by Tim Bonyhady
Her best memory of Paul involved Goethe’s Faust, which she first encountered in 1933 when Gretl took her to a bowdlerized production at Salzburg’s puppet theater. When eleven-year-old Annelore responded by wanting to read Goethe’s text after returning to Vienna, Hermine characteristically tried to exercise control and refused permission. Because of Faust’s seduction of the beautiful young Gretchen, which results in her falling pregnant and killing her baby, Hermine ruled that Annelore was too young, only for Paul to read Faust with Annelore, leaving out the Gretchen story. He did so as a matter of family tradition. Just as Goethe was one of the favorite authors of Paul’s father, so Faust was one of Paul’s favorite plays. He also enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate that while Hermine could make him use the servants’ stairs, she could not entirely control him. Annelore was delighted to defy Hermine. Like Paul, she came to know much of Faust by heart.
Annelore’s diary reveals that she enjoyed some of her outings with Paul. She described her visit with him to see his mother’s one surviving sister, Elisabeth Schick, as “very nice,” their other family visit as “quite nice.” She must have relished their visits to Gerstner as she had great memories of its food, especially its ice creams in the shape of fruits and birds. Yet she also recorded that she was “very pleased” when Paul called to say that he would not be taking her out one public holiday and underlined the “very” for emphasis. She thought one of her afternoons with him was “pfui!”—her most common exclamation of disgust. After he collected her on Christmas Day, she asked him to come upstairs, knowing he would not, and she was right, so they were together only half an hour. “I was delighted,” she concluded.
As Anne recalled it almost sixty years later, she wanted Paul out of her life. The catalyst was her decision to learn the cello, inspired by her cousin, Hans Troller, a grandson of Moriz’s sister Fanny, who displayed great promise as a musician. After Hans spent part of the summer of 1935 in Alt Aussee, Annelore wrote to Paul asking for his cello, which he had not played since he was a young man. While Paul obliged, he gave it to her exactly how it was after years of neglect, devoid of strings. After she wrote to him expressing her outrage, having never received a present in such a state, he stopped their outings, which, she declared, was what she had been “aiming for in any case.”
Annelore’s connection with Judaism was always tenuous. Her only Jewish instruction was at school, when she attended the Jewish classes held twice each week. She never practiced Judaism at the Wohllebengasse, where she was surrounded by Christians. She never went to synagogue. While Paul insisted that she stay home from school on most of the Jewish High Holidays, she otherwise ignored them. Her observance of Yom Kippur in 1932 was probably typical. While Orthodox Jews ate much more than usual the day before Yom Kippur, then fasted from before sunset until the first stars appeared the following night, many Liberal Jews treated it like any other day. After Annelore spent the morning at the Wohllebengasse, Paul took her to Gerstner, her favorite café.
She came to regard his identification as a Jew as a form of hypocrisy since he had little or no faith. She lambasted him for failing to introduce her to Judaism in such a way that she was glad to be a Jew. Yet she wanted less Judaism as a girl, not more. Far from appreciating being able to stay at home on the Jewish High Holidays, she resented not being able to attend class with her Christian classmates. She was at least as unhappy about having to attend the Jewish religious instruction classes at school. When her teacher tried to introduce her to Hebrew, she misbehaved. Paul’s insistence that she be a Jew was central to her rejection of him.
“Let Mummy tell you how she was Saint Joseph once and an angel another time,” Gretl suggested to my brother, Bruce, in the early 1960s, implying that Annelore happily played these roles as a girl. Anne’s memories were different. She recalled just one Nativity play staged by her class after she started high school, like Gretl, at the Frauen-Erwerb-Verein. Another Jewish girl was chosen to be Joseph, while Annelore was delighted to be an angel. Gretl supported her participation by giving her one of her best nightdresses as a costume. Then, to Annelore’s distress, her religious instruction teacher discovered what was afoot and objected to his pupils celebrating a Christian festival. This “huge row” meant she never took part in such a play again.
