Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  Under the Hapsburgs, a Jew could not marry a Christian without one of them becoming Konfessionslos, or embracing the faith of the other. While this law left it to each couple to decide which of them altered their religion, it was intended to encourage Jews to leave the Kultusgemeinde and generally had this result, so intermarriage became one of the prime vehicles for loss of Jewish identity and assimilation. When Austria became a republic following the end of World War I, this law was repealed so couples could retain or change their religion as they chose. While Mizzi was intent on remaining a Jew, she pressed Erni to abandon his Catholicism. His experience of anti-Semitism as a schoolboy at the Theresanium inclined him to do so—prompting him to regard his conversion as futile. But for Erni to leave the Church was still a profound step because it was such a rejection of Hermine’s ambitions for him. Between his engagement to Mizzi and their marriage, he became Konfessionslos. Meanwhile, Paul and Gretl stayed as they were. He continued to identify as a Jew. She remained a Catholic.

  Gretl’s past became an issue after they were engaged. When she told Paul that she was not a virgin, he could have refused to marry her, although he was probably not a virgin himself. Alternatively, he could have declared that her affair with Schiller did not matter to him. Instead, he turned it to his financial advantage. Having already agreed on the size of Gretl’s dowry, Paul demanded that Gretl and Hermine increase it on the basis that Gretl’s loss of her virginity was a liability in the marriage market. Once again the Gallia family conferred. Erni tried to persuade Gretl to reject Paul because his demand suggested he was simply after her money. But Gretl was in love. She also felt guilty about her affair and, having braved the embarrassment of one broken engagement, knew a second would destroy any chance of her marrying. In March 1921, four days before Gretl and Paul married in a civil ceremony, they entered into a prenuptial agreement, a common arrangement when there were great discrepancies in wealth.

  The agreement was complicated because the value of the Austrian crown was plummeting due to hyperinflation, which impoverished many members of Austria’s middle class. Whereas 16 Austrian crowns bought one American dollar in 1919, it took 177 in 1921. Gretl, who provided most of her own dowry, drawing on her inheritance, contributed assets valued at 1.5 million crowns, which were highly vulnerable because they included bonds and treasury notes paying fixed interest. She also undertook to furnish and equip a bedroom, dining room, living room, and kitchen, including all utensils and linen. Hermine contributed another 1 million crowns in cash.

  Gretl and Paul when they married, 1921. (Illustration Credits ill.35)

  Austrian law had long given husbands the power to administer their wives’ property unless they entered into a legal agreement to the contrary. When Moriz married Hermine, he became responsible for the management of her dowry. The agreement between Gretl and Paul empowered Paul to do the same, entitling him to invest the 2.5 million crowns contributed by Gretl and Hermine as he thought fit. The agreement also specified that if Paul predeceased Gretl, the entire 2.5 million crowns would revert to her—a provision consistent with Austrian general law, which provided that the property a woman took into a marriage remained hers. If Gretl predeceased Paul without having children, his entitlement depended on the length of their marriage, like a reward for long service. If Gretl died within three years of their wedding, three-quarters of her dowry reverted to her heirs while Paul retained one-quarter. If she died between three and six years, Paul kept half. If she died between six and nine years, Paul got three-quarters. After nine years, Paul would retain it all.

  Another provision governed what was to happen if Gretl died after they had children. Had there been trust between them, Gretl would have left Paul the full dowry, expecting him to use whatever he needed from it to care for their children and leave the remainder to them when he died. If she had doubts, she would have required him to preserve the capital while authorizing him to use the income for their children. The agreement provided that he was to get nothing, regardless of how long their marriage lasted. A final clause specified that if they separated, Paul was to vacate their apartment, leaving all the things the agreement identified as hers, and pay maintenance sufficient to sustain Gretl’s usual standard of living.

