationalist rebellions throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like Emperor Franz Josef himself, Dr. Preminger was an ideal bureaucrat, unfailingly punctual, industrious, and self-disciplined, qualities he passed on to his sons. Otto also inherited his father’s instinctive theatricality—in court Dr. Preminger was noted for his showmanship. As Willi Frischauer, Otto’s contemporary and first biographer, and at the time a young journalist, recalled, “[I] covered at least one of the spectacular court appearances of this brilliant lawyer. A determined defender of the status quo, he became a stern prosecutor of all who tried to stab the multinational country in the back while it was still fighting for its life.”27 In court, facing prominent dissidents and would-be secessionists, Dr. Preminger with well-timed retorts and withering glances displayed a seeming delight in going for the jugular. As Frischauer reported, Dr. Preminger was the lead prosecutor of a certain Dr. Kramarz,
which in German rhymes with “arse,” a Bohemian member of the Austrian parliament who was indicted for plotting the breakaway of Bohemia from the monarchy. The verbal duel [between the defendant and the prosecutor] was a forensic occasion. Facing the dock, Dr. Preminger stemmed the flow of Kramarz’s inflammatory rhetoric: “You ought to be ashamed,” he said with an icy voice, “right into the last syllable of your name!” The phrase is still quoted as a unique example of courtroom invective.28
“When we moved to Vienna [in 1915] the great days were already gone,” Ingo observed. The Great War that Gavrilo Princip’s bullets at Sarajevo had initiated was being fought, in part, in an attempt to preserve what was left of Vienna’s imperial heritage, its celebrated status as the capital of a vast empire. A long period of swelling discontent among the people it governed had severely tarnished the regime, however, and by 1915 Vienna was on its way to becoming “a museum city, a city that lived on its past,” as Ingo said.29 For centuries, since the rule of the first Hapsburg emperor, Albert II, began in 1438, Vienna had been the seat of the Empire, a cosmopolitan crossroads to which Polish, German, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Hungarian, and Bohemian citizens were frequent visitors. Proud of its royal status, Vienna was addicted to pomp and ceremony, and to florid architecture. The Viennese admiration of façade is epitomized by the baroque embellishments of the Hofburg, the sprawling imperial residence located in the heart of the old city, and in the Ringstrasse, the wide boulevard that encircles the inner city. The Ringstrasse, which began to be constructed on May 1, 1865, but was not completed for two decades, was designed as a spectacular civic self-promotion, the myriad architectural references of the buildings that line the boulevard intended to assert Vienna’s place in a historical continuum. The university is sheathed in an imposing Italian Renaissance face, the style adopted also for the joined museums of art history and natural history. Parliament is designed with classic Greek simplicity, wrought on a monumental scale. City Hall is intensely Gothic. The Court Opera is French Renaissance. Early Baroque is the style for the Burgtheater. The forced magnitude of the architectural performance, along with the eclectic historical references, betrays a sneaking sense of inferiority. Rather than conjuring strength, the Ringstrasse projects an aura of borrowed grandeur.
