by Tim Bonyhady
Had it been up to Gretl, I am sure she would have regaled Bruce and me with stories about her life in Vienna, just as she did her closest Australian friend, John Earngey, whom she came to regard as her stepson. But Anne asked Gretl not to, so we could become as Australian as possible, and Gretl agreed, although opportunities were everywhere. She could have talked as we sat in the apartment in Sydney surrounded by her Viennese inheritance. She might have told me more when we went into town and, without my knowing, visited one shop after another run by other Austrian refugees. She could have continued when she took Bruce and me to The Sound of Music in 1965 and for the first time we saw a film that not only represented the Anschluss but did so in one of the landscapes most important to Gretl—that of Salzburg and the surrounding Salzkammergut, where she spent twenty-seven summers.
I remember returning from the movie to the apartment, taking out my sketch pad, and drawing pistol-carrying Nazis based on seventeen-year-old Rolf, who begins as sixteen-year-old Liesl’s love interest and ends as the weak, confused Nazi who catches the von Trapps as they flee but neither uses his gun nor raises the alarm until they have gone. As I recall it, I did these drawings without any sense that the escape of Gretl, Kathe, and Anne had been much more remarkable than that of the von Trapps. I did not realize that the captain, Maria, and the children could never have walked from the Salzkammergut over the Alps to freedom in Switzerland because it was almost one hundred miles to the west. I had no idea that in fact the von Trapps simply walked to their local station and took the train to Italy, where they were entitled to go because they had dual Austrian and Italian citizenship. I know that Gretl, who had read The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which revealed that much of the film was invention, typically said nothing.
As I remember it, the only story Gretl ever told me about her escape—almost the only story she told me about her forty-two years in Austria—was about four thin disks, all the same size, all covered in the same dark blue material, which she kept in the safe. They intrigued me in a way that none of the jewelry did because it was not clear why they were there. Gretl explained that they were gold coins that she disguised before leaving Vienna so that she could take them into Switzerland undetected by the Nazis’ border guards. After covering the coins with cloth, she sewed them onto her traveling coat in place of its original buttons and did not unwrap the coins even after she reached Sydney, so they remained talismans of her escape, symbols of her success in defying the Nazis.
The Orlik etching of Gustav Mahler—one of my favorite pictures in the apartment—sparked my first venture into family history. The catalyst was an inscription it carried by Mahler, perhaps the only time he inscribed one of these portraits. I was intrigued because this inscription was not to one of the Gallias but to Mahler’s “dear friend” Dr. Theobald Pollak “in memory of the original.” While Anne had told me that Theobald Pollak was one of Gretl’s honorary uncles—she called him Uncle Baldi—I knew nothing else. In the library, I discovered a web of connections linking the Gallias and Pollak with Mahler and his wife, Alma Schindler. But a visit to my mother proved even more revealing when she took out a box containing a small cache of correspondence from the Mahlers, including one of their personal postcards. Sent to Hermine in 1903—the year of the Orlik portrait—this card was jointly written by Theobald Pollak and Gustav and Alma Mahler.
Until then, I had never ventured into the literature of fin de siècle Vienna, let alone thought of contributing to it. Although I had been to Vienna several times as a child and as an adult, it was not my city. While I enjoyed Vienna’s art, architecture, and music, the culture and history, politics and law that I wanted to explore were those of Australia, my family’s new home. The books I wrote, like the exhibitions I curated and the environmental causes I tried to advance, were an extension of my mother’s attempt to assimilate in Australia, a means of making me more Australian.
Emil Orlik, Gustav Mahler, 1903. Perhaps the only example of this portrait inscribed by Mahler himself. (Illustration Credits ill.2)
I had also never thought of adding to what had been written about the family since turn-of-the-century Vienna began exciting international interest in the 1960s. While the Gallias usually appeared as patrons of Klimt and Hoffmann in books and catalogs about art and design, Moriz and Hermine also featured in the literature about what made Vienna one of the intellectual and cultural centers of the early twentieth century. The Gallias were part of the argument about whether it was Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity who gave Vienna a cultural significance it had not achieved before or since.
I was ignorant about things Jewish as well, despite one visit to Israel with my mother on our way back from our second trip to Europe when I was fifteen. It was not only that I was an atheist who had never been to synagogue and knew nothing of the Talmud but also that I was almost completely removed from Jewish society and culture. When I first met Claire Young, with whom I lived for twenty years, I had no idea what she meant when she described herself as a shiksa. Without novels—especially James Michener’s The Source, which I chose as my prize for coming in fifth in my second year of high school in 1970, and Exodus by Leon Uris, which I read around the same time—I would have known almost nothing of Jewish history.
I also had little idea what was in my mother’s cupboards. It had not occurred to me that she might have correspondence linking the Gallias and the Mahlers. As my stints in the library and the papers in her box began illuminating the place of the Gallias in turn-of-the-century Vienna, I gained a new sense of possibility. Where Vienna had been outside the bounds of what I might write about, it now moved within them.
