Читать книгу Fault Lines - David Pryce-Jones - Страница 10

ACCORDING TO THE Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, which keeps the record of these things, all Springers had acquired their surname because they had been acrobats at some royal court in Germany, a role apparently reserved for Jews. They came to Vienna either from Ansbach or from Furth in Bavaria. Like the Foulds in France, Max Springer (1807–1885) belonged to a generation of Jews increasingly free to meet everyone else on equal terms and so make what they could of their talents. Max Springer’s interests extended from finance to railways and coal mining. His wife Amalia Todesco belonged to one of the most successful Jewish families. Eduard Todesco, Amalia’s father, had built a palace facing the side of the Opera, and Max Springer built the smaller but still stately house round the corner at number 14 Kaerntnerring. The latter also founded an orphanage, the Springer Waisenhaus, for Jewish boys up to the age of fourteen. In 1872 Kaiser Franz Josef gave Max Springer and therefore his descendants the title of Freiherr, or Baron. Axel Springer, the German press tycoon, used to write to Mitzi claiming that they were relations, but she believed not.

Expropriated by the Nazis, long since bought and sold by non-Jews as investments in prime property, these great monuments in stone to past wealth have something empty and haunting about them, as though to reproach what happened to those who once lived in them. To brush up my German, I used to stay in an apartment in the Kaerntnerring that still belonged to Mitzi. Dr Hans Mailath-Pokorny, all his life her man of business for Central Europe, lived in it. He had the challenging features, the moustache, the corpulent figure, and overbearing manner of a Grosz caricature. He had known the German conservative politician Franz von Papen and liked to argue that everything would have come out all right if von Papen had chucked out Hitler instead of Hitler chucking von Papen out. Upstairs in tiny rooms under the roof was Tante Bébé, otherwise Elizabeth d’Italia, lonely and wizened but still quick with repartees. Interrogating her, a Gestapo officer had said, “You are very sarcastic,” to which she replied, “All Jews are sarcastic.” To survive the war she had gone into hiding in Abbasia near Fiume.

At my request, Lore Mayer, a Viennese historian, undertook a study of the Springers. In the wars and revolutions of Europe, currencies and values have changed or collapsed to the point of worthlessness, so that equivalents to more recent currencies and values are tentative. Figures have to speak for themselves. When Max Springer died, he was worth almost one and a half million florins. At more or less the same time, comparable all-round businessmen Ignaz Ephrussi and Moriz Koenigswarter, Lore Mayer notes, had 3.3 million and just under 21 million florins respectively.

Max’s son Gustav (1842–1920) enters the history books as one of the most prominent entrepreneurs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of his day. Extending his father’s interests, he obtained concessions to build railways in Russia, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire. After the Franco-Prussian War, he started the yeast factory at Maisons-Alfort on the outskirts of Paris. His product, Levure Springer, dominated the market. The Vienna stock exchange crashed in 1873, ruining a great many people. In the crisis Gustav picked up shares at rock bottom prices that recovered within a year. His investment advice, “Buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins,” is sometimes wrongly attributed to the Rothschilds. Roman Sandgruber is a professor of economic history at Linz University. His book, Traumzeit für Millionäre, analyses the tax returns of the 929 individuals who in 1910 declared an annual income over 100,000 crowns. With an income of 4.1 million crowns, Gustav is the country’s fourth highest taxpayer. He died worth 346 million crowns. Lore Mayer estimates his fortune in Austria to have been in the broad range of 170 to 350 million in the Euros of today. To this must be added what he owned in France, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, which she puts in an equally broad range of a further 200 to 380 million Euros.

Gustav’s extravagance was legendary. Mitzi would remember the luxury of their private train, and his habit of sending his shirts to be laundered in Paris.

Every summer he stayed at his favourite house, Kapuvár, near Győr in western Hungary. Built in the early eighteenth century, this house is on a slight rise dominating the small town. Decorated with a yellow wash, it is in the classical Habsburg style, with a regular façade at the front and an even more regular façade at the rear. The interior was a mass of heavy mahogany furniture and tiled stoves, with stags’ antlers as trophies on the walls even of bedrooms. In the same county was Pokvár, taken for its shoot. Puszta Bucsa near Debrecen, Rakoncás, Jenő Major, Zodony, Alag, Cson-grád, Szabolcs, Nándor, were among Gustav’s Hungarian possessions. “Grund fliegt nimmer weg,” land never flies away, had been Gustav’s justification for these investments. It was unimaginable that financial and political security would soon dissipate forever. The names of his forests in Slovakia convey a similar elegiac poetry – Vrbové, Šípkové, Čachtice, Lubina, Bohuslavice, and Bošáca. A surviving report to Mitzi from Rimler Pal, her head forester, lists those that he considered could be sold to raise funds for her in 1936 as war was approaching.

