by Tim Bonyhady
7
Restitution
The past as much as the present continued to draw Anne to Austria. On her second trip, in 1973, she revisited the house in the Wohllebengasse, which had been bought by a Russian insurance company. She went with trepidation, not because she had any idea that the building’s ownership by the “Red Insurance Man” and its use for spying had been investigated by Time magazine, but because she was uncertain how she would be received. She could hear her heart beating as she rang the bell, entered, and introduced herself to a secretary who called the company’s manager. When he showed her through, she again was interested only in the changes, which ranged from the walling up of the door between the hall and the smoking room to the removal of many Hoffmann door handles and the conversion of her bedroom into a washing-up room.
“Vienna is as wonderful as ever,” she exclaimed a year later, only to be “a bit sick of Vienna” within a week. She visited the house in the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse where she had lived with Gretl. She searched for the building where Kathe had lived in the Rechte Bahngasse but was unsure whether she found the right one. She sought out her favorite teacher, Ilse Hornung, found that she still occupied the same apartment, and rang the downstairs bell. When there was no response, she even went upstairs to confirm no one was there, only to wonder what she was doing. What would she have said had Ilse been at home? Would she have confronted her about being a Nazi?
Anne’s worst moment came when Gretl died in 1975, while she was again in Europe. She decided that, rather than return to Australia as soon as possible, she should be at the Hietzing cemetery when Gretl’s ashes were interred in the family grave. The only other funeral she had attended there was thirty-nine years before when she was part of Hermine’s vast procession. In 1975 Anne was the one mourner. Just as Hermine thought of herself as utterly abandoned or godforsaken when she first went to the theater by herself, so did Anne with infinitely more reason. She, too, described herself as “mutterseelenallein.”
Her attitude toward her inheritance remained deeply ambivalent, even as the National Gallery of Victoria prepared to exhibit the Gallia collection. At times she was happy to answer Terry Lane’s questions, at other times not. The same was true when it came to lending the few objects that she retained. While she readily organized one of her trips to Vienna so she could bring the apartment to life for Lane, she was clear that she did not want to be associated with the exhibition. As it drew near, she got frightened and withdrew her support, provoking an anxious letter from the gallery’s director, Patrick McCaughey. He wrote, as if surprised by Anne’s response, that the gallery had always expected “the exhibition would be an occasion of pride for you.” More usefully from her point of view, he assured her the gallery would preserve her anonymity.
Mizzi, who had been widowed when Erni died shortly before Gretl and Kathe, felt very differently about her past becoming a public event. She was delighted to invite Lane for afternoon tea so he could ply her with questions. His notes reveal her remarkable recall of fabrics, colors, the use of particular objects and rooms. She also exemplifies the vagaries of memory. When she met Erni in 1920, Hermine was a shareholder in the Wiener Werkstätte, it was less than a year since Erni had been on the Werkstätte’s board, and it was less than two years since Moriz had been its chairman. This involvement with the Werkstätte was the kind of information that was vital to Lane, but Mizzi had forgotten it.
The exhibition, in 1984, was the first anywhere to re-create a suite of Hoffmann rooms. While primarily consisting of the gallery’s own collection, Vienna 1913 also included the Klimt from London. As Patrick McCaughey described it, “The exhibition was extraordinary. Terry Lane brought visitors through the front door of the apartment where Madam Gallia, glittering in Klimt’s silvery whites, greeted them. The exhibition was set out room by room, interspersed with related Wiener Werkstätte material.… It physically re-created the pre–World War I atmosphere of Vienna between secession and modernity, between decadence and innovation … it lent credence to the idea that the National Gallery of Victoria was the Metropolitan of Australia, able to collect works that no other museum could touch.”
Anne was confounded. While Lane had partly relied on her recollections when he had the furniture restored, she was stunned by its transformation. The silk, wool, and leather coverings of the chairs amazed her after years of so much vinyl. She had no idea that they had ever been—or could again be—so spectacular. While she still wanted to retain her anonymity, she expressed her new attachment to the collection by making the first of what became small annual donations to the gallery. In congratulating Lane, she wrote, “I am sure that the things never looked as good as in your exhibition.”
Mizzi was characteristically more effusive. After attending the opening and returning to see the exhibition again, she declared, “It was a memorable impression for me and will remain so for a long time.” Uncertain whether or how Anne would respond, Mizzi assumed the role of the family representative. “I want to thank you for the time and trouble you took with the Gallias for the Gallias.” She also dwelled on how the re-creation of the Hoffmann rooms transported her across time and space. “I relived the first time I came to the Wohllebengasse more than sixty-three years ago, before I was even engaged.” She concluded: “The exhibition means more to me than to anybody else.”
One of Mizzi’s favorite stories was how, when she was at the exhibition one day looking at Erni in the children’s portrait by Andri, a woman about her age of central European origin, almost certainly a refugee, engaged her in conversation. For all the gallery had done to re-create the Wohllebengasse, the woman said these were things one could understand only if one had been to the apartment and known the people. “You are right,” Mizzi responded proudly, “I was married to that small boy for over fifty years.” Yet despite her sense of proprietorship, Mizzi also felt distanced from the exhibition’s contents. She liked to say how strange she found it that, after being required by Hermine to visit the Wohllebengasse, she had to pay to see the apartment in the gallery.
Anne thought she was done with Vienna in 1992. After seven visits in twenty-one years, she declared: “Unless something goes very wrong with the family grave for which I feel responsible, I do not wish to see Vienna again.” But because Bruce was living in England, she wanted to see him and, once there, always went to Vienna. As a result, she went more often than ever, returning annually until 1998, even though, with Anni Wiesbauer dead, she had no one to visit. Where the novelist Hugo Bettauer imagined Vienna in 1923 as a city without Jews, and the Nazis tried to make it so, for Anne it became a city without people. While she made a few German friends on her travels who accompanied her to exhibitions, invited her home, and took her on excursions, she never made those connections in Vienna. She spent her days there immersing herself in art, music, and theater, and making her obligatory pilgrimage to the Hietzing cemetery where, even after she discovered that several other refugees had returned to Vienna to be buried, she remained affronted by the decision of Gretl and Kathe to do so when Australia had given them “refuge and kindness.”
Other refugees typically returned at most once to their childhood homes. Anne kept visiting the Wohllebengasse. Each time she was delighted to be welcomed by the staff of the Russian insurance company. Each time she focused on the apartment’s continuing modifications rather than how it remained fundamentally intact, so it would still have been possible to slot the Hoffmann furniture into the exact spaces Hoffmann created for them. She found that, having revisited the apartment over twenty-five years, it was no longer a place that aroused her memories but one into which she projected them. She still thought it worth recording that it was not where she belonged.
Austria’s way of presenting its past continued to occupy her. The Monument Against War and Fascism—the first major Viennese memorial that dealt to some extent with the Holocaust—was one example. Almost everything about this monument was controversial when it was erected in 1988 to ma
rk the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss. While political groups on the right regarded its location between the Albertina Museum and the Vienna Opera as too prominent, the left lambasted it for treating fallen Austrian soldiers, civilian casualties of Allied bombings, and Jews as all of a piece. Anne noticed something else. Having always followed the family practice of buying postcards of her travels rather than taking her own photographs, she was struck that there were no postcards of the new monument.
After seeing an exhibition about the Aussee region under the Nazis, she looked forward to the publication of its catalog and ordered it from Australia, only for it to infuriate her. While it listed twenty-nine houses in Alt Aussee and thirty in the immediate vicinity that Jews owned before the Anschluss, the catalog devoted just a page to this community. It did not identify the individuals who profited from the Aryanization of the houses—apart from Goebbels—who was already so infamous that his reputation could not suffer. It said nothing about the fate of the original owners of these houses.
Still, Anne’s appreciation of Alt Aussee grew, while most of the Australian landscape became increasingly alien to her. Although she thought that to have gone to Alt Aussee every year as a girl was “a bit much” and she would have preferred its mountains to be higher, she came to see “why one could spend some time” there. She admired the careful management of its forests, which was in contrast to the devastation in Australia, where vast forests of old eucalyptus were being clear-felled for woodchips. She loved how strawberries and blueberries grew wild along Aussee’s forest and mountain paths. She thought its meadows and air were wonderful. She described it as “uniquely beautiful.”
She first tried to regain access to the villa in 1975, when she knocked at the door without prior warning and asked whether she could look at her childhood home. The man who came to the door refused to let her in. On her next visit, in 1995, she was eager to see the villa but was frustrated that the surrounding trees had grown so high that it was barely visible from the road. Although she walked around the house many times, she did not approach its owners. When she reflected on this visit, her eagerness to see the villa was clear, but so was her uncertainty about whether she would try again. She concluded: “It was an experience. One could repeat it. One does not have to repeat it.”
She repeated it two years later much more adroitly. Rather than arriving unannounced and unexpected, she sent a letter in which she introduced herself, enclosed an old photograph of the villa, and offered to tell its occupiers about its history. The reply came by return mail inviting her to afternoon tea. This time the front door opened before she could ring the bell, revealing more of her past than she ever imagined finding. When Anne entered the main room, sixty years since her last visit in 1937, the table and twelve accompanying chairs, sideboards, grandfather clock, armchairs, rocking chair, paintings, gilt-framed engraving, tapestries, and carved wooden light fitting adorned with four eagles in its salon were all the same. So were the grand piano and a second grandfather clock in the adjoining sitting room. While their owner was different, these parts of the house remained the Villa Gallia in the most material way. When she left that day, Anne wrote in her diary, “Am so happy,” “mission accomplished.”
What made this experience for Anne was not just the place but the person, Frau Wick, who had acquired the villa with her late husband toward the end of the war. This meant, crucially for Anne, that Frau Wick had not been party to the villa’s forced sale by Mizzi in 1940, while it was probably just as important to Frau Wick that Austrian law gave Anne no avenue for regaining the villa and Anne never expressed any claim to it. The more they talked, the more Anne was amazed by how much they had in common. They told each other about their families. They talked about growing old. They discussed the war and contemporary Austrian politics, including the rise of Jörg Haider and his neo-Nazi Austrian Freedom Party. When Anne returned to Australia, they corresponded and sometimes phoned each other. This friendship was the only one that Anne made in her fourteen visits to Austria. While never reconciled with Austria, she could be reconciled with Frau Wick.
I was with Anne when she visited Frau Wick in 1998, on her last trip to Austria—there not only so I, too, could see the villa but also so Anne could show off my son, Nicholas, partner, Claire, and me to Frau Wick. Just before we left, Frau Wick went to a cupboard and took out three coffee cups and two saucers, explaining that they were the last surviving pieces of china that had come with the villa. I was initially nonplussed when Frau Wick gave these remnants to Anne. I knew they would go into Anne’s sideboard along with many more impressive objects once owned by Hermine. Then I understood. The cups and saucers were a private, personal piece of reparation, Anne’s first experience of genuine restitution from Austria.
A few months later, a parcel arrived in Canberra. Inside was a wax doll that had stood on top of the piano in the villa’s salon when Anne was a girl. After returning home, she had asked Frau Wick about this doll. As almost everything else seemed to have survived, Anne wondered what had become of it. Frau Wick’s response was to send Anne the doll as a Christmas present, still in its original glass container, though short one arm. When we looked at its base, we discovered it had been given to Moriz as a reward for his investment in war bonds—a manifestation of the patriotism that failed to protect the Gallias in Austria. Unlike the coffee cups, Anne put the doll on show in her display cabinet.
8
Identity
The survivors of the Shoah—whether they became refugees, lived out the war in hiding, or were inmates of concentration camps—almost all reconsidered their identities. Their choices ranged from embracing Judaism more fervently than before to denying their Jewish origins. At one extreme, they could take public pride in their Jewishness, implicitly, if not explicitly, declaring that they would never again submit to anti-Semitism. At the other, they could construct an entirely new identity in the hope of escaping renewed intolerance and persecution—exploiting the opportunities to remake themselves that came with moving to countries where they were unknown, Judaism was much less an issue than in Europe, and Jew spotting was neither an art nor an obsession.
The best-known instance of such invention involved Madeleine Albright, the first woman secretary of state of the United States. Within days of the Senate’s confirming her nomination in 1997, the Washington Post revealed that two of Albright’s grandparents had died in Theresienstadt, while one had died in Auschwitz. According to Albright, who was born a Roman Catholic in Prague in 1937, she had not known. While her parents had told her that they fled Czechoslovakia with her before the war to escape the Nazis, Albright realized that they may have been converts from Judaism only in 1996, when someone sent her a letter about her family’s past. Even then she did not suspect how her grandparents had died. She later explained, “If you’re eight years old and you are told that your grandparents died, and you think of grandparents as being old people, then you don’t question it.” She never doubted her parents’ account because they “were never mysterious or hesitant about it.”
The response in 1997 was widespread incredulity. As described by Albright, “People could not believe that I didn’t know my family’s past. Instead of being allowed to take in privately the tragic facts I had only recently learned, I was made to feel as if I were a liar and my father, whom I adored, was portrayed as a heartless fraud.” Philip Taubman of the New York Times wrote a piece that began: “Madeleine Albright must have known.” Frank Rich of the New York Times suggested Albright was “shading the truth.” Yet there was some recognition that Albright’s parents were not alone in suppressing their identity. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, observed, “In Poland, every single day, Jews surface who thought they were Catholics all their lives.”
And not just in Poland. Many refugees, who married or remarried after they escaped, told their new families little or nothing about their origins. When one of my colleagues was a boy, his father acknowledged that
he was a Jew, but he would not reveal where he came from or what he had experienced. When Hugh asked his father why he was being sent to an Anglican school, his father responded, “Son, religion is never worth dying for.” When one of Mizzi’s cousins visited Sydney in the 1960s, she went to see another relative who had been married for more than twenty years. When Mizzi’s cousin arrived for dinner, her relative whispered as soon as his wife went to the kitchen, “Don’t tell her I’m a Jew. I’ve never told her.”
Others did not explain the dead. Much like Madeleine Albright’s parents in the United States, Guido Hamburger Jr. and Anna Schauer in England did not tell their children what had happened to Guido Senior and Nelly, or Anna’s parents, whom the Nazis also killed. Instead, Guido Junior and Anna led their son and daughter to believe that they had no idea what became of the older Hamburgers and Schauers. Insofar as Guido Junior and Anna talked about them, it was as if all four grandparents had simply disappeared in the chaos of the war. Like Madeleine Albright, the children of Guido Junior and Anna accepted their parents’ story for years, though, unlike Albright, they eventually questioned it and discovered how their grandparents died.
Friedrich Hamburger’s daughter, Jana, did not even realize where she had been. Because she was only three when Theresienstadt was liberated, Jana grew up with no memories of the camp and her parents never talked about it. Nor did her mother’s father, who was another camp survivor. While she had a wooden doll’s bed made by her grandfather inscribed “Terezin,” the Czech name for Theresienstadt, she did not understand its significance. Her parents raised Jana as a Catholic and never told her that she was of Jewish origin. She found out only when an exhibition of drawings and paintings by the children of Theresienstadt came to Vancouver. As Jana was dating a Jewish boy at the time, she went to the exhibition, began questioning her parents, and discovered their origins.