25. ‘A NEVER-TO-BE-REPEATED OPPORTUNITY’

How can I write about this time? I read memoirs, the journals of Musil, look at the photographs of the crowds on this day, the following day, the day after that. I read the Vienna newspapers. On Tuesday the Hermansky bakery is baking Aryan bread. On Wednesday Jewish lawyers are sacked. On Thursday non-Aryans are excluded from the football club Schwarz-Rot. Goebbels gives out free radios on Friday. Aryan razor blades are on sale.

I have Viktor’s passport with its stamps and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk. I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring. I have folders of notes from the archives. But I realise that I can’t do this from London, from a library. So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais.

I stand on the balcony of the second floor. I have bought a netsuke back with me, the pale-brown one of three chestnuts with the small white grub in ivory, and I realise that I’m worrying away at it in my pocket, tumbling it round and round. I hold the balcony rail hard and look down to the marble floor and think of Emmy’s dressing-table falling. I think of the netsuke undisturbed in their vitrine.

And I hear a group of businessmen come in down the passageway from the Ringstrasse for a meeting in the offices, a knot of talk and laughter, and I hear how the faintest echo of the street comes in with them. It is those voices that make me remember Iggie. He said that the old doorkeeper, Herr Kirchner, who used to swing the gates of the Palais Ephrussi open with a flourish and a low bow to amuse the children, had conveniently gone out and left the gates to the Ringstrasse wide open on the day the Nazis came.

Six members of the Gestapo, in perfect uniforms, walk straight in.

They start out quite polite. They have orders to search the apartment as they have reason to believe that the Jew Ephrussi has supported the Schuschnigg campaign.

Searching. Searching means this: every single drawer is wrenched open, the contents of every cupboard pulled out, every single ornament is scrutinised. Do you know how much stuff there is in this house, how many drawers in how many rooms? The Gestapo are methodical. They are in no hurry. This is no Wilde. The drawers in the little tables in the salon are rifled through, papers scattered. The study is taken apart. The filed catalogues of incunabula are swept through for evidence, letters winnowed. Every drawer in the Italian cabinet is probed. Books are pulled off the shelves in the library and examined and dropped. They reach deep into the linen closets. Pictures are taken off walls and the stretchers are checked. The tapestries in the dining-room where the children used to hide are jerked away from the wall.

After they have searched the twenty-four rooms in the family apartment, the kitchens and the servants’ hall, the Gestapo request the keys to the safe, to the silver-room and to the porcelain store where the plates are stacked, service by service. They need the key to the boxroom in the corner, where all the hatboxes, the trunks, the crates with the children’s toys, the nursery books, the old Andrew Lang fairy stories are kept. They need the keys for the cabinet in Viktor’s dressing-room where he keeps his letters from Emmy, from his father, from his old tutor Herr Wessel, the good Prussian, the man who taught him about German values, made him read Schiller. They take Viktor’s keys to the office at the bank.

And all these things, a world of things – a family geography stretching from Odessa, from holidays in Petersburg, in Switzerland, in the South of France, Paris, Kövecses, London, everything – is gone through and noted down. Every object, every incident, is suspect. This is a scrutiny that every Jewish family in Vienna is undergoing.

At the end of these long hours there is a cursory consultation and the Jew Viktor Ephrussi is accused of having contributed 5,000 schillings to the Schuschnigg campaign and this has made him an enemy of the State. He and Rudolf are arrested. They are taken away.

Emmy is allowed two rooms at the back of the house. I go into these rooms. They are small and high and very dark, and an opaque window above the door lets in a little light from the courtyard. She is not allowed to use the main staircase, not allowed to go into their old rooms. She has no servants. She has – at this moment – only her clothes.

I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never asked Elisabeth or Iggie.

It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also forbidden to shave or wash so that they look even more degenerate. This is because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. This process of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character – wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back. You are supposed to end up looking like a cartoon from Die Stürmer, Streicher’s tabloid that is now sold on the streets of Vienna. They take away your reading glasses.

