Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  Gretl took Annelore to much more famous places in Italy. After taking the train to Genoa, they went by boat to Pisa, Naples, Pompeii, Palermo, Monreale, Syracuse, Taormina, and Venice. Yet sixty-five years later, the Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, a site of no particular renown, was all that Anne remembered finding impressive. Her list of disappointments and dislikes was long. She was annoyed to learn that, as a fifteen-year-old girl, she was not allowed to visit the houses in Pompeii containing pornographic frescoes. She was shocked and frightened to find fully clothed skeletons in the catacombs in Palermo. Italy was too hot and smelly, she complained.

  The religious component of Annelore’s holidays with Gretl was also very different from her holiday with Käthe. While Gretl took Annelore to Christian sites, she also paid more than usual attention to Jewish ones. This Jewish tourism was greatest in Eisenstadt, the site of Austria’s oldest continuous Jewish community, where Gretl and Annelore inspected the ghetto, the Jewish cemetery, and the home of a prominent Jewish family. They continued it in the Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, where Annelore photographed an interior dominated by a menorah, a seven-branched Jewish candelabrum. This tourism suggests that her upbringing by Gretl was not as antithetical to Judaism, or removed from it, as Anne later remembered.

  2

  Austro-fascism

  The first great crisis of the Austrian republic was Bloody Friday on July 15, 1927. The catalyst was the trial of three Frontkämpfer, right-wing veterans of the war set on undermining the republic and its democracy, who had killed a socialist in a village in the Burgenland close to the Hungarian border. As with four similar right-wing killings over the previous two years, the Frontkämpfer escaped punishment when a jury acquitted them. But this time the city’s socialists and communists marched in protest on the Palace of Justice, where the police opened fire, the crowd set the palace alight and stopped fire engines reaching it, and the police retaliated by killing at least eighty-five of the demonstrators and wounding up to one thousand.

  Gretl was there by accident, caught up in the conflict and carnage as she happened to be making her way across the city. Her entanglement in Bloody Friday exemplifies how, for all that the Gallias’ wealth cocooned them, political events and political violence were inescapable in Austria through the 1920s into the 1930s. The republic was divided. Its national governments were always led by the Christian Socials, once the party of Karl Lueger, which was the biggest right-wing party. The Social Democrats, the dominant party of the left, were not only the country’s largest political group but also the strongest socialist party in the world, securing 42 percent of the vote in Austria’s general election in 1927.

  The Social Democrats’ stronghold was Vienna, the home of over one-third of Austria’s shrunken population after it lost its empire. “Red Vienna,” as it became known, was the international showcase of democratic socialism. It was famous for the municipal government’s provision of worker housing, welfare payments, medical services, education, sports facilities, and culture. It was also famous—and in many places notorious—for how the city council funded this program through a system of property and luxury taxes, one of which applied to domestic employees and forced Hermine to reduce her four full-time servants to three.

  Mass events were integral to the city’s political culture. The first attended by Annelore occurred one May Day, which was an occasion for a celebration of worker power until Engelbert Dollfuss became Austria’s chancellor with a majority of one vote in the country’s parliament and established a regime often dubbed Austro-fascist, though it was not as extreme as its German and Italian counterparts. When Dollfuss declared presidential rule in 1933, he forcibly prevented parliament from sitting and instituted press censorship. He also banned all mass meetings and demonstrations, including the workers’ celebration on May Day.

  Dollfuss used these measures to try to control the National Socialists, or Nazis, Austria’s dominant far-right party in the early 1930s, which won between 10 and 15 percent of the vote. When the Nazis embarked on a wave of terror to destabilize his regime, Dollfuss closed the Nazis’ regional offices, arrested thousands of their members, and banned the party, but with little effect because the Nazis simply went underground. Dollfuss was much more effective when he stopped the Social Democrats’ meetings and parades, disrupted and broke strikes organized by their members, censored their main newspaper, and outlawed their armed Schutzbund, a paramilitary organization. When the Social Democrats responded with force in February 1934, the Christian Socials crushed their ill-coordinated uprising in four days, outlawed them, and arrested many of their leaders.

