Читать книгу Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Hilde Spiel - Страница 11

FRANZISKA’S EARLY YEARS IN VIENNA ARE VEILED IN MIST. HER IMage is wavering and pale, as if reflected in a troubled pool.

The child playing in the garden near the Schlesisches Tor, the bride under the canopy, tall and slim at the side of her plumper groom, the traveler in the carriage, vivacious by comparison with his more relaxed cheerfulness — these can all be imagined, can be worked out from her descent and her circumstances. How the young woman adapted herself to a new world, to a strange family, how she bore her totally changed existence, can only be surmised. After the closing behind her of that gate on the Graben, while she enters the multifarious rooms and tortuous corridors of the Contrini house, she disappears from our sight for a considerable time.

There must have been no lack of disputes and quarrels, sorrow and anger. Her heart filled with homesickness, she looked out from the alcoves on the first floor onto somber cobblestones, fountains, the statue of a saint and the pillar of the Trinity. To bend to the will of the imperious Adam Arnsteiner, to submit to the gentle but firm direction of the pious Sibilla, may have been harder for her than to accommodate herself to their son by holding him under her spell. Throughout his life this good-natured man was delighted and alarmed in equal measure by her quick wit, her cleverness and her scintillating charm. Frequently he took refuge in silence and occasionally in flight from her predominance. But as long as his father was alive, he stood poised between the two powers which each sought by love and capricious behavior to win him to their sides.

Only one report bears witness to the vexations of the time that Fanny spent under the same roof as her parents-in-law. Shortly before the feast of Passover, as related by a Hebrew chronicler, a learned scholar travelled to Vienna with his pupil, on his way to his native city of Frankfurt. On his journey he visited Adam Arnsteiner, with the intention of celebrating the feast in the latter’s house. He sent his pupil to market to buy the things that were necessary for the feast. On his return, the pupil, mistaking the door, entered a room in which sat Herr Arnsteiner’s daughter-in-law, combing her hair.

The pupil reprimanded her: was it right for wedded daughters of Israel to behave thus? Then she said to her father-in-law that if both guests did not leave immediately, she would without further ado return to her father’s house in Berlin. And Herr Arnsteiner went into the scholar’s chamber and thanked the pupil for reprimanding his daughter-in-law. Nevertheless he entreated the wise man to find another lodging, so that his daughter-in-law should not desecrate the feast [by making a journey]. And now, open your eyes and see whether there are yet descendants of the Arnsteiners! Thus it happens when women uncover their heads.

She was not only self-willed, this young daughter-in-law from Berlin, in her refusal to tolerate these dictatorial and perhaps not particularly attractive guests in her home over the feast. She also resisted the precept of her religion which instructed women to cut their hair on marriage and to cover it with a wig. Hence the reproaches of the Talmudic student, who must have been astonished by such sacrilege; hence too the mockery of the chronicler at the rebellious daughters of Israel whose punishment was that they should bear no sons! But between the moment when Franziska threatened to depart, and the one when Adam Arnsteiner thanked the two scholars and at the same time asked them to leave his house, what anger and wrangling, what entreaties and adjurations filled the air can only be guessed. Nathan — who was no more pious than his young wife, but an inconspicuous freethinker, who in later years was to be numbered by the Vienna police among the unorthodox members of his community — must have had great difficulty in pacifying his deeply religious father and persuading him to act as he did, for fear that Franziska should really return to Berlin.

But with this momentary image, this scene in a room accidentally entered by the pupil — sitting in front of the mirror and combing her dark hair in defiance of the religious law, her large, finely prominent eyes full of tears of resentment — Franziska disappears once more into the obscurity that surrounds those years.

She emerges again in a different guise, at an indeterminate time and in an unexpected place.