For three days father and son are in prison somewhere in Vienna. The Gestapo need a signature, there is a form that you sign, or you and your son get sent to Dachau. Viktor signs it away, the Palais and its contents and all his other properties in Vienna, the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions. And then they are allowed to return to the Palais Ephrussi, walk in through the open gates, across the courtyard to the servants’ staircase in the corner and up to the second floor to these two rooms that are now their home.

And on 27th April it is declared that the property at number 14 Dr Karl Lueger Ring, Vienna 1, formerly the Palais Ephrussi, has been fully Aryanised. It is one of the first to receive such an accolade.

As I stand outside the rooms that they were given, on the other side of the courtyard, the dressing-room and the library seem impossibly close. This is the moment, I think, that is the beginning of exile, the moment when home is with you and is very, very far away.

The house wasn’t theirs any more. It was full of people, some in uniforms and some in suits. People counting rooms, making lists of objects and pictures, taking things away. Anna is in there somewhere. She has been ordered to help with this packing-up into boxes and crates, told that she should be ashamed of working for the Jews.

And it not just their art, not just the bibelots, all the gilded stuff from tables and mantelpieces, but their clothes, Emmy’s winter coats, a crate of domestic china, a lamp, a bundle of umbrellas and walking-sticks. Everything that has taken decades to come into this house, settling in drawers and chests and vitrines and trunks, wedding-presents and birthday-presents and souvenirs, is now being carried out again. This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.

To assess the value of art objects belonging to Jews, appraisal officers are appointed by the Property Transactions Office, who will methodically facilitate the stripping-out of pictures, books, furniture, objects from the houses of Jews. Experts from the museums appraise what is of value. In these early weeks of the Anschluss the museums and the galleries hum to the sounds of busy, focused work as letters have to be written and copied, lists created, queries entered about provenance or attribution, and every picture, every piece of furniture, every objet ranked. For every single thing there are competing levels of interest.

As I read these documents I think of Charles as he was in Paris. Amateur d’art, passionate and diligent in his searching out and his listing, his life of scholarship, his vagabonding to piece together knowledge about his loved painters, his lacquer, his netsuke collection.

Never have art historians been so useful, their opinions attended to so seriously, than in Vienna in the spring of 1938. And because the Anschluss means that all Jews lose their jobs in official institutions, there are exciting opportunities for the right candidates. Two days after the Anschluss, Fritz Dworschak, previously the keeper of medals, is made the director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the Museum of Art History). The distribution of all this seized artwork, he announces, is a ‘singular, never-to-be-repeated opportunity for expansion…in a great number of areas’.

He is correct. Most art objects are to be sold on or auctioned off to raise money for the Reich. Some items are to be bartered with dealers for other objects; some items are to be given to the Führer for his new museum that is being planned for his birthplace of Linz; others to the National Museums. Berlin closely monitors the situation. ‘The Führer plans to personally decide on the use of the property after its seizure. He is considering putting artwork first and foremost at the disposal of small Austrian towns for their collections.’ Some pictures, some books, some furniture are earmarked for the collections of the Nazi leadership.

In the Palais Ephrussi this process of assessment is now under way. Everything in this great treasure-house is held up to the light and examined. This is what collectors do. In the grey light from the glassed-in courtyard all these objects from this Jewish family are held accountable.

The Gestapo write rather acidly about the taste behind the collections, but note that thirty of the Ephrussi pictures are ‘museum-ready’. Three Old Masters are given directly to the ‘gallery for painting’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, six to the Austrian Gallery, one Old Master is sold to a dealer, two terracottas and three paintings traded to a collector, ten sold to another dealer in the Michaelerplatz for 10,000 schillings. And so on and on and on.

Numerous ‘artistic and high-quality pieces that are unsuitable for office purposes’ go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Naturhistorisches Museum (the Natural History Museum). All other ‘unsuitable’ objects are taken to the ‘Depot of Moveables’, a huge storage depot from which other organisations can come and take their pick.

