The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
Page 25
Rumors had long been circulating among the aunts, uncles and cousins of the family that the progenitor of the Wittgensteins, Paul and Gretl's grandfather Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, was the bastard son of a German aristocrat, believed to be Prince Georg Heinrich Ludwig, a reprobate scion of the princely house of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. A pretty Jewish maid (so the story goes), by the name Breindel Brendel or Bernardine Simon, who worked in the household of Prince Georg at Laasphe, became pregnant by him (or by his brother) and to cover up the scandal was forced to marry the Prince's land agent and factotum, Moses Meyer, and move with him to another Wittgenstein estate to have the baby. It was here then, in Korbach, on September 12, 1802, that Hermann Christian Wittgenstein is supposed to have been born. Except that he wasn't called Hermann Christian Wittgenstein at the time of his birth, but was probably called Hirsch (or Herz) Moses Meyer. Following a Napoleonic decree of 1808 by which all Jews were ordered to adopt fixed surnames, the family took the name Wittgenstein and in 1839 Moses Meyer's son Hirsch converted to Christianity, adopting the name Hermann Christian Wittgenstein.
In the Schiffbauerdamm, Kurt Mayer assured Paul and Gretl in the politest manner that their best bet was to pursue this line of inquiry and that they should hire a professional genealogist to search the records at Korbach and at Laasphe. Both disapproved of the scheme (their father Karl had humorously disclaimed connection to the Sayn-Wittgenstein family by describing his name as "mein Wittgenstein" in distinction from "sein Wittgenstein"), but now it appeared to be their only chance. It was a typical symptom of the craziness of Nazi Party policy that in June 1938 the future security of one man, his daughters, his siblings, his nephews, nieces and cousins all hung in the balance, all dependent upon who had slept with whom way back in January 1802.
COUNTER-ATTACK
Gretl once told her cousin Karl Menger: "I want to be remembered as the daughter of my father, the sister of my brothers, and the mother of my sons." Notable by its absence from this list is any desire to be remembered as the wife of her husband. By June 1938 she was divorced from Jerome and had all but given up on him. She remained loyal however and allowed him to visit her at Gmunden or in Vienna. She also provided him with money. At the time of Anschluss he had found himself in the Austrian capital. Immediately he realized that neither funds nor valuables could be removed from the Reich and that his lavish and extravagant Parisian lifestyle would finally have to come to an end. He returned to France in order to sell his furniture and pictures. From Paris he could have proceeded directly to America, but he felt uncomfortable with that idea and went back to Vienna instead. There he fell into a frenzy of depression and agitation, fearing destitution and impending war. It is said that he was suffering from a "severe cancerous illness" that deepened his despair. Not everyone agrees. In any case he was woebegone, and on June 15 for some forgotten reason he lost his temper and shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle while staying at the Villa Toscana in Gmunden.
Gretl moved quickly to prevent the news of his suicide getting into the papers, and the editor of the local Salzkammergut Beobachter, working from his offices at Adolf Hitler Platz in Gmunden, duly ignored the sudden and violent death of the lord of the local manor and ran small items on the natural deaths of two old biddies and the attempted suicide of a lovelorn milkmaid instead.
Neither in life nor in death was Jerome much honored. He had used a portion of his wife's money to endow a scientific institute but lost a lot more of it in bad investments. He had failed as a husband to Gretl and was a bad-tempered and absent father to his sons. None of his in-laws liked him much, and after his death, there was little to be said about him. His life had been occupied in restless pursuit of scientific knowledge, in squandering other people's money and causing them grief by his paranoid fits of neurosis. His death, which came at an inconvenient hour for Gretl, must have relieved her and her sons of an irksome burden. He was buried quietly in the town cemetery at Gmunden.
The great love of Gretl's life, in whom she vested her highest aspirations, was her younger son and "golden boy" Ji. Poor stammering Tommy had proved a disappointment. Arrogant and lazy, depressive and not very bright with money, cars or women, he was reckless and feckless and Gretl found herself constantly having to bail him out of trouble. Ji on the other hand was a star in her eyes. To many he seemed to be "just like his mummy." In youth he was effeminate, with a high-pitched voice. He was a late developer who remained a mummy's boy well into his thirties. Once, long before, Gretl had pined for a daughter but now, realizing that she would never have one, she encouraged the softer sides of Ji, while simultaneously pushing him beyond his abilities. "I want my children to become reformers of some kind," she would say. "That is the only career befitting our family." To that end she had Ji thinking about social issues from an early age. As soon as his schooling was finished--he was no intellectual and did not distinguish himself either at his upper-class boarding school in Baden-Wurttemberg or at Vienna's smart academy, the Theresianum--he was encouraged to attend lectures in political science at the universities of Freiburg and Vienna. After that he became a volunteer for the Vienna Rescue Society, and briefly worked at a Swiss cheese factory and at a Czechoslovakian brewery. In 1933 he covered the World Economic Conference in London for the Brooklyn Times-Union and for a while entertained the notion of becoming a political or financial journalist, but his mother had higher ambitions for him. According to their cousin Karl Menger: "For all her social conscience, Mrs. Stonborough seemed to me to belong to that type of very rich Europeans who consider important positions even more than wealth as a birthright of their children." In 1935 she used her diplomatic and political connections to secure him a job, aged twenty-three, at the Department of Labor in Washington, where he worked in the office of Roosevelt's Secretary for Labor, Frances Perkins, the first American woman to hold a cabinet post.
Mother love and early success brought a swagger to young Ji's gait. He was quick tempered, opinionated and conceited. Although no aristocrat, his manner was de haut en has or what the Viennese would call hopper-tatschig. Lofty is perhaps the best English word for it. Those whom he did not like were dismissed as "vulgar" and "prole" or berated for their "damned prole insolence" in an accent that was neither American nor German, but even more English than the English. Odi profanum vulgus was his oft-stated motto: "I hate the vulgar rabble."
By 1937, Helene's husband, Max Salzer, who had managed the Wittgenstein foreign fortune since 1925, was suffering from senile dementia, so with Gretl's push it was decided that the now twenty-five-year-old Ji should take over his role. This was an odd choice as Ji was young and volatile, knew nothing about business and had no head for maths ("Computing how little there is in my cheque book is well beyond me," he once jokingly admitted), but when Gretl had decided on something, that was that. A company was duly incorporated in Switzerland, in the tax-haven canton of Zug, under the name Wistag AG & Cie. The share or partner capital of one million Swiss francs was to be controlled by Ji, and the interest on that sum was to be used to meet the running costs of a subsidiary trust that held the Wittgensteins' foreign investments. In 1939 these were valued at 9.6 million Swiss francs. Under Swiss law the exact apportionment of the trust shares could be kept secret from everyone except the beneficiaries themselves. The deeds of incorporation stipulated that each of the shareholders could receive a small rate of interest from the trust but that the capital sum must remain with the company (Wistag) for ten years. In other words the trust could not be broken, nor the capital taken out of it until 1947.
Meanwhile Hitler's Four-Year Plan, an expensive program of national reconstruction and rearmament, made him thirsty for revenue and in April 1938 he issued a decree that required all citizens of whatever racial origin to declare their foreign assets. Any currency held abroad was to be brought immediately back into the Reich and exchanged for Reichsmarks at a rate favorable to the government. The form that was sent out to the Jewish population at the beginning of May was
an extended version of that which went to the Aryan population and demanded that every Jew provide details of all his or her assets, including those held within the Reich--pictures, plates, bank credit, buildings, businesses, photographs and so on. Jews could then be charged the Judenvermogensabgabe (Jewish capital levy) of 20 percent of their total asset worth. If they then wished to emigrate they could pay a 25 percent emigration tax and a further 65 percent on whatever was left of their cash reserves. After all these taxes had been submitted it was highly unlikely any Jew would be able to leave the Reich with more than 10 percent of his or her original wealth. At the top of the form entitled "Register of the Assets of the Jews" was printed the warning:
This inventory must be submitted by 30 June 1938. Anyone who is liable to register their assets and have them valued but who either fails to fulfil this obligation or does so either too late or incompetently risks a severe penalty (fine, imprisonment, a jail sentence or confiscation of their assets).