Like Otto Preminger, a “native” son destined to achieve international fame, historical Vienna was a city of vivid contradictions, in many ways a city divided against itself. In The Viennese, Paul Hofmann quotes a revelatory insight by an outsider, a Dutch conductor-composer named Beernard van Beurden: “The Austrian lives in a two-room apartment. One room is bright, friendly, the ‘cozy parlor,’ well furnished, where he receives his guests. The other room is dark, somber, barred, totally unfathomable. If the visitors in the friendly parlor are not naïve,” Hofmann concludes, “they will nevertheless soon steal glances of the ‘other room,’ where the ambivalent Viennese personality also dwells.”30 Summarizing the disparity between appearance and reality seemingly endemic to Vienna, Hofmann observes that “the city that inspired Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, the capital of Gemütlichkeit, of hand-kissing and the waltz, of coffeehouses and wine taverns in the green, of whipped cream and the annual ball, has long had one of the highest suicide rates in the world.”31
As the site of imperial power and its rituals, Vienna adopted a courtly culture defined by exaggerated deference to women, a love of gossip and intrigue, virtual adulation of titles, jostling for preferment, and a mask of sociability put on to sustain the fiction of “merry Vienna” enacted in the numerous historic coffeehouses. The image of cozy Vienna, a light-minded city engaged in perpetual play the city of Sachertorte mit Schlag and Wiener melange, of perennial productions of The Merry Widow, of waltzes eternal on the banks of the blue Danube, is of course sleight of hand concocted to distract the tourist trade from the city’s other, darker face. Vienna’s relentless self-mythologizing is sometimes easily enough shattered. For one, the Danube is rarely blue (a blank, steely gray is more like it), and further, is nowhere to be seen from within the heart of imperial Vienna. Only the equally drab Danube canal can be glimpsed fleetingly from the outer edges of the Old City. Unlike in Budapest, where the Danube flows through the heart of the city in a stream of majestic width, the fabled river linked to Vienna in song and story is notable for its absence. Like so much else in the city’s iconography, the blue Danube is a cunning ruse, an attempt to gild plain reality with a manufactured romantic veneer: Vienna “performed” rather than content to be itself. The Viennese themselves have a word to describe their fondness for pretense: Schmähe. The “best translation of this dialect term,” as Hofmann writes, is “ ‘blarney Viennese style.’ ”32 (Otto Preminger’s skilled importation of “Vienna” to New York and Hollywood— his deft performance of Viennese courtliness—would help to solidify his reputation as a “personality”)
A far more sobering charge against the city is its history of anti-Semitism. It was during his time in Vienna, in a crucial formative period from 1907 to 1913, that Hitler began to develop his maniacal racial beliefs. In Vienna he heard, and was impressed by, poisonous theories of racial anti-Semitism spouted by Georg von Schönerer, the Austrian pan-Germanist and founder of the German National Party. The city’s mayor, the most beloved in its history, was the infamous Karl Lueger, der Schöne Karl (“Handsome Karl”), whose Christian Social Party pretended to represent the voice of the common people. Mayor from 1897 until his death in 1910,
Lueger honed his performance of Viennese charm to diabolic perfection. Taking an accurate pulse of his primarily working-class supporters, Lueger was elected on a platform of attacks against Jewish influence in the city’s business, industrial, and cultural affairs. “I decide who is a Jew,” declared Lueger, a strategic anti-Semite who in fact had a number of Jewish friends. He intuited, correctly, that a relentless rhetoric of anti-Semitism would get him elected and would help to sustain his popularity once he was in office. (On three separate occasions the philo-Semitic Emperor Franz Josef had opposed Lueger’s election by the city parliament.) In Mein Kampf, Hitler conferred on der Schöne Karl the epithet Lueger no doubt deserved: “the most formidable German mayor of all time.”33
It is surely not merely historical chance that Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was exposed in his formative years to the endemic anti-Semitism of Austrian culture. A Viennese dandy (though born in Budapest, Herzl was raised in Vienna) and an assimilated Jew, Herzl was the victim of numerous anti-Semitic attacks while a law student at the University of Vienna. When, as a correspondent for Vienna’s liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse, he went to Paris to cover the Dreyfus affair, French anti-Semitism together with his Viennese experience propelled him toward a momentous Zionist conversion.
If Vienna reveled, then as now, in its status as a “museum city” and vigorously promoted its Old World patina, only
a few years before Dr. Markus Preminger and his family arrived, the city, in another of its contradictions, had been a crucible of modernist rebellion. The roll call of Viennese visionaries of the early years of the century includes painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; architects Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner; composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg; and writers Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, and Robert Musil. Challenging the academic tradition in painting, based in historicism and naturalism, Klimt founded the artistic movement known as the Secession. Schoenberg explored atonality The artisans working in the Viennese brand of art nouveau known as Jugendstil, and craftsmen of the Wiener Werstätte (the Viennese Workshop, founded by Kolo Moser and Josef Hoffmann in 1903), developed a simple style in furniture, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and objets d’art that forcibly rejected the baroque overstatement which had always been the city’s favored mode. And it was during Vienna’s brief period at the cutting edge of modernism that Theodor Herzl developed his Zionist idea and native son Sigmund Freud, finding plentiful data among his fellow citizens for his theories about neurosis, explored the death wish, dreams, and human sexuality.