A knowing writer, evidently an insider, who published a sketch of Gustav in a book La Société de Vienne, 1885, went under the pseudonym of Comte Vasili, suggesting a Tsarist aristocrat, which almost certainly he was not. Baron Gustav, he writes, was “small and stout, very affable and not lacking wit, with the attractions of a playboy.” His head was large and conspicuously bald. Any servant was tipped a crown if he said that the Herr Baron had just come from the barber and was right, but fined a crown if he was wrong. Aged twenty-nine in 1871, he married Hélène Koenigswarter, thus putting himself on a footing with the most socially acceptable Jews. Comte Vasili praises her taste and skill as a hostess.

Fifteen years later, on 23 May 1886, Hélène died giving birth to Mitzi, the only child of the marriage. In the view of some of her descendants, for instance my cousin Elly, the fact that Mitzi never knew her mother is a complete psychological explanation of her desperate lifelong appeal for love. Even as a child, she saw herself giving but not receiving, and the one person who might have paid off this emotional debit unhesitatingly was not there.

On the grounds of protecting Mitzi’s health, her father bought an estate of fifty acres some way from the city centre, and there he built Meidling, the house known nowadays as the Springerschloss though it still has the old address of Tivoligasse 71. The property marched with the park of the great Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn. Mitzi used to tell stories about talking over the fence to the Empress Elisabeth or Frau Schratt, the Emperor Franz Josef’s mistress. When she had been out pushing the infant Max in his pram, Nanny Stainer liked to recollect, she had often seen the Emperor himself walking quite close and raising his hat to them. Gustav had several illegitimate children, and Mitzi was in touch with one called Helen Lavalle, taking pleasure in acknowledging a half-sister who was about her own age and had settled in Canada.

Meidling is a nineteenth-century pile with irregular and sometimes fantastic features, the roofs sloping steeply, half-timbering, ornamental towers silhouetted against the sky, the whole fascinatingly and even endearingly ugly. Baron Gustav had commissioned the architects of the Burgtheater, and the interior is like a stage-set around a horseshoe staircase rising from the ground floor up to the roof. Entering, you wait for the lights to go up. A child growing up in such a setting was bound to expect the rest of the world to fall in with her. Mitzi never went to school. She had a nurse known as Moumel with whom she stayed in touch all her life. Miss Maclellan, the unsmiling Scottish governess, seems to have been incapable of anything like maternal feelings but at least she brought Mitzi up to speak and write English naturally. Amalie Kostiall, her lady’s maid, lived at Meidling until after the Second War when she was almost 100 years old. The absence of any formal education was greatly to disadvantage Mitzi in later life, leaving her unable to reason, to resolve contradictions, to take a step back and see herself objectively. She would describe how her father made her sit on a stool at his side in the office he had on the ground floor in Meidling, obliging her to learn about business and nothing else. At the end of the day the coachman drove him to the Hotel Imperial on the Ring, where he preferred to live in the best suite, leaving his great house to Mitzi and the women attending to her.

Gustav’s fortune was at the service of his passion for horseracing. Gustav Jantsch, a pre-1918 Austrian cavalry officer, was the author of Vollblutzucht und Turf, and this very comprehensive study of the subject devotes a chapter to Gustav’s role in it. The Springer racing colours were black with a red cap. Bucsany in Hungary was the first stud he bought. In the same county in Hungary he then acquired Felsojatto where he had seventy-one mares, which Jantsch says was certainly the biggest stud in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as Germany, and most likely France too. In the First War he bought Lesvár but reduced the number of mares to seventeen. At yearling auctions he was a steady buyer, or as Jantsch puts it, “nothing was too expensive for a man who could pay whatever he liked.” At one point, he had sixty-one horses under training, fifty-five of them winners. Horses of his were several times winners of the German Derby and a number of races in England. When Buccaneer won the Austrian Derby for him in 1913, he was presented with a silver-gilt cup with an ornamental frieze and an inscription, all of which today conveys the death-knell of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time, the press reported incredulously that he made a present of the prize winnings to the English jockey. After his death in 1920 one obituary called him “Ein nobler Sportsmann,” not the usual description of Jewish magnates.

