The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [48]
Robert Musil in his novel The Man Without Qualities has the old Count Leinsdorf muse on this disappearing act. These Jews have muddled social life in Vienna by not staying true to their decorative roots:
The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress . . . Frankly, a Galician Jew who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn’t look right on the Esplanade at Ischl, wearing a Tyrolean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long, flowing robe . . . Imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of Western European elegance at its finest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean.
Go into the slums of Vienna, Leopoldstadt, and you can see Jews living as Jews should live, twelve in a room, no water, loud on the streets, wearing the right robes, speaking the right argot. In 1863 when Viktor arrived in Vienna from Odessa as a three-year-old child, there were fewer than 8,000 Jews in Vienna. In 1867 the Emperor gave civic equality to Jews, removing the last barriers to their rights to teach and their ownership of property. By the time Viktor was thirty in 1890 there were 118,000 Jews in Vienna, many of the newcomers the Ostjuden driven out of Galicia by the horrors of the pogroms that had erupted throughout the previous decade. Jews also came from small villages in Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary, shtetls where their living conditions were abject. They spoke Yiddish and sometimes wore caftans : they were immersed in their Talmudic heritage. According to the popular Viennese press, these incomers were possibly involved in ritual murder, and certainly were involved in prostitution, hawking second-hand clothes, peddling goods all over the city with their strange baskets on their backs.
By the time of Viktor and Emmy’s marriage in 1899 there were 145,000 Jews in Vienna. By 1910 only Warsaw and Budapest had a larger Jewish population in Europe; only New York had a larger Jewish population in the world. And it was a population like no other. Many of the second generation of the new migrants had achieved remarkable things. Vienna was a city, said Jakob Wassermann at the turn of the century, where ‘all public life was dominated by the Jews. The banks. The press, the theatre, literature, social organisations, all lay in the hands of the Jews . . . I was amazed at the hosts of Jewish physicians, attorneys, clubmen, snobs, dandies, proletarians, actors, newspapermen and poets.’ In fact, 71 per cent of financiers were Jewish, 65 per cent of lawyers were Jewish, 59 per cent of doctors were Jewish and half of Vienna’s journalists were Jewish. Die Neue Freie Presse was ‘owned, edited and written by Jews’, said Wickham Steed in his casually anti-Semitic book on the Hapsburg Empire.
And these Jews had perfect façades – they vanished. It was a Potemkin city and they were Potemkin inhabitants. Just as this Russian general had put a wood-and-plaster town together to impress the visiting Catherine the Great, so the Ringstrasse, wrote the young firebrand architect Adolf Loos, was nothing but a huge pretence. It was potemkinische. The façades bore no relation to the buildings. The stone was only stucco, it was all a confection for parvenus. The Viennese must stop living in this stage-set ‘hoping that no one will notice they are fake’. The satirist Karl Kraus concurred. It was the ‘debasement of practical life by ornament’. What was more, through this debasement, language had become infected by this ‘catastrophic confusion. Phraseology is the ornament of the mind.’ These ornamental buildings, their ornamental disposition, the ornamental life that went on around them: Vienna had become orotund.
This is a very complex place to send the netsuke to, I think, as I circle back to the Palais Ephrussi towards dusk, feeling calmer. It is complex because I’m not sure what all this ornament