The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [47]
I realise that I am going too fast, walking as if I had a destination, rather than a point of departure. I remember that this was the street that was made for the slower movement of the daily ‘Corso’, the ritualised stroll for society along the Kärntner Ring to meet and flirt and gossip and be seen. In the illustrated scandal sheets that proliferated in Vienna around the time that Viktor and Emmy got married, there were often sketches showing ‘Ein Corso Abenteuer’, an adventure on the Corso, advances from bewhiskered men with canes or glances from demi-mondaines. There was a ‘regular jam’, wrote Felix Salten, ‘of knights of fashion, monocled nobles, members of the pressed-trouser brigade’.
This was a place to get dressed up for. In fact, it was the site of the most spectacular bit of dressing up in Vienna. In 1879, twenty years before Viktor and Emmy marry and Charles’s netsuke arrive, Hans Makart, a wildly popular painter of vast canvases of historical fantasy, orchestrated a Festzug or procession of artisans for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emperor’s wedding. The artisans of Vienna were deployed in forty-three guilds, each of which had its own float decorated in allegorical fashion. Musicians and heralds and pikemen and men with banners milled around each float. Everyone wore Renaissance costume, and Makart led the whole swaggering cavalcade on a white charger, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. It occurs to me that this slippage – a bit of Renaissance, a bit of Rubens, some cod-classicism – fits the Ringstrasse perfectly.
It is all so self-consciously grand, and yet a bit Cecil B. de Mille. I am the wrong audience for it. A young painter and architecture student, Adolf Hitler, had a proper visceral response to the Ringstrasse: ‘From morning until late at night I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings that held my primary interest. For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ringstrasse seemed to me like an enchantment out of “The Thousand-and-One-Nights”.’ Hitler would paint all the great buildings on the Ring, the Burgtheater, Hansen’s Parliament, the two great buildings opposite the Palais Ephrussi, the university and the Votivkirche. Hitler appreciated how the space could be used for dramatic display. He understood all this ornament in a different way: it expressed ‘eternal values’.
All of this enchantment was paid for by selling building lots to the rapidly growing class of financiers and industrialists. Many of them were sold to create the Ringstrasse Palais, a type of building where a series of apartments lay behind one formidable façade. You could have the imposing Palais address, with a great front door and balconies and windows onto the Ringstrasse, a marble entrance hall, a salon with a painted ceiling- and yet live on just one floor. This floor, the Nobelstock, would have all the main reception rooms centred on a large ballroom. The Nobelstock is easy to spot as it has the most swags around its windows.
And because many of the inhabitants of these new Palais were the families who had recently made good, this meant that the Ringstrasse was substantially Jewish. Walking away from the Palais Ephrussi, I pass the Palais of the Liebens, the Todescos, the Königswaters, the Wertheims, the Gutmanns, the Epsteins, the Schey von Koromlas. These bravura buildings are a roll-call of intermarried Jewish families, an architectural parade of self-confident wealth where Jewishness and ornament were interlocked.
As I walk with the wind at my back, I think of my ‘vagabonding’ around the rue de Monceau and I remember Zola’s rapacious Sac-card in his vulgarly opulent mansion, intrusive on the street. Here in Vienna there are subtly different arguments about the Jews of Zionstrasse behind the great façades of their Palais. Here, the common talk goes, the Jews had become so assimilated, had mimicked their Gentile neighbours so well, that they had tricked the Viennese and simply disappeared into the fabric