The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Mizzi felt honored to be taken seriously by a great man. Klimt asked her to model nude for the Naked Truth of the Secession. Mizzi introduced Klimt to her mother, raising expectations. Klimt wangled Mizzi a role on a holiday parade float representing Vienna, and her family cheered with the crowd.

  Teenager Mizzi Zimmermann, at left, 1899. She became pregnant with Klimt’s son while she modeled for his painting of Schubert playing the piano. (Illustration Credit 7.2)

  Klimt unveiled his painting of Schubert, playing one of his sensual piano compositions. But he didn’t invite Mizzi to the Dumba Palace on the Ringstrasse to join the guests admiring his rendering of her as a delicately lit, mysterious beauty by the piano, her hair a russet halo. The critic Hermann Bahr called it “the most beautiful painting that was ever painted by an Austrian,” saying that “this tranquility, this placidness, this radiance on the civic modesty—this is our Austrian character.”

  But Mizzi was desperate. Mizzi was pregnant. “Is it possible that your dear good mother doesn’t have a clue?” Klimt wrote, when he returned from his steamy encounter with Alma.

  I’m falling apart from within, in a chaos of contradictions. How destiny has tortured me, hunted me. I feel more guilty than you can ever imagine. How was I ever happy? How was I looking forward to Italy? How much did I hope, full of longing, to be relieved of this sadness? But it was not meant to be. Everything beautiful was destroyed by torturous thoughts! My heart wanted to burst from pain.

  From the time you came, I felt you were a kind of Fate. I felt it would be better if you didn’t come, but I couldn’t do without you. But at the same time, the beast within the man was aroused. I held it down, and we resisted for a time. I had a holy reverence for the Virgin. You were saved. Then you came again, you came again, transformed! And the disastrous mischief began.

  How deeply it cut into my heart when I was asked, at the unveiling of my last painting, this painting of misfortune, so many times: “Who is She?” Always “She,” the very image of you. I should have told them, “That is a blessed and beautiful child, that I have brought misfortune and misery.” And if I rake my feverish mind, from the depths of my idiotic skull, I can’t change what has happened.

  Dear Mizzi, maybe you can find the courage to tell [your mother] everything. Is it really so unnatural, so incomprehensible, Mizzi? Is it the most disgusting thing that can happen to two human beings? Must I wander the earth a haunted man? Bring me a bit of comfort by telling me that you forgive me. I need strength. It is imperative. I am bound to do major state commissions until the Paris World Exhibition. I have to sustain my poor and defenseless sisters.

  You shall be cared for as if you were my wife. I want to shelter you from sorrow, and look after your future, as a small penitence, for the misery I have brought upon us. For that, however, I need the strength to awaken from this despair.

  You are going to bring it to me when you say that you don’t blame me, and your dear mother does not condemn me. I ask you for this comfort. With it, I will return to work, with redoubled strength. Will there be a reprieve? Your deeply unhappy friend, Gustav Klimt

  He didn’t tell Mizzi he was expecting another child in two months, with a poor Czech washerwoman named Maria Ucicka.

  The odds were against Mizzi from the start. Klimt was deeply attached to his unmarried sister-in-law, Emilie Flöge, and her family. He would never give up this relationship, or the summer idylls at mountain lakes with the warm, close-knit family that his late brother Ernst had had the good fortune to marry into. They were the only real family Klimt had ever had.

  Mizzi took Klimt’s advice. She told her family. Her stepfather threw her out, enraged she would jeopardize her sisters’ slim marriage prospects. Mizzi moved into a small hotel and begged Klimt for financial support. Marriage was not just a convention for most women in those days; it was the arbitrator of their destiny. It could determine comfort or poverty, companionship or abject loneliness. For a girl like Mizzi, an affair with Klimt was a high-stakes endeavor.

  Mizzi was ruined.