  The celebrations attended by Annelore that May Day were initiated by Dollfuss to mark his introduction of a new constitution that put an end to Austrian democracy and attempted to legitimate his rule. If twelve-year-old Annelore’s response is any guide, the Gallias sympathized with Dollfuss. After spending the morning along with thousands of other schoolchildren watching a pageant staged by the Christian Socials at the stadium in the Prater, Annelore described the proceedings as “really wonderful.” That she spent the afternoon watching and photographing the triumphal procession that went through the city suggests even more interest in it.

  Dollfuss’s treatment of Jews was one attraction. While anti-Semitism was part of Christian Social ideology, Dollfuss did not persecute Jews, tried to protect them from Nazi attack, and chose not to exploit anti-Semitism for populist ends. This stance was particularly important to the Gallias because they remained unable to escape their Jewish origins, as revealed by a Viennese residency certificate filled out by Gretl. While required to identify herself as born within the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, she had no opportunity to record her Roman Catholic identity of more than thirty years.

  Dollfuss was dead twelve weeks after the May Day celebrations, assassinated by members of Austria’s banned Nazi Party as part of an attempted putsch in July 1934. In three days of fighting, there were 269 killings. Over half were on the government side, but the army’s loyalty enabled it to suppress the revolt. When Annelore attended the May Day rally staged by the Christian Socials in the Prater a year later, the proceedings were much the same as in 1934, except that they ended with a speech by Austria’s new chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, followed by a minute’s silence in honor of Dollfuss. As a memento of the occasion, Annelore bought a postcard of the rally in the stadium.

  Annelore received a rare lesson in viewing political events critically when the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, a close ally of Dollfuss’s and Schuschnigg’s, embarked on his long-planned conquest of Abyssinia in 1935. As the international community toyed with imposing sanctions on Italy, Annelore’s geography teacher observed, “There is a war against Abyssinia, and Austria is neutral and friendly to Italy—think what that means.” The discussion that followed taught Annelore that “neutral” and “friendly to Italy” were mutually exclusive terms and that what politicians said required analysis.

  The Salzburg Festival was more than a cultural event. From 1920, it sought to strengthen, if not create, a distinctive Austrian identity. This political dimension was magnified in 1933, when the festival became the focus of conflict between the new Nazi government in Germany and the Christian Socials. Hitler began when he deprived the festival of much of its audience by imposing a special tax on German visitors to Austria and stopped German artists from performing there. Many Austrians, led by Dollfuss, responded by attending the festival, which became a symbol of Austrian independence. By one account, “those people who wished to help Austria in her fight against National Socialism, and who were perhaps indifferent to the existence of Mozart, flocked to Salzburg.” While Gretl was far from indifferent to Mozart, she must have been alive to these politics when she gave Annelore her first and only experience of the festival that year.

  The Burgtheater, which remained a state institution in the new republic, also became increasingly political under the Christian Socials. Its most partisan production seen by Annelore
was The Hundred Days, which the Italian playwright Giovacchino Forzano based on a sketch by Mussolini. While nominally about the hundred days between Napoleon’s escape from the island of Elba and his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Forzano and Mussolini intended the play as a statement about contemporary politics, supporting authoritarian rule over Italy. When the Burgtheater staged the drama in Vienna, it strengthened the play’s attack on parliamentary democracy so that The Hundred Days justified the Christian Socials’ dictatorship by denigrating constitutional rule as “self-defeating” when it hindered government.

  Annelore’s first direct experience of Nazi mayhem was at an afternoon performance at the Burgtheater in late 1936 or early 1937. As she recalled it, she was by herself because Gretl was in mourning for Hermine and so could not attend. When a Nazi in the audience threw a stink bomb, fourteen-year-old Annelore had every reason to be fearful. The performance stopped. Members of the audience rushed toward the exits. Far from joining them, Annelore exploited her lack of adult supervision to stay inside and “watched with fascination” as the theater’s stagehands raised the curtain and removed the backdrop, giving her “a wonderful view of the stage machinery.”