Among the high officials of the court and state chancery in Vienna there was a certain Johann Georg Obermayer, who took it into his head one day to marry a very young girl. Caton von Preissing had married for the first time at fourteen years of age and six months later was already a widow. Her stepfather Herr von Rath, master of ceremonies to the Princess Dietrichstein, introduced her to his friend Obermayer, and without demur she obeyed the much older man. The wedding took place in 1776. The married couple entered upon a companionable existence in fashionable society. As was still frequently the custom among the nobility and upper bourgeoisie, they spoke to each other only in Spanish, addressed each other as Señor and Señora, and referred to each other as Doña Caterina and Don Jorge. The court secretary and later imperial councilor enjoyed having people around him, and invited gentlemen of his acquaintance, mostly diplomats and scholars, to his house after the theater. Caton, as she was known to her friends, had guests nearly every evening. She herself received more intimate friends while still in bed or getting dressed. She lunched at about three. Then her day began in earnest.

Emilie, a daughter of the oddly matched but evidently happy couple, was to depict this scene of the fashions of Maria Theresa’s age for posterity. As an old woman, the wife of Lieutenant-General von Weckbecker, she described the life of her parents, which was in many ways an example of the usages of the time. The ladies, it seems, spent all their time at their elaborate toilet, in flirtations and gossip, visits to the theater and informal or formal social gatherings. Caton, to be sure, as her daughter relates:

went only to the grandest parties; the smaller ones, at which the women arrived as early as four or five and stayed till eight or nine, were not to her taste. Fanny Arnstein did the same. The two women often met in society and soon became intimate friends, but in the winter they could not meet on three evenings of the week, because Fanny Arnstein too received guests after the theater. She was rich, and every evening there was a supper at her house, but not at my parents’; we had only water with crushed sugar and — oh miracle — tea!

When and where the two newly-wed women, who had entered the married state in the same year, first met, is unknown. At some time in those last years of the Empress’s reign, the wife of the tolerated Jew Arnsteiner must have found entry to a house which had not previously granted admission to her kind. At some time she slipped nimbly over a threshold that had earlier been barred to her, began to associate with women of her own age, from whom she was distinguished by no noticeable blemish, and turned, in this lively, frivolous, easy-going circle, from a Prussian Franziska to a Viennese Fanny. She forgot the prejudice directed against her and by her to the world around her, she made friends with one or other of the light-hearted young ladies, she dared one day to invite this one or that one to her house and realized to her delighted astonishment that they did not deny her the honor of a visit; finally she even invited their husbands, whom she had met with them at the theater, to supper after the performance, began to hold such receptions on a regular basis, and so gradually, without being fully aware of what she was doing, bridged over the abyss of millennia of separation.

This sort of thing was possible in Vienna, as it was not in the Prussian capital, without some special purpose and without causing a great sensation. Here conventions were overturned without ceremony, here social differences were effaced, national and religious frontiers were dissolved, without their disappearance being noted on the map of public life. This was, to be sure, no pre-planned retractation; it was rather the tacit, though at the same time non-committal, surrender of long-preserved inaccessibility, it was a dropping of barriers which could be re-erected at any time. While in Berlin men like Lessing, like Dohm, like Nicolai had arisen to battle for the civic advancement of the Jews and attempted to carry it through with vigor, in the imperial capital the reservations held until now were being voluntarily abandoned. Of similar disposition, with gentler and more tractable natures, the Viennese were at the same time not disposed to raise such concessions to the status of a principle. As a favor, not as of right, their Jewish fellow-citizens were allowed entry to their circles. How far this should go was left to individual discretion.

It was not least in the name of music that members of all ranks and classes were able to unite in Vienna. When, in January of 1780, the year in which the Empress died, the Cologne lawyer Johann Baptist Fuchs arrived in the city, he found the most disparate people assembled in harmony at the private concerts of the nobility. At a soirée at the house of Frau von Hochstedten, a minister’s wife, “a Frau von Arenstein played the piano charmingly, and Mlle Weberin enchanted those present with her singing.” Thus, in that town mansion which gave Fanny — on whom, out of courtesy, the honorific von was prematurely bestowed — the opportunity to shine in public with the utmost gracefulness at the side of Mozart’s former beloved and future sister-in-law Aloysia Weber, a transformation had taken place of which the Empress, certainly, was unaware. She, who had not long before uttered those evil words, nourished up to her last breath her hatred and loathing of any Jew who had not renounced his faith and had himself christened. If he did so, he could become her favorite overnight — just as if the holy water had the power to wash away from one moment to the next the imaginary filth with which, in her eyes, this “worst plague” of a state was covered.

