The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [54]
The nature of the age was much discussed around these marble café tables and between these earnest young men. Hofmannsthal, the son of a Jewish financier, argued that the nature of the age ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy’. It can rest only, he said, on ‘das Gleitende’, moving, slipping, sliding: ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende’. The nature of the age was change itself, something to be reflected in the partial and fragmentary, the melancholy and lyric, not in the grand, firm, operatic chords of the Gründerzeit and the Ringstrasse. ‘Security,’ said Schnitzler, the well-off son of a Jewish professor of laryngology, ‘exists nowhere.’
Melancholy fits with the perpetual dying fall of Schubert’s Abschied, Farewell. Liebestod, the love of death, was one response. Suicide was terribly common among Viktor’s acquaintances. Schnitzler’s daughter, Hofmannsthal’s son, three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers and Gustav Mahler’s brother would all kill themselves. Death was a way of separating oneself from the mundane, from the snobbery and the intrigues and the gossip, drifting into das Gleitende. Schnitzler’s list of reasons for shooting yourself in The Way into the Open encompasses ‘Grace, or debts, from boredom with life, or purely out of affectation’. When, on 30th January 1889 the Crown Prince, Archduke Rudolf, committed suicide after murdering his young mistress Marie Vestera, suicide gained its imperial imprimatur.
It was understood that none of the sensible Ephrussi children would go as far as that. Melancholy had its place. A café. It shouldn’t be brought home.
But other things were brought home.
On 25th June 1889 Viktor’s sister, the long-faced, belle laide Anna, converted to Catholicism in order to marry Herz von Hertenreid. She has a long list of possible husbands, and now she has found a banker and a baron who comes from the right kind of family, even if he is Christian. The von Hertenreids are a family that – approving tones from my grandmother – always spoke French. Conversion was relatively common. I spend a day looking up the records of the Viennese Rabbinate in the archives of the Jewish community next to the synagogue in Judengasse, the names of every Jew born, married or buried in Vienna. I’m searching for her when an archivist turns. ‘I remember her marriage,’ she says, ‘1889. She has the firmest signature, confident. It almost goes through the paper.’
I can believe this. Anna seems to have been able to create trouble wherever she went. On the family tree my grandmother made for my father in the 1970s, there are pencil annotations. Anna has two children, she writes, a beautiful daughter who marries and then flees with her lover to the East, and a son who is ‘not married, did nothing’. ‘Anna’, she continues, ‘witch’.
Eleven days after Anna’s wedding to her banker, Stefan, the heir-apparent – groomed for the life of the bank, with his fantastic waxed moustaches – elopes with his father’s Russian Jewish mistress Estiha. Estiha only spoke Russian – this is written on the annotated family tree – and broken German.
Stefan was immediately disinherited. He was to receive no allowance, live in no family property, communicate with no member of the family. It was a proper Old Testament banishment, admittedly with the particularly Viennese slant of marrying your father’s lover. One sin piled on another: apostasy on filial disgrace. And linguistic incompetence in a mistress. I’m not sure how to read this. Does it reflect badly on father or son, or both?
Cut off, this couple went first to Odessa, where there were still friends and a name to use. Then on to Nice. Then a succession of progressively less smart resorts along the Côte d’Azur as their money ran out. In 1893 an Odessa newspaper notes that the Baron Stefan von Ephrussi has been received into the Lutheran Evangelical faith. By 1897 he is working as a cashier in a Russian bank for foreign trade. A letter comes from a shabby Paris hotel in the 10th arrondissement in 1898. They have no children, no heirs to complicate