Ironically, the city’s short-lived golden age as a center of avant-garde experiment was also the beginning of the end. As Paul Hofmann observes, by the conclusion of the Great War, in October and November 1918, Vienna “joined the ranks of those once-illustrious cities that have fallen on hard, or drab, times. Like Alexandria, Athens, Istanbul, Lisbon, Naples, Venice … Vienna became an urban has-been.”34
When Markus Preminger relocated his family to Vienna in 1915, the city had already passed through an initial outburst of patriotism that followed the outbreak of war. And though in the thick of the conflict it was not yet possible to foresee the eventual defeat of the Empire, the death tremors, sotto voce, had already begun. Nonetheless, at the time the Premingers arrived, Vienna was still an imperial capital with an array of cultural offerings that tempted Otto, at ten already incurably stagestruck. Often accompanied by his maternal grandfather, Otto made regular visits, sometimes as many as three or four a week, to the Burgtheater on the Ringstrasse, where he saw a wide variety of both classical and contemporary plays.
In retrospect Ingo recalled the Viennese theater of the time as “terrible—the only good stuff came from Berlin.” And unlike Otto, “who was basically nonmusical—music bored him, he never went to the opera,” Ingo preferred the city’s rich musical offerings, even though “the really great days, when Vienna was the center of the musical world, were over by the time I started going to concerts and operas.”35
From his very earliest days in Vienna, seeing and reading plays was more important to Otto than attending school. The youngster thought nothing of missing class in order to read another great play by Shaw or Schiller or Shakespeare, in a handsome edition at the National Library. Soon after the family settled in Vienna, a routine visit to a family doctor revealed that Otto had a heart murmur. The doctor’s recommendation that the young man should refrain from sports was no hardship—unlike his younger brother, Otto was nonathletic, and being sidelined from exercise gave him more time to read.
Typical of assimilated, well-to-do Jewish families, the Premingers were cultural connoisseurs. Books, theater, concerts, and museums quickly became a part of the fabric of their lives as new arrivals in Vienna. And given Dr. Preminger’s prominence (“My father was very well known in Vienna for his work of so-called patriotic indictments,” Ingo recalled),36 attendance at cultural events might also have been a way of attaining social cachet. Markus encouraged Otto’s obsession with theater. “I saw everything,” Otto recalled. “Shaw was popular then: I saw Caesar and Cleopatra 72 times.”37
Otto’s first theatrical ambition was to become an actor. And with his already stentorian voice, his penetrating eyes, and his sturdy build, the young man, who projected a crackling sexual energy, was not deluding himself with dreams of joining the Burgtheater ensemble. In his early teens he could recite from memory many of the great monologues from the international classic repertory, and, never shy, he demanded an audience. At first, most of the burden fell on his grandfather, who regularly filled the young
Otto as a young man on the town, more interested in theater and concerts than in attending classes.
man’s ears with praise. Otto began to recruit some of his schoolmates for group readings in his family’s apartment of some of the plays he had committed to memory. Emboldened by the success of the readings, he soon sought and gained permission from the stodgy director of the National Library to allow him and his friends to read aloud portions of classic plays in the library’s rotunda. Otto’s own most successful performance in the rotunda was Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar.
As he read, saw, and after a fashion began to produce plays, Otto started missing more and more classes at the local Catholic gymnasium. “There were times when I didn’t go to school for many weeks, and when it came to light, [my father] stood up for me. He told the school [officials] I [had been] sick and [they] gave me a chance to catch up on what I had missed. [My father and I] had a wonderful relationship, like two brothers. He never punished me.”38
Austria’s failing fortunes in the world war had no impact on the Preminger family’s way of life. Indeed, throughout the conflict, Markus flourished professionally as he continued to prosecute dissenters, mostly Czech nationalists. At the end of 1916 he moved his family from the eighth district to Mahlerstrasse 9, fashionably located within the inner city. Throughout the war years, Otto, now often with his younger brother, continued to go to the theater and concerts, museums, and the National Library. His attendance at school remained irregular, with his absences never once eliciting a cross word from his father.