It was thus, under the rule of Maria Theresa, that the family of a certain Alois Wiener, who had entered the capital in her father’s lifetime, came to high honor. This man, originally named Liebmann Berlin, had, with his two little boys, converted to Christianity and taken the Viennese innkeeper’s daughter Maria Ruttenstock as his second wife. His studies in alchemy came to the notice of Francis of Lorraine, who was devoted with heart and soul to this “secret art.” Wiener was created teacher of Oriental languages at the university and in 1747 published a book written half in Hebrew, half in German, entitled Or Noga, Splendor lucis or splendor of light, containing a short physico-cabbalistic exposition of the greatest secret of nature, privily called Lapis Philosophorum.

A year earlier, the Empress, to please her husband, had given Wiener a hereditary title. Now he was called Alois Wiener von Sonnenfels. His elder son Joseph, who had been born in the old faith, rose to become a professor of “studies in police and public finance matters” and an influential reformer, who helped to abolish torture in Austria and replace the crude Kasperl show with the great dramatic works of Germany. In his urge “to eradicate the prejudices and stupidities with which the people of Vienna were still burdened,” Joseph von Sonnenfels even dared to offer resistance to the narrow-minded exercise of authority of Cardinal Migazzi. After succeeding, as he once wrote, in removing “the green hat, the Hanswurst [clown]” from the theater, he now hoped “to dislodge the red hat, the Roman Cardinal and nuncio, right speedily from the cabine.” When this remark reached the Empress’s ears, she wanted to expel him from the country, but in the end she forgave him, demonstrating a mildness which she was capable of showing to all but unbaptized Jews. Joseph’s brother Franz too enjoyed the sunshine of her favor, became a councilor at the treasury, and in 1797 was granted the rank of Freiherr (baron) of the realm by his imperial namesake, Maria Theresa’s grandson.

Alois Wiener was only the first of a series of men who converted to Christianity in Maria Theresa’s Vienna. They, whose forefathers “would rather let themselves be burned alive than waver by the point of a needle from their faith,” were now prepared to give up this faith altogether — not always because they expected more certain salvation from their new religion, but sometimes because, while this was guaranteed to them by neither, baptism seemed to render at least their earthly welfare more secure. The ideas of the Enlightenment had penetrated from France even to a naїvely pious Vienna. Many a one heard the message, though he might prefer to turn a deaf ear. The quick witted Jews drew their own conclusions. If there were no God, neither wrathful Jehovah nor gentle Jesus, there could be no reason to live precariously, in perpetual trouble and anxiety, in the service of the one, when one could achieve peace and prosperity under the other’s wing.

By degrees, whether out of such considerations as these or through genuine desire for redemption, a number of Jewish families had ended up in the bosom of the Catholic Church. While fathers often set themselves against the apostasy of their sons, there were also wives of these belated candidates for baptism who at times refused to change their faith. When Karl Abraham Wetzlar, whose power and influence surpassed even those of Adam Arnsteiner, converted with his ten children in 1777, causing a great stir, and was elevated to the rank of “Panier- und Reichsfreiherr” (banneret and baron of the realm) von Plankenstern, his wife, Eleonore, remained faithful to Judaism. One of her sons, Raimund, who married a Baroness de Pignini, became a patron of the arts and the “generous, good and true, honest” friend of Mozart. Even if certain members of those families, and even the great majority of tolerated Jews, still resisted conversion, the baptism of Viennese Jews continued in the later days of Maria Theresa. Among others, Maria Josepha Königsberger, the daughter of a court agent, had turned away from Judaism when she married Freiherr, later Lieutenant-General, von Sebottendorf. “Pepi” Sebottendorf had become Fanny’s best friend in Vienna. Her attempt to secure her social position through baptism tempted Fanny to follow her example. But a recent an example in her husband’s family had shown that neither Fanny nor her young husband was of a mind to carry their latitudinarianism so far as to abandon their religion.

