The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  The house, designed by noted architect Christian Heidecke, featured fifteen main rooms grouped around a central court—including a ladies’ drawing room, a private office for Eugen, a gentlemen’s smoking room, a glass-enclosed winter garden that also served as a music room, and a magnificent formal dining room. Sophie and Eugen’s dressing rooms, as well as the children’s rooms, were on the second floor; household servants lived in small rooms in the gabled attic. The house was decorated in what would be known as le goût Rothschild (in the taste of the Rothschilds), with extensive brocade and gilt, antique-wood paneling, and fabulously elaborate stucco ceilings. The eighteenth-century French furnishings were from the eras of Louis XIV through Louis XVI: tulipwood secretaries, mahogany bureaus, cabinets inlaid with tortoiseshell and ivory, marquetry tables, gilded mirrors, Gobelin tapestries, and vitrines full of Meissen.

  The villa at 10 Rauchstrasse teemed with life. There were gardens and gardeners, cooks and maids, a butler, a carriage house, coachmen, and horses in the stables. By the turn of the century, Eugen, who was always fascinated by the new and innovative, added to the horse-drawn carriages a more modern conveyance. I was delighted to uncover a photo from around 1900 of Eugen’s first Elektromobil, a battery-powered, chauffeur-driven electric hansom cab made by Karl Benz.

  From the villa grounds echoed the sounds of horses neighing and the barking of dogs, of which there were many, especially poodles. From the upstairs rooms, where the children lived, came the usual childish cries and squeals and laughter, the screeching of violin lessons, the dull notes of scales played on a piano, and the rote repetition of verbs and declensions being chanted in several languages. Far from being a museum piece, the house on Rauchstrasse was a noisy, going family concern.

  Although the actual raising of the children was left to a succession of harried nurses, nannies, governesses, and tutors, Eugen was keenly involved in his children’s lives, to a degree that was unusual for the time, and particularly so for such a powerful, autocratic figure. He took a tolerant and openly affectionate view of them and closely followed their education and development. Occasionally he would even play simple card games with his children and would beam with delight when, with childish outrage, they would catch him cheating. (Years later he was still trying out the same old tricks on his grandchildren, including my father.) Considering the business and social demands on Eugen’s time, these interactions were necessarily rare, which to the children made these moments with their father even more precious. They regarded this patriarchal figure with awe. There is no doubt that he loved them, and they him.

  Sophie, on the other hand, was much more emotionally distant, perhaps because of her own difficult childhood. My grandfather Fritz, the youngest, would remember that he rarely ever saw his mother, except when she would come upstairs, resplendent in evening gown, jewels, and pearls, to formally inspect the children before she dashed off for an evening at the opera or the theater, or to play hostess at the latest grand dinner party.

  These glittering, glamorous affairs were numerous; Eugen’s social connections were extensive. The dinner guests included all the major captains of finance and industry, and next-door neighbors the Hainauers, who represented the French Rothschilds. There was also a seemingly endless stream of diplomats, politicians, musicians, young writers such as Thomas Mann, artists such as Max Liebermann, Prussian army officers, the Baron and Baroness This and the Duke and Duchess of That. The house was filled with the passionate discussion of philosophy and politics, music and art.

  So this was my great-grandfather: a pillar of finance and industry, a social lion, a man of enormous wealth, a respected and widely renowned connoisseur of art, and a loving father of a large and happy brood of children. He would seem to be the quintessential man who has everything.

  BEGINNING OF THE GUTMANN ART COLLECTION

  In Eugen’s time, collecting art reflected more than an appreciation of aesthetics and beauty. As a symbol of power and wealth, one’s ability to afford great art could also provoke great envy. It was common for Berlin sophisticates to snicker at the wealthy parvenus and arrivistes—particularly the Jewish ones—who sought through their art collections to achieve social aggrandizement. Eugen, though never formally schooled in art, instinctively knew the difference between the priceless and the merely overpriced. One of the most magnificent private collections of objets d’art in all of Germany was on display in those dazzling vitrines and cabinets at 10 Rauchstrasse.

