The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [85]
In 1914, before the war, Viktor had a fortune of twenty-five million crowns, several buildings scattered around Vienna, the Palais Ephrussi, the art collection of ‘100 old paintings’ and an annual income of several hundred thousand crowns. It was the equivalent of $400 million today. Now even the two floors of the Palais that he rented out for 50,000 crowns did not bring in any more income. And his decision to leave his money in Austria had proved catastrophic. This newly-minted patriotic Austrian citizen had invested massively in war bonds late into 1917. They were worthless, too.
Viktor admitted the severity of all this in crisis meetings on 6th and 8th March 1921 with his old friend, the financier Rudolf Gutmann. ‘On the Borse the Ephrussi have the best reputation in Vienna,’ wrote Gutmann to another German banker, one Herr Siepel, on 4th April. The Ephrussi bank was still fundamentally viable and its reach across the Balkans made it a useful business partner. The Gutmanns took part of the bank, putting in twenty-five million crowns, and the Berlin Bank (a predecessor of the Deutsche Bank) put up seventy-five million crowns. Viktor now owned only half the family bank.
Lodged in the archives of Deutsche Bank are files and files of these documents, the careful toing and froing about percentages, the reports of conversations with Viktor, the deals. But through the Manila shadings you can still hear the faint oscillation of Viktor’s voice, his weariness, in those tumbling consonants. The business was ‘buchstäblich gleich Null’. It was ‘literally zero’.
This feeling of loss, of having failed to preserve an inheritance, affected Viktor profoundly. He was the heir: it was his legacy and he had lost it. Each part of his world had closed down – his life in Odessa, St Petersburg, Paris and London was finished and only Vienna was left, the hydrocephalic Palais on the Ringstrasse.
Emmy, the children and little Rudolf weren’t exactly destitute. Nothing had to be sold for food or fuel. But what they possessed comprised the contents of this vast house. The netsuke still lay in their lacquer cabinet in the dressing-room, and were still dusted by Anna when she came in to arrange the flowers on Emmy’s dressing-table. The walls still held their Gobelin tapestries, their Dutch Old Masters. The French furniture was still polished, clocks still wound, the wicks of candles still trimmed. The Sèvres still lay stacked in the china closet next to the silver-room, service by service on the linen-covered shelves. The gold dinner-service with its double E and the proud little boat with its full sails were still in the safe. There was still a motor-car in the courtyard. But the life of objects within the Palais was less mobile. The world had undergone an Umsturz, an overturning, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished, where before they had been just a background, a gilt-and-varnish blur to a busy social life. The uncounted and the unmeasured started at last to be counted very accurately.
There was a huge falling away; things were so much better and fuller before. Perhaps this was when there were the very first intimations of nostalgia. I begin to think that keeping things and losing them are not polar opposites. You keep this silver snuff-box, a token for standing as second in a duel, a lifetime ago. You keep the bracelet given by a lover. Viktor and Emmy kept everything – all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures – but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities. This was how they were diminished.
Vienna is sticky with nostalgia. It has breached the heavy oak door of their house.
22. YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Elisabeth’s first term at university was chaotic. The financial situation of Vienna University had