Nathan Arnsteiner, as we have seen, passed his childhood in the company of his four brothers and sisters. A younger brother had moved to Fürth. The youngest son, Joseph, led his own life in Vienna, although he remained in business with his father. He was, as we know from his own account, his parents’ favorite. But according to the strict old custom, Nathan, the first-born son, shared his father’s home and could expect one day to take over his business alone, while his brothers were forced sooner or later to found their own households and businesses. It can be surmised that Joseph was more attractive, more talented and intelligent than the slow-moving, portly Nathan. At the same time he harbored a willfulness that impelled him to renounce utterly the faith of his parents who, true to tradition, then drove him from their house, so that he lost them forever.

A year after they had travelled to Berlin for the wedding of their eldest son, Adam and Sibilla repeated their journey to attend the nuptials of their youngest. Joseph was then still quite the obedient child of his father and had agreed to a marriage with Johanna Strelitz, the daughter of the Berlin merchant Abraham Markus Strelitz, Moses Mendelssohn’s well-beloved friend. He brought his wife back to Vienna where a baby daughter was born to him. Whether Johanna died in childbirth or succumbed to an illness is not known. In any case she was already dead when the Wiener Diarium of 10 October 1778 carried the following report:

On the 28th of last month, September, we had yet another touching example of zeal for the Christian religion, when Joseph Adam Arnsteiner, youngest son of Adam Isak Arnsteiner, one of the most respected Jews of this city, received the holy sacrament of baptism from the honorable and right reverend Precentor of the cathedral, and the prelate of the Metropolitan church, as well as from his Excellency the archiepiscopal secretary of the consistory, Councilor de Terme. Not only has the newly baptized gentleman, of whose philanthropic heart, when still a Jew, we have already spoken in terms of much praise in our pages of the 25th of April of this year, through his well conducted behavior at all times earned the approval of one of the greatest scholars among the Jewish rabbis, but all the Christians and Jews who have associated with him give him the character of a capable and upright man, and just as his intentions towards the Christian religion have been pure and unselfish, so too we wish that this example may serve those of his brethren still left in darkness, and may bring them also in time to this happy resolution.

Four days later the journal added that “on the 30th of this month his only child, a little daughter, likewise received the holy sacrament of baptism.”

Perhaps Joseph had not suspected, or had deceived himself into avoiding the suspicion, that this step would mean a break with his parental home. When it came to this, he was startled and distressed, but unflinchingly pursued his intention of making himself entirely at home in the Christian world. He married again; his new wife was the well-born Baroness Barbara von Albrechtsburg. Their children were to mingle not only with the old-established aristocracy, but also with descendants of Freiherr Wetzlar, who had also been baptized. Five years after his conversion Joseph applied to the Bohemian and Austrian court chancery to be raised to the rank of knight. The chancery document by which his request was forwarded to the Emperor contains the following information:

For his own person, the applicant, since his conversion to the Catholic faith, has no further income, and previously, as a Jew, he did not carry on his own business, but worked only under the direction of his father. However it is also the case that if he is to acquire his own property here in order to farm his land, the rank of knight is necessary to him; and the request is therefore submitted to the imperial mercy, that the rank of Ritter [knight] should be accorded to him.

The answer was that “assent should be granted to Arnsteiner, that when he has bought his property, the rank of Ritter will be granted to him on payment of the usual taxes.” In May 1783 he had purchased the estate of Weinwarts near Müggendorf and was accordingly knighted by the Emperor in the name of Joseph Michael, Edler (nobleman) von Arnstein.