  The family’s disregard for politics was most apparent when Gretl introduced Annelore to the work of Wagner at the Staatsoper. After Lohengrin in 1933, they saw Moriz’s favorite, Die Meistersinger, in 1934, Parsifal in 1935, and Götterdämmerung, Der Fliegende Holländer, and a second performance of the Die Meistersinger in 1937. While mother and daughter went as a matter of family tradition, these operas had a new function in the 1930s, as the Nazis interpreted Wagner in line with their ideology. “Wach auf!” or “Awake!”—the chorale in Die Meistersinger sung by Hans Sachs to greet Luther and the Reformation—was one of the Nazis’ most resounding calls to arms. Die Meistersinger was the work that Hitler had performed on his most important political occasions. In 1937 his minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, credited Wagner with teaching Germans that Jews were “a subhuman race.”

  The lure of the second Meistersinger that Annelore attended was immense because of its guest conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, whom the Gallias had seen already in 1922 when he performed in Vienna for just the second time at a concert staged to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brahms’s death. Having been “very enthused” by Furtwängler’s “splendid” performance, the family bought the first book about him published that year. A decade later, Furtwängler was one of the most famous musicians in the world—eclipsed as a conductor only by Toscanini. As Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore probably knew, Furtwängler had displayed courage in publicly protesting against the Nazis’ expulsion of Jewish musicians such as Bruno Walter, prompting Goebbels to respond, “There isn’t a single filthy Jew left in Germany that Herr Furtwängler hasn’t stood up for.” Unlike many German and Austrian cultural figures, Fürtwängler had not joined the Nazi Party, yet he served the Nazis by conducting at many of its most significant occasions, starting with a performance of Die Meistersinger as part of the celebrations that marked the inauguration of the Third Reich in 1933.

  Furtwängler later maintained that, far from doing the Nazis’ bidding, music was his only master. He even cast his interventions to protect Jewish musicians as symbolic of his devotion to high art. Yet Goebbels effectively made this stance an impossibility when he wrote an open letter to Furtwängler declaring that music in Germany was political. Furtwängler must also have realized that whether he criticized the Nazis or conducted at the occasions that mattered most to them, his actions were politically significant because the greatest classical musicians continued to be revered and idolized through the 1930s. Had Furtwängler followed Toscanini’s example and refused to conduct in Germany after the Nazis came to power, he would have undermined their legitimacy. By working for the Nazis, he boosted it.

  The performance by Furtwängler that Anne remembered was the second of two concerts she attended—the first in 1936, the second in 1937—at which he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Great Hall of the Musikverein. Because of Furtwängler’s celebrity, the tickets were unusually expensive. Although Anne generally displayed no interest in her seats in the auditorium, she recalled that she was in the front row, so close to Furtwängler that he sweated onto her program. When Taking Sides, the film of Ronald Harwood’s play about Furtwängler, was released in 2001, this experience made her want to see it.

  Like Gretl, Annelore started her first ball season at age fifteen but, instead of going mainly to private balls, she attended public ones. Gretl had been preparing Annelore for this moment for years, hoping she would enjoy Gretl’s own delight on the dance floor. After starting classes when she was five or six years old, Annelore continued in high school when Gretl sent her to the Elmayer, Vienna’s most fashionable dancing and deportment school, which segregated its Jewish and non-Jewish clients, placing them in different classes at its premises next to the Spanish Riding School in the First District. By 1937, Annelore could waltz, fox-trot, and tango.

  Georg Schidlof, Annelore’s main partner during this season, was a Jew from a much poorer family—another mark of the Gallias’ failure to live up to Hermine’s aspirations. She knew Georg because his mother, Lizzi, had lived in the Wohllebengasse for at least two years as the twins’ last governess. When Georg became Annelore’s escort, it was because their mothers arranged it, not because of any romance between them. As Gretl looked for a young man to take Annelore, she approached Lizzi because nineteen-year-old Georg was the right age with the right status as an officer cadet in the Austrian army doing his compulsory military service. Just before the season started, Georg’s father gave him a gala uniform so he could attend the balls in style.

