Assimilated Jewish families made a decisive contribution to the culture of Vienna in its golden age, the age of Theodor Herzl, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stefan Zweig. But who exactly were those families and what explains the extent of their contribution? Scholarship in this field, from Robert Wistrich’s The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (2006) to Marsha Rozenblit’s Reconstructing National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (2001), has identified essential factors in the creative synergies between Viennese Jews and the traditional Austro-Catholic elite, including immigration, secularization, entrepreneurial investment, technical innovation, educational aspiration and artistic patronage. A further key is provided by the tailoring accounts of Wilhelm Jungmann & Neffe.
Visitors to Vienna will be familiar with the elegant premises, located near the Opera. The firm traces its origins back to 1866, when the founder, son of a Jewish businessman from Hungary, set up a drapery business. Renamed when Jungmann went into partnership with his nephew in 1873, the flourishing business became an official supplier to the Habsburg court. After further changes of ownership, the firm was purchased in 1943 by the great-grandfather of the present head, Georg Gaugusch.
Looking through the firm’s order books from the 1880s, Gaugusch was not surprised to encounter the names of aristocratic families as well as members of the dynasty. Probing a little deeper, he discovered that leading Jewish citizens featured equally prominently in the tailoring accounts. This prompted him, while still a student at Vienna’s Technical University, to begin research into the social background of those customers from a vanished era, immersing himself in a wealth of archival sources. “Who were they?” Gaugusch asked himself when contemplating some of the grandiose monuments in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery. Under the title Wer einmal war (Who once was), he has provided an answer.
The result is a monumental publication detailing the most prosperous Jewish families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the introduction Gaugusch sets out his criteria for selection, starting with membership of the Jewish religious community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde). Families ennobled by the Emperor for public service are joined on his list by those with which they intermarried, while other families are included on grounds of intellectual distinction, or because they were perceived as part of the Jewish “milieu”, even if they converted to Catholicism. This first volume only covers surnames from A to K, arranged in alphabetical order, but the list of distinguished families already fills 1,650 pages. A full index is to be included in the forthcoming second volume. Meanwhile, the index can be consulted online under www.genteam.at and www.jewishfamilies.at.
It was those businessmen, investors, scientists and technicians who enabled Austria-Hungary to become one of the world’s most productive nations
It was those innnovative businessmen, farsighted investors, gifted scientists and inventive technicians who enabled Austria-Hungary to become one of the world’s most economically prosperous and culturally productive nations. Jewish entrepreneurs developed the railways, financed the coalmines, set up Pilsner beer production, pioneered sugar refining, consolidated the iron and steel industries, controlled the leading banks and newspapers, and were prominent in the leather goods, furniture, clothing and food-processing trades. Thanks to the painstaking research incorporated in this book, we can now map those achievements against the names, addresses and lifespans of specific individuals, whose traces might otherwise have disappeared.
The entry for Hermann Engländer, a silk merchant from Hungary, is particularly instructive through its documentation of the difficulties Jewish migrants faced in applying for permission to set up business in Vienna. After twice being rejected in the early 1840s, Engländer was finally able to make his move during the more liberal 1850s. In Vienna the family struggled for commercial success, but it enriched the city culture in other ways through Hermann’s grandson Richard Engländer, who became a celebrated bohemian author after changing his name to Peter Altenberg. In the 1890s Altenberg, who gave his postal address as the Café Central, helped to launch the literary revival known as Young Vienna.
This invaluable reference work will be mined by historians for generations to come, although at times the genealogical detail is so dense that the reader may feel swamped by the wealth of information. However, each entry is introduced by a succinct account of the significance of the family concerned, highlighting their commercial or cultural achievements. We are made aware that they not only handed their accumulated business skills and financial resources down the generations, but also made lavish donations to educational and charitable causes. Jewish charities feature prominently on the list, but the process of acculturation means that we also find generous support for the construction of new hospitals, art galleries and concert halls, in addition to the synagogues built in almost every quarter of the city.
For further information about Jewish patronage, the reader may turn to the documentation of a more tragic phase in the history of the Viennese Jews, Sophie Lillie’s Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens (What once was: Handbook of the expropriated art collections of Vienna). The parallel between the two titles suggests that we should consider them as companion volumes. Lillie’s book, published by Czernin in 2003, is also alphabetically arranged, listing the Jewish families whose artworks were seized by the Nazis after the annexation of Austrian in 1938. Many of them coincide with names that featured in the Jungmann tailoring accounts.
The most striking aspect of Lillie’s list of confiscated artworks is their extraordinary range, from medieval religious paintings to the early twentieth-century avant-garde of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Typically, the husband and wife in one of those wealthy families would concentrate their focus on different fields. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and his wife Adele owed their affluence to the sugar-beet factories set up in the years following 1867 by Ferdinand’s father, David Bloch. By 1910 their production methods were so advanced that one of their factories had its own electricity works, providing power for the whole region. In his succinct account of the family’s banking interests and landed property, Gaugusch also alludes to their art collections, referring us in a footnote to Lillie.