Paul's, Hermine's and Helene's properties were searched and everything of worth that was found in them scrutinized by the art historian, Gestapo agent and valuer Dr. Otto Reich. Gretl, as a Jewess, was also forced to fill in one of these forms, despite her being an American citizen. When Dr. Reich came to her house on the Kundmanngasse she was not at home, but a quick-thinking servant brought out some bauble of interest and, as Dr. Reich was drooling over it, shot into the garden with armfuls of precious manuscripts and hid them in the potting shed. Gretl's form looks a little understated. Her artworks and porcelain collection were together valued at only 11,235 Reichsmarks, her silver and jewelry at 9,000 RM, while her priceless collection of musical manuscripts was not included. Nor is it clear whether the artworks that were packed up for export in March were accounted for in this valuation. As an American Gretl was under no obligation to declare her foreign assets, and while she and her sons were still free to travel in and out of the Reich there was much incentive for her to bury or hide as much as possible and try to smuggle it out bit by bit.
Paul's declaration claims an income of 57,700 Reichsmarks in the year to April 1938, and assets of 4,368,625 RM. The form makes interesting reading as it offers a glimpse into his private financial affairs. It reveals, for instance, that his sister Hermine owed him 107,512 RM (presumably loans against debts she had incurred on her school) and that among his possessions were to be found a sixteenth-century Gobelin tapestry worth 15,000 RM, a Stradivari violin of 1716 valued at 30,000 RM and a viola by Antonius and Hieronymus Amati at 10,000 RM--this last instrument was valued by Machold Rare Violins on April 15, 2002, at $1.8 million. Among his pictures, whose total value was put at 70,080 RM, he owned Monet's oil portrait of Eugenie Graff, Madame Paul (now at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard) and Giovanni Segantini's Die Quelle des Ubels (The Source of Evil), which Karl had bought at the wildly successful Secession Exhibition of 1898, valued in 1938 at 26,000 RM. At the end of the register, in a space reserved for remarks, Paul had written:
This form has been completed while I and my sisters, Hermine and Helene Salzer (born Wittgenstein), are still in the process of applying to be released from these obligations. My siblings and I are convinced that our grandfather, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, was not a full Jew by blood. His appearance and his way of life, and the appearance of his direct descendants, demonstrate this and the Department of Genealogical Research [in Vienna] has initiated an inquiry to establish if this confidence of ours is right. If it is the case then we are only two parts Jewish and I would like to point out that all the members of the Wittgenstein family have for 100 years been born and brought up as Christians. The family originates from Germany and came to Austria in 1850.
ESCAPE
Paul was convinced that the only sensible course of action was to leave Austria and could think or speak of little else. As a patriot he was heartbroken that 99 percent of the Austrian people had so enthusiastically and perfidiously sold out to the Germans in Hitler's referendum of April 1938. Even if the Reich Agency for Genealogical Research were to grant him Mischling status he would still be banned from teaching and performing. Hermine, on the other hand, was able to distance herself from worldly affairs and was content to muddle along, imagining the worst that could happen to her was that a few of her friends might no longer greet her in the street. Paul stood to lose a good deal more.
Paul [Hermine wrote] suffered indescribably during his long daily walks and wanderings because of the abominable prohibitions that threatened every step in the crassest manner and wounded his self-esteem. He acted like a man whose very foundations of life had been destroyed.
So long as he had money abroad the authorities were not going to let him out. First, they demanded that he bring all of his foreign fortune into the Reich, then he must pay the 25 percent Reichsfluchtsteuer (emigration tax) and all the other tariffs that the regime had created to rob the emigrating Jew. Only then would they consider his emigration. But even if he had wished to adhere to government guidelines Paul could not have done so, for his foreign assets were locked into a Swiss trust until 1947. Paul's only hope was to flee the country and to try to gain access to his Swiss funds once he was safely abroad. His passport was stamped with an unexpired Swiss visa but he needed also an exit permit to get out of the Ostmark.
