by Tim Bonyhady
Gustav Klimt, Beech Forest, 1903. (Illustration Credits ill.7)
This purchase changed the status of Hermine and Moriz among Vienna’s cultural elite. On the day that Hermine first publicly appeared as one of Klimt’s subjects, Moriz and she demonstrated their wealth, taste for the new, and regard for Klimt by buying another of his paintings. While Hermine and Moriz needed to own one picture by Klimt to be regarded as serious collectors of avant-garde Austrian art, to purchase two put them in another league, given Klimt’s high prices and small output. The only collector to own more Klimts in 1903 was Fritz Waerndorfer, whose collection grew to four when he bought Pallas Athena.
The appetite of Moriz and Hermine for culture was still not sated. The performances on offer that night in Vienna ranged from a production of part one of Goethe’s Faust at the Hofburgtheater to the regular Saturday night performance of Johann Strauss Jr. at the Kursalon. After admiring and acquiring the most exciting new Viennese art during the day, Moriz and Hermine opted for more new Austrian culture. Leaving their children with their governess, Moriz and Hermine spent the evening at the Deutsches Volkstheater, watching Maria Theresa, the latest comedy by Franz von Schöntan, whose plays were very popular yet appealed to the avant-garde.
2
God
Most Viennese in 1900 came from somewhere else. As towns and villages shrank and cities swelled across Europe in the nineteenth century, Vienna grew unusually quickly. The 445,000 people who lived there in 1850 became 1.6 million in 1900, making Vienna the third most populous European city after London and Paris. Moriz and Hermine were among the provincials who flocked there from across the Hapsburg Empire, especially the Czech Crown lands. He came from southern Moravia, where Czech was the local language, but most Jews used German, which was the language of social and economic aspiration. She came from southern Silesia, where almost everyone spoke German.
Their families were both prosperous. Moriz’s father, Emmanuel Gallia, was a successful produce merchant, innkeeper, and landowner in Bisenz, a town of just a few thousand people offering limited economic opportunities. Hermine’s father, Nathan Hamburger, did much better in Freudenthal, which was more than three times the size of Bisenz. He began in 1864, aged just twenty-three, by renting one of the town’s two breweries. In 1870, he bought it and rapidly transformed it into one of the most modern in Silesia. Before long he was also producing malt for export and acquired two inns, a restaurant, a hall, a business selling farming equipment, and a butter factory, making him one of Freudenthal’s wealthiest men.
Just as aristocrats often intermarried in the mid-nineteenth century to aggregate their wealth and power, so did members of the upper middle class. The Rothschilds were particularly committed to this practice, which usually involved first or second cousins but sometimes uncles and nieces. Between the 1820s and 1870s, thirty of thirty-six Rothschild marriages were within the family. The Gallias and Hamburgers had far less wealth to protect but continued this practice at the end of the century when marriages between relatives were rarer. While two of Hermine’s first cousins married each other and another married a second cousin, Moriz and Hermine were uncle and niece. She was the eldest child and only daughter of his oldest sister, Josefine. He was twelve years Hermine’s senior, a conventional age difference for men and women of their class.
Moriz and Hermine would have known something of the long history of Jews in Vienna when they moved there. For all its renown as the City of Music, Vienna was the City of Blood for Jews because of the destruction of its Jewish community in the 1420s, when it was one of the largest in Europe. Archduke Albert V began by imprisoning all the city’s Jews. Then he expelled many poorer Jews by setting them adrift in boats on the Danube and accused the wealthy of sacrilege in order to legitimize their torture and forcible conversion and seize their property. Rather than submit to baptism, a hundred Jews committed suicide in Vienna’s main synagogue, which the Archduke promptly demolished. He had the remaining 270 Jews burned to death outside the city’s walls.
A century later, only twelve Jewish families lived in Vienna by one account, just seven according to another, and Jews visiting the city had to wear a ring of yellow cloth “uncovered and unhidden” so that they would be immediately identifiable. During the following century, the few Jewish families in Vienna were the target of more decrees of banishment, sometimes enforced, sometimes not. But in the 1620s, when there were still just fifty Jewish families in Vienna, Emperor Ferdinand II followed the Italian example of creating a “ghetto” away from the city center as a means of giving the city’s Jews greater rights (rather than persecuting them). While Ferdinand required Jews to live in this ghetto across the Danube Canal, he freed them of control by the city council, permitted them to own shops in the inner city, and allowed them to erect a new synagogue.