Turning to Lillie’s Was einmal war, we learn that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s passion was for porcelain, while Adele’s more modern tastes led her around 1905 to join the circle of Gustav Klimt and sit for several of his portraits. No fewer than five Klimt paintings were on display in their mansion overlooking the Academy of Arts, together with works by Waldmüller and Kokoschka. In 1939, the collection was impounded by the Nazified Austrian authorities, who alleged that Bloch-Bauer was guilty of financial irregularities (his wife Adele had died a dozen years earlier). Prize items in the collection, including paintings by Klimt, were then transferred to the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace. Sixty years later, as Lillie notes at the end of her account, the heirs of the Bloch-Bauers were still litigating with the Republic of Austria for the return of their family property. (For the concluding phase of this story we may turn to The Lady in Gold: The extraordinary tale of Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” by Anne-Marie O’Connor (2012). After the Austrian government was pressurized into enacting new legislation about expropriated artworks, the painting was finally returned to Adele’s niece Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann, now a ninety-year-old living in the United States.) There are scores of other Jewish families whose stories deserve to be explored in comparable detail. Gaugusch only devotes six pages to the Ephrussi, whose palatial home still stands on the Ringstrasse near the Schottentor. But Edmund de Waal has reconstructed, in The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), the rich international saga lurking within the interstices of the biographical record. The pattern that characteristically emerges from these complicated genealogies is one of unprecedented achievement culminating in unforeseen disaster. In every case Gaugusch, assisted by his wife and other dedicated supporters, has done his best to list the place of death of each person identified. There are numerous gaps to be filled, but alongside the addresses of leading Viennese nursing homes we may find Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, or – in the case of those fortunate enough to escape abroad – London, New York or Buenos Aires.
In addition to the Jewish family networks highlighted by Gaugusch, we need to take account of the structural transformation of the public sphere which resulted from the institutions they created: banks and department stores, newspapers and journals, clinics and consulting rooms, theatre ensembles and drama schools, literary salons and academic seminars, co-educational schools and expressive dance studios, art galleries and cinemas, restaurants and coffee houses, trade unions and workers, educational institutes.
The marginal status of the Jews of Vienna was exceptional
This resulted in a paradox best defined as “empowered marginality”. The marginal status of ethnic minorities has frequently been discussed by social scientists, but the situation of the Jews of Vienna was exceptional. Despite high levels of educational and professional achievement, financial clout and ennobled status, this sub-group remained outsiders in a predominantly Catholic society. This placed leading Jewish figures in a position where they could ask questions with a critical edge or develop initiatives from an original angle, while building on resources that gave their innovative projects a firm institutional basis.
Theodor Herzl provides the most compelling example. As literary editor of the leading daily newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, he was able to bring his diplomatic contacts into play as he transformed Zionism from a utopian vision into a dynamic political movement. A similar pattern of empowered marginality emerged when Mahler became Director of the Vienna Opera House, Freud created the Psychoanalytical Society, Karl Kraus launched his magazine Die Fackel, Schoenberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances, Bertha Zuckerkandl created her influential salon, Genia Schwarzwald her pioneering grammar school for girls and Dora Kallmus her celebrated photographic studio.
Although initiated by members of Jewish families, such institutions should not be pictured in isolation, as they were open to all the talents – particularly through informal coffee house circles. The contrast with London is instructive, for there the coffee houses had been displaced by gentlemen’s clubs, to which only a self-perpetuating elite was admitted. During the heyday of British imperialism the links between writers and politicians were no longer forged in the coffeehouse, but behind closed doors. Jewish applicants for membership tended to be viewed askance, and there was no place for sensitive young men who did not share the values of imperialism, let alone for women who were claiming the right to participate in public life. The coffee houses of Vienna, by contrast, were open to all-comers.
Felix Wärndorfer slapped 500 kronen down on the table – and the Wiener Werkstätte was born
It was around those coffeehouse tables that the two most successful artistic enterprises of turn-of-the-century Vienna were created. Early in 1903, the architect Josef Hoffmann was sitting with the designer Koloman Moser in the Café Hermannshof opposite the Opera, discussing the creation of applied art workshops similar to those of the English Arts and Crafts movement. There they were joined by Felix Wärndorfer, a Jewish businessman with a passion for the work of William Morris. When he heard about their project he reportedly slapped 500 kronen down on the table – and the Wiener Werkstätte was born. It proved so successful that in its heyday it had retail outlets in Berlin and New York, as well as Vienna.
The founding of the Vienna Secession is even better documented, as the designer Alfred Roller kept minutes of secret meetings held in the Café Dobner under the leadership of Gustav Klimt, before the launching of this breakaway artistic group. In addition to the journal Ver Sacrum, they envisaged the construction of a new exhibition building near the Ringstrasse. “It all depends on W –”, Roller noted after one of the crucial discussions. “W –” was the multimillionaire Karl Wittgenstein, and it was mainly due to his munificence that they succeeded in constructing the magnificent Secession building, designed by Josef Olbrich, that stands at the corner of the Friedrichstrasse to this day.
For fuller details of the Wärndorfer and Wittgenstein family networks we shall have to await the publication of Gaugusch’s second volume, covering L to Z. However, for the evolution of Viennese Modernism the importance of Jewish participation and patronage is already clear. Looking back in his memoirs on the Vienna of his youth, Kokoschka recalled: “Most of my sitters were Jews. They felt less secure than the rest of the Viennese Establishment, and were consequently more open to the new and more sensitive to the tensions and pressures that accompanied the decay of the old order in Austria”.
The evidence, reinforced by the publications of Gaugusch and Lillie, suggests that it was above all members of the cultivated Jewish bourgeoisie who enhanced the grandeur of the Ringstrasse, purchased the products of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Secession, attended Mahler’s and Schoenberg’s concerts, shopped in the most fashionable stores and had their dreams analysed by the best man in town.
Edward Timms, Research Professor at the University of Sussex, is the author of a two-volume study of Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, first published in 1986. His most recent book is a volume of memoirs, Taking up the Torch: English institutions, German dialectics and multicultural commitments, 2011.