Other racehorse owners had the aristocratic names of Kinsky, Esterhazy, Zichy, and Harrach. Could Gustav really have fitted into such company, or did he stand out and attract envy and resentment? He regularly took Mitzi to his box at the Freudenau racecourse where one day she heard an officer in an adjoining box remark to another, “What a pity the little Springer girl looks so Jewish.” Comte Vasili, for one, observes, “Anti-Semitism is making progress day by day, in all classes of this society.” Dr Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, is remembered for declaring that he decided who was a Jew, and an aphorism of Gustav’s seems a practical response to this kind of discrimination, “Jude muss man sein, aber nicht zum Abattoir” – one must be Jewish though not going into the slaughter house for it. Max Springer had set up and paid for the Jewish orphanage, the Springerische Waisenhaus in the Goldschlagstrasse in the 14th district. Gustav took on the responsibility. For Jewish high holidays he and Mitzi used to attend the synagogue there. Less fortunate Jews made demands on her father and on her, as though Judaism really was a common identity. At a pinch, she might quote with approval the lament of a friend, the Comtesse Fitz James, née Gutmann, “Mes nerfs juifs me font mal,” My Jewish nerves are troubling me. Ibok, a word with no known derivation, was the family code for Jew, used in contexts when that direct and giveaway monosyllable might be better concealed.

A formal photograph was taken in the park of Meidling on Mitzi’s eighteenth birthday. She, her nurse Moumel, and her Scottish governess are the only women among a retinue of well over a hundred men: lawyers and accountants in top hats, clerks in bowler hats, a handful of orphans dressed as page-boys – and in this self-contained circle all have Jewish names with the exception of some foresters and keepers from Czechoslovakia and Hungary in folk costumes.

Singular, set apart by her expectations and the Jewish milieu of her upbringing, Mitzi seems to have protected herself by preserving everything that had a personal bearing from childhood to her death. What an archive she amassed of almost fifty volumes of large thick diaries, correspondence in five languages with many of the German letters respectfully addressed to “Euer Hochwohlgeboren Gnädigste Frau Baronin,” little drawings, scraps, billets doux, telegrams, business dossiers, bank accounts, lawyers’ opinions on the regular forays of the dozen or so governments trying to get their hands on Mitzi’s money through taxes or political chicanery, postcards from the resorts of Ischl and Baden-Baden and Carlsbad, letters of condolence, official certificates, cadastral surveys, maps, menus. I pick at random a letter from London solicitors itemizing large holdings in British and American shares, mostly in mining and railroads. This was a fortune in itself but only the part held at Hambros Bank in London of what Mitzi was inheriting from her late father. She must have rated every last detail about herself and her life so important that the multifarious evidence had to be preserved, duly but not necessarily correctly sorted and filed away in envelopes and packets tidily tied up with string. Innumerable photographs of herself are a sort of chronicle from her pre-1914 appearance in long tight-waisted dresses and hats as elaborate as a still life of flowers, until she poses in matronly suits with one or all of her children around her, all the way down to Cecil Beaton portraits conveying the impression of wisdom and age. Still more innumerable photographs, as stiff as boards and dully brown in the technology of the period, are portraits of elderly men usually in a white tie with decorations or else in a morning coat and top hat. A few are wearing the Kaiser und König uniform and distinctive forage cap of the Emperor’s soldiers, the whole appearance complete with whiskers and monocle. Occasionally she wrote names on the back of these photographs, otherwise the sitters are unidentifiable. The women are posed self-consciously in ballroom dresses, rows of pearls hanging almost to the stomach, aigrettes, parasols, fancy dress costumes, feather boas, and furs. Liliane used to joke that many of the women around her were members of an “Internationale Judeo-lesbienne,” and went so far as to speculate whether her mother and two women who were regular guests at Meidling, Marianne Glasyer and “My beloved friend Giesl von Gieslingen,” might have belonged to it too.

Nowhere that I can find in this archive is any mention of eligible Austrian Jews she might have married. On the face of it, the engagement between a pampered heiress from Vienna and a worldly fortune-hunter from Paris looks like a fine example of the traditional matchmaking practised among Jews. But Mitzi writes that at seventeen she fell in love with Eugène at first sight. She accuses her father of obliging her to break off the engagement, and a sentence only two short years later covers what must have been a lot of ground, “the fight I put up and the sufferings and sorrows I endured finally ended in Eugène and myself getting married … in 1905.” In the archive is plenty of evidence that the demands each made of the other kept their relationship at a high emotional pitch. One of several similar notes from Eugène that she kept with a framed photograph of him by her bedside says, “I would give every minute of my existence, every drop of my blood to see you perfectly happy.” In her notes she signs herself “Doggie,” and after twenty years and more of marriage could still write, “a big hug from the one who adores you and is more in love with you than ever, even if you, old fool! say I am less fond of you.” Cocky was her nickname for him.

One thick package has the label, “Letters from the perpetual quarrelling (dramas!) between my father Gustav, Eugène and me.” All three of them were accustomed to having their own way and did not know how to let well alone. A two-page letter from Mitzi without a heading but undoubtedly addressed to her father opens with the accusation, typically left in the air, that the harm done to her has entered her heart. Two issues could not be resolved: whether Mitzi and Eugène would settle in Vienna rather than Paris and what nationality their children would have and therefore whether baby Max grew up to be an Austrian or a French soldier. Concessions were made to keep Gustav happy: Eugène and Mitzi would perpetuate the Springer descent by hyphenating their surnames, and Eugène would accept a title so that his son Max could eventually be Monsieur le Baron.

Here is one round in the contest, as described by Eugène to his father Léon Fould in a letter of 15 March 1909:

Big news – at lunch, the day before yesterday, my father-in-law says to me (only Mitzi and Hélène were there) that he is going to see Lueger the mayor, in order to settle the question of the little boy’s nationality. I answered, “I must ask you to do nothing because as you know you have given me mortal offense and I have taken the decision never to hear speak again of this matter which has always been exceedingly painful to me and to my father.” He, “But we promised.” Me, “Yes, but if the person to whom something has been promised then refuses his part of it, I consider that fact makes it quits, as in my case – and I am quite willing, if I have to, to go as far as the Emperor to explain the situation.”

Whether before or after this stormy lunch, an undated letter of Eugène’s reveals that Gustav could also play the card of going to the top:

We were at the palace this morning for an audience with the Emperor…. The Emperor put himself out to be amiable, spoke to me in French and asked if I liked Vienna. Then he spoke in German and said he had had “ein schweres Jahr.” [A bad year] He really couldn’t have been friendlier and looked far less broken down than I would have thought.

Gustav’s letters were evidently dictated to a secretary and copied out later in exquisite schrift, in the old German style. In his own spiky hand he sometimes gave as good as he got, as in this brutally understated brush-off, quoted in full. “If I am grateful for your letter I cannot all the same forget the two lessons you have seen fit to give me, and you cannot hold it against me if I avoid a third. My compliments to you.”

Compromising further, Eugène agreed to divide his time by spending eight months in Paris, four in Vienna. In the first years of their marriage, however, he and Mitzi lived in Berlin, where ostensibly he was a banker. At best desultory about his career, his real interest was acquiring more and more works of art for his collection, and for this he depended on Mitzi’s money. In Paris they rented the second floor of 54 Avenue d’Iéna, a house in a monumental style appropriate to the surroundings and the nearby Arc de Triomphe. Its builder was Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe, and his descendants, the Gunzbourgs, lived below on the first floor. Originally from Saint Petersburg, they had a fortune from sugar. The first Jews to be ennobled as Barons by the Czar, they enjoyed much the same exclusive social standing as the Fould-Springers. Financial advisors said that Mitzi’s income was large enough for Eugène to spend annually 100,000 francs on works of art. In the end a full-time collector, he spent five or six times that amount every year.

On 2 May 1914 Poppy was born in Meidling, taking her pecking-order place after Max and Bubbles as Mitzi and Eugène’s third child. For no known reason she was nicknamed Pimoulouche by her parents, and that was how she signed her letters to them. Eugène also called her Dimples, and notes in his hand are full of the affectionate phrases of a loving father. “A difficult child,” in the words of Mitzi’s diary, Poppy used to slip into her father’s bed in need of reassurance. She could sit on her own bed and cry uncontrollably. Her younger sister Liliane left a pen-portrait of her as she was growing up:

Bizarre and very sensitive character, philosophical by nature evidently but unhappily she sometimes forgets it, she is small, very small but less small than she thinks, hair lies flat, nose and mouth and eyes are round, very pretty hands, lazy and contrary to the marmot she wakes up in winter at the sight of snow, and on reading bad sentimental verses and interminable dissertations on vague subjects, looking in the mirror she gives herself up to martyrdom, dark matters – musical, a bit of a poet and quite a good sort, that’s my sister Thérèse.

The teenage Poppy went to school in Paris at the Cours Hattemer. She used to complain afterwards that she had received no education in what was then an exclusive day-school. Julien Weil, the Grand Rabbi of France, gave religious instruction to the three sisters. To the end of her life Bubbles could recall snatches of Hebrew prayers. Unusually for girls at that period, Poppy and her younger sister Liliane did their bat mitzvah, the ceremony whereby they became full members of the Jewish faith. This took place in the synagogue on the Rue Victoire in Paris. With the two of them in the ceremony were Aline de Gunzbourg from downstairs in the Avenue d’Iéna and Lulu Esmond, friends in a little clique seeing each other virtually every day. For this occasion, the four all wore white dresses evidently in imitation of Catholics at a first communion.

After the First World War, Eugène began the search for a country house. One of his friends, the Marquis Boni de Castellane, a dandy surviving from the Belle Époque, told him that Royaumont was for sale. All her life Mitzi resented that Castellane had insisted on being paid a commission for introducing buyer and seller. Eugène merely emended the motto of the Order of the Garter to Boni soit qui mal y pense. Purchased and then restored in minute detail according to the original drawings, the château was finally a tribute to the fastidiousness and taste on which Eugène’s social standing rested. A thin line divides snobbery from the wish to be correct. He criticized one of the most prominent soldiers in the country for signing himself Ph. Pétain on the grounds that the surname is sufficient for a marshal of France.

Poppy was eighteen when she and Alan were married there on 28 December 1934. Photographers recorded the event, and an enormous number of commemorative albums seem to have been made for the guests. For a formal portrait Poppy is standing in the drawing room. Given the immense train of her dress swirling over the floor and her resplendent tiara of flowers, the pose would be regal, except that Poppy looks far too young and unprepared for the adventure on which she was embarking. Three and a half inches above five foot (according to her passport), perhaps she hasn’t even finished growing. She had known Alan only since the beginning of that year. And in another photograph taken on the same spot, he is standing next to her. His morning coat has been marvellously tailored, it has no creases, and his appearance is further formalised by stickups, a cravat that might have suited Beau Brummell, and the carnation in his buttonhole. He had already published stories in The Sketch and Harper’s, as well as his two travel books, quite enough to attract the attention of everyone trying to spot a new talent. Unexpectedly expressionless, he seems to want to be taken for a Central European aristocrat whom it would be quite wrong to suspect of any unorthodox or bohemian tendencies.

A carpet had been laid down the steps of the terrace. Five years earlier, Eugène had died and Max was to give Poppy away. Aline de Gunzbourg, Lulu Esmond, Liliane, two cousins, were bridesmaids. Bubbles’s five-year-old son Philip was the page. These familiars, so to speak, are distinct from the English contingent in language, religion and culture. Next to the two family nannies stand self-conscious outsiders: Frank Wooster, now Mitzi’s husband; Alan’s parents, Vere and Harry Pryce-Jones (the latter spoken about as Mr Colonel); and his younger brother Adrian. Also the best man, Patrick Balfour, the one person present who knew everything there was to know about Alan and was himself homosexual. At the time he was sharing a house in London with John Betjeman, and earning his living as a gossip columnist for the Evening Standard. In the following year he covered the war in Abyssinia, where Evelyn Waugh, also reporting and gathering material for Scoop, found him “an old chum [who] makes all the difference in the world.” I knew him only much later, when he was Lord Kinross, author of numerous books including a biography of Ataturk. By then, he was slightly seedy, with the ruddy face of a Mister Punch exhausted by cynicism and the disconcerting habit of pushing his false teeth almost out of his mouth with his tongue. Giving parties, he made no effort to hide the collection of canes in his room. The gossip writer in him loved to recall which of his friends had gone to bed with one another and to tell me tales of Alan.

The service was held in the Protestant church of St Peter’s in Chantilly, a few short miles from Royaumont. What did Poppy have to say about that? What could the elderly Jewish friends and relations recorded in the photographs have made of Alan? One of them, Madame Jean Stern, used to play on Alan’s surname with apparent innocence: “Percival Johnson, l’ai-je bien dit?” – have I said that right? – just to quote it was enough to make Max laugh. At any rate, back at the château they all assembled at last on the steps of the terrace. Visible in some of the photographs is Mitzi’s Rolls-Royce, reserved for her. A groom led up a pony harnessed to an open carriage with white flowers woven around its body and the spokes of its wheels. In the postillion’s seat, a coachman held the reins. Driven away in this carriage, Alan and Poppy were a couple as singular as any to be found.