My mother did not intend to get me started. The last thing Anne wanted was for me to write about her. Had she put more store on her life before she died in 2003, I might not have begun. But Anne was adamant that her life was not interesting. When my brother, Bruce, and I tried to get her to think differently, we failed. While it is in the nature of parents to expect the last word in arguments when their children are young, it is a prerogative of the living to have the last word about the dead. When I embarked on this book, it was because of Anne. Insofar as I intended to write about other members of the family, it was to explain her. Above all, I wanted to put a value on her life that she did not. Although her death was still far too close for me to be ready to write about it, my plan was to begin and end with her.
The postcard jointly sent by Theobald Pollak and Alma and Gustav Mahler to Hermine in July 1903 showing the Mahlers’ summer villa. (Illustration Credits ill.3)
I thought I had ideal materials—accessible, diverse, and rich without being daunting. I had a memoir written by Anne at my request in the early 1990s as my interest in the Gallias grew. There was a cache of family papers in her cupboards. There was the family’s Wiener Werkstätte collection, which had become the only substantial Hoffmann commission to enter a museum largely intact when the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne acquired it in 1976. Not even Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts had anything like it. There was the portrait of Hermine that had been the only painting by Klimt in an English museum since the National Gallery in London acquired it, also in 1976.
I still wanted more, of course, and was soon looking far and wide, not only spending long stints in archives, libraries, and museums but also visiting the towns where different family members came from, the buildings where they lived and worked, and the cemeteries where they were buried. Yet for all I found, nothing equaled my mother’s cupboards, which contained much more than I realized. There were concert books, weather books, travel logs, autograph books, sketchbooks, recipe books, and a guest book. There were birth and death certificates, wedding and divorce documents, and a prenuptial agreement. There were records of leaving one religion and entering another. There were school exercise books and school prizes. There were passports, letters, postcards, poems, and menus. There were books with inscriptions, dedications, and marginal notes. There were theater, concert, and cinema p
rograms. There were photographs not only of members of the family but also of the houses and apartments where they lived. There was an account of arrest and imprisonment.
This material took me deeper into the past than I ever thought possible, transforming my mother’s place in this book in a way I could not resist. While my cast of characters multiplied as I embraced many members of the family whom Anne had rejected, the change in the place of Hermine and Gretl was greatest. Because their surviving diaries were much richer than I anticipated, I felt compelled to make the most of them. As this material was about how the Gallias lived in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this part of the book grew and grew. I found myself writing a book about three generations of women: my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother.
I also found myself coming closer to the present than I had planned. I had initially intended to stop when Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore escaped Vienna because their Australian lives seemed too big to deal with in this book. But having gotten them to Sydney, I found I had to go further, if only selectively. I wanted to discover how they dealt with their loss of privilege, what it was like for them to be classified as enemy aliens once World War II started, and how their religion continued to change. I needed to show how they responded to a very different culture, how after trying so hard to assimilate in Austria they tried again in Australia, and how they remained deeply attached to Austria despite the persecution they suffered there. As I came to think of it, I had to explore what it meant for Annelore to become Anne.
I was also eager to explore what happened to the family collection and to discover how Gretl and Kathe had succeeded in bringing their paintings and furniture to Australia when the Nazis looted so much art in Austria. But again I found myself working forward as I came to think that how Anne disposed of the collection was as integral to its history as how Moriz and Hermine acquired it. Anne’s treatment of her inheritance exemplified how a collection built up by family members with access to the best advice and smartest taste is often dispersed one or two generations later by a descendant with nothing like the same understanding of the art world and little or no appreciation of what he or she has inherited. Anne’s experience also demonstrated the vulnerability of the naive in the art market.
My pursuit of these questions was both impersonal and personal. At times I would be engaged with Hermine, Gretl, and Anne like any other historical subjects, looking for materials to reconstruct their lives without particular emotional investment in the process or heightened response to what I found. At times I would be drawing on my direct knowledge and inherited understanding of the family and grappling with trace memories, trying to conjure up what I once had been told or seemed to have experienced. Yet from the moment I started dipping into the diaries in Anne’s cupboards and found her enjoying a night at the Vienna Opera on Kristallnacht, the past would confront and shock me in a way I had never experienced.
I was particularly struck by the continuities and discontinuities across the generations—how some patterns of behavior had been abandoned while others were repeated regardless of their flaws. Like Anne, I struggled with the legacy of coming from a rich Jewish family but, unlike her, I began to accept Judaism as part of my identity while still being shocked by the ostentatious consumption of Hermine and Moriz and embarrassed to find myself the great-grandson of such a tycoon. Wherever I turned, I found more than I anticipated or wanted, not just because it kept me writing longer than I expected but also because it often took me into terrain where I would have preferred not to tread.