  Unlike the way he pursued his banking career, Eugen assembled his art collection cautiously. He started small—quite literally. He began with miniature portraits. My great-grandfather seemed from the start to have a knack for the sublime. Miniatures by now-recognized masters of the genre such as François Dumont, Richard Cosway, Peter Adolf Hall, and Peter Paillou became part of Eugen’s growing collection. His passion then progressed to gold boxes: eighteenth-century objets de vertu—snuffboxes and containers that were exquisite in execution, masterfully fashioned, inlaid with pearls, jewels, ivory, and tortoiseshell.

  Growing up in Dresden, with the Grünes Gewölbe, or “Green Vault” treasure rooms of the Kings of Saxony, would have set the standard for Eugen. Following his footsteps in Dresden, a few years ago I found myself before an entire section devoted to exotic and elaborate gilded nautilus shells. I think at that moment I came close to experiencing the same awe that must have inspired my great-grandfather—nautilus shells, jewels and gemstones, ivory and pearls, coconuts and ostrich eggs, all fashioned in gold and silver.

  In 1893 Eugen made a much-anticipated trip to Paris. Just a few years before, Frédéric Spitzer, the famed Viennese antiquarian and adviser to the Rothschilds, had died, leaving one of the largest and most coveted collections in fin de siècle Europe. Dubbed the “sale of the century,” the auction would last over three months. Eugen knew it would be the most hotly contested auction and the bidding would be furious. All the same, he had done his research, and he had to have several pieces. Uppermost on his list was one of the famous Orpheus clocks, of which fewer than a dozen are left in the world. This particular one was perhaps the most exquisitely engraved gilt table clock of the Renaissance. The mysterious dial, Eugen was told, had been crafted by the master of sixteenth-century German goldsmiths, Wenzel Jamnitzer.

  In the early 1530s Jamnitzer had opened his narrow workshop, just a few doors down from Albrecht Dürer’s house, in the shadows of the Imperial Castle of Nuremberg. The ground floor centered around an enormous hot kiln. On the next floor were printing presses for etchings. From here Jamnitzer and his sons produced a dazzling array of vases, engravings, jewelry, and artifacts of silver and gold. Soon he was appointed court goldsmith to the German Emperor. Much of Jamnitzer’s fame was based on highly inventive objects for the curiosity cabinets of princes, as well as extravagant presentation pieces. On just a few occasions Jamnitzer would focus his talents on decorating a clock; of these barely a handful survive.

  The clock Eugen coveted was one of these. If one can visualize the chronometrically perfect components rendered in gilt brass, with a case of gold and bronze covered with intricate high-relief depictions of scenes from the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld, one has an idea of the mechanical mastery and artistic genius of this clock.

  After a spirited contest in Spitzer’s elaborate Paris mansion, near the Arc de Triomphe, my great-grandfather prevailed, and the Orpheus Clock, originally intended for an Italian Renaissance prince, would soon find its way to the Gutmann home in Berlin.

  As time went on, Eugen’s collecting interests became increasingly eclectic: Renaissance jeweled pendants, seventeenth-century pocket watches, Italian bronzes, medieval illustrated manuscripts, and Renaissance majolica pottery.

  Perhaps the most astonishing pieces in Eugen’s collection, and closest to his heart, were the German Renaissance and Mannerist silver-gilt sculptures. Most of these pieces illustrated Eugen’s continued fascination with the combination of beauty and function. Johannes Lencker’s
ewer, featuring a nymph on the back of a mythological fish-man known as a triton, is considered to be one of the greatest pieces ever made by the master sculptors of sixteenth-century Augsburg. Eugen acquired from the late Baron Karl von Rothschild a magnificent pair of sixteenth-century silver-gilt drinking cups by Hans Petzolt of Nuremberg. Perhaps the most coveted of all was the Jamnitzer Becher (chalice), created by Wenzel Jamnitzer’s son Abraham and featuring a pedestal of three golden elephants supporting an ornate stem flanked by golden angels and a perfectly white ivory cup topped with a gold crown, out of which blossomed an entire miniature Gothic castle, replete with turrets adorned with silver and pearl. And this was just one of hundreds of exquisite pieces.

