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By Root 1363 0

become so critical that an appeal was was made to Austria in general, and Vienna in particular, for help. ‘If assistance is not promptly forthcoming the University will inevitably sink to the level of a little Hochschule. The Professors are on starvation salaries . . . the library is not able to function.’ The annual income of a professor, commented a visiting scholar, was inadequate to buy a suit and undergarments for himself and clothes for his wife and child. In January 1919, lectures were cancelled as there was no fuel for the lecture-halls. Against this rose the incendiary academic climate of possibility. It was, perversely, a fantastic time to study: there were Austrian – or Viennese – schools of economics, theoretical physics and philosophy, law, psychoanalysis (under Freud and Adler), history and art history. Each of these schools represented extraordinary scholarship coupled with intense rivalry.

Elisabeth had chosen to study philosophy, law and economics. It was, in one sense, a very Jewish choice: all three disciplines had strong Jewish presences in the faculty. One-third of the legal faculty was Jewish. To be a lawyer, an Advokat, in Vienna meant being an intellectual. And that is what she was, a plain, fierce, focused intellectual eighteen-year-old in her white crépe-de-Chine blouse with a black bow at the neck. It was a way of making absolute the division between her and the emotional intermittencies of her mother. And the slowly resurgent domestic life in the Palais, the nursery, her noisy new infant brother, the fuss.

Elisabeth chose to study under a fearsome economist, Ludwig von Mises, a man known in the university as der Liberale, Mr Libertarian. Mises was a young economist out to make his reputation through his stress on the implausibility of the socialist state. There might be communists on the streets of Vienna, but Mises was going to find the economic arguments to prove them wrong. He started a small seminar circle, ‘privatissimum’, in which his selected disciples would give a paper. On 26th November 1918, a week after Rudolf was born, Elisabeth gave the first talk on ‘Carver’s theory of interest’. Mises’s students remembered the intensity of the scrutiny in these seminars, the genesis of a famous school of free-market economics. I have her student essays on ‘Inflation und Geldknappkeit’ (fifteen pages of small italic handwriting), on ‘Kapital’ (thirty-two of the same) and ‘John Henry Newman’ (thirty-eight pages).

But Elisabeth’s passion was for poetry. She sent her poems to her grandmother and to her friend Fanny Lowenstein-Schaffeneck, now working in an exciting contemporary art gallery selling the paintings of Egon Schiele.

Elisabeth and Fanny were in love with the lyric poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. It consumed them: they knew the two volumes of his Neue Gedichte (New Poems) by heart and waited impatiently for the next poem to be published: his silence was unbearable. Rilke had been Rodin’s amanuensis in Paris, and after the war the girls had travelled with their copies of Rilke’s book on the sculptor to pay homage in the Musée Rodin. Elisabeth marked their excitement in the margins in pencilled rushes.

Rilke was the great radical poet of the day. He combined directness of expression with intense sensuousness in his Dinggedichte, ‘thing poems’. ‘The thing is definite, the art-thing must be still more definite, removed from all accident, reft away from obscurity . . .’, Rilke wrote. His poems are full of epiphanies, moments when things come alive – a dancer’s first movement is the flare of a sulphur match. Or of moments when there is a change in the summer weather, a catch in mood when you see someone as if for the first time.

And his poems are full of danger, ‘all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further’. This is what it is like to be an artist, he says, breath-catchingly. You are unsteady on the edge of life, like a swan, before an ‘anxious launching of himself/On the floods where he is