This good fortune did not last. In 1641, Ferdinand III placed the ghetto under the jurisdiction of the city council, which wanted all its occupants expelled, and barred Jews from trading in the inner city. In 1642, 1649, 1665, and 1668, mobs stormed and plundered the ghetto. In 1669, Leopold I set about destroying it in return for a vast sum from the council, which offset the emperor’s loss of the special taxes paid by the ghetto’s inhabitants. Within a year Leopold had expelled all of Vienna’s Jews, expropriated their property, and destroyed their synagogue so that a church could be erected on its foundations, though this time a tiny community established itself within a few years. At the end of the seventeenth century, ten “privileged” Jewish families lived in the city.
Jews in this period remained as vulnerable as ever. They were separated from the rest of the population by religion, language, clothing, culture, descent, and law. They spoke Yiddish, celebrated the Sabbath, observed special religious holidays, and followed their own dietary laws, while the men wore skullcaps and the women covered their hair or shaved it and wore wigs. Far from being citizens, they were classified as aliens and, because they were subject to so many restrictions and exclusions, they looked to the Jewish community for identity, maintaining its traditions and observing its religious tenets.
Emperor Joseph II reduced this separation in 1782 through his Edict of Tolerance, a prime expression of the European Enlightenment. This edict freed Jews from having to wear yellow badges, allowed them to attend Christian schools and universities, and enabled them to carry on all trades. Yet the edict also left Jews subject to discriminatory taxes and excluded them from the civil service and many professions. It failed to repeal the restrictions on the number of Jews entitled to live in Vienna. It undermined the identity of Jews by prohibiting them from using Hebrew and Yiddish and preventing them from establishing synagogues or forming community organizations.
Had this treatment been exceptional, Moriz and Hermine might have hesitated before moving to Vienna. But until the eighteenth century, European Jews were accustomed to bouts of intense persecution between periods of relative toleration. At best they enjoyed stability, prosperity, and substantial autonomy while remaining subject to significant discrimination. At worst they were killed or lost their homes and livelihoods when forced to move from one place to another. The Jews of Moriz’s birthplace, Bisenz, were one example. In 1604, they occupied forty-nine buildings, ran their own hospital, and owned sixteen vineyards, whereas Jews across Europe were generally barred from agriculture. In 1605, the prince of Transylvania, Stephan Bocskai, slaughtered almost the entire community.
Two hundred years later, Bisenz was one of fifty-two Moravian towns where the Hapsburgs allowed Jews to live. They numbered almost one thousand, more than ever, but had no say in the general administration of the town. Instead, their community was a self-governing entity with its own mayor, staff, services, and schools. Like all Jews in Moravia, those in Bisenz had to pay onerous special taxes, were excluded from many occupations, and had limited freedom of movement. They also were subject to the Familiants Law of Emperor Charles VI, which tried to contain the Jewish population of the Czech Crown lands by all
owing only the eldest son of each family to marry and then only after his father’s death.
Hermine’s birthplace, Freudenthal, represented a different facet of Jewish experience. It was one of many central European towns where few, if any, Jews had lived for hundreds of years. If there was a Jewish community in Freudenthal in the medieval era, its members would have had to leave with the larger expulsion of Jews from Silesia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and none seem to have returned in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Hapsburgs imposed even stricter demographic limits on the Jews of Silesia than those of Moravia.
Emperor Franz Joseph reformed this situation, out of necessity more than choice, as part of the larger constitutional changes triggered by the European revolutions of 1848 and Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866. As part of extending the rights of all his subjects in 1848, Franz Joseph gave Jews freedom of movement and residence, legalized their religious services, permitted them to own land, opened the public service and professions to them, allowed them to marry, and repealed the special taxes. When Franz Joseph transformed his regime into a constitutional monarchy in 1867, he gave Jews the same civil and political rights as other Austrians.