  I discovered that Eugen’s collection was not static, but rather a constantly evolving ensemble. In 1907, finding his collection a bit heavy with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century silver-gilt “wager cups” and silver plate, he sold some of those pieces to his American counterpart, J. P. Morgan, for a reported 1 million marks (roughly 6 million in today’s dollars). Later Eugen bought the famous Jamnitzer chalice from the estate of the last Baron von Harsdorf of Nuremberg for roughly the modern-day equivalent of $2 million.

  The Gutmann silver and gold collection—in German simply the Silbersammlung Gutmann—became almost legendary in its time. Even the vitrine display cabinets were famous in their own right. During the same trip to Paris when Eugen secured the Orpheus Clock as well as the Reinhold Clock for his collection, he also, quite remarkably, acquired from Fontainebleau a spectacular series of Empire ormolu cabinets that had once belonged to Napoléon.

  In 1906, Eugen’s friend Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Berlin state museums, publicly exhibited the collection in honor of the Kaiser. Later, the distinguished art historian Otto von Falke wrote that Eugen’s collection was “worthy to rank beside the treasure chambers of princes.” It also became the object of considerable jealousy. One century and multiple catastrophes later, I would hold some of those silver pieces in my hands and marvel not only at the skill of the men who’d made them, but at the artistic taste and discernment of the man who had so lovingly collected them.

  I remember when I first began my search into my family’s history, Aunt Lili had warned me that nothing good would ever come from unlocking the saga of the Silbersammlung Gutmann. She compared it to the mythical Nibelungen gold and said it was cursed. At the time I had no idea what she meant. Now I do.

  CONVERSION IN GERMANY

  German Jews reacted to prejudice against them in different ways, many of which created deep divisions within the Jewish community, and even between individual families. Most Jews retained their traditional heritage and identity even while practicing German customs. For example, many assimilated Jews celebrated the Sabbath on Sundays, instead of Saturday. In Berlin, most of the city’s Jews observed Christmas as a national holiday, complete with tannenbaums in their living rooms. Still others took a different tack, embracing an assertive form of Judaism—Zionism—as an alternative to assimilation. Even so, many German Jews chose to become Christian, at least nominally. Eugen and his children were among this group. In 1898, they officially converted to Lutheranism, just a few years after Bernhard, the patriarch, had passed away. Was the timing out of respect? I have often wondered why.

  Significantly, Bernhard left his castle, Schloss Schönfeld, not to Eugen but to Eugen’s younger brother Alfred. Bernhard had been unhappy with Eugen’s lack of religious observance for some time, whereas Alfred had remained faithful to the Jewish religion. Perhaps this had been the cause of another Gutmann family feud?

  Certainly the conversion was not the result of some sudden personal epiphany or crisis of faith on Eugen’s part. Eugen had never been religious, at least not since his boyhood days in Dresden. He and Sophie and the children had barely observed the High Holidays, if at all, and only rarely attended Berlin’s grand, Moorish-style New Synagogue on the Oranienburger Strasse. In December the house on the Rauchstrasse not only had a Christmas tree, but also a smaller tree decorated with German sausages for the family dogs.

  It could be said of Eugen, a relentlessly secular man, that his only true places of worship were the bank, the home, and the opera house—and that was equally true after his conversion. A nonpracticing Jew before, he became an equally nonpracticing Christian afterward. Save for his conversion and the occasional wedding, Eugen was never known to set foot in a church.

  If not motivated by faith, was his conversion an attempt by Eugen to improve his social standing and business prospects, or was it a necessary first step toward achieving a royal appointment to the German nobility? At the time of his conversion, Eugen was already wealthy and was clearly respected in Germany. As for aspirations to nobility, that, too, seems unlikely. When he had been offered the title of baron by the Kaiser, Eugen reacted by saying he didn’t need to add anything to his name: “Gutmann was enough.”

  So again, why the conversion? A hopeless attempt to break the anti-Semitic curse? I cannot know for certain. It was not discussed within the family. Certainly my father never spoke of it. I can only speculate. Perhaps it was for Eugen simply a public statement of his German identity, a final logical step in his steady assimilation. Maybe he gave up something that he didn’t endorse—a separate Jewish culture—in favor of something that he believed in most strongly—a unified and secularized German nation. Or, perhaps in the same way he grew rich by anticipating market forces and trends, Eugen sensed something dark and foreboding within the German nation, some premonition of disaster, and wanted to insulate, if possible, his children and grandchildren from what he thought might be coming.

  The Gutmann family conversion persuaded few of Eugen’s contemporaries that the Gutmann family was now, suddenly, no longer Jewish. Unlike in earlier eras, when the distinction between Jew and Christian was essentially religious, by the turn of the century Jewishness in Germany and elsewhere had become a question of race, of ethnicity, of blood. It might be possible to change one’s religion, but changing one’s ancestry was impossible. Thus, those Germans who chose to hate and despise Jews would continue to hate and despise converted Jews.

  It’s probably also fair to say that most German Jews, even the most religiously secular among them, regarded conversion as a kind of cultural betrayal and generally did not accept that Jewish converts had ever truly stopped being Jewish. All of which may explain why, curiously, even after becoming Christian, Heinrich Heine remains in both Jewish and secular literature a “Jewish poet,” the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Fritz Haber remains a “Jewish chemist,” and Eugen Gutmann, to this day, is still a “Jewish banker.”

  So the Gutmanns would remain Jewish in Gentile eyes, defectors in Jewish eyes, and secular in their own eyes. This situation would cause for subsequent generations, down to my own, no end of misunderstanding and loss of cultural connection and identity—some of it merely awkward, and some of it fatal.

  Meanwhile, at home, other uncertainties loomed over Eugen as the new century dawned. His marriage to Sophie, never tranquil, was breaking apart. She had always been a difficult personality, headstrong and increasingly resentful of her duties. Eugen’s reputed philandering could not have helped, but it was Sophie who became the subject of a scandalous rumor—an affair with a young tutor in the Gutmann household. Perhaps true, perhaps not, the story rocked the Berlin tabloids. There was even talk of a duel until the tutor fled the country.

  It was all simply too much for the family. The couple divorced in 1902 and Sophie moved to Italy, where she married a young Italian count, Cesare Sciamplicotti. She died in 1915 when she was only sixty-three. It is perhaps revealing that after the divorce the three youngest children—Kurt, Max, and Fritz—all still teenagers, stayed home in Berlin with Papa.

  After the divorce Eugen married another aspiring opera singer, a much younger German American woman named Mary Stevenson, who unfortunately died a few years later. With admirable vigor for a man of seventy-eight, Eugen then carried on an affair
with the celebrated opera diva Barbara Kemp. He bought a Baroque manor house, the Schloss Zeesen, on a lake south of the city, where he continued to play host to Berlin society. He vacationed at the elegant Dutch seaside resorts of Scheveningen and Noordwijk, and at the new Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Maria in Switzerland. As Eugen approached retirement, he could look back on a life that had been, for the most part, well and successfully lived.

  EUGEN’S CHILDREN

  Not surprisingly, Eugen’s children would also have their trials and tribulations. His eldest daughter, Lili, was a great beauty—elegant, refined, and, thanks to her father, wealthy. As she came of age, she was a center of considerable attention from the young banking scions, diplomats, and bemedaled Prussian military officers who socialized at the Gutmann villa.

  Among them was a dashing young cavalry major named Baron Adolf von Holzing-Berstett. Lili’s 1898 wedding to Adolf was a lavish affair at which Prince Max of Baden, the last Chancellor of the German Empire, accompanied Lili to the altar in a church filled with exotic flowers gifted by Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden. But their marriage proved unhappy. The union produced no children, and in 1909 the baron, beset by gambling debts, committed suicide. One wonders why he didn’t ask Lili or Eugen for the money, but perhaps he had already gone too often to that well. Two years later, my great-aunt Lili would remarry, to an Italian diplomat and aristocrat, Luca Orsini Baroni. Significantly, Luca would later become the Italian ambassador to Germany.

  Eugen’s other daughter, Toinon, married Hans Schuster-Burckhardt, the son of the chairman of the Swiss Bank Corporation. Hans would become one of Eugen’s most trusted aides at the Dresdner Bank. They had three children, but sadly, Hans would die in 1914 of an apparent heart attack. Toinon would later marry Baron Hans Henrik von Essen, the Swedish ambassador to Germany.