by Tim Bonyhady
Almost everything Gretl said was an expression of her own situation as someone from a wealthy background who had been forced to adjust to her loss of privilege but was very fortunate to live on Sydney Harbor and had retained her interest in high culture. She declared: “We New Australians have learned a lot here. How to be less fussy. How to keep houses as well as how to live without servants. How to enjoy the sunshine and swimming every weekend. In return we are giving Australia many of our own ideas—ideas about food and furniture and architectural designs. We are keen supporters of music, the theater, the ballet.” She also maintained that she had “never regretted that we came here,” despite never feeling at home or accepted in Australia. For all her friends in Sydney, Gretl wrote to Anne in 1960, “You know I don’t feel comfortable among Australians. I like them as little as they like me.”
Wiener Lieder—not so much songs about Vienna but love songs to it—expressed Gretl’s homesickness. One of her favorites was “Meine Mutterl war eine Wienerin,” or “My Mother Was a Viennese.” It describes how a mother takes her small daughter on an excursion to the Vienna Woods, where they look down on the city and the mother has her daughter promise to be true to it. When Gretl played this song in Australia, it brought tears to her eyes. Anne recalled, “It was as if she had been asked to be faithful to Vienna for the rest of her life despite what the city and its people had done to her.” Another of Gretl’s favorites was “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume,” or “Vienna, City of My Dreams.” Vienna remained the city of Gretl’s dreams throughout her life in Australia. She called it her “dear, dearest Vienna.”
The pictures on Gretl’s walls in Sydney may have heightened her nostalgia. The Viennese scenes included the interior of the Peterskirche, the Beethoven house in Heiligenstadt, and a view of the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace. But because these pictures were by Carl Moll, they were also a reminder of how, after being so close to the Gallias for so long, he had rejected Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore following the Anschluss. I wonder whether Gretl was able to separate what these pictures depicted from who had painted them, especially given her strong code of loyalty. What was it like for her to see Vienna every day through Moll’s brush?
I wonder, too, what Gretl felt if she heard that when Alma Mahler tried to regain a painting she had owned by Edvard Munch, one of the prime witnesses for the Austrian government was Paul Hamburger’s widow, Fely, who drew on her enduring relationship with Moll through the war to argue that, far from stealing this painting, he had acted in good faith. I am even more curious about Gretl’s response when Fely married the art historian Bruno Grimschitz who, after being one of the few Austrians subject to de-Nazification—stripped of all his official positions because he was so politically tainted—was reappointed as a professor at the University of Vienna in 1957. What did Gretl make of Fely’s first saving Paul Hamburger from the Holocaust, then marrying a rehabilitated Nazi?
Return for Gretl was never a possibility, even as a tourist. Too much of what she missed had been destroyed or dispersed. Austria also was too far away. Yet what she did in life was one thing, in death another. When Gretl decided that she wanted to be buried with Moriz, Hermine, and Lene in the Hietzing cemetery, she arranged for a stonemason to put her name and date on the family gravestone so only her date of death would have to be added. A codicil to her will, written more than twenty-five years after she arrived in Sydney, expressed her alienation from Australia. She declared that if she could not be interred in Vienna as she wished, “I want my ashes to be scattered, but I definitely do not want them to be buried in Australia; in death, at least, I do not wish to be a foreigner.”
Kathe retained nothing like the same attachment to Austria. For most of her life in Sydney, she looked on Vienna as a place she had left once and for all. After being imprisoned in the Hahngasse following the Anschluss and hiding in her lawyer’s car after Kristallnacht, she could not imagine returning. Kathe was also much more interested in Australia. Whereas Gretl traveled only as far as Melbourne, Kathe went by herself to Alice Springs so she could see Australia’s Red Center. While Gretl read English novelists such as Somerset Maugham and John Galsworthy, Kathe preferred Australian writers. When Gretl pressed her to be buried in the Hietzing cemetery, too, Kathe agreed because of family, not country.
Kathe’s embrace of Australia was most apparent in the early 1960s, when she decided to find a means of expressing her gratitude to Australia for accepting Gretl, Anne, and herself as refugees and being so good to them. While the international revaluation of Klimt’s work had only just begun, his work was gaining increasing recognition in the United States, where the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh had all acquired his canvases. This revaluation meant that the portrait was Kathe’s most valuable possession. It also retained emotional significance for Kathe as it kept Hermine in her daily life in the most visible of ways. Kathe offered it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia’s second-oldest art museum, as a gift.
Gretl, Kathe, Anne, Bruce, and Tim in the apartment in Sydney, Christmas 1967. One of Carl Moll’s paintings of Hermine’s birthplace, Freudenthal, is on the wall behind. (Illustration Credits ill.50)
The gallery occupied a spectacular site overlooking Sydney Harbor, but almost everything else about the museum was deficient when Kathe approached it. While it had a director and deputy director, it had neither curators nor a registrar. Behind its neoclassical sandstone facade, embellished in the mid-1870s with the names of the most famous European masters, such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Raphael, was a tiny display including none of their works. The gallery’s best European pictures were late-nineteenth-century British paintings by Lord Leighton, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Ford Madox Brown acquired when the gallery was new. Its strength was its Australian holdings.
They Kill You in the End was how the gallery’s director, Hal Missingham, titled his account of his life and times at the gallery. Missingham’s twelve chapters addressed the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs of his professional life involving the gallery’s building, trustees, staff, and exhibitions. The notable omission was acquisitions. A dearth of funds was one reason, but Missingham also failed to make the most of his opportunities to build the collection through philanthropy when he declined Kathe’s offer, seemingly rejecting the portrait of Hermine as a work of no value to an Australian collection and of no interest to an Australian audience—one of the greatest blunders of an Australian museum director.
The sharpest record of Anne’s views of Austria and Australia is in the letters she wrote to George Turner from 1943. Her first letter revealed her dismay at George’s failure to contact her while he was interned in Australia. “I could have wept that I did not know,” she wrote. “Not one, not a single one of my old friends is out here, for five years I have not seen anyone at all. And then to hear that an old friend has been so near—and that I did not see him—it just makes me miserable.” Still, Anne declared it a “great experience” to hear from George and responded at once at length. Over the next thirty years they corresponded regularly, writing to each other every month for long periods. She typically kept only his first letter, due to her repeated culling of her possessions. He kept all her letters until I came to see him in 2004 while writing this book, and he entrusted them to me after putting them in chronological order and reading them one last time.
Anne’s highest praise for Australia was as “a good place to live.” She appreciated its material prosperity, abundance of food, and short working week. She delighted in its sunshine, beautiful beaches, and the ease and joy of swimming in a rock pool on the edge of the harbor just a few minutes’ walk from the apartment in Cremorne. She thought Australia’s highest mountain, Kosciuszko, “very beautiful,” but emphasized that it was “of course” nothing like Austria’s Alps. Sydney’s “low cultural standards” distressed her. “Art treasures may be found only in reproductions,” she lamented after
visiting the Art Gallery of New South Wales. “Good concerts, theater, opera, all these things are practically unknown.” She did not expect Sydney to acquire a concert hall because of “local lethargy.”
The occasional visit by European musicians did little to alleviate her sense of deprivation. When an Italian company came to Sydney late in 1948, she seized the opportunity to see professional opera for the first time since Vienna, attending nine of the fourteen different operas that it performed yet still wanted more, exclaiming, “God knows when there will be opera again in this country.” When the Vienna Boys’ Choir toured in 1954, she saw them four times, despite always being tired because Bruce was only three months old. When the choir returned in 1959, she went again, taking five-year-old Bruce with her. “This was my first concert when I was a child and I am taking Bruce,” she explained to George, “though he is still a little young for that.”
The Third Man, the film of Graham Greene’s screenplay starring Orson Welles, provided a rare opportunity for her to see what had become of her old home. “I would love to see some pictures of Vienna,” she wrote when it was released in England in 1949. Yet she knew she would have to wait because British films took months to reach Australia and, when The Third Man arrived in 1950, she appreciated its award-winning cinematography but was disappointed by how little it revealed of the postwar city. While the most famous sequence of the film, set below ground, lasts only a few minutes, it had such an impact on her that she wished the film “had shown more of Vienna than of the sewer.”
Her fears and suspicions, as well as her attachment to Gretl and Kathe and her relationship with Eric, prevented her from returning. Following George’s first visit to Vienna after the war, she asked what had happened when he encountered men whom he had known who had fought for Hitler. All she heard made her “very doubtful of the desirability of going back, even for a short visit,” and, when George was there again a decade later, she thought the same. “Strangely enough I don’t feel like going there,” she wrote, when it was not strange at all. “I could not trust the people. I am sure that I would be unhappy if I had to stay there for any length of time.” She otherwise longed to see “all the old places again,” the “magnificent culture,” “all those beautiful things.” “I hope that one day I shall get back if only for a while,” she wrote. “I could envy you the chance of going to Vienna,” “I sometimes think that I will never be lucky enough to get there.”
Erni and Mizzi were the first to return. They began acquiring the means to do so during the war when, having been a business failure in Europe despite his inherited wealth and connections, Erni proved a success as a partner in a Tasmanian liqueur factory that flourished by supplying the American army fighting in the Pacific. When he first visited Sydney in 1944, Anne was amazed to see Erni assume the persona of the rich uncle. While he did not do as well after Mizzi and he moved to Melbourne, Mizzi supplemented their income by taking in lodgers. When he retired at age sixty-five in 1962, they sailed for Europe, where their joy in exploring new ground was intense, their return to familiar places much more complex—especially for Mizzi—whose experience of remaining in Austria so long after the Anschluss haunted her. The one family site that she would not revisit was Alt Aussee—she was too scarred by her experience of going there in 1940 to hand over the keys to the Villa Gallia—so Erni went by himself.
Anne’s earliest opportunity to follow with Bruce and me came after she embarked on a new career as an academic in the 1960s, which led to a tenured position in the German Department at the University of New England in Armidale, where Gretl had taught so unhappily twenty years before. By 1970, Anne was bored with language teaching but excited by her development of a course in German culture and history. She was also due for sabbatical leave and feeling “quite adventurous.” Although 1971 was Bruce’s last year of high school, and many parents would have stayed at home so as not to jeopardize their child’s prospects, she decided we would spent eight months in Europe, rightly confident that his results would not suffer.
The strength of the Australian dollar allowed her to make this trip more unusual and ambitious. She decided that, rather than settle in one city, where she could have rented an apartment and Bruce and I could have gone to school, we would travel from town to town, which meant from cheap hotel to cheap hotel. Her goal was not only to discover how German was taught in different universities but also to see as great a variety of theater, opera, and art as possible, while we experienced Europe with her in between studying by correspondence from our hotel rooms. Far from having a fixed itinerary, she did not know how long we would stay in any one place or where we would go next, as one of her first postcards to a friend in Australia reveals. She gave our address as the flat of Gretl and Kathe in Cremorne with this postscript: “My mother knows where we are.”
We flew to Frankfurt in West Germany thirty-two years after she escaped Austria. Our first night at the opera was on January 1, 1971, our third night in Frankfurt. Anne spent the next night, by herself, at the theater. The next night she was there again, not only because it was part of her research for the university but also because her appetite for opera and theater had gone unsated for so long. By the end of January, she had been to twenty-five performances. In February, when her opportunities were diminished by our spending six days in the Bavarian and Austrian countryside, she went to seventeen. In March she attended twenty.
We spent the first month traveling through West Germany, where everything was new for all three of us. Then we crossed into Austria, where Anne found that much of what she thought would feel like old territory seemed new. When she hired a car on our second day in Salzburg, she was not sure where to take it. Her choice was between the professional and the personal—between enhancing her understanding of German history by visiting Berchtesgarten in southern Bavaria, where Hitler had his alpine retreat, or revisiting her childhood by driving through the Salzkammergut to Alt Aussee. She opted for Aussee.
She did not know what to do when we arrived—a common dilemma for returning refugees of her generation. Some sought to regain access to their childhood homes. Others stood outside but could not face confronting the current occupants, however much they wanted to get inside. Almost all found the experience profoundly unsettling. After hesitating over lunch, Anne decided that she wanted to see the Villa Gallia and was not satisfied with looking from the road but walked all around the villa, which proved to be shut for the winter, just as it was when she was a girl. The differences interested her most: “the house made ugly by new windows and a yellow color, the garden changed, tennis court, red currants and gooseberries gone, also the rosebushes near the house and the peonies.”
She needed more. Although it was winter, she decided we should walk up the Tressenstein, the smallest of the mountains surrounding Alt Aussee. With snow and ice everywhere, she fell twice but pressed on until we reached a spot with stunning views of the frozen lake and she could see the house where George Turner’s family stayed each summer. After we returned to Salzburg, we saw what proved to be our first and only operetta—Strauss’s Wiener Blut, which she enjoyed despite its “very poor” dancing and “fair” singing, costumes, and lighting. Her summation of the day fell far short of what it must have meant to her. She described it as “silly though most rewarding.”
Five days later we were in Vienna, where she was delighted that she could find her way around without a map. She was pleased to discover when she took us skating at the Eislaufverein that she still “could do a few things, though not backward nor the dance step.” She found the Burgtheater even better than her memory. She remained so attached to the Vienna Boys’ Choir that she bought tickets for us to go to mass in the Burgkapelle every Sunday—Bruce and my first experience of Catholic services since our baptisms. She was disappointed when we celebrated her forty-ninth birthday at the opera for Verdi’s The Force of Destiny and could get only standing places in the Gods. She was thrilled a week later when, by arriving much earlier, we were able
to secure places in the front row of the downstairs standing area for “the most beautiful and richly decorated Magic Flute ever.”
She could easily have visited the Wohllebengasse but stayed away until we visited Vienna again in July when we found the building locked. Our one visit to the Hietzing cemetery was fraught. While Anne located the family grave as easily as she navigated the streets of the city, she was taken aback to find not just the names of Moriz, Hermine, and Lene, but also those of Gretl and Kathe. Perhaps her mother and aunt had not told her what they had done. More likely she had forgotten. “I suppose I was told this once,” she wrote of finding their names, “but the reality of it” gave her a “real shock.”
Other parts of the city were full of significance for her. She wrote that the memories came flooding back—the names and identities of many people she had not thought of for years. Almost all were either dead or gone. She found that she had a relative living in Vienna only by looking in the phone book. He was Otto Herschmann, her father’s youngest brother, who had returned in 1957 from Argentina and immediately rejoined the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. Anne’s sole contact with Otto had been through lawyers after Paul died intestate in 1958 and Otto unsuccessfully challenged Anne’s inheritance of Paul’s small estate. When Anne discovered that seventy-seven-year-old Otto was still alive, she did not call him.
The only person whom Anne wanted to see was Anni Wiesbauer, her lace-cleaning teacher, with whom she had not corresponded since the early 1950s. When Anne returned to Vienna and discovered that Anni was still living in the same apartment, she could have sent a letter or telephoned in advance. Instead, typically, she knocked at Anni’s door unannounced and was thrilled by their reunion. “Wonderful to know someone like her!” she wrote after seeing seventy-two-year-old Anni. “She was so pleased to see me,” she observed after going to see her again without warning. “Had my picture out to show it to a friend,” she added, revealing her insecurity and need.