The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  We were okay, said Iggie, we found a barn lower down the valley in the dark, but our friend, Franzi, had a card and stayed in the hut. We never talked about it.

  Not talking about anti-Semitism was possible; not hearing about it was impossible. There was no political consensus on what politicians could say in Vienna. This was tested by the publication in 1922, by the novelist and provocateur Hugo Bettauer, of The City Without Jews: A Novel About the Day After Tomorrow. In this unnerving novel he tells the story of Vienna racked by post-war poverty and the rise of a demagogue – a dead-ringer for Dr Karl Lueger, named Dr Karl Schwertfeger – who binds the populace together in one easy way: ‘Let us look at our little Austria today. In whose hands is the press, and therefore public opinion? In the hands of the Jew! Who has piled billions upon billions since the ill-starred year 1914? The Jew! Who controls the tremendous circulation of our money, who sits at the director’s desk in the great banks, who is the head of practically all industries? The Jew! Who owns our theatre? The Jew!…’ The Mayor has a solution, a simple solution: Austria will throw out the Jews. All of them, including the children of mixed marriages, will be deported in orderly ways on trains. Those Jews who attempt to continue staying secretly in Vienna will do so under pain of death. ‘At one o’clock in the afternoon whistles proclaimed that the last trainload of Jews had left Vienna, and at six o’clock…all the church bells rang to announce that there were no more Jews in Austria.’

  And this novel, with its chilling descriptions of the painful breakups of families, desperate scenes at railway stations as closed carriages take away the Jews, is counterpointed with the descent of Vienna into a drab, provincial backwater as the Jews who animated it leave. There is no theatre, no newspaper, no gossip, no fashion and no money until Vienna finally invites the Jews back.

  Bettauer was assassinated by a young Nazi in 1925. He was defended at his trial by the leader of the Austrian National Socialists, giving the party some prestige amongst the fissile politics of Vienna. That summer, eighty young Nazis attacked a crowded restaurant shouting ‘Juden hinaus!’

  Part of the wretchedness of these years was the effect of inflation. It was said that if you passed the building of the Austro-Hungarian Bank in Bankgasse in the early hours of the morning you could hear the printing presses clattering away printing more money. You were passed banknotes with their ink still damp. Perhaps, say some bankers, we should change our currency totally and start again. Schillings are talked of.

  ‘An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand,’ wrote the Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig about the year 1919 in his novel The Post-Office Girl. ‘Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always late. Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum…’

  Viktor looked into his own vacuum: in the safe at the office off the Schottengasse were stacks of files of deeds and bonds and share-certificates. They were worthless. As the citizen of a defeated power, all his assets in London and in Paris, the accounts that had been building over forty years, the office building in one city, the share of Ephrussi et Cie in another, had been confiscated under the Allied terms of the punitive settlement after the war. In the Bolshevik conflagration the Russian fortune – the gold held in St Petersburg, the shares in the Baku oilfields, the railways and the banks and the property Viktor still owned in Odessa – had disappeared. That was not just a spectacular loss of money, it was the loss of several fortunes.

  And, more personally, at the height of the war in 1915 Jules Ephrussi, Charles’s elder brother and owner of the Chalet, had died. Because of the hostilities his vast fortune, long promised to Viktor, had been left to the French cousins. So no suites of Empire furniture. Or the Monet of willows overhanging a river bank. ‘Poor Mama,’ wrote Elisabeth ‘all those long Swiss evenings in vain.’

  In 1914, before the war, Viktor had a fortune of twenty-five million crowns, several buildings scattered around Vienna, the Palais Ephrussi, the art collection of ‘100 old paintings’ and an annual income of several hundred thousand crowns. It was the equivalent of $400 million today. Now even the two floors of the Palais that he rented out for 50,000 crowns did not bring in any more income. And his decision to leave his money in Austria had proved catastrophic. This newly-minted patriotic Austrian citizen had invested massively in war bonds late into 1917. They were worthless, too.

  Viktor admitted the severity of all this in crisis meetings on 6th and 8th March 1921 with his old friend, the financier Rudolf Gutmann. ‘On the Börse the Ephrussi have the best reputation in Vienna,’ wrote Gutmann to another German banker, one Herr Siepel, on 4th April. The Ephrussi bank was still fundamentally viable and its reach across the Balkans made it a useful business partner. The Gutmanns took part of the bank, putting in twenty-five million crowns, and the Berlin Bank (a predecessor of the Deutsche Bank) put up seventy-five million crowns. Viktor now owned only half the family bank.

  Lodged in the archives of Deutsche Bank are files and files of these documents, the careful toing and froing about percentages, the reports of conversations with Viktor, the deals. But through the Manila shadings you can still hear the faint oscillation of Viktor’s voice, his weariness, in those tumbling consonants. The business was ‘buchstäblich gleich Null’. It was ‘literally zero’.

  This feeling of loss, of having failed to preserve an inheritance, affected Viktor profoundly. He was the heir: it was his legacy and he had lost it. Each part of his world had closed down – his life in Odessa, St Petersburg, Paris and London was finished and only Vienna was left, the hydrocephalic Palais on the Ringstrasse.