Many Jews exercised their new rights to move to new towns, enter new occupations, and participate in Europe’s burgeoning capitalist economy. Hermine’s father, Nathan, who was born in Wischau in southern Moravia, was among a small group who went to Freudenthal, where they secured an upstairs prayer room in the center of the town and then established a Jewish cemetery on its outskirts. Yet even as the community established these institutions, it stopped growing and was soon in decline because of the pull of even bigger towns and cities, which saw Hermine and her parents settle in Vienna, while her three brothers also lived there for extended periods. Much the same occurred in Bisenz, where the Jewish community expressed its self-confidence in the 1860s by building a new synagogue, only for the population to halve by the end of the century. Moriz, his two brothers, and his three sisters were part of this exodus. By the early 1900s, no Gallias lived in Bisenz.
The number of Jews who moved to Vienna was particularly large because it offered the greatest opportunities and because Jews there initially experienced unprecedented tolerance, encouraged by Austria’s Liberal government. A census in 1857 recorded just six thousand Jews, less than 1.5 percent of the population. By 1880 there were seventy-two thousand, or 10 percent, a proportion maintained as the city grew and grew over the next twenty years. Moriz and Hermine were among the new arrivals. They married in 1893 in Vienna’s main synagogue in the First District. Their four children were born in Vienna between 1895 and 1899 and, like them, became members of the city’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. They all were part of Vienna’s extraordinary transformation in fifty years from a city almost without Jews to the most Jewish city in western Europe.
Vienna also became the only European capital with an elected anti-Semitic government as prejudice burgeoned again in the city. While the increase in its Jewish population was one factor, the envy with which many of its old residents looked on the economic success of the new arrivals was another. The key figure was Karl Lueger, the leader of the Christian Social Party, who controlled majorities in the Austrian parliament and provincial diet and was Vienna’s mayor, the highest elected position in the Hapsburg monarchy, from 1897 until his death in 1910. While the Christian Socials eclipsed Austria’s Liberals for many reasons, the way in which Lueger exploited and legitimated anti-Semitism was integral to his party’s success. “We in Vienna are anti-Semites,” Lueger observed in 1905, as if it were an uncontroversial, acceptable matter of fact.
Lueger also accused Jews of ritual murder. He identified them as a destructive element that brought down the state wherever they became powerful. He threatened them with pogroms. In practice he neither stripped Jews of their civil rights nor initiated attacks against them, and often worked with them when it was to his advantage. Yet discrimination against Jews intensified while Lueger was Vienna’s mayor, making it almost impossible for them to secure government contracts or obtain municipal positions, let alone be promoted. The same was true of the imperial army and the oldest, most prestigious imperial departments, though newer ministries such as the post office and railways were a little more open.
Theobald Pollak, the original owner of the family’s portrait of Gustav Mahler, illustrates both the discrimination Jews encountered in Vienna and the opportunities they enjoyed. Pollak’s religion meant that he could secure a position in the Department of Railways only through patronage. He also experienced enduring prejudice and vilification there but quickly rose to be one of the department’s most senior officials and acquired a string of titles and honors, becoming a Hofrat, or ministerial counselor, a Knight of the Iron Cross, and Commander of the Order of Isabella of Spain.
Alma Schindler, who was very close to Theobald Pollak, recorded something of his experience in her diary. She wrote that Pollak looked on religion as a cause of havoc—to blame for martyrs and crusades and much else evil in the world. She also identified him as so sensitive to anti-Semitism that he imagined it where none existed, prompting him to create “very unpleasant,” “crazy” scenes and conflicts when he was with friends and acquaintances of Alma’s family. Yet she also recognized that Pollak’s fears were well founded when it came to his work. “The defamatory tactics of the anti-Semitic faction are making him ill,” Alma observed in 1900, when Pollak had been a departmental secretary for over a year. “God knows, I’m glad I wasn’t born a Jew.”
Many of Alma’s other entries explain why. Even though she was attracted to Jews, she did not find it easy to accept them. She expressed her abhorrence of the founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, Fritz Waerndorfer, by identifying him as “a brazen Jew.” While she developed a passion for the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, a card he sent her from Vienna’s most Jewish district, the Leopoldstadt, prompted her to wonder, “Is he one of those little half-Jews who never succeed in freeing themselves from their roots?” When she heard that Zemlinsky had become engaged to another woman, she railed, “You Jewish sneak, keep your hook-nosed Jew-girl. She’s just right for you,” only to display her confusion by wondering whether she should marry “some Semitic moneybag.”