He needed the title if he was to become a man of property, but after cutting himself off from his father’s business he could not afford to be idle. The Weinwarts estate yielded too little profit to keep him and Baroness Albrechtsburg in the manner appropriate to their ranks, and so, “on his own account,” he conducted a banking business in the Kohlmarkt. He had, to be sure, already acquired these premises with the help of a sum furnished by his father a year after his conversion. Through the mediation of the prebendary de Terme, who had christened him in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, an agreement had been concluded with his parents, by which the disowned son was to receive a lump payment of 50,000 gulden in compensation for the loss of his inheritance. Cut off from his father’s wealth and property as from his love, Joseph, spurred on by filial affection as much as by practical considerations, repeatedly tried to bring about a reconciliation. By chance, a letter written by him shortly before his father’s death has been preserved. It speaks for all those who, in those times of change, dared to renounce the commandments and laws that had endured for thousands of years, and is one of the liveliest and most instructive documents of the era of emancipation. Here is an extract:

Certainly, dearest parents, I know what is commonly the result of the influence of education and of misunderstood religion, but is it possible that you could hate your son because he harbors other principles of faith than yours? in these times of enlightenment, under the government of our most gracious monarch, who exhibits his tolerance and general forbearance in all his dealings as an example to all his subjects, who allows each one to believe that which he will, if he only behaves as he should; under such a government, under which you, subject to Jewish law, enjoy the same protection, the same rights as any of your fellow-citizens, where you have gathered your treasures and may consume them in peace, without fear of any pressure or compulsion; under such a tolerant government, should you hate an innocent, irreproachable son, cast him aside, who implores only to be received by his parents and to have their blessing, because he does not share your theoretical principles? and banish from your sight forever your innocent grandchild, not yet of age, who did no other, could do no other, than to obey the well-intentioned will of her father! Herein I appeal to my brother, who is still Jewish, and to his wife my sister-in-law, who go so often into the great world, and see from their own experience that among the numerous members of the established religion they are received with love and respect, at the same time as you, out of religious hatred, banish from your sight a once beloved son! Your religion itself, dearest parents! damns nobody for eternity, and yet you would be relentlessly severe even in this temporal life!

Accordingly, once more, most worthy parents, I beseech you, hear my request, which has no selfish or ulterior motive, allow me and my dear child, your grandchild, to approach you, even to visit you daily, to kiss your hands and receive your blessing. We are human, dearest parents! Human beings who flourish today and fade tomorrow — what a terrible thought is this not for me, and I may add, must it be for you too, if one of us should be snatched away from this earthly life without a full and heartfelt reconciliation and reunion.

Appoint the hour for myself and my child at which we may betake ourselves to our parents, and believe me, to the last breath in my body,

your dearest son

Michael Joseph Edler von Arnsteiner

Whether his parents gave way to his request and restored him to their favor with his little daughter Caroline is not known. But it is to be doubted that his touching and certainly deeply felt self-vindication softened their hearts, for he is not mentioned in the wills made by Adam and Sibilla in 1785 and 1787. They were true descendants of the women and men who had run to the burning at Erdberg dancing and leaping, as if going to a wedding, who “persevered in their wickedness and obstinacy even up to their ears” like “accursed martyrs of the devil.” What seemed natural to their eldest son was unthinkable for them. The gulf that had earlier lain between them and the whole of Christendom now lay between them and their child, dividing a family, separating one generation from the other. But Joseph’s Jewish brother and his wife, who went so often into the great world and saw from their own experience how they were received there with love and respect, did not find it necessary to take that decisive step. To the end of their days, even when they had laid aside all forms and customs of their religion, they remained members of a community whose equality of rights had by no means been achieved, whose complete freedom was still withheld long after the deaths of Nathan and Fanny.

Their friendly reception by the great world might have appeared miraculous if their era had not quite generally offered the spectacle of conflicting opinions and movements. The revolt against rationalism had begun, in France with Rousseau, in Germany with Herder. Emotion and reason had declared war on each other, poetic rapture and dry abstraction fought for precedence in people’s spirits. Yet the two great opposing movements of the time demanded in equal measure, before all else, magnanimity and generosity towards all fellow humans. While it had become “insupportable for the awakened consciences of the Enlightenment to know that there were any among them who were without rights,” the sentimental enthusiasm with which the predecessors of romanticism enclosed the whole world in their arms comprehended even those mortals who had previously been despised. The only ones to hold fast to old prejudices were certain dignitaries of that same church whose founder had taught and enjoined charity, and the practicing agents of an absolutist government which admitted neither the rule of liberal reason nor romantic idealism. Viennese society, touched if not shaken by the breath of the new spirit and universal sympathy, had relaxed its conventions. The ruling powers and the clergy in Maria Theresa’s last years held on to their own with a grip of iron.

The precept of physical separation of Jews from Christians had so far been suspended only in individual cases. In 1772, a Jewish family, having been evicted from their home, could find no shelter, till Franz von Sonnenfels, who had not adopted the intolerance of his new co-religionists with his baptism, made over to them one of his own houses as a residence. But repeated attempts were made, whether by the narrow minded Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Migazzi, or the councilors Loehr and Count Hatzfeld of the government of Lower Austria, to restrict the few and hard won rights of the Jews. At about the time when Fanny was already on intimate terms with Caton, the young wife of the court secretary Obermayer, Loehr remarked censoriously on the fact that “Jewish females should be seen in such dress as is little different from that of a lady, with and among Christian people in public places, in their company and society.”

Certainly, the Bohemian-Austrian court and state chancellery, in which Obermayer was secretary and the progressive Hofrat (councilor) von Greiner adviser for Lower Austria, was not on the best of terms with the Lower Austrian government. It even opposed a new, oppressive measure concerning the Jews, which the latter planned to introduce as late as 1778, in accordance with the Empress’s views. “The closer association with Christians,” the chancellery observed, “of which in fact no particular complaints or evil consequences have so far been brought to public notice, cannot be otherwise abolished but by Christians themselves, who alone must determine to whom they wish to allow entry into their houses. And indeed one does not after all see what great evil is to be found in it, to cause such alarm and make necessary such extraordinary arrangements.”

There was only one high official in the Lower Austrian government, Hofrat von Gebler, an immigrant from a German principality, in whom the chancellery found an ally. He remarked that “representations might be made on the part of the rich Jewish houses, which after all deserve some consideration, such as the Arnsteiners, also bearing in mind the foreign marriages which otherwise could not be brought about, and the example of other Catholic countries, particularly of France and of the grand duchy of Tuscany. If meanwhile despite this a new and more severe measure against the Jews is to be promulgated, then the admonitions of the Bohemian-Austrian chancellery appear to me worthy of all consideration.” Whereupon an imperial resolution of December of that year ordained that no new measure concerning the Jews should be announced, “but it should be seen to that the regulation of 1764 should be most scrupulously observed.”

And so, shortly before her death, Maria Theresa was still intent on “reducing the numbers of the Jews here, and by no means, on any pretext, increasing them further.” At that time there were ninety-nine families in Vienna, among whom were twenty-five tolerated ones, with children and servants amounting to not more than 520 persons in all. They had much to expect from the demise of the Empress and the accession of Joseph. Yet they uttered no word of complaint or of hope, but knuckled under and kept their counsel, while the dissension of officials raged over their heads. From their ranks no request or petition penetrated to the ears of the government. On the other hand they took part, as far as they were allowed, in the destiny of their country and the rise of their city.

They sighed when another quarrel with Frederick sprang up over the Bavarian succession, and breathed again when peace was declared after ten months’ bloodless war. They strolled in the Augarten which had been opened to the public, and visited the playhouse recently raised to the rank of “Imperial and Royal Theater” (the Hofburgtheater). They admired the new paving, in tessellated granite, on both sides, of the most important streets in Vienna; they enjoyed the splendid festivals that were held so frequently both in winter and summer, the sleigh-rides of the nobility, the solemn processions, the fireworks in the Prater; they flocked to the column of the Trinity in the Graben for the centenary commemoration of the end of the Great Plague; and they were frightened out of their wits when, a few days later, the great powder-magazine on the outskirts of the city blew up and destroyed a number of houses. Vienna was their home; they knew no other and professed their loyalty to her, even if their love was only seldom returned.

