Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  Hermine exercised her power over Gretl in other ways, requiring her to run errands in the city and deliver her instructions to the servants. She expected Gretl to be present when she had guests for lunch or afternoon tea and allowed Gretl to have visitors only if she was also present. She controlled Gretl’s appearance by insisting she wear her hair long. She forbade Gretl from playing the Steinway grand piano in the salon—restricting her to a modest upright in her bedroom—even though Gretl was by far the most accomplished musician in the family.

  Hermine’s preference for Käthe and the enduring antagonism between Gretl and Käthe made Gretl’s return to the Wohllebengasse even more difficult. Hermine’s names for her daughters were indicative. She referred to one by the diminutive Käthelein, the other as plain Gretl. Hermine also reprimanded and criticized Gretl repeatedly and, because Käthe generally sided with Hermine, Gretl usually had no one to defend her. A rare exception, which Gretl treasured, was when Annelore did so as a small girl, inverting the hierarchy of the house. “No one,” Annelore admonished Hermine, “speaks like that to my Mutti.”

  The rooms that Hermine allocated to Gretl and Annelore were even more telling. Since its construction, the apartment’s two floors had created a clear divide between the family who lived above and the servants who lived below. Hermine could easily have maintained this divide by giving Erni’s and Gretl’s old rooms on the first floor to Gretl and Annelore. While Gretl’s old room became Annelore’s playroom, Hermine made Gretl and Annelore share a bedroom on the ground floor intended for servants. Following Gretl’s broken engagement with Norbert Stern, affair with Erich Schiller, and divorce from Paul Herschmann, Hermine considered Gretl a social embarrassment and moral failure deserving of punishment and, even though Annelore was blameless, treated her the same.

  Their stigma was acute. Gretl and Annelore were probably the only mother and daughter in Vienna from such a wealthy family who shared a bedroom for so long, let alone one on the servants’ floor. The position of their room shaped how they were treated by family, friends, acquaintances, and servants and how they saw themselves. Gretl and Annelore were, of course, superior to the servants, yet they were inferior to Hermine and the twins. For all the privileges that Gretl and Annelore enjoyed within the Wohllebengasse, they were also pariahs.

  The stairs provided one of the great metaphors of class relations and social position in the homes of the rich in the early twentieth century. There was not just the language of “upstairs,” “downstairs,” and “below the stairs.” There were also the servants whom the English dubbed “tweenies,” or between-stairs maids, who assisted both the cook and the housekeeper and thus were constantly moving between floors. As Gretl and Annelore were also required to do so, Gretl drew on this metaphor to evoke their place in Good Living Street. According to Gretl, they lived on the stairs.

  III

  ANNELORE

  1

  Memory

  Annelore revealed little of herself in the diaries that she kept as a ten- and eleven-year-old. Her opening entry, made in Alt Aussee in August 1932, was typically bland. “Before lunch I went to the swimming school,” she wrote. “The weather is beautiful. In the afternoon I went to the Sommersbergersee with Mutti and Käthe.” No wonder she opted to rely on her memories when I asked her to write about her life. Yet when she read these diaries carefully after working on her story for a year, they disturbed her more than any other family papers. The difference was that the papers of Moriz, Hermine, Gretl, Käthe, and Lene contained more or less what she expected. Even though many of the incidents they described were new to her, she did not find them surprising. Her diaries were a shock because of the gulf between her entries and her memories—a gulf that made her wonder what she had done and how she had acquired her identity.

  As Anne remembered it, her childhood was abnormal in its isolation, which came not just with being an only child and the one Gallia or Herschmann of her generation but also with having almost no friends her own age. As she thought of herself as having “virtually only adult company,” she blamed Hermine. She recalled that when she invited one of her classmates to the Wohllebengasse, Hermine was scandalized to discover her friend was illegitimate, stopped Annelore’s seeing her again, and began vetting all invitations that Annelore wanted to extend or accept. Just two girls met Hermine’s standards.