  An Innocent Abroad

  Like the Bauers, many members of the Jewish elite considered themselves quintessentially Viennese. Freud donned lederhosen to stroll in the Vienna Woods with his daughter Anna. The Bauers celebrated Christmas and Easter as they did the balls of the opera season. In the eyes of Vienna wit Alfred Polgar, even the classic Viennese feuilleton, or short funny sketch, blended “the melancholy of the synagogue and the alcoholic mood of Grinzing,” the medieval winery district in the Vienna Woods. The Viennese Fiakerlied, or “Coachman’s Song,” a favorite of the crown prince, was composed by a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Jewish bon vivants like Budapest-born Felix Salten seemed über wiener, more Viennese than the Viennese.

  Yet a wall of social prejudice stubbornly defined them as Jews. One of the more unusual Vienna residents to point out the virulence of this tenacious anti-Semitism was Samuel Clemens, the American writer known by his pen name, Mark Twain.

  Twain moved his family to Vienna in September 1897. He was depressed. The previous year, his family had lost their beloved daughter Susy to spinal meningitis, at twenty-four. Twain desperately needed a change of scene. He was suffering from paralyzing writer’s block when he checked in to the Hotel Metropol, on the Morzinplatz overlooking the Danube Canal. He brought his God-fearing wife, Olivia, and his daughter Clara, the belle of the family.

  Twain was already something of a philo-Semite. “The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole’s and the Archbishop’s,” Twain wrote a few weeks after arriving in Vienna, to the Reverend Joseph Twichell, an old friend. “It’s a marvelous race—by long odds the most marvelous the world has ever produced, I suppose.”

  Mark Twain, sitting for a sculpture by Theresa Federowna Ries in Vienna. Twain had so many Jewish friends in Adele’s milieu that he was called “the Jew Mark Twain” in the anti-Semitic press of 1897. (Illustration Credit 8.1)

  The Vienna literati invited Twain to address the Concordia club in October. He found himself face-to-face with the crème de la crème of Jewish society. Nearly half the Concordia’s 348 members were Jews. The audience included nearly every prominent member of Adele Bauer’s Jewish milieu, from Gustav Mahler, Alma’s future husband, to the handsome and picaresque Felix Salten, a journalist who was writing a sexually explicit fictional memoir of a teenage Vienna prostitute, but would someday be better known as the author of Bambi, the children’s classic. Viktor Leon was the librettist of The Merry Widow. The great Vienna newspaper editor Moritz Szeps found a seat at the august all-male club; and his daughter, the pioneer female journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, likely watched from a special balcony for women. Vienna journalist Julius Bauer, a close friend of Adele’s family who penned a libretto for Johann Strauss the Younger, wrote a picaresque song about Twain’s exploits that was sung, opera-style, by Alexander Girardi, the star of the wildly popular Strauss opera Die Fledermaus.

  Then Twain stood up before these Vienna wits and confided that he had always wanted to deliver a speech in German, but people “thwarted my desire, sometimes violently. Those people have always said to me: ‘Be still sir! For God’s sake, be quiet! Find another way to make yourself tiresome.’ ”

  His listeners were astonished, and delighted—Twain spoke and read what he had famously termed “the awful German language.” They leaned forward to listen, as Twain threatened to reform German “so that when you need it for prayer it can be understood Up Yonder.”

  Among the guests laughing at Twain’s send-up was the journalist Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism and a friend of Twain. They had covered the Dreyfus affair together in Paris, in which a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, had been unfairly accused by the French of spying for the Germans—a case that was a cause célèbre of anti-Semitic scapegoating. Twain began his Vienna sojourn by openly defending Dreyfus at the salon of ardent pacifist
Bertha von Suttner, who would be the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This prompted the anti-Semitic Reichspost newspaper to sniff at “the unavoidable Mark Twain, who seems to have no idea of how he is being mishandled by the Jews in Vienna.”

  Vienna would watch every move of the man the press called “Our Famous Guest.” The city of 1.7 million had forty-five newspapers, a score of cultural journals, and a dozen humor magazines. Twain’s appearances would be covered by Stefan Zweig.

  As Twain socialized with the high society, he puzzled over the anti-Semitism of Vienna. “The Jew is not a burden upon the Charities of the State, nor of the city. When he is well enough to work, he works; when he is incapacitated his own people take care of him,” Twain wrote a friend in Vienna. “His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.”