Her favorite books included Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom, or A Fight for Rome, one of the most influential German novels to contrast Jews and Germans. While the Germans in Dahn’s book are beautiful, blond, blue-eyed, virtuous, and courageous, the Jews are generally ugly, untrustworthy, more or less perverted, exploitative, and incapable of spiritual feeling. When Anne reread it in Australia, she was struck by its “very Germanic outlook,” characterizing it as “Wagner without music.” She also recognized that she had not realized as a girl that it was a political tract designed to mythologize the German race and fuel antipathy toward Jews. “I did not really understand what I was reading,” she observed.
Annelore embraced Christian festivals because of the presents she received, the special food she got to eat, and her sense of participation rather than exclusion. One highlight was her Namenstag, or feast day in July. Another was Alt Aussee’s Kirtag, or church day, in September. The most entrancing was Christmas, which started each year for Annelore with one or more visits to the Christkindlmarkt outside Vienna’s cathedral, St. Stephen’s, where the stalls sold toys, Christmas decorations, and roast chestnuts. Then she would watch as Hermine supervised the installation of a richly decorated tree in the family’s apartment, and presents for each member of the family were piled high on separate tables. As Christmas Eve approached, Annelore would wait impatiently for the candles on the tree to be lit because Hermine would then ring a bell, signifying the start of the Bescherung, or exchange of presents, allowing Annelore to open her gifts. One year she even had a vision of the Christ child with a Christmas tree in hand running over the roof of the house opposite toward the Wohllebengasse.
Her first visit to a major Catholic site was with Ida, who went on the same religious journey as Adolf so long as they were married, converting from Judaism to Catholicism and then reverting to Judaism, only to re-embrace Catholicism almost immediately after Adolf died. Four years later, when Ida sought the intercession of the Virgin at Austria’s most important place of pilgrimage, Mariazell, she was accompanied by Gretl and Annelore, who went to see a mechanical crib made by a local craftsman in the late nineteenth century. This crib, which depicted the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension through dozens of scenes containing hundreds of figures with moving parts, captured seven-year-old Annelore’s imagination. The representation of the Crucifixion was most extraordinary. A red liquid fell from the wounds of Christ and was caught at the base of the cross by a woman with an open book, which she closed once the blood was in it.
While many Jewish children in Vienna had Christian governesses who sometimes took them to Christian events such as the Christkindlmarkt and occasionally even took them to church, Annelore’s engagement with Christianity was unusually great, far exceeding her exposure to Judaism. While Paul Herschmann never went to synagogue, Hermine sometimes went to church and had masses said for Moriz and Lene on the anniversaries of their deaths. Annelore’s governesses, who were all Catholics, wrote Christian stories and drew Christian pictures for her. In 1931, nine-year-old Annelore herself drew crosses on the cover of her school drawing book, and she filled its pages with even more Christian imagery, including a drawing of two female Christ Childs.
Yet there were profound limits to her Catholic experiences, as illustrated by the confirmation in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in 1933 of her cousin Lizzi Hamburger, the only daughter of Hermine’s youngest brother, Paul, and his wife, Fely. Annelore attended the celebratory lunch at the Wohllebengasse of calf’s head soup, asparagus in breadcrumbs, ragout of sweetbreads and pancreas, bacon, duckling with new potatoes, cream cake, ice cream, sherry, champagne, and coffee. She also joined the entire family when they hired a Fiake
r, or horse-drawn coach, to go on an outing to Vienna’s pleasure park, the Prater. But to her disappointment, she could not attend the ceremony in St. Stephen’s because of her Judaism. As she recalled it, she wished she could have been confirmed, too.
Hermine could have comforted Annelore by drawing on her own childhood. Hermine might have explained that when she fell under the influence of the nuns from the Order of German Knights as a girl in Freudenthal, she, too, had been drawn to Catholicism and wanted to participate in the annual Corpus Christi procession, but her parents had stopped her because of their Judaism. Instead Hermine compounded Annelore’s sense of exclusion. As they watched the procession that went through Vienna’s Fourth District on Corpus Christi Day, Hermine would tell Annelore how wonderful it would be if she were part of it, carrying one of the pillows with a crown on it or holding one of the ribbons attached to these pillows. It was another way Annelore learned she was the wrong religion.
Hermine maintained her guest book until early 1936. She had visitors on New Year’s Day and then again on the fifth, seventh, tenth, and fourteenth of January, when seven women joined her for two tables of bridge, accompanied by the usual tea and sandwiches with heated cheese pastries. It was her last bridge party. A week later she was in hospital for a gallbladder operation and, though her doctors initially declared it a success, she died of a blood clot on February 6 at age sixty-five and was buried on February 8, which the Gallias otherwise would have celebrated as Erni’s forty-first birthday. A day later Annelore turned fourteen.
Annelore had many memories of these events. She remembered how Hermine left the Wohllebengasse on a stretcher, carried from her bedroom down the hall of the apartment, and how she thought Hermine would never return. She remembered being very frightened when she was taken to the hospital after Hermine died and had to kiss Hermine’s hand one last time. She remembered being taken to see Hermine in a coffin with a window at one end so her face remained visible. She remembered that Erni, Gretl, and Käthe led the vast funeral procession at the Hietzing cemetery, she followed with Mizzi, and Hermine’s three brothers, Otto, Guido, and Paul, walked behind. Anne remembered that she wore a black hat and a black armband that Gretl bought for her for the funeral. She remembered that she cried bitterly, although she was not really sad. She also remembered that while Hermine usually gave her things she did not like and forced her to use them to her annoyance and embarrassment, that year she had received two embroidered pillowcases bought by Hermine before she fell sick that were exactly what Annelore wanted.
Hermine left Käthe most of her shares and bank deposits and all of her stake in the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft because she had not received part of a factory like Erni or a dowry like Gretl. Hermine also specified how her silver was to be distributed. She gave the remainder of her estate to Erni, Gretl, and Käthe in equal shares and left it to them to decide what to do with it. They agreed to remain joint owners of the Wohllebengasse and the Villa Gallia while dividing the rest, a process that was sometimes complicated, sometimes simple. One of Hermine’s most spectacular pieces of jewelry—a string of huge pearls from the Adriatic—was so long that Gretl, Käthe, and Mizzi could split it in three and each wear one of these thirds.
Hermine addressed how her daughters should live through a provision that was as controlling as it was perceptive. Rather than leave it to Gretl and Käthe to recognize that they got on too badly to continue living together, Hermine stipulated that they live separately, an instruction they obeyed. Their new apartments were both in the Third District, a middle-class area much less prestigious than the Fourth. While Gretl rented a prewar apartment on the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse, the Third District’s main shopping street, Käthe chose a modernist block almost Stalinist in its severity, overlooking a railway line in the Rechte Bahngasse.
Only the Hoffmann dining room survived more or less intact in the Wohllebengasse. While Erni, Gretl, and Käthe probably removed the marble-topped side table under the window, they left the marble wall fountain and the built-in marble buffet. They also left the massive dining-room table, along with fourteen of its eighteen chairs, as the apartment’s new tenants were eager to convert the dining room into a boardroom and wanted the table for their meetings. The other rooms were all dismembered: Erni, Gretl, and Käthe took not only their furniture but, in accordance with contemporary practice, almost everything else including all the Hoffmann chandeliers and most of the Hoffmann wall hangings and wallpapers. While Erni and Mizzi selected just six chairs, a carpet, a chandelier, and some silver when they moved to a new apartment in the Eighth District, Gretl and Käthe divided the rest because they had no furniture of their own.
The Klimt portrait of Hermine and some of the Hoffmann furniture from the salon in Käthe’s apartment in Vienna’s Third District, c. 1938. (Illustration Credits ill.38)
The siblings also divided Hermine’s pictures. There were three family portraits, so Erni, Gretl, and Käthe each took one. Käthe chose the Klimt since she had been closest to Hermine, Erni exploited his position as the sole son to take the Andri portrait of Moriz, and Gretl got the painting of the Gallia children. Otherwise Gretl and Käthe again took more because Erni and Mizzi had their own collection, though they each received several pictures. Erni’s prime acquisition was Klimt’s Beech Forest. Gretl and Käthe divided the pair of portraits by Waldmüller, which remained particularly valuable. Gretl took the Orlik portrait of Mahler because she had been closest to Theobald Pollak and was the most musical.
Their new apartments were nowhere near as elegant or spacious as the Wohllebengasse. Käthe’s bedroom was so full that she could not close the door. Yet when Gretl took the smoking-room furniture, the room she put it into was so large that she could put the five ebonized bookcases along a single wall. She similarly was able to keep almost all the white-and-gold boudoir furniture together in a room that also accommodated the family’s Steinway grand piano in a music corner where she hung eight of Carl Moll’s woodcuts of Beethoven houses. Käthe kept the salon furniture together in one room with its original carpet, while she put the hall furniture in another, albeit with a chandelier from the salon and the carpet from the dining room.
Gretl was thrilled to be freed from the “Goldener Käfig,” or “Golden Cage,” as she called the Wohllebengasse, running her own household again fifteen years after she first left. While she thought of her childhood as very happy, Gretl came to look on her time in the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse with Annelore as the best period of her life. Annelore was delighted to have a bedroom of her own that she could have decorated as she wanted. Yet she preferred Käthe’s apartment and went there whenever she could. She felt that she had two homes and two mothers who competed for her love and attention. The guest book kept by Hermine until her death, which Käthe continued in the Rechte Bahngasse, is particularly revealing. Lorle, the family’s usual abbreviation of Annelore, was Käthe’s most frequent visitor. While she sometimes went with Gretl, she was there by herself once or twice each week. She occasionally came for breakfast, sometimes for lunch, but usually for supper and then stayed the night. Käthe’s delight at these occasions is apparent from her most common formulation for them, “Lorle alone.”
The sisters’ division of Annelore and competition over her was manifest in 1937, a year after Hermine’s death. First Gretl took Annelore to Eisenstadt, the capital of the Austrian province of Burgenland, then Käthe took her to Budapest. While Gretl had often taken Annelore on short holidays before, Käthe had never done so and their trip was intended as a trial, designed to determine whether Käthe should take Annelore on even longer holidays. When Käthe and Annelore had a wonderful time eating in restaurants by the Danube, listening to gypsy music, and visiting relatives, Gretl and Käthe divided the summer, making it the first since 1922 when Annelore did not go to Alt Aussee, as well as the first when Gretl and Annelore were apart on Gretl’s birthday.
Annelore’s holiday to the Austrian and Italian alps was her best ever—especially her wee
k in Hinterbichl, a tiny village at the end of a remote valley in the East Tyrol. Käthe took Annelore there because Hinterbichl was the summer retreat of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, which was established in 1924 as the successor to Austria’s imperial choir. Within a few years, the Vienna Boys were as famous as their predecessors, acquiring an international reputation that made them a subject of nationalist pride. When Gretl took Annelore to one of the choir’s concerts as another Great Depression birthday present, along with her string of pearls, the Vienna Boys became one of her passions. All she wanted was “to see them again and to know more and more about them.”
Annelore’s religion was her great constraint. The choir was a Catholic institution that sang mass each Sunday in the old imperial chapel, the Burgkapelle. Because she was a Jew, Annelore could not go there. But she saw the choir wherever else she could—in concerts, operas, and films. She was at the choir’s jubilee tenth anniversary concert in 1934, at which all of its sixty choristers for once performed together and its founder, Joseph Schnitt, spoke about it. She loved Max Neufeld’s film Singende Jugend, or Singing Boys, which included a host of well-known actors but for Annelore was “a film with the Vienna Boys’ Choir.” Because it was largely set at the Hotel Wiener Sängerknaben run by the choir in Hinterbichl, it fueled her desire to go there.
Annelore found Hinterbichl all the more enjoyable because of the contrast with her annual holidays in Alt Aussee. Even one summer at the Villa Gallia involved a high degree of repetition and, after fourteen summers, she was bored by it, whereas Hinterbichl was new. Her love of the Alps started when Käthe and she spent a day climbing toward the Grossvenediger, one of Austria’s highest peaks, then spent the night in an alpine hut at an altitude of almost ten thousand feet. She was equally excited by her first close contact with the choristers whom she continued to idolize, even though they were all younger than she. She loved their performances, which included Strauss’s The Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods and the chorus from Wagner’s Rienzi.