Following Austria’s defeat in the autumn of 1918, Vienna’s status fell quickly. Inflation escalated. Immigrants from the countries that had been ruled by the former Empire flooded into the already overpopulated city. Famine was widespread. Overnight, with the collapse of the Empire, Austria faced the challenge of becoming a republic, a prospect that roused the skepticism of the Austrians as well as of the international community. “In 1918 and 1919 … the Viennese not only doubted the new state’s chances for survival but were not even sure how it should be called,” as Paul Hofmann notes. “Some proposed German Alpine Land, others Southeast Germany. The name German-Austria (Deutschoesterreich) came eventually to be accepted and, for some time, official.”39 With the dissolution of the monarchy Markus, of course, lost his government job, and as erstwhile attorney general he was publicly attacked by leaders of countries that had been newly created in the wake of the Empire’s defeat. Under fire, Dr. Preminger, who had believed in the Empire he had worked vigorously to safeguard, bequeathed a valuable lesson to his older son. “One day [my father] found my mother weeping over a cruel editorial [denouncing Markus’s work for the Empire]. He comforted her with words that left a deep impression on me,” Preminger recalled. “ ‘Will you never learn, darling?’ he said. ‘Anyone who acts in public must be prepared for criticism, just or unjust. Only your own conviction and your own judgment of yourself count.’ ”40
Soon after his former employer was out of business, Markus opened his own law practice. Because his clients—bankers, industrialists, and businessmen—were drawn from the new ruling class, Dr. Preminger remained on the same side of the political spectrum, with the elite rather than the disenfranchised. And as defender of the well-to-do he proved as adept as he had been in prosecuting enemies of the Empire. But Markus instilled in both his sons a sense of fair play as well as respect for those with opposing viewpoints, and rather than becoming reactionary conservatives, as their privileged upbringing might seem to have foreordained, Otto and Ingo became lifelong liberal Democrats.
“It was when he switched to private practice that my father started making good money, very good money,” Ingo said. “We started out in Vienna in modest quarters, but we ended up on the Ringstrasse.” The Premingers’ th
ird and last apartment in Vienna was located at Lueger Ring No. 10. (The street was named for Karl Lueger, for whom Ingo expressed respect. “He followed a ‘creative’ kind of anti-Semitism, and if a Jew became Catholic the prejudice disappeared,” Ingo claimed. “It was well known that, privately, Lueger did not hate Jews.”)41 Directly across the street was the University of Vienna, which Otto would enter soon after the family had moved into their new apartment, and just a few minutes’ walk down the Ringstrasse were the Burgtheater and the elegant Café Landtmann. As was customary at the time, Markus’s office was in a separate wing of the family apartment.
To provide a suitable setting for Markus’s prosperous clients, and no doubt reflecting their own tastes, Dr. and Mrs. Preminger decorated their apartment in a style of traditional Ringstrasse formality. The ornate Biedermeier furnishings evoked an Old World taste that Markus’s sons, and especially Otto, would repudiate. “For both my father and uncle, the Old World style was to be shunned,” Eve Preminger remarked. “It was simply a style they could not abide.”42
As Markus continued to thrive in postwar Vienna, Otto began seriously to pursue a career in the theater. At sixteen, he won the role of Lysander in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed in the open-air theater, the Burggarten, on the grounds of the old imperial palace. And in 1923, at seventeen, as was often to be the case in his career, timing was on his side. Max Reinhardt, the Viennese-born director who had established his base of operation in Berlin, announced plans to establish a theatrical company in Vienna in the rundown, 135-year-old Theater in der Josefstadt, located only steps away from the school Otto was then attending. A stagestruck banker, Camillo Castiglioni, who had amassed a fortune amid the economic shambles of postwar Vienna, made Reinhardt a princely offer: unlimited funding for the renovation of the theater in exchange for the best house seats at every performance. Under Reinhardt’s supervision, the Theater in der Josefstadt was transformed into a baroque bijou. Despite lavish appointments in the lobby and auditorium, however, the renovated theater had an air of intimacy, as if the grand seigneur himself was welcoming the audience into his living room. In the beautifully proportioned hall each seat offered a clear view of the stage. Adding a final personal touch, Reinhardt ordered from Venice a magnificent crystal chandelier, which “hangs brightly lit in the middle of the theater as the audience arrives,” Otto noted, with the kind of admiration the maestro had clearly wanted to evoke from his audiences. “When the performance is about to start its eight hundred electric candles dim slowly while the huge glittering fixture rises to the ceiling in order to give the boxes and balconies an unobstructed view of the stage. This beautiful effect creates in the audience a unique mood of expectation.”43
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