The very, very best pictures in Vienna are photographed and pasted into ten leather-bound albums, and then these albums are sent to Berlin to be looked over by Hitler.

And in a letter from (initials illegible), Reference: RK 19694 B, from Berlin on 13th October 1938, there is a note that ‘The Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German [sic] submits with letter of 10 August 1938, received here 26 September 1938, 7 inventories concerning property and objects of art confiscated and sequestered respectively in Austria, also 10 albums of photographs and the catalogue are available in the office, the inventories and the certificate are attached.’ And apart from the ‘Palace including grounds and forest of the Jew Rudolf Gutmann’ and ‘7 estates of the family property of the House Habsburg and Lothringen as well as 4 villas and 1 palace of Otto V. Habsburg’, there are the art objects sequestered in Vienna, including the property of: ‘Viktor V. Ephrussi, No. 57, 71, 81–87, 116–118 and 120–122…Confiscation has been made in favour of various offices: Austria, Reichsführer-SS, NSDAP, Armed Forces, Lebensborn and others.’

While Hitler looks over the albums and chooses what he wants, and while these matters are being discussed and the difference between confiscation and sequestration is mulled over, Viktor’s library is taken away: his history books, the Greek and Latin poetry, his Ovid and Virgil, the Tacitus, the runs of English, German and French novels, the huge morocco-leather edition of Dante with the illustrations by Doré that so scared the children, the dictionaries and atlases, Charles’s books sent from Paris, the incunabula. Books bought in Odessa and Vienna, sent from his dealers in London and Zurich, his lifetime of reading, are taken off the library’s shelves and sorted and packed into wooden crates, and then the crates are nailed shut and are carried down the stairs into the courtyard and heaved onto the back of a lorry. Someone (initials illegible) scrawls a signature across a document, and the lorry coughs and starts up and drives through the oak doors onto the Ring and disappears.

There is a special organisation that identifies particular libraries belonging to Jews. When I go through the membership booklet for the Wiener Club for 1935 – President Viktor v. Ephrussi – I see that eleven of his friends have their libraries taken.

Some of these crates are taken to the National Library. Here the books are picked over by librarians and scholars and then they are dispersed. As with the art historians, these are busy days for librarians and scholars. Some of these books are to stay in Vienna, some end up in Berlin. Others are destined for the ‘Führerbibliothek’ planned for Linz, still others for Hitler’s private library. And some are earmarked for Alfred Rosenberg’s Centre. Rosenberg, the early ideologue of Nazism, is a power in the Reich. ‘The essence of the contemporary world revolution lies in the awakening of the racial type,’ wrote Rosenberg grandiloquently in his books, ‘for Germany the Jewish Question is only solved when the Last Jew has left the Greater German space.’ These books, choked with rhetoric, sold in their hundreds of thousands with a popularity second only to Mein Kampf. One of the duties of his office became the confiscation of research material from ‘ownerless Jewish property’ in France, Belgium and Holland.

All across Vienna this is happening. Sometimes Jews are forced to sell things for next to nothing to raise money for the Reichsflucht tax in order to be permitted to leave. Sometimes things are just taken. Sometimes taken with violence, sometimes without, but always accompanied by a penumbra of official language, a piece of paper to sign, an admission of guilt, of involvement in activities that run counter to the legality of the Reich. There is lots of documentation: the list of the Gutmanns’ collection runs over page after page. The Gestapo take Marianne’s eleven netsuke of the boy playing and the dog and the monkey and the tortoise, the ones that she showed to Emmy a lifetime before.

How long does this separation of people and where they have lived take? The Dorotheum, Vienna’s auction house, runs one sale after another. Every day there are sales of sequestered property. Every day all these things find people willing to buy them cheap, collectors willing to add to their collections. The sale of the Altmann collection takes five days. It begins on Friday 17th June 1938 at three o’clock, with an English grandfather clock with Westminster chimes. It sells for only thirty reichsmarks. Each day is neatly enumerated to reach an impressive 250 entries.