  According to my mother, Gretl bought ready-made furniture for her new apartment. After the arguments between Norbert Stern and Moriz over Josef Hoffmann proved so destructive, it is easy to imagine that Gretl did not want to risk repeating this experience. Yet a floor plan of the apartment drawn up by Franz von Krauss, who designed the family building on the Wohllebengasse, suggests that Gretl employed him again to fit out some of the apartment’s rooms, while she bought mass-produced furniture for the rest. This question of design matters because the manner in which Viennese couples fitted out their apartments remained one of the prime ways in which they displayed their taste and standing. Architect-designed furniture enhanced the individuality of its owners; mass-produced furniture made them look common. Erni and Mizzi provide the most immediate yardstick. While Hoffmann designed two of their rooms, another two were by Wilhelm Legler, who exhibited with Carl Moll at the Galerie Miethke.

  If Gretl employed Krauss, Paul and she started married life much like Erni and Mizzi. Both couples rented apartments in Hietzing, the fashionable outer Viennese suburb where Nathan and Josefine Hamburger had lived. Both couples commissioned architect-designed furniture, displaying an almost complete dearth of independent taste. Both couples employed one servant who did most of their cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Yet Gretl was acutely aware that she would have been living much more grandly had she married Norbert Stern. Rather than containing a salon, dining room, smoking room, and boudoir, the apartment included just a salon and smoking room. Krauss probably fitted out only two or three rooms rather than six, and whatever he designed lacked Hoffmann’s cachet.

  The greater wealth of Erni and Mizzi fueled Gretl’s sense of disadvantage. The key was Erni’s position as her father’s successor, which saw him briefly replace Moriz on the board of the Wiener Werkstätte and immediately become the manager of the family liqueur company, Johann Timmels-Witwe, and acquire a half share in it. Although Erni displayed little aptitude as a businessman, this company was much bigger than the Herschmann leather business and Erni received half its profits, whereas Paul received just one-fifth of what the leather company earned.

  Gretl’s sensitivity about her situation and status is revealed by an exchange she had with Otto Hamburger’s former housekeeper and new wife, Dagmar, who had just become the mistress of her own house with servants in Bruntal. The inversion of the two women’s circumstances—the rise of Dagmar and fall of Gretl—was pivotal. When Dagmar observed, “You are living just like the proletariat,” Gretl retaliated with, “You ought to know.” Yet Gretl felt profoundly lucky in one respect. While Erni and Mizzi proved unable to have children, Gretl was pregnant within two months of her marriage and, in February 1922, she gave birth to a girl whom Paul and she named after his late mother, Anna.

  The diary that Gretl kept about Anna is imbued with a sense of order and progress—of everything happening in the right way at the right time, with both sides of the family engaging with the new baby. Gretl recorded Anna’s first sounds, first laugh, and first outing. She recorded Anna’s first significant presents from the Gallias and the Herschmanns—a gold heart on a gold chain from Hermine and a bloodred coral necklace from Paul’s wealthiest brother, Franz. She recorded Anna’s first independent steps at ten months, while they were at a restaurant. She recorded the appearance of Anna’s first tooth, a fortnight after her first birthday.

  Everything else suggests the marriage of Gretl and Paul turned sour very fast. When she looked back on what occurred, Gretl thought their great mistake was their failure to escape their interfering families when Paul was offered a tutorship in Germany. Instead, they remained in Vienna, where the Herschmanns no more accepted Gretl than the Gallias accepted Paul. Hermine was especially difficult. When Gret
l and Erni married, Hermine required them to ring her every day, bring their new spouses to the Wohllebengasse for lunch every second weekend, and spend part of each summer in Alt Aussee. While Mizzi dutifully went to the Villa Gallia every year, Paul never did.

  The economy was another source of stress: Austria’s defeat in the war saw the Allies strip it of much more territory than its main ally, Germany—transforming Vienna from the epicenter of a multilingual empire of 55 million people to the capital of a nation-state of just 7 million, with borders more or less determined on linguistic lines. As hyperinflation accelerated and the value of the Austrian currency fell faster than ever, it took 83,000 crowns to buy an American dollar in 1922, compared to 177 a year before, so it became essential to spend what one earned as soon as one received it. Rather than taking a weekly salary from the family leather business, Paul began paying himself daily so Gretl could buy what they needed before prices escalated again. Since she had never managed a household before, Gretl found doing so under pressure particularly challenging.

  Their different religions became even more of an issue as anti-Semitism intensified and Paul and Gretl had to decide Anna’s religion. Had Paul followed Jewish matrilineal tradition, Gretl’s religion would have been determinative. Since she was a Roman Catholic, Anna would have become one, too. But just as Paul insisted that she be named after his mother, so he insisted that Anna be brought up Jewish and Gretl again gave way. For him it was a matter of continuity, an extension of tradition. For her it was a reversion to something her parents had rejected.

  Their first Christmas as a family of three exacerbated this conflict when Gretl wanted to celebrate it with a richly decorated tree and presents. Many assimilated Viennese Jews happily did so, just as they celebrated Easter with eggs. Paul maintained the antipathy toward Christian festivities that he had demonstrated before they married. He not only stopped Gretl from displaying any Christian symbols in their apartment but also denied her a candelit tree. All he allowed was one pine branch decorated with hearts, which, as Gretl described it, left her crying, with ten-month-old Anna licking her tears “like a faithful dog.” Gretl and Paul probably separated shortly thereafter.

  The Scheidung von Bett und Tisch, or “separation of bed and table,” involving property settlement and alimony but not allowing remarriage, was the closest thing to divorce available to Austrian Catholics such as Gretl. Austria’s civil code made it relatively easy to secure when both parties consented. If they had no children and the parties agreed on the terms of their separation, the courts would approve their agreement. If there were children, the courts had to examine the agreement in order to ensure it protected the children’s interests. While the prenuptial agreement between Gretl and Paul simplified matters, as it identified Gretl’s property and required Paul to pay her “decent maintenance,” the courts had to weigh Anna’s interests before they agreed to the Scheidung of Gretl and Paul in December 1923.

  One of Gretl’s ways of trying to convince herself she had made the right decision after breaking her engagement with Norbert Stern was her expectation that she would otherwise have been back under her parents’ roof within a few years—the usual lot of upper-middle-class women whose marriages did not last. Gretl must have remembered this prognosis as her marriage to Paul ended and there was no question what she would do. Her inheritance and maintenance from Paul were insufficient to allow her to keep the apartment in Hietzing for long. It also ran counter to all social norms for a woman such as her to take a job while she had a small child. Less than three years after her marriage, Gretl was back in the Wohllebengasse with Hermine as well as Käthe and Lene, who had just completed their chemistry degrees after six years at the University of Vienna. To this household of women, Gretl returned with Anna, whom the Gallias promptly renamed Annelore, or Lorle, in a deliberate rejection of the name that Paul had given her.

  The Gallia apartment looked much the same as a decade before when it was new. Whereas Adolf Loos did not mind if his clients rearranged his rooms, Hoffmann dictated how his patrons lived and Hermine was one of the most obedient. While she turned the smoking room into her study after Moriz died, Hermine changed nothing else. Although she could have afforded to buy new paintings or furniture, she did not do so. Instead, she maintained her attachment to the art and design of turn-of-the-century Vienna, regularly participating in their commemoration and celebration while ignoring what followed. When she lent her portrait to the Secession in 1918, it was the first time Klimt’s work had been shown there since he led his Klimtgruppe out of the society thirteen years before. In 1921, she contributed two paintings to a retrospective of Moll’s work held at Vienna’s Künstlerhaus to mark his sixtieth birthday. She participated as both a shareholder and a patron when the Wiener Werkstätte reached its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1928, after once again almost going bankrupt, and Hoffmann and Eugenia Primavesi marked the occasion in style over four days, including a characteristically grand feast. She attended the exhibition in 1930 at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, or Museum of Applied Arts, that marked Hoffmann’s sixtieth birthday.

  Hermine’s fortune was in decline for reasons beyond her control. The introduction of rent control during the war cut her income from the other apartments in the Wohllebengasse. The taxes introduced by Vienna’s socialist government required her to pay much more to the city. The triumph of electric lighting slashed the value of her stake in the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft. The biggest blow was that Austrian war bonds became worthless when the Hapsburgs fell, depriving her of one-eighth of her capital. While Hermine was fortunate that many of Moriz’s investments withstood the economic turmoil of the era, she struggled with her new status and responsibilities. One of the family’s names for her was Minerl, a diminutive of Hermine. She came to think of herself as “das arme Minerl,” a woman who needed help.

  Her establishment was still lavish, especially by the standards of the 1920s, when the number of women in domestic service dropped markedly. The most senior was the cook, who had a room to herself on the ground floor and was the one employee to be called Frau rather than by her Christian name, but, as in many wealthy Viennese households, she had access to the pantry only when Hermine unlocked it. Hermine’s personal maid was the only servant to live on the first floor, so she could be as close as possible to her mistress. Two junior servants, who shared a bedroom below, cleaned and dusted the apartment and helped with the meals. Although Hermine took pride in how well she accommodated the servants, they worked from before breakfast until after dinner, with just half a day off every second weekend.

  Several other women worked regularly for Hermine without living in. A hairdresser came every morning to put waves in her hair before pinning up her long plait. Two other women spent one week in every four doing the washing and ironing. A specialist lace cleaner cared for Hermine’s collection, which she began forming when she married in the 1890s and then extended in the early 1900s when Austrian lace excited almost as much international attention as the Wiener Werkstätte. One of Hermine’s former servants assisted on special cleaning days, polishing the parquetry floor with a brush strapped to one foot and a cloth under the other.

  Frau Dr. Herschmann, as Gretl continued to be known, retaining both Paul’s name and title, was a beneficiary of Hermine’s wealth when she returned to the Wohllebengasse. Gretl did not have to pay rent and had few other expenses. Almost everything was done for her. Hermine even added to her staff by employing governesses to look after Annelore until she started her primary schooling. Gretl used this freedom to play the piano and take chamber music lessons with an accomplished violinist. She joined one of Vienna’s leading choirs, the Singakademie. Like Hermine, she took up bridge, which became fashionable in the 1920s, and played at least once a week. She extended her range of languages by learning Italian and went on holidays by herself to Germany, France, and Italy.

  Like other members of the family who benefited from Hermine’s money, the privileges enjoyed by Gretl came at a
price that Mizzi and Anne, if not Gretl herself, came to think excessively high. For all that Moriz and Hermine shaped the way she would be seen by posterity when they commissioned Klimt to paint her portrait, they could not control the stories told about her by members of the family who felt they suffered from the way she wielded her power.

  As Mizzi saw it, Käthe was a victim of Hermine’s rule when Lene died in 1926, at age twenty-seven, after another illness that Vienna’s best doctors could not diagnose. As Lene’s death traumatized Käthe because the twins had been so close—always sharing the same bedroom despite the size of the family apartment and maintaining their identical appearance by wearing the same clothes and cutting their hair in the same style—the last thing that Käthe needed was for her world to be diminished even further. But Hermine feared Lene had been poisoned by chemicals in the Viennese factory where Käthe and she worked following a stint at the family’s powdered-milk business in Fulnek. Hermine insisted Käthe leave the factory and work for another family company, the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, which had been reduced to an outlet for gas stoves. Instead of pursuing her career as a chemist, Käthe became a shop manager who, at weekly cooking demonstrations, showed customers how to roast and bake.

  Mizzi also blamed Hermine for Käthe’s failure to marry, even though it was part of a much larger phenomenon: in the 1920s, marriage and children lost some of their traditional importance for members of Vienna’s middle class. Women such as Käthe, who completed their university degrees, were particularly unlikely to marry and, if they did, usually married late and often had no children. The dilemmas faced by them even became the stuff of two popular Austrian novels featuring young chemists who decide that they would prefer marriage and a family to their career, though only one fulfills this ambition. Mizzi fixed on how Hermine obstructed Käthe’s opportunities, recalling that whenever Käthe attracted a suitor after Lene died, Hermine went to bed, demanded attention, and prevented Käthe from going out so she would always have her favorite surviving daughter under her roof.