  The diary entries made by Annelore in Vienna were consistent with these memories. She went just twice to visit other girls and had only one girl over to the Wohllebengasse in seven months. Annelore’s entries for Alt Aussee could not have been more different. They showed that far from being alone during the summer of 1932, she played with other girls almost every day. She swam in the lake, learned to ride a bicycle, played Ping-Pong and tennis, and cooked with them. They sometimes came to the Villa Gallia; she sometimes went to their houses. While she occasionally described herself as bored, her happiness was usually clear. “I can ride a bike,” she recorded one day. “It was fun,” she wrote after another.

  Many of Anne’s other childhood memories related to the grave in the Hietzing cemetery where Moriz and Lene were buried. As Anne remembered it, she had to go to there every Sunday, as well as on religious festivals such as All Souls’ Day and All Saints’ Day. While she occasionally went with Käthe, she generally accompanied Hermine, who turned these outings into social events with a competitive edge. As they walked around the cemetery so Hermine could meet acquaintances and confirm that the Gallia grave was decorated with the most beautiful flowers, Annelore’s boredom and frustration grew. She hated how these visits ruined her Sundays, the one day of the week in Austria when there was no school.

  Her diaries tell a different story. They record one visit to the grave of Otto Hamburger’s first wife, Henny, in Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery “obeying Grandmother’s command”; another to the Gallia grave in Bzenec, as Bisenz had become known following the war; and a third to the Hietzing cemetery on All Saints’ Day. That was it. During the seven months that Annelore recorded her daily life in Vienna, she did not go once to the Hietzing cemetery on a Sunday, let alone every week. For the one period when Anne could test her memories against a contemporaneous record, they were wrong.

  Anne’s solution was to write a chapter about what her diaries revealed, while leaving the rest of her story based on her memories intact. She wrote: “It could be that my memories are wrong but it could also be that the seven months covered by the diary are atypical. Perhaps there was one summer in which I had playmates, but the other summers I had none. Perhaps the compulsory cemetery visits that I remember came later.” Otherwise she was unforgiving. If her diaries were typical and her memories were wrong, she had only this explanation: “I was so spoiled that if I did not like anything I exaggerated it and it stuck in my memory in that form.” She accepted one of Mizzi’s observations about her that characteristically combined affection with criticism. Mizzi always said, Anne wrote, that after her upbringing in the Wohllebengasse, it was a wonder she turned out at all.

  Most of her memories were unhappy. They started with Gretl’s twenty-ninth birthday in the summer of 1925 when Gretl and she were in Alt Aussee as usual. Annelore, who was already being schooled in etiquette—required not just to say “Küss die Hand,” or “kiss the hand,” but to do so every morning and evening, just as Gretl had done as a girl—went outside to play, climbed a fence, and tore the pink frock that Hermine had just given her. “The outcry at this awful deed was such that it has stayed with me for over sixty years,” Anne wrote. “Although I was only three, I was dressed up and expected to behave like a lady.”

  Hermine controlled her in many ways—prohibiting her from eating bananas because she thought they transmitted polio, requiring her to wear her hair in plaits over her ears throughout junior high school when the fashion was for girls to have their plaits behind their ears, and insisting that she wear pink or red, which made her prefer white and blue. Gretl, full of fears after Annelore nearly died of a blocked inte
stine as a one-year-old, instructed Annelore to go to the toilet as often as possible at school and insisted that she place a paper cover on the toilet seat to avoid infection. Käthe was more liberal, occasionally buying Annelore a banana in Aussee, although only when Hermine was not there.

  Annelore particularly resented her skating outfit because Vienna’s largest outdoor rink, the Eislaufverein, was the place where she most wanted to look stylish. She wanted to impress her German teacher, Ilse Hornung, who was one of Europe’s leading figure skaters when Austrians took immense pride in their success on the rink. As Annelore developed a crush on Hornung, she wrote repeatedly about her idol’s “sweet” clothes, such as very short pants and Yugoslav slippers or tight trousers and a very short sweater that exposed Hornung’s midriff. Annelore longed for a new pair of white skates and a new skating dress with a flared skirt that would “fly.” Instead, for all of her expensive new outfits, she had to make do with Gretl’s brown skates and one of Käthe’s velvet dresses.

  Annelore, aged three, 1925. (Illustration Credits ill.36)

  As Anne remembered it, the only clothing that she received despite Hermine’s disapproval was a pair of tennis shorts that were cut so that they looked like divided skirts. While the American Alice Marble created a sensation when she introduced these shorts to the international tennis scene in 1932, within a year they were nowhere near as controversial. Annelore still wore a knee-length skirt that summer and the next, but got the shorts she wanted in 1935 from Käthe, who exploited the privileges that came with being Hermine’s favorite to help make herself Annelore’s favorite. Had Gretl wanted to give these shorts to Annelore, Hermine would have stopped her, even though Gretl was Annelore’s mother.

  This competition between Gretl and Käthe was so much part of Anne’s life that she took it for granted when writing her story, neither discussing its oddity nor exploring how it came to be. The answer, most likely, lay not just in Käthe’s own failure to have children but in the death of Lene. As Käthe looked for a substitute for her twin, she fixed on Annelore and, whether consciously or not, took every opportunity to supplant Gretl. The theater was a prime example, as Annelore became what Käthe described as a “Theaternarr,” or “theater addict.” While Gretl took Annelore to her first evening performance not long after she turned ten in 1932, Käthe was soon using Christmas to give Annelore ever more theater outings, until Gretl trumped Käthe in 1936 by promising to take Annelore to the Burgtheater fifteen times, so as to stop Käthe from eclipsing her in Annelore’s affection.

  The earliest photographs of Annelore suggest a very different childhood. The Viennese studio Jobst, which took two or three portraits of her every year until she was four, created compelling images of her as a radiantly happy girl. A series from 1925 showing the three-year-old Annelore in the pink frock that she was soon to tear is particularly striking. Whereas this dress represented the start of her overly controlled childhood in Anne’s memories, Jobst showed her looking self-assured, eager, excited, and full of wonderment at the world.

  Two portraits of Annelore from 1931 are much closer to her later image of herself. They both were taken by Vienna’s leading celebrity photographer between the wars, Trude Fleischmann. One shows the nine-year-old Annelore almost pouting, not quite sulking, in her first theater dress, a sleeveless satin outfit, and wearing lipstick and a string of pearls. This portrait brings out the wealth and sophistication of Annelore’s upbringing, making her look like a starlet. The other, which shows her in a sailor suit and the same string of pearls, makes Annelore appear older than her nine years, even though the sailor suit establishes this portrait as an image of childhood. Sad, serious, and resentful, she stares at the camera, one eyebrow raised, challenging the viewer. Why, she seems to ask, do I have to be here? Why are you making me do this?

  Anne recalled nothing about Fleischmann when I asked her. She was photographed far too often for any of her portrait sessions to stick in her memory. But her clothes were another matter because they caused her such resentment and embarrassment as a girl. At the end of her life, she could recall who had given her most of what she wore in her childhood photographs and when she had been forced to wear these outfits and could add color to these sepia and black-and-white prints, recalling that her theater outfit was blue with red flowers and that the sailor suit came with a matching blue cap and a white blouse. She remembered even more about her string of pearls, which exemplified for her how she had been overindulged as a child. She received these pearls one Christmas when she decided that, rather than opening her presents all at once, she would extend her pleasure and excitement by opening one each day. She started on Christmas Eve and finished on the ninth of February. The pearls were in the last parcel. By then, she was bored and there was a new swag of presents, since February 9 was her birthday.

  The Christmas was either 1929 or 1930—the first years of the Great Depression. Hermine’s finances must have been affected, the turmoil was so great. Yet just as much of the family fortune survived the inflation of the war years and the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, so it survived the crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Hermine retained the houses in the Wohllebengasse and Alt Aussee. The family companies—Johann Timmels-Witwe, the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, and Hamburger and Co.—continued to operate. So did many other companies in which Hermine had shares. Although Hermine’s shareholding in the Wiener Werkstätte became worthless when the Depression forced it to close, its disappearance in 1932 had emotional rather than financial significance for Hermine. While she was one of just three remaining shareholders in the Werkstätte, she owned only 1 percent of it.

  Anne was too young to know much of how the adults around her responded to the Depression. She remembered that Erni and Mizzi joined a scheme that saw the well-to-do invite a hungry child for lunch once a week, while Hermine would simply throw a coin to the beggar who sat on their street corner. Just as Gretl had gone through World War I getting ever more presents, so did Annelore during the Depression. Most were new, bought regardless of the economic conditions. But nearly all of the jewelry, including the string of pearls, was old, bought in the early 1900s by Moriz and Hermine for Gretl, Käthe, and Lene.

  The transmission of this jewelry from one generation to the next was a goal that Gretl expressed already as a girl, most likely echoing Moriz and Hermine. When she received an exceptionally beautiful bracelet on her eleventh birthday, Gretl wrote that she looked forward to giving it to one of her daughters one day. By the time she became a parent, Gretl had turned this wish into a matter of principle and point of pride. “Schmuck kauft man nicht, Schmuck hat man”—“One does not buy jewelry, one has it”—she would say. Its transfer to Annelore demonstrated the Gallias’ enduring wealth and capacity to withstand the greatest economic crises. Christmas for Annelore in the Great Depression started forty-seven days of presents that ended with pearls.

  Annelore in her sailor suit and pearls, 1931. (Illustration Credits ill.37)

  The best opportunity for Gretl and Annelore to leave the Wohllebengasse came when Gretl’s aunt Ida died in 1929, almost five years after her husband, Adolf. Because Ida and Adolf had no children of their own, they divided their property among their nephews and nieces. The smallest beneficiaries received one forty-second of the estate, which was a large sum because Adolf and Ida had been so rich. The greatest beneficiary was Gretl, who was bequeathed two twenty-firsts because Ida and she were particularly close. Ida also felt Hermine had mistreated Gretl after Gretl’s divorce from Paul, and she wanted to put thirty-five-year-old Gretl in a position where she could rent an apartment of her own. But Frau Herschmann-Gallia, as Gretl increasingly styled herself, lacked the nerve.

  Gretl’s custody of Annelore immediately became an issue since her separation agreement with Paul gave her Annelore only until she turned seven—a custody arrangement adopted in many countries as the absolute rights of fathers began to be displaced on the basis that mothers were better suited during children’s “ten
der years.” Anne thought Paul had no desire to have her living with him. Most men of Paul’s generation paid scant attention to small children and had little idea what to do with them. Paul also had no one to look after Annelore while he worked. But when Ida died, Paul thought Gretl’s inheritance justified a reconsideration of his maintenance payments and threatened to exercise his right to take Annelore. Rather than call his bluff, Gretl accepted reduced payments.

  Paul’s visits to the Wohllebengasse to see Annelore were complicated by Hermine, who prohibited him from using the building’s main entry, not only to ensure she never encountered Paul again but also to humiliate him. Just as Hermine forced Gretl to occupy a room next to the servants, so she made Paul use the servants’ stairs and stay on the ground floor. When Annelore was little, he would see her in the bedroom she shared with Gretl in the Wohllebengasse. Later, he usually took her out. Her diaries reveal that she wrote to Paul twice while she was in Alt Aussee over the summer of 1932, then saw him every week or two after she returned to Vienna but saw much less of him the following year.

  What did a forty-year-old divorced father do with his ten-year-old daughter on such outings in the Viennese autumn and winter of 1932 and the early spring of 1933? He took her to four films and always bought her the program, which she stuck into her diary. He took her twice to Gerstner, the old imperial patisserie on the Kärntnerstrasse in Vienna’s First District. He took her twice to see other members of his family. He took her twice to the circus, once to a park, and once for a walk. If he took her to his own home in the Gredlerstrasse, she did not record it. If he told her about the death in December 1932 of his brother Bernhard in Vienna’s main asylum, Steinhof, where Gretl imagined she might be incarcerated had she married Norbert Stern, Annelore also failed to note it.