So this is how it is to be done. It is clear that in the Ostmark, the eastern region of the Reich, objects are now to be handled with care. Every silver candlestick is to be weighed. Every fork and spoon is to be counted. Every vitrine is to be opened. The marks on the base of every porcelain figurine will be noted. A scholarly question mark is to be appended to a description of an Old Master drawing; the dimensions of a picture will be measured correctly. And while this is going on, their erstwhile owners are having their ribs broken and teeth knocked out.

Jews matter less than what they once possessed. It is a trial of how to look after objects properly, care for them and give them a proper German home. It is a trial of how to run a society without Jews. Vienna is once again ‘an experimental station for the end of the world’.

Three days after Viktor and Rudolf come out of prison, the Gestapo assign the family apartment to the Amt für Wildbach-und Lawinenverbauung, the Office for Flood and Avalanche Control. Bedrooms become offices. The grand floor of the Palais, Ignace’s apartment of gold and marble and painted ceilings, is handed over to the Amt Rosenberg, the Office of Alfred Rosenberg, the Plenipotentiary of the Führer for the Supervision of all Intellectual and Ideological Education and Indoctrination in the National Socialist Party.

I picture Rosenberg, slight and well dressed, leaning on the huge Boulle table in Ignace’s salon overlooking the Ring, his papers arrayed in front of him. His office is responsible for coordinating the intellectual direction of the Reich, and there is so much to do. Archaeologists, literary men, scholars all need his imprimatur. It is April and the linden trees are showing their first leaves. Out of the three windows in front of him, across the fresh green canopy, there are swastika flags flying from the university, and from the new flag-pole that has just been erected in front of the Votivkirche.

Rosenberg is installed in his new Viennese office with Ignace’s carefully calibrated hymn to Jewish pride in Zion – his lifetime bet on assimilation – above his head: the grandiose, gilded picture of Esther crowned as Queen of Israel. Above him to his left is the painting of the destruction of the enemies of Zion. But there are to be no Jews in Zionstrasse.

On 25th April there is a ceremonial reopening of the university. Students in lederhosen flank the steps up to the main entrance as Gauleiter Josef Bürckel arrives. A quota system has been introduced. Only 2 per cent of the university students and faculty will be allowed to be Jewish: from now on, Jewish students can only enter with a permit; 153 of the Medical School’s faculty of 197 have been dismissed.

On 26th April Hermann Göring commences his ‘transfer-the-wealth’ campaign. Every Jew with assets of more than 5,000 Reichsmarks is obligated to tell the authorities or be arrested.

The next morning the Gestapo arrive at the Ephrussi Bank. They spend three days looking at the bank’s records. Under the new regulations – regulations that are now thirty-six hours old – the business has to be offered first to any Aryan shareholders. The business also has to be offered at a discount. This means that Herr Steinhausser, Viktor’s colleague for twenty-eight years, is asked if he wants to buy out his Jewish colleagues.

It is only six weeks since the planned plebiscite.

Yes, he says, in a post-war interview on his role at the bank, of course he bought them out. ‘They needed cash for the “Reichsfluchtsteuer”, the Reich flight tax…they offered me their shares urgently, because this was the fastest way to get cash. The price, Ephrussi and Wiener’s price to get out, was “totally appropriate”…it was 508,000 Reichsmarks…plus the 40,000 Aryanisation tax of course.’

So, on 12th August 1938, Ephrussi and Co. is taken off the business register. In the records it says, singularly, ERASED. Three months later the name is changed to Bankhaus CA Steinhausser. Under its new name it is revalued, and under its new Gentile ownership is worth six times as much as under Jewish ownership.

There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.

It is on this visit that I go to the Jewish archive in Vienna, the one seized by Eichmann, to check up on the details of a marriage. I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp across his first name. It reads ‘Israel’. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: ‘Israel’ for the men, ‘Sara’ for the women.

I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry.