“The Jewish question,” as Mitzi then perceived it, “is something I understand in many a way and not at all in others. There are always masses suffering for the wrong-doing of others, and what horrors we shall still see God alone knows. All countries will take up anti-Semitism again, I fear. Where are these miserable Jews going to settle down – Francis de Croisset [born Franz Wiener in Vienna, a family friend, Jewish, a successful playwright] says one ought to find them an island in the Pacific as Palestine is not safe for them either.” This passage goes on to relate the story of another friend, the aristocratic Count Yorck, known as Sonny and married to Ruth Landsberg, a member of the Jewish family that owned Mazer, the Palladian villa in the Veneto as perfect architecturally as Royaumont. On a flight from Venice to Berlin, there had been “a little Jew to whom Yorck poured out his worries. This man next morning denounced him. Hitler’s officials want to force the Jews back into the mentality one says they have, and bad treatment is the way to get them there quickly. Sonny Yorck lost his situation in a bank for having a Jewish wife. The Jewish father of Ruth has got a new job in a Nazi undertaking. Comprendre qui pourra [let him understand it who can]. My Jewish question is concentrated on Max Springer and his family. What will happen to them?”
As Austrians identified more and more openly with Nazi Germany, the family’s centre of gravity shifted away from Meidling. For most of the time Mitzi and Frank were at Montreuil, treating it as headquarters. Her children felt they could not reject summons to go there, although the heart might sink. On their own at Royaumont, Max and Lily had the time of their lives in a house so close to Paris and so ideal for entertaining. The two English nannies substituted for the missing domesticity. In innumerable photographs I am to be seen, with aunts and uncles, or sometimes Harry and Vere and the teenage Adrian on a summer visit, bending over a gigantic pram or holding me in their arms.
Bubbles, the eldest daughter, in old age liked to present an idealized portrait of herself as artist, painter, socialite, cosmopolitan, the friend of royal persons, author whose memoir has a title that is the equivalent of a handwave, I Loved My Stay. Eduardo Propper de Callejon had not been Mitzi’s choice for a son-in-law. The one and only time I ever heard her say anything in Yiddish was years later when she had an expression for the Proppers as “Jews from Galicia with lice in their side-locks.” A monarchist by conviction, Eduardo had joined the Spanish diplomatic service and been posted to Vienna after the First War. He left the service in 1931 when King Alfonso XIII resigned. In exile in France, Eduardo and Bubbles lived either at Royaumont, in Mitzi’s flat in the rue de Surène, or in the Hotel Meurice with other Spanish exiles whom he referred to as “a Spanish nationalist colony.” During the civil war he spent several days in Berlin on a mission to buy arms for Franco. For much of the Thirties Mitzi was paying them an allowance.
After the birth in October 1930 of Philip, their son and my first cousin, Bubbles had a post-natal depression or psychological collapse exactly as Poppy was to have, though longer lasting. The birth in May 1934 of their daughter Elena, or Elly, prolonged it. With Bubbles weeping in a hotel room and Poppy weeping in the Malmaison clinic, Eduardo and Alan discussed how to come to terms with married life and fatherhood. “At first David meant nothing to me,” Alan wrote. “Sometimes I have hated him for making Poppy suffer so. Only when I saw the faculty of searching grow in him could I recognize him. He looked for something. His contented feet, and his sash, however, made me recognize him as a possibly lovable human being.”
One idea was to put in order Poppy’s property at Kostolany in Slovakia. In preparation, Alan continued his Czech language lessons, and bought himself a Tatra, a car of Czech design whose advanced engineering gave it a scarcity value but a headache to mechanics. Off the road a good deal, the Tatra nevertheless was Alan’s pride and joy. Another idea was to rent Herstmonceux, a huge and well-know country house in Sussex. The owner, Sir Paul Latham, was a friend of Max, and used to visit Royaumont. Caught in a park with a soldier, he was sent to prison. “I am feeling very John Bullish just now,” Alan confided in a letter to his parents on 21 October 1936 with a cheeriness contrary to the tone of the letters Poppy was writing to them, “and long to be in London: or Herstmonceux Place. Poppy is very excited about that.” On 26 October he was explaining to them that she had “a peri-flébite – which sounds more alarming than it is. There is nothing to be done except to stay in bed.” Next day she would move into her mother’s Paris flat in the rue de Surène, while he attended a party given by the duc de Gramont at Vallière, the duke’s country house. “The Herstmonceux plan has gone down very well – and with a little careful nursing we shall bring it off. Poppy wants it, Max thinks the idea splendid – and Mitzi is going to look the whole thing over, at my request.” Four days later, he wrote again to tell them that Poppy was “absolutely herself,” looking at Molyneux dresses and coming out for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne. One week more, and they had decided to take Herstmonceux, “though I don’t quite see how we can afford to live in it. One must not, however, be sordid in plan-making, must one.”
Instead Mitzi looked after them financially as she did Bubbles and Eduardo, buying the lease of a house in London, in Marylebone. Coming to stay there, Mitzi found it “adorable … they are ever so sweet…. I do hope I can manage to let them keep it, but how.” 4 York Gate was in the middle of an imposing terrace which is part of John Nash’s masterful town-planning for that area. The uniformity is eye-catching. One end of the street is closed by St Mary’s church and the other is the edge of Regent’s Park. In childhood, Poppy had spent two or three summer holidays with the Esmonds at North Berwick, but otherwise knew nothing about the country she now found herself in. Aged twenty-three, she had a housekeeper, Mrs Kay, and a butler, Saunders, noting their wages in a special diary bound in pig-skin. Ruth Harris, a long-standing friend, used to maintain that Poppy spoke with a French accent, but by the time I could judge this for myself, she spoke English like a native. In the process of anglification, she was presented at court, a ceremony that required a formal dress as for a wedding, ostrich feathers and elbow-length white kid gloves. In a white tie and tails Alan escorted her to Buckingham Palace, and with them were Vere and a Harry very solemn as a Gentleman at Arms complete with helmet and sword. (They sent a photograph of themselves in a group to Brüll, because after my birth he had written to them in English, “From Meidling I can only report the best. The little David, his mother and grandmother are all right and very happy…. This child may bring you good luck.” I was grown-up when his son Hans returned this photograph to me just before he emigrated to Israel.)
That York Gate house was made for entertaining. Voices of guests arriving in the hall reached up the staircase. Alan picked up literary life as though he had never been away in Vienna, and his absence had only served to establish him as a man of letters on his own terms. He propelled Poppy into the world of Harold Nicolson, Eddie Marsh, Charles Morgan and Squire. Among his contemporaries, he didn’t like Evelyn Waugh, he thought Raymond Mortimer “the most brown person I know,” therefore destined not to be remembered. After some dinner party or social encounter he could turn a phrase that exactly summed up a character. Stephen Spender had, “The head of a beautiful turnip.” Again, “We ran into Stephen Spender on Chiswick Mall. He thinks I am frivolous, I think he is half-prefect, half sarg [sergeant]. He was sunburnt, handsome – and I like him. But the sincerity and strength of his politics, even though I agree with them, hopelessly divide us. There was a sort of tension – the combat between an open shirt and a blue overcoat. ‘I live near here,’ he said.” Christopher Isherwood “seduced more boys than any other individual in Berlin, one is told with aghast admiration.” Cecil Day-Lewis was “a memorial. A cape gooseberry. There is no trace of poetry left, no fire; an accent so genteelly ow-ow that it seems to have been acquired along with party membership.” The adjectives for Cyril Connolly tell the whole story: “Easily wounded, unforgiving, dislikeable, delightful.”
/> Every day, columns of horses from the cavalry barracks in Albany Street would clatter and jingle down York Gate on the way to exercising in Regent’s Park. Hearing that evocative sound, I would stand on furniture and crane out of the window. Someone called Margaret was filling in for the proper nannies at Royaumont, and she forbade me from taking up my watch on the grounds that I might fall out of the window. Catching me red-handed one day, she undressed me and stood me in the corner, forbidding me to move while she went to the kitchen for tea. As luck would have it, she was still out of the room when I heard the heavy tread of grandfather Harry coming upstairs. He may have been calling my name. Ashamed to be naked, I shot under the bed, and there he found me, poking his head upside down below the valance, and then dragging me out. When Margaret re-entered the room, he gave her an hour to pack her bags and leave.
ELEVEN
Adolfo Chamberlini
ALL GRANNY WOOSTER needed to be happy was a pen and paper. Every day she wrote up her diary in the belief that she had in hand a document of historic importance. When she fled in 1940 she entrusted the volumes to Madame Provins, her housekeeper and mother of her maid Paulette – they had a house of their own in Montreuil. Buried by Madame Provins in the garden without adequate protection, a good many volumes were spoiled beyond recovery. Mitzi never forgot, let alone forgave, what she considered criminal negligence.
A grandson and a published writer, I was handed the remaining volumes. Mitzi had the highest expectations. Editing a coherent book out of these hundreds of thousands of words was supposed to be my task but it was something she alone could do. She wrote in a manner that assumed the reader to have been as familiar with this material as she was. Statement has to stand for explanation. Suddenly switching from one topic to another, she lets drop names, places, references, amid random reflections of fear or hope about the politics of the day, without any attempt to be discursive. She comments for instance, “The law against Jews in Hungary is pretty bad. My children cannot visit our properties,” without spelling out what that law specified, and almost immediately contradicting herself: “We are all making plans to go to Hungary in September.” (This was 1939, so war overtook plans.) Then early in 1940 she expressed her disappointment and anger more explicitly: “As for Hungary they want the certificates of baptism of Frank’s parents and grandparents, mine and the one of Bubbles.” Which led her to exclaim, “When I think of the years of hard work that all these places gave me! And for what!”
Another sketchy incident concerns a tax demand in Czechoslovakia for eighteen million crowns. How the demand arose is not clear. Pokorny appears to have negotiated it down to a few millions. Bitterness remained: “I will always hate the Czechs and never forgive the way they treated me and made special laws to steal from me all they could.” Again, what laws were these? The Munich toing and froing, she hazarded, could have had a different outcome. “These famous Czech patriots will not once try to kill Hitler. Old President Hácha ought to have done it during the death of his country.” Her Czech properties grew beet, and through Pokorny she appears to have bought or gone into partnership with Teplà, a factory producing sugar from beet. Alan was put on the board of Teplà (which may also explain why he took Czech lessons and passed the test for a driving licence in Bratislava, where he may have had an eye on his Tatra car.) When someone Jewish, whom she refers to as “le malheureux Wolf” (the wretched Wolf) somehow made trouble for the Teplà board, Pokorny drove him by car from Slovakia to the Protectorate of Bohemia. On the face of it, this means handing him to the Nazis. Mitzi concludes an incomplete summary of this episode with what might be an admission of guilt: “the Jews who are refugees from Vienna in Prague, what about them? Tout cela déborde la charité privée [private charity can’t cope with this] and although I feel nothing but pity for these unfortunate people my conscience is clear. Confronting a mess like this, an individual can do nothing.” Pokorny informs her that he has advised their accountant, a man called Hinteregger, to acquire protective covering by becoming a Nazi – this didn’t take much persuasion, Mitzi notes with sarcasm that was probably deserved but still needs to be backed with evidence. References to one Lauf are murkier still. His first name is not given. Turning up in Vienna and accepting bribes to stand between the Nazis and the Springer interests, he was really running a protection racket.
Two opinions exist about a German lawyer, Geutebruch, someone else whose first name is not recorded. Mitzi seems to believe he was acting in her interest. Not only did he oversee the sequestration of Meidling but in the war turned up in Paris at the office in the rue de Surène and at the Maisons-Alfort factory. Protected by his French passport, Max went once to Meidling after the Anschluss. Describing Geutebruch as a Gauleiter, he loved to relate an exchange they had had in Vienna, saying with an exaggerated German accent, “Herr Gauleiter, was behalten Sie für Italien?” To which the answer was, “Italien bedeutet kein Problem.” (Herr Gauleiter, what’s your opinion about Italy? Italy presents no problem.) At the end of the war, according to Max, Geutebruch had had himself sent to the front and been killed.
Mitzi was at Montreuil on 12 March 1938 when the Wehrmacht overran Austria, and Hitler annexed the country next day. In the course of a triumphal visit to Vienna, he appeared on a balcony of the Hotel Imperial, according to Mitzi the balcony of the room that her father had reserved for himself. Overstating an important friendship, Mitzi put in her diary, “Vansittart says England would stand behind me if one touches our houses in Vienna.” She was practical enough to add, “We are ruined by events in Austria.”
Alan had shunned the anti-fascist posturing of so many intellectuals at the time, and now he was to come up against political reality. “Brüll’s voice at the telephone,” he records, “I must come at once to Vienna. He can give no explanations, I surmise, because of the Gestapo. Advice, letters to be got from Vansittart, instructions from Mitzi.” British and not Jewish, Alan did not have to feel afraid. Brüll was among the Jews whom the Gestapo humiliated by forcing them down on their hands and knees to scrub pavements. A fortnight after the Anschluss Alan flew to Vienna. The Consulate was thronged with Jews trying to obtain visas and Alan had a spasm of guilt when he was shown into the Consul’s office ahead of these desperate people. At lunch in the Grand Hotel, where the presence of German officers imposed silence on everyone else, the British Consul put Alan in the picture. Then at Meidling he learnt that Brüll had taken responsibility for a large loan to the shady Lauf in the hope of saving the situation.
A letter to his parents dated Wednesday, 6 April 1938 shows Alan rising to the crisis. “I left Berlin by the night train on Monday,” he writes, “arriving in Vienna at 8.0 yesterday morning. Then out to Meidling: then a three hours conference with a Berlin lawyer [Geutebruch?], a Vienna one, and the people of the bureau. Then out to Meidling again, to arrange the packing of books, clothes and pictures. Then another conference from 3.30 till 7.0 broken by a visit to the Consul. Then a talk to one of the Legation secretaries; very interesting but only to be described verbally. Dinner at 9.0 in Meidling; more packing; and the 11.15 night train to Prague with the Centraldirektor that involved discussions with him until 1 A.M. in my wagon-lit.” He was due to fly to Paris, he tells them, take a train to Montreuil, probably cross to London for a few hours and then back to Vienna. “I think I have accomplished quite a lot by my going; and anyhow I have collected some fascinating snapshots of Central European life at the moment. Also, I may tell you, that apart from Unity Mitford, few people stand higher in the esteem of the Dritter Reich than your loving son. Sieg Heil! I don’t think!”
The same spirit infuses a letter written from Royaumont on 11 April. He and Mr Hickman plan to fly out of Le Bourget airport at 6.45 the following morning. He has to spend a few days relieving Brüll of his functions, and hand everything over to some suitable person whom he has still to find. Then he will go on to Prague because the last interview at the Legation there had been very rushed. He reassures his parents by telling th
em that he is enjoying himself in his new role and has just received a charming letter from Vansittart who can hardly have a minute to spare for the affairs of England. “And then – isn’t it sad – I must arrange for Meidling to be dismantled: for the pictures to be sent to London, and the house closed, I suppose for ever. But under present conditions with a huge garage for armoured cars and camouflaged police wagons at the lodge gates, and a twenty foot swastika flag flying from the windows of your room (I had it taken away and replaced by the Union Jack!), it isn’t much fun. All the servants, too, have turned into Nazis, and to hear Heil Hitler spoken by those silly old things is, to say the least, unexpected. Though they’re so silly that they assume, as a matter of course, that we are delighted too. You are being angelic to take such care of David and York Gate, and I can’t ever tell you how grateful we are.”
Baron Gustav Springer (1842–1920), whose interests extended from Austria and Hungary to Maisons-Alfort, his yeast factory in Paris.
Gustav with his only child, Mitzi, standing behind him. His wife, Hélène Koenigswarter had died giving birth to Mitzi.
Meidling, the house Gustav built in a park of some fifty acres adjoining the imperial palace of Schönbrunn.
Pokvár, the house with an estate and a partridge shoot near Györ in western Hungary where the family spent the summer.
The great Cistertian abbey of Royaumont was destroyed in the French Revolution, but the Palladian palace built in the 1780s for the Abbott survived in secular hands. Mitzi and Eugène bought it in 1923.
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