  Annelore’s dress was another Christmas present from Käthe, who retained the best eye for what her niece most wanted and also had the means to indulge her. Rather than being pink or red, which Hermine had repeatedly chosen, the gown was white with blue velvet ribbons. It was Annelore’s first piece of Viennese high fashion—made by the Berger sisters, Hilde and Fritzi, who also designed textiles and fashion postcards for the Wiener Werkstätte. Käthe, who bought a series of Fritzi’s watercolors, took Annelore to the sisters’ salon because it was where she bought many of her own best clothes.

  Annelore’s outfit prompted her fifth photographic session with Jobst. Instead of taking place in the studio, it was in Gretl’s apartment in the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse. In one portrait Annelore sits on a sofa with her dress spread out, her hair up, which was the fashion for girls in senior high school, still wearing the pearls of the Trude Fleischmann photographs, staring sternly at the camera. In another she stands at a window, pulling back the curtain and looks over her shoulder, smiling. In the third she sits in an armchair next to the white-and-gold Hoffmann vitrine, her dress spills over the chair’s arms, and she has a rare, dreamy look of contentment. As Anne remembered it more than fifty years later, the last two photographs caught her mood. She loved going out and loved her new dress.

  Anne thought these photographs were taken at the end of 1937, before she went to her first ball, when the dress was brand-new. But an album compiled by Gretl in Vienna reveals that these photographs were from March 1938, at the end of the season. The different dates are significant. In December 1937, Austria was still independent, though under intense pressure from Hitler, who declared he could not ignore the fate of Germans outside the Reich. In March 1938, he annexed his birthplace. The photographs of Annelore in her ball dress were the last of her taken before the Anschluss. They appear indicative of the obliviousness of so many Austrians of Jewish descent to what was about to befall them. Here is my mother in the most sumptuous of gowns, a debutante seemingly thinking only of dancing as the Nazis prepared to invade.

  One of Anne’s own stories reinforces this impression. It was about the annual Scout Ball, the one occasion when Georg and she danced the polonaise that started every ball. Because Georg had been a Scout throughout high school, he was able to arrange for t
hem to be among the opening pairs. The convention was that these couples were all listed in the program but Georg and Annelore were not. Far from wondering why they had been omitted, Annelore was “too carefree and happy” to think about it. She realized only later that Georg and she were excluded because they were Jews, and the Nazis were already so powerful that they controlled who appeared on the program.

  Schuschnigg, meanwhile, oscillated between accommodating and rejecting the Nazis’ demands. When he saw Hitler at his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria in mid-February, Schuschnigg agreed to accept the Austrian Nazi leader, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, into his cabinet as minister for the interior. Less than two weeks later, Schuschnigg announced that he was committed to maintaining Austria’s independence and would make no further concessions to the Nazis. As he for once proved a passionate, powerful speaker, the crowds on the Ringstrasse broke into the old imperial anthem in an outpouring of nationalist fervor and Schuschnigg excited adulation wherever he went.

  Annelore in her ball dress with the Hoffmann vitrine behind, in the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse, March 1938. (Illustration Credits ill.39)

  Annelore was at the opera two days later for a new production of Dalibor by the Czech composer Smetana, which was another instance of the intersection between culture and politics. The conductor was Gretl’s childhood idol, Bruno Walter, whose employment at the Vienna Opera, after Hitler prevented him from performing in Germany, was immediately interpreted as a symbol of the Christian Socials’ acceptance of Jews. When Schuschnigg entered his box before the start of the second act, he received a standing ovation from the audience and was lauded again when he attended a festive, optimistic gathering in the foyer at the end of the performance. While Annelore could not see Schuschnigg from her seat, she was so struck by the audience’s response that she recorded it in her concert book.