The Empress meanwhile had grown fat and sluggish, could hardly walk and had to be carried by machinery on a green morocco-leather couch to her apartments in the Hofburg and to the balcony of the Gloriette at Schönbrunn. In the autumn of 1780 she contracted catarrh of the chest. Her faith, which had made her as good and happy as she was intolerant, helped her to endure the pain and contemplate her death with dignity. She sat in her arm-chair, surrounded by her family, patiently waiting for eternal bliss. About nine o’clock on the evening of 29 November she breathed her last.

On the same day, in Berlin, whither she had travelled for her confinement, Fanny gave birth to a daughter.

It was presumably on the first, if certainly not the last, of her visits to her parental home, that little Henriette was born to her. Whenever she lost her taste for the mild air of Vienna, the soft tones of its conversation, its leisurely way of thinking, Fanny betook herself to Berlin, to enjoy its brisk wind, sharp outlines, cutting wit and agile comprehension. She refreshed herself in the circle of her clever sisters, two of whom, Cäcilie and Rebecca, were later drawn into her circle and settled in homes near hers. And she enjoyed her reunions with her brothers, although they did not possess in the same measure the circumspection and farsightedness of her father. Her eldest brother Isaac, like his brothers Benjamin and Jacob, had married a cousin from the house of Wulff, just as Cäcilie had taken a maternal cousin for her first husband. With these and numerous other in-laws Fanny had a widely ramified family, which flocked around her whenever she visited the Prussian capital. Moreover, she found in Berlin what she herself was hoping to establish in Vienna: the beginnings of the literary salon.

Under Frederick the Great, court and society had become highly Francophile. Their teachers were Parisian philosophers; Frenchmen had set up the new grammar school, and the King had appointed Maupertuis as president of the Berlin Academy that had been founded by his grandfather. The example of a constant social interchange of thought, of the cultivation of learned conversation, had come from Paris and had incited imitation. The assemblies at the houses of the Marquise du Deffand, the Marquise d’Epinay, Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle d’Espinasse were beginning to find followers among the Prussians. The nobility, to be sure, still hesitated to give up its formal receptions, and the bourgeoisie, lacking a feeling for higher culture, held fast to “the simplicity of the household according to German custom.” It was, therefore, left principally to Jewish circles to unite art and society according to the Parisian model. They possessed gifts which allowed them to conform to French culture more speedily than their compatriots — “true intellect, wit and taste, the refined expression of refined concepts, a mocking tone and a speedy perception of the ridiculous, and finally the instinct of a certain practical rationalism in their way of life.” With their growing prosperity they were able to gratify their aspirations towards knowledge and wisdom, to recognition of what was true and possession of what was beautiful, and it was at their gatherings that liberal people of noble birth, whose families and usual social contacts offered them little stimulation, were beginning to assemble. And so, as a later observer expressed it, there developed “a quite original intellectual atmosphere in Berlin, a mixture of Jewry, of the ‘enlightened ones,’ as our ancestors called them, and a kind of Gallic Atticism.”

One of the first houses in which such circles developed was that of the councilor Benjamin Ephraim, who, as the youngest son of the mint-master, raised his controversial name to deserved honor. As early as 1761 he had gone to Amsterdam to set up a business house in association with his father’s firm, had there married a rich heiress and shortly afterwards returned with her to Berlin. Now he was establishing an art collection in his city mansion which was in no way inferior to that of Daniel Itzig and included paintings by Caravaggio, Poussin and Roland Davery. His splendidly decorated apartments were visited, if not yet by persons of rank, at least by some who were noteworthy. In the 1780s his nieces Sophie and Marianne Meyer, later to become respectively Frau von Grotthuss and Frau von Eybenberg, introduced young sons of old families into his house, after first gaining entry to the upper social circles through their early conversion to Christianity.