Staying with Marga in England, he used often to play parlor games in the evenings, consisting of quizzes and tests about classical music. It was during one such game that Marga and Paul realized that both of them knew the libretti to various of Mozart's operas by heart, so by using references to them they were now able to communicate without rousing the suspicion of the censors. For instance, Paul's intention of coming to London was suggested by the phrase "Due parole." It is with those words that Count Almaviva, in the short recitative from Act I, scene 6 of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, prefaces his announcement that he is to be sent to London. Marga, who had spent many hours playing cryptic musical games with Paul on their holidays by the sea, knew exactly what they meant. By this means a plan was hatched to create reasonable grounds for the authorities in Vienna to allow Paul to make a brief visit to England. Marga sent letters on bogus "Gunfield Concert Agency" letterhead, offering Paul dates in a series of lecture recitals for which the musicologists Ernest Walker and Donald Francis Tovey were also billed. These nonexistent performances were originally planned for May but Paul was unable to obtain his visa; so she rearranged the dates, sending him another contract for mid-June. Once again, Paul was thwarted by officials and telegraphed to say it was impossible. On June 17, Gretl was coming to London, planning to stay at a hotel in Ebury Street. Paul wired Marga: "SHE WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU OXFORD OR LONDON--PLEASE LEAVE MESSAGE AT GORING." But two days later he was obliged to send another: "MY BROTHER-IN-LAW STONBOROUGH DIED SUDDENLY THIS EVENING STOP MY SISTER WILL COME LATER STOP HEARTFELT GREETINGS AND REGRETS--PAUL."
Gretl arrived in England a few days after Jerome's funeral and met Marga briefly in London before traveling to Cambridge, where she handed Ludwig two smuggled parcels. They contained pieces of jewelry and musical manuscripts belonging to various members of the family-Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Opus 109; Haydn's Symphony No. 90 in C; Mozart's A major Violin Concerto; an early Bach cantata ("Meine Seele"), and two piano concertos by Mozart (K 238 and K 467). She asked Ludwig to look after them on behalf of their siblings in Austria who might one day need them. Ludwig placed the two packages in safe-deposit boxes at Barclays Bank on Bennett Street, with entitlement for two people besides himself (John Maynard Keynes and Piero Sraffa) to remove them in his absence.
Marga, meanwhile, was making her own inquiries about how to obtain a British passport for Paul. In one of their coded letters Paul had urged her to visit Ludwig, who, he believed, might be in a position to pull strings. A meeting was arranged between them at a London hotel and was concluded, to Marga's astonishment, in ten minutes flat. A long silence followed, broken eventually by Ludwig: "Everything has been settled now."
"But I have come all the way from S
outhwold to Charing Cross about your brother's affairs. I think you might at least invite me to lunch."
"Well, if you want that, then all right," said Ludwig wearily, "but what can you want to say to me now?"
"I don't know," Marga replied, "but I expect I shall think of something soon."
So off they went to a Lyons Corner House, where they talked about people they both knew in Vienna while Ludwig agreed or disagreed always with alarming animus. After a while he stood up abruptly and declared, "You have said things that make me want to go on talking. Let us go to the zoo." The caged animals provided ample amusement and afterward they sat and had tea. "I offered him some of my jam, since he had finished his," Marga recalled. "He objected, though it was part of the share the waiter brought me, it was not mine, nor was what he had eaten his, it was all 'just jam.' " After that Ludwig escorted her by third-class Underground to Liverpool Street saying, as he did so, that he had talked enough and was only coming to carry her coat, which he had discovered at the zoo was too heavy for her to carry and too hot to wear. As they parted company Marga generously invited him to stay with her at South-wold. "It sounds good," he answered, "but it's no good for me. I know I would hate it."
Back in Vienna Gretl had arranged a meeting with the new Governor of Ostmark, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, to whom she had a line of connection through his brother Richard. Described by Ji Stonborough as a "nice, honest and honorable man" Richard Seyss-Inquart had joined the Nazi Party in 1938 shortly before his elder brother became chancellor. According to one report Richard was "a full-hearted Nazi" who was charged with the task of persuading the Catholic Church to support Hitler's Anschluss. He had served as a Catholic priest during the First World War and had since worked as a chaplain and teacher in various deaf-and-dumb schools, orphanages and army hospitals. In 1920 he abandoned the priesthood in order to get married and wrote several books of depressing poems that nobody bought. Richard had met Gretl through his work as head of a young offenders' institution at Langenzerdorf where she had a seat on the board of governors. In 1928, desperate for a divorce, he suffered a nervous breakdown and Gretl housed and fed him in the so-called Little Villa at Gmunden during the weeks of his recuperation.