  Twain and his family made a highly watched outing at his friend Theodor Herzl’s play, The New Ghetto, which predicted that invisible social walls would prevent Jewish assimilation as durably as the old walled ghettos of days past.

  It could even be said that Twain influenced early psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud was a regular at lectures of “our old friend Mark Twain,” though there is no evidence that they ever met. The therapist took notes that would turn up in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud confessed to skipping the lecture of a prince’s doctor to see Twain brag about teaching six members of the imperial family watermelon-stealing techniques—an anecdote Freud used in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud would quote Twain in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Interpretation of Dreams.

  Historians believe Freud was also influenced by Mark Twain’s September 1899 Harper’s essay, “Concerning the Jews,” which Twain wrote in Vienna. Why is it, Twain asked, that “the Jews have thus ever been, and are even now, in these days of intelligence, the butt of baseless, vicious animosities? I dare say that for centuries there has been no more quiet, undisturbing, and well-behaving citizen, as a class, than that same Jew.

  “Will it ever come to an end?” Twain wrote. “Will a Jew be permitted to live honestly, decently and peaceably like the rest of mankind?”

  Twain delighted his new Viennese friends by becoming mixed up in open ridicule of Vienna’s anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger, through a mysterious mock letter, published in the Neue Freie Presse, and bearing the signature “Mark Twain.” The letter described a heated city meeting on the “Jewifying” of judgeships—the anti-Semitic term for allowing Jews into the judiciary. The letter reported that Mayor Lueger recommended tolerance of Jewish judgeships, which made the writer so happy he jumped to his feet and waved his hat in the air, yelling, “Long live Lueger! Long live the Jews!” until someone punched him, knocking him out cold. According to the letter, he awoke at the Hotel Metropol with broken bones and missing teeth. “I won’t very soon forget the session of your city council,” “Twain” concluded brightly in the letter—which was edited by the newspaper’s feuilleton editor, the Zionist Theodor Herzl, Twain’s friend.

  Twain protested he had been the victim of a hoax. But the letter’s trademark humor suggested he had been in on the joke. Twain did in fact report on government, and he embellished his notes with satire. At one long-winded government meeting, Twain wrote in his notebook that a “tallow-chandler” had wandered in and accused Vienna’s leading anti-Semites, Lueger and Schönerer, of having Jewish great-grandmothers—plunging the chamber into an uproar. “Invented a new name tonight for [Schönerer’s] party: ‘The Louseboy’s Party,’ ” Twain scribbled to himself.

  Twain’s daughter Clara was studying piano with the young Russian Jewish composer Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose seductive manner and kisses would so beguile Adele Bauer’s friend Alma that she found herself falling in love with him, though she said a friend told her he was “ugly as a Russian Jew after a pogrom.” Ossip began an attentive courtship of Clara that made it clear Twain would gain a Jewish son-in-law.

  Twain and his family of “innocent wild Americans” rubbed shoulders with everyone from Johann Strauss to Emperor Franz Joseph. But anti-Semites focused their suspicions on his many social ties to Jews. Old Testament names like Samuel were customarily Jewish in Vienna, and anti-Semites began insisting “Mark Twain” was an attempt by Clemens to disguise his Jewish roots. The anti-Semitic press began to taunt him as “the Jew Mark Twain.” One cartoon showed Twain surrounded by greedy Jewish merchants caricatured as hook-nosed Shylocks.

  Twain was unfazed. His depression had lifted. He was writing a play with the Vienna playwright Sigmund Schlesinger, and the two men joked about a role for Katharina Schratt. Like the rest of Vienna, Twain was quoting Fledermaus: “Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.”

