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By Root 1301 0

possible; not hearing about it was impossible. There was no political consensus on what politicians could say in Vienna. This was tested by the publication in 1922, by the novelist and provocateur Hugo Bettauer, of The City Without Jews: A Novel about the Day after Tomorrow. In this unnerving novel he tells the story of Vienna racked by post-war poverty and the rise of a demagogue – a dead-ringer for Dr Karl Lueger, named Dr Karl Schwertfeger – who binds the populace together in one easy way: ‘Let us look at our little Austria today. In whose hands is the press, and therefore public opinion? In the hands of the Jew! Who has piled billions upon billions since the ill-starred year 1914? The Jew! Who controls the tremendous circulation of our money, who sits at the director’s desk in the great banks, who is the head of practically all industries? The Jew! Who owns our theatre? The Jew! . . .’ The Mayor has a solution, a simple solution: Austria will throw out the Jews. All of them, including the children of mixed marriages, will be deported in orderly ways on trains. Those Jews who attempt to continue staying secretly in Vienna will do so under pain of death. ‘At one o’clock in the afternoon whistles proclaimed that the last trainload of Jews had left Vienna, and at six o’clock . . . all the church bells rang to announce that there were no more Jews in Austria.’

And this novel, with its chilling descriptions of the painful breakups of families, desperate scenes at railway stations as closed carriages take away the Jews, is counterpointed with the descent of Vienna into a drab, provincial backwater as the Jews who animated it leave. There is no theatre, no newspaper, no gossip, no fashion and no money until Vienna finally invites the Jews back.

Bettauer was assassinated by a young Nazi in 1925. He was defended at his trial by the leader of the Austrian National Socialists, giving the party some prestige amongst the fissile politics of Vienna. That summer, eighty young Nazis attacked a crowded restaurant shouting ‘Juden Hinaus!’

Part of the wretchedness of these years was the effect of inflation. It was said that if you passed the building of the Austro-Hungarian Bank in Bankgasse in the early hours of the morning you could hear the printing presses clattering away printing more money. You were passed banknotes with their ink still damp. Perhaps, say some bankers, we should change our currency totally and start again. Schillings are talked of.

‘An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand,’ wrote the Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig about the year 1919 in his novel The Post-Office Girl. ‘Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always late. Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum . . .’

Viktor looked into his own vacuum: in the safe at the office off the Schottengasse were stacks of files of deeds and bonds and share-certificates. They were worthless. As the citizen of a defeated power, all his assets in London and in Paris, the accounts that had been building over forty years, the office building in one city, the share of Ephrussi et Cie in another, had been confiscated under the Allied terms of the punitive settlement after the war. In the Bolshevik conflagration the Russian fortune – the gold held in St Petersburg, the shares in the Baku oilfields, the railways and the banks and the property Viktor still owned in Odessa – had disappeared. That was not just a spectacular loss of money, it was the loss of several fortunes.

And, more personally, at the height of the war in 1915 Jules Ephrussi, Charles’s elder brother and owner of the Chalet, had died. Because of the hostilities his vast fortune, long promised to Viktor, had been left