I began to see that, however much the Gallias were exceptional in their embrace of modern art and design at the turn of the century, and how fortunate they were to escape with most of their collection after the Anschluss, in many respects they were creatures of convention and followers of fashion, whether it came to their passion for Wagner, embrace of the tango, or attitudes toward sex and marriage. For all their individuality, they were in large measure typical of those Jews who came from the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century, enriched Vienna at least as much as it enriched them until the late 1930s, and then with extraordinary speed were all gone from the city they had expected would always be their home.
I also saw that for all the debate about the extent to which the culture of fin de siècle Vienna was a creation of the city’s Jews, only Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein had taken one of the families that had been among the big patrons of this culture and told their story over several generations. For all the interest in this Vienna, there was no other book that explored where one of these families had come from, how they had made their money, what they spent it on, who they mixed with, what happened to their religion, and what became of them and their possessions. If this material existed for other families, no one had exploited it. I would write this book about the Gallias by making what I could of the remains of Good Living Street.
1
Klimt
The bronze doors made by Gustav Klimt’s brother Georg opened at eleven in the morning, but not everyone was welcome inside the small white-and-gold templelike structure on Vienna’s Friedrichstrasse that combined the ornate with the austere and enriched the city’s architecture as much as it transformed its artistic life at the turn of the century. Instead, entry to the Vienna Secession that Saturday, November 14, 1903, was restricted to the society’s members and a select group of invitees, many of them collectors. The rest of the public had to wait until the following morning to view the Secession’s eighteenth exhibition.
Those who attended were primarily women, dressed for these fashionable events in the most glamorous ways—some in hats decorated with spectacular bird feathers; others in veils; some still wearing conventional wasp-waisted, tightly laced, or corseted dresses; others in loose-fitting reform dresses widely promoted as rational; most in fur coats and muffs. The diaries kept by Alma Schindler, whose stepfather, Carl Moll, was a leading figure in the Secession, suggests many were Jews. After attending the private view of another of the Secession’s exhibitions, Alma observed, “All the tribes of Israel were assembled, as ever, like on a feast day at the synagogue.”
Hermine Gallia was one of them. While she was probably a regular at the Secession’s private views, the society’s eighteenth exhibition was especially important for Hermine because she appeared in it in a new guise. When the private view opened, her portrait by Klimt went on show for the first time. While identified in the exhibition catalog simply as a Portrait of a Lady—the standard practice of the Secession, which liked to keep the sitters of portraits anonymous—everyone who mattered to Hermine would have soon discovered that she had joined the ranks of the small group of women, still just seven in all, painted by Vienna’s most successful and most notorious artist.
How might Hermine have been described that morning? She was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist in the small Silesian town of Freudenthal in the northern reaches of the Hapsburg Empire. She was married to her uncle Moriz, who had made a fortune as a businessman in Vienna. She was thirty-three years old, already middle-aged according to the contemporary calculus, a society matron. She was not just Frau Gallia but Frau Regierungsrat Gallia, as Emperor Franz Joseph had made Moriz a Regierungsrat, or imperial councilor. She was familiar with many of Vienna’s leading artists, architects, and musicians—a friend of one or two, an acquaintance of many. She was a member of Vienna’s main Jewish organization, its Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. She was the mother of four children, one boy and three girls, all of whom were Catholics.
The portrait by Klimt both signified her status and was designed to enhance it by demonstrating the Gallias’ wealth, taste, and support for the avant-garde. While Hermine and Moriz conceived the painting primarily as a private picture that would hang in their apartment, they expected the portrait to shape how they were perceived by their many visitors. They anticipated that, like most of Klimt’s paintings at the turn of the century, the portrait would b
e exhibited at the Secession when it was new so that Klimt could show off what he had just produced and they could show off what they had just acquired. They saw the portrait as an investment in the future, a claim on posterity, since, for all of Klimt’s notoriety, it was the form in which Hermine was most likely to be remembered, the guise in which she had the greatest chance of becoming famous, able to perpetuate Hermine not just within the private sphere of the family but also in the public arena of art.
The outcry over Klimt’s work had started in the late 1890s, when he rapidly went from being an artist of great technical facility but little originality to one of Europe’s most innovative, imaginative painters. Klimt’s rejection of traditional iconography resulted in several of his paintings being branded ugly, unnatural, and incomprehensible, as well as being lauded as daring and profound. The eroticism of much of his work led to its being declared obscene; in the case of the vast canvases of Philosophy and Medicine, which the imperial government commissioned for the University of Vienna, it excited petitions and counterpetitions from members of parliament and the university’s professors. Meanwhile, his poster for the Secession’s first exhibition in 1898 and a special issue of its magazine Ver Sacrum in 1901 had Klimt in trouble with the law—the first time for his depiction of a male nude, the second time on account of his female nudes.