  At his desk overlooking the Danube Canal, Twain finally began to write again. His new story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” was reminiscent of the Goethe Faust tale, beloved by the Viennese, of a man’s deal with the devil. “It was past midnight,” Twain wrote, when down on the Morzinplatz, he saw “a tall, handsome stranger, dressed in black.” With a “rush of wind, a crash of thunder, and a glare of lightning,” the Prince of Darkness appeared. He had “an intellectual face, and that subtle air of distinction which goes with ancient blood and high lineage.” Vienna “is my favorite city,” Satan told Twain. “I was its patron saint in the early times. I still have much influence here, and am greatly respected.”

  In less than two years, Twain had become intimately acquainted with Vienna’s most virulent demon.

  When Twain moved his closely watched spectacle from Austria in the fall of 1899, Adele had chosen her wedding date.

  Vienna, too, was at a threshold. In November 1899, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, his anatomy of the unconscious impulses driving individuals and society. It took six weeks for the first review to appear, a snide dismissal that epitomized the isolation suffered by emerging modernists who tried to express ideas that did not conform to hostile convention.

  On the brink of the twentieth century, Vienna was, in the words of one new writer, Karl Kraus, an “isolation cell in which one was allowed to scream.” But this isolation of genius was ending. The salons of the emerging “second society,” run by the small coterie of Jewish intellectual women, would open a forum for new ideas and art. In the process, the women who hosted them would gain influence they could never have aspired to in Vienna’s hostile tradition-bound institutions.

  Adele was one step closer to joining this world on December 19, 1899, when she emerged a bride from Vienna’s grand Stadt Temple and stepped carefully onto the cobblestones of Seitenstettengasse.

  “I Want to Get Out”

  Klimt is often described as a recluse. But at the turn of the century, he was a doting intimate to the host of loyal patrons who supported his search for a new language of art. Klimt’s most important private patron that year was Serena Lederer, the wife of spirits manufacturer August Lederer, who belonged to the same circle of prominent Jewish businessmen as Moritz Bauer and Ferdinand Bloch.

  Serena, high-spirited, outgoing, and extroverted, had appeared in Klimt’s Burgtheater painting. Klimt had painted an 1899 portrait of Serena in a flowing white dress, and stayed on to give Serena drawing lessons.

  Klimt was a regular at the Lederer dinner table, and his complaints about “petit-bourgeois” narrow-mindedness were familiar to the family. “If only people would analyze less and create more,” Klimt lamented.

  Klimt was nervous, and rightly so. He was working on the most important, high-profile commission in the empire. He was to create a series of immense ceiling murals for the University of Vienna, to immortalize the quest for knowledge of one of the oldest universities in the Germanic world, which had opened its doors in 1365. Klimt was to illustrate the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.

  Klimt was now working on Philosophy, using the passages of life, from conception to death, as a visual representation of the drama of human existence.
He was apprehensive about the reaction. The various officials were probably expecting a neoclassical tableau of great philosophers in Greek togas. They might not appreciate Klimt’s attempts to visually grapple with mortality and a search for meaning in which God played no evident role.

  At Klimt’s studio, Serena’s daughter Elisabeth, age six, found his work-in-progress difficult to comprehend. Klimt told her gently that he “liked it this way, and I could only understand this when I was older.”

  Klimt unveiled Philosophy at the Secession in March 1900, revealing a world in which men and women floated in frightening uncertainty. The figures were naked, realistic, with wrinkles and bony hips. A vulnerable old man with shriveled genitals bowed his head in despair. A woman clutched her breasts in anguish. A man and a woman embraced, as an almighty being in the guise of a woman surveyed a dystopian abyss of existential angst.

  The painting was subtitled Victory of Light over Darkness. But this shapeless void didn’t reassure anyone that darkness had been vanquished.

  This vision of an uncertain future could not have been comforting to an imperial family shaken to the core by the suicide, in January 1899, of Crown Prince Rudolf, after apparently shooting his nubile mistress, Marie Vetsera, a month after she turned seventeen. The shocking deaths at the royal estate at Mayerling robbed the emperor of his son—and the empire of an heir to the throne.

  To the correspondent of a Munich art magazine, Klimt’s Philosophy showed mankind as “a dull, spineless mass” that “struggles in its battle for happiness and knowledge and remains a mere pawn in the hands of nature.”