The possibility that Alma would marry a Jew was so clear that it became a conversation topic with her friends and acquaintances. At a dinner attended by the architects Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Koloman Moser, the German singer Hans Oberstetter “begged” Alma “never to marry a Jew.” Another of Alma’s admirers, Max Burckhard, followed suit when Alma’s romance with Zemlinsky intensified after he turned out not to have gotten engaged to his “Jew-girl.” When Burckhard warned Alma, “For heaven’s sake don’t marry Z. Don’t corrupt good race,” she concurred. “He’s right—my body is ten times too beautiful for his,” she declared, though she also acknowledged “that his soul is a hundred times too beautiful for mine … didn’t occur to me.” While there were occasions when Alma’s desire for Zemlinsky was so great that she felt she would “gladly be pregnant for him … his blood and mine, commingled,” in between she saw a fundamental obstacle: it would involve “bearing his children—little, degenerate Jew-kids.”
She looked on converts to Christianity in much the same way, as part of thinking of Jewishness as a matter of race rather than religion that conversion did not alter. Although the composer Felix Mendelssohn had been baptized when he was seven, Alma still regarded him as a Jew. The same was true of Gustav Mahler himself, whom she met while still infatuated with Zemlinsky. Her identification of Mahler as a Jew underlay her observation: “So many things about him annoy me: his smell—the way he sings, the something in the way he speaks.” But as Mahler rapidly replaced Zemlinsky in her affections, she longed not just to make love with Mahler but also to become pregnant by him. “Oh, to bear his child!” she exclaimed. “My body. His soul. When shall I be his?” By March 1902, when they married, Alma was one month pregnant.
She was contemptuous of Hermine and Moriz in 1901 when she first visited their apartment in the Schleifmühlgasse in Vienna’s Fourth District, where the Gallias lived for twenty years before moving to the Wohllebengasse. All Alma noted after being invited for dinner along with her mother, Anna, and stepfather, Carl Moll, was the lavishness of the Gallias’ hospitality, their corpulence, and their race, suggesting that Alma, who delighted in intellectual exchange and often recorded it in her diary, found what Hermine and Moriz had to say of no interest. She wrote: “Evening at Gallias, Caviar, champagne and a gross Jewish couple.” She thought Hermine and Moriz ripe for caricature—describing them as “made for Rudolf Wilke,” widely regarded as the most talented draftsman with the leading German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, who stocked his cartoons with obese Jews.
This entry raises many questions. Did Hermine and Moriz perceive what Alma thought of them that night? Did Alma think the same when Moriz, and especially Hermine, went on to see much more of her? Did Anna and Carl Moll share Alma’s views? And how did Hermine and Moriz respond to other Viennese who were much more anti-Semitic? I imagine that, just as Alma was acutely sensitive to Jewishness, seemingly able to identify it wherever she encountered it, so Hermine and Moriz were acutely aware of how their Jewishness defined their reception. They looked to see when they were genuinely accepted, when they were tolerated just because of their money, and when they were unwelcome, despised, or hated. As they encountered anti-Semitism repeatedly in Vienna, one of their great dilemmas was whether to confront this prejudice, try to ignore it, or do all they could to escape it.
Conversion was one possibility. While it did not free Jews from anti-Semitism, it sometimes allowed them to secure positions otherwise barred to them. Mahler was the most spectacular example. When he saw the opportunity late in 1896 to become director of Vienna’s Hofoper, or Imperial Court Opera—the most coveted musical post in Europe—he was ineligible because the court required all of its officeholders to be baptized. By February 1897, Mahler was a Catholic, in April the Emperor Franz Joseph appointed him as one of the Hofoper’s conductors, in July Franz Joseph made him its deputy director, and in October its director. Yet this imperial acceptance did not stop Mahler from being vilified in the anti-Semitic press. That Mahler had got himself “done”—as one newspaper described his conversion—was of no account to those who applied the maxim “Once a Jew always a Jew.” There was outrage at “the setting of a non-German, especially a Jew, at the head of a German artistic institution.”