  Emmy, the children and little Rudolf weren’t exactly destitute. Nothing had to be sold for food or fuel. But what they possessed comprised the contents of this vast house. The netsuke still lay in their lacquer cabinet in the dressing-room, and were still dusted by Anna when she came in to arrange the flowers on Emmy’s dressing-table. The walls still held their Gobelin tapestries, their Dutch Old Masters. The French furniture was still polished, clocks still wound, the wicks of candles still trimmed. The Sèvres still lay stacked in the china closet next to the silver-room, service by service on the linen-covered shelves. The gold dinner-service with its double E and the proud little boat with its full sails were still in the safe. There was still a motor-car in the courtyard. But the life of objects within the Palais was less mobile. The world had undergone an Umsturz, an upheaval, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished, where before they had been just a background, a gilt-and-varnish blur to a busy social life. The uncounted and the unmeasured started at last to be counted very accurately.

  There was a huge falling away; things were so much better and fuller before. Perhaps this was when there were the very first intimations of nostalgia. I begin to think that keeping things and losing them are not polar opposites. You keep this silver snuff-box, a token for standing as second in a duel, a lifetime ago. You keep the bracelet given by a lover. Viktor and Emmy kept everything – all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures – but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities. This was how they were diminished.

  Vienna is sticky with nostalgia. It has breached the heavy oak door of their house.

  22. YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

  Elisabeth’s first term at university was chaotic. The financial situation of Vienna University had become so critical that an appeal was was made to Austria in general, and Vienna in particular, for help. ‘If assistance is not promptly forthcoming the University will inevitably sink to the level of a little Hochschule. The Professors
are on starvation salaries…the library is not able to function.’ The annual income of a professor, commented a visiting scholar, was inadequate to buy a suit and undergarments for himself and clothes for his wife and child. In January 1919, lectures were cancelled as there was no fuel for the lecture-halls. Against this rose the incendiary academic climate of possibility. It was, perversely, a fantastic time to study: there were Austrian – or Viennese – schools of economics, theoretical physics and philosophy, law, psychoanalysis (under Freud and Adler), history and art history. Each of these schools represented extraordinary scholarship coupled with intense rivalry.

  Elisabeth had chosen to study philosophy, law and economics. It was, in one sense, a very Jewish choice: all three disciplines had strong Jewish presences in the faculty. One-third of the legal faculty was Jewish. To be a lawyer, an Advokat, in Vienna meant being an intellectual. And that is what she was, a plain, fierce, focused intellectual eighteen-year-old in her white crêpe-de-Chine blouse with a black bow at the neck. It was a way of making absolute the division between her and the emotional intermittencies of her mother. And the slowly resurgent domestic life in the Palais, the nursery, her noisy new infant brother, the fuss.

  Elisabeth chose to study under a fearsome economist, Ludwig von Mises, a man known in the university as der Liberale, Mr Libertarian. Mises was a young economist out to make his reputation through his stress on the implausibility of the socialist state. There might be communists on the streets of Vienna, but Mises was going to find the economic arguments to prove them wrong. He started a small seminar circle, Privatissimum, in which his selected disciples would give a paper. On 26th November 1918, a week after Rudolf was born, Elisabeth gave the first talk on ‘Carver’s theory of interest’. Mises’s students remembered the intensity of the scrutiny in these seminars, the genesis of a famous school of free-market economics. I have her student essays on ‘Inflation und Geldknappkeit’ (fifteen pages of small italic handwriting), on ‘Kapital ’ (thirty-two of the same) and ‘John Henry Newman’ (thirty-eight pages).

  But Elisabeth’s passion was for poetry. She sent her poems to her grandmother and to her friend Fanny Lowenstein-Schaffeneck, now working in an exciting contemporary art gallery selling the paintings of Egon Schiele.

  Elisabeth and Fanny were in love with the lyric poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. It consumed them: they knew the two volumes of his Neue Gedichte (New Poems) by heart and waited impatiently for the next poem to be published: his silence was unbearable. Rilke had been Rodin’s amanuensis in Paris, and after the war the girls had travelled with their copies of Rilke’s book on the sculptor to pay homage in the Musée Rodin. Elisabeth marked their excitement in the margins in pencilled rushes.

  Rilke was the great radical poet of the day. He combined directness of expression with intense sensuousness in his Dinggedichte, ‘thing poems’. ‘The thing is definite, the art-thing must be still more definite, removed from all accident, reft away from obscurity…’, Rilke wrote. His poems are full of epiphanies, moments when things come alive – a dancer’s first movement is the flare of a sulphur match. Or of moments when there is a change in the summer weather, a catch in mood when you see someone as if for the first time.

  And his poems are full of danger, ‘all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further’. This is what it is like to be an artist, he says, breath-catchingly. You are unsteady on the edge of life, like a swan, before an ‘anxious launching of himself/On the floods where he is gently caught’.

  ‘You must change your life,’ Rilke wrote in his poem on the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. Could any instruction be more thrilling?

