The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [83]
Streets changed, too. The von Ephrussi family no longer lived at 24 Franzenring, Wien 1, named for the Hapsburg Emperor. The Ephrussi now lived at 24 Der Ring des Zwölften Novembers, Wien 1, renamed after the day of liberation from the Hapsburg emperors. Emmy complained that this renaming business was a bit French, that they were going to end up on rue de la République.
Anything might happen. The value of the krone was so diminished that there was speculation that the new government might sell the imperial art collections for food for the starving Viennese. The Schönbrunn ‘is to be sold to a foreign consortium and turned into a gambling palace’. The Botanical Gardens are to be ‘razed for the building of apartments’.
With the collapse in the economy, ‘loud-voiced people were arriving from all parts of the world to buy banks, factories, jewels, carpets, works of art or landed estates, and the Jews were not the last ones to come. Foreign sharks, swindlers and forgers poured into Vienna and a pest of lice came with them.’ This is the backdrop to the 1925 silent film Die Freundlose Gasse (Lonely Street). Car headlights rake along the night-time queue outside a butcher’s shop. ‘After waiting all night many are turned away empty-handed.’ A hook-nosed ‘International Speculator’ plots to destroy the value of the stock of a mining company, while a widowed civil servant (could there be a more pitiable Viennese stereotype?) cashes in his pension to buy shares and loses everything. His daughter, played by Greta Garbo, hollow-eyed, faint with hunger, is forced to work in a cabaret. Rescue comes from a handsome Red Cross official, a gentleman, the bearer of tinned food.
Anti-Semitism gained even more ground in Vienna during those years. You could hear the echo of the demonstrations, of course, with their rants against the ‘plague of Eastern Jews’, but Iggie remembered that they used to laugh at those, as they laughed at the mass displays of youth groups in their proud uniforms and of Austrians in peasant costumes of dirndl and lederhosen. There were lots and lots of these parades.
What was particularly terrifying were the Krawalle, brawls of savage ferocity, that took place on the steps of the university between the newly resurrected pan-German student fraternities, the Bummel, and Jewish and socialist students. Iggie remembered his father white with anger when he and Gisela were caught watching one of these bloody fights from the window of the salon. ‘Don’t let them see you watching,’ he shouted – and this from a man who did not shout.
Under the slogan of ‘Keeping the Austrian Alps clean of Jews’, the German–Austrian Alpine Club expelled all their Jewish members. It was the club that provided access to hundreds of the mountain cabins in which you could spend the night and make coffee over a stove.
Like many of their peers, Iggie and Gisela hiked in the mountains during the early summer. They would take a train to Gmunden and then set off with a rucksack each, a walking stick and a sleeping bag, chocolate and a screw of coffee and sugar in brown paper: you could get milk and hard rolls and a crescent slice of yellow cheese from farmers. It was exhilarating to be free of the city. And once, said Iggie to me, hiking with a friend of Gisela’s, we were caught out at dusk high in the Alps. It was already cold, but there was a hut, full of students round the stove and cheerful noise. They asked us for our cards and then us told to get out, told us that Jews polluted the mountain air.
We were okay, said Iggie, we found a barn lower down the valley in the dark, but our friend, Franzi, had a card and stayed in the hut. We never talked about it.
Not talking about anti-Semitism was