  It was not until after Elisabeth died, aged ninety-two, that I realised how important Rilke was to her. I knew there were some letters, but they were a rumour, a muffled roll of splendour. It was when I stood in front of the statue of Apollo with his lyre in the courtyard of the Palais Ephrussi on a winter’s afternoon and haltingly tried to remember Rilke’s poem, the marble glistening like ‘a predator’s coat’, that I knew I had to find them.

  Elisabeth had been given an introduction to Rilke by her uncle. Pips had helped Rilke when he was stranded in Germany by the outbreak of war. Now he wrote to invite Rilke to Kövecses: ‘this house is always open for you. You would make us all very happy if you would announce yourself “sans cérémonie”.’ And Pips begs permission for his favourite niece to send some poems. Elisabeth wrote – breathlessly – to Rilke in the summer of 1921, enclosing ‘Michelangelo’, a verse-drama, and asking him whether she might dedicate it to him. There was a long delay until the spring – a delay occasioned by his finishing the Duino Elegies – but then he wrote back a five-page letter and they began to correspond, the twenty-year-old student in Vienna and the fifty-year-old poet in Switzerland.

  The correspondence started with a refusal. He resisted a dedication. The best outcome would be to have the poem published, then the book ‘would represent a lasting link to me…It will be a pleasure to accept being a mentor in your first “Erstling”, but only if you don’t name me.’ But, continues the letter, I would be interested to see what you are writing. They wrote to each other for five years. Twelve very long letters from Rilke, sixty pages interspersed with manuscript copies of his recent poems and translations, and many volumes of his verse with warm dedications of his own.

  Dr Elisabeth Ephrussi, poet and lawyer, 1922

  If you stand in a library and look at Rilke’s collected works, the yard or so of volumes, most of them are letters, and most of these seem to be to ‘titled, disappointed ladies’, to borrow John Berryman’s penetrating phrase. Elisabeth was a young poetic baroness, and so not unusual amongst many of his correspondents. But Rilke was a great letter-writer, and these in particular are wonderful letters, exhortatory, lyrical, funny and engaged, a testament to what he called ‘a writing friendship’. They have never been translated and only recently transcribed by a Rilke scholar working in England. I move my pots to one side and cover the tables with photocopies of these letters. I spend a happy couple of weeks trying out possible translations of these sinuous, rhythmical sentences with a German PhD student.

  Translating the work of his friend, the French poet Paul Valéry, Rilke writes about his ‘great silence’, the years when Valéry didn’t write poetry at all. Rilke encloses the translation he has just finished. He writes about Paris and how the recent death of Proust has affected him, made him think of his years there, working as Rodin’s secretary, makes him wish to return and study again. Has Elisabeth read Proust? She should do so.

  And he is very careful and particular about Elisabeth’s situation in Vienna. He is intrigued by the contrast between her academic studies at the university where she is studying law and her poetry:

  Be that as it may, dear friend, I am not anxious for your artistic abilities, to which I attach such a great importance…Even though I cannot foresee which path you will decide to take with your law doctorate, I find the great contrast between your two occupations positive; the more diverse the life of the mind, the better the chances are that your inspiration will be protected, the inspiration which cannot be predicted, that which is motivated from within.’

  Rilke reads her recent poems ‘A January Evening’, ‘Roman Night’ and ‘King Oedipus’: ‘all three good, however I tend to put Oedipus over the rest’. In this poem she writes about the King leaving the city into his exile, his hands over his eyes, wrapped in a cloak, and that ‘the others went back to the palace, and all the lights were extinguished one by one’. She has spent enough time with her father and his Aeneid for exile to provoke powerful emotion in her.

  If Elisabeth has time at the end of her studies, she could read literature, but Rilke’s advice is ‘to look into the blue of the hyacinths. And the spring!’ He gives her specific advice about her poems and about translation; after all, ‘it is not the gardener who is encouraging and caring w
ho helps, but the one with the pruning-shears and spade; the rebuke!’ He shares his emotions about what it is like to have finished a great work. You feel a dangerous buoyancy, writes Rilke, as if you could float away.

  In these letters he becomes lyrical:

  I believe that in Vienna, when the dragging wind is not cutting through you, you can sense the spring. Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows – a slight feeling of embarrassment of being a city…in my own experience only Paris and (in a naïve way) Moscow absorb the whole nature of the spring into them as if they were a landscape…

  And then he signs off: ‘Farewell to you for now: I deeply appreciated the warmth and friendship of your letter. May you keep well! Your true friend RM Rilke.’

  Just think what it must have been like to get that letter from him. Imagine seeing his slightly right-sloping and looping handwriting on the envelope from Switzerland as the post is brought into the breakfast-room in the Palais, your father at one end opening the beige book-catalogues from Berlin, your mother at the other with the feuilleton, your brother and sister arguing quietly. Imagine slitting open the envelope and finding that Rilke has sent you one of his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ and a transcription of a poem of Valéry. ‘It is like a fairytale. I cannot believe it belongs to me,’ she writes back that night from her desk pushed up against the window looking onto the Ring.