But Benjamin Ephraim, like Daniel Itzig and the far poorer, though considerably more highly honored Moses Mendelssohn, in whose houses the beginnings of an “intellectual Berlin” had likewise formed, was by no means able to unite the higher reaches of society with those of poetry, politics and science, as a series of talented women succeeded in doing one or two decades later. When Fanny visited her native city for the first time since her marriage, Henriette Herz was sixteen and newly married, Dorothea Mendelssohn a little younger and Rahel Levin a child of nine. Before the Berlin salon came into its prime, Fanny had already founded her own in Vienna.

The Empress was dead, her world had passed away with her, and her old adversary Frederick rightly exclaimed: “Voilà un nouvel ordre de choses!” And indeed, Joseph II forthwith set about translating all the reforms he had planned into reality. In so doing, as his mocking observer on the Prussian throne remarked, he was putting the cart before the horse, hurrying ahead of his time and the wishes of his subjects, and trying to coerce the latter into their own prosperity. Like others who have sought to set the world to rights, of whom, certainly, there were not many in his amiably skeptical country, he was convinced of his own infallibility; believed himself, since he wanted what was good and just, to be good and just in all circumstances; meted out high-handed justice and practiced favoritism; vented his disappointment over misplaced trust on innocent parties; possessed little sense of humor and was not inclined to allow people to be content in their own way. Suaviter in re, fortiter in modo, he wielded a benevolent authority with an iron hand. The idea of “Josephinismus” was thus more valuable than anything that Joseph himself achieved. Many of his measures fell into disuse as soon as a reaction set in under his nephew Francis; others soon turned out to be inadequate or misguided. Without question his brother Leopold, that unhandsome and self-indulgent man, was able to bring more insight and statesmanlike wisdom to bear in his short reign. But Joseph became a symbol; it was around him that legend formed. Whatever thereafter was liberal in Austria was attributed to him, who decreed freedom from the throne like a principle of absolutism.

He carried out his most important acts in the first year of his undivided sovereignty, as if he suspected how soon foreign affairs would hinder further internal reforms, and how short a span was allotted him for his work. As early as the winter of 1780 personal records were introduced among his officials by his orders, in order to separate the top intellects from the mediocre ones. In the following February he cancelled the court’s authority to demand free lodging for officials in the home of every citizen; in June he approved a more lenient law of censorship as well as a new charter of tolerance with reference to non-Catholics, while a second one regarding the toleration of Jews was in preparation; in November 1781 he entirely abolished serfdom in Bohemia, Moravia and Galicia, where its practice had already been moderated; and in December he endorsed a plan for the secularization of a number of monasteries and convents. At the same time, a new, practical system of finance administration and new methods of legal procedure and the practice of bankruptcy law were introduced, while long overdue improvements were undertaken in the fields of public education, the church and agriculture.

A fresh wind of optimism was blowing through the land. When Fanny returned to Vienna with her infant daughter, she was immediately swept along by the hope and confidence which possessed all intelligent souls. Not that Joseph’s accession had been accompanied by outward splendor. On the contrary, since the Empress’s death much of the ceremonious pageantry which had marked the imperial, ecclesiastical and military festivals had disappeared. Joseph continued to live in a style of marked simplicity, and it was only at his summer palace of Laxenburg that he received select members of Viennese society, landed gentry and foreign diplomats in some style, with operas, comedies and entertainments of all sorts. But the consciousness of having shuffled off the burden of a seemingly immutable past, of experiencing a turning-point in history, of being “modern,” to use a word that had recently become current, seemed better to the wiser among his subjects than the sight of magnificent processions, behind which were concealed the inflexible rule of feudal power and bureaucracy.

Joseph had in fact initiated the reform of public life during his mother’s lifetime, and despite her opposition. He had introduced new regulations for schools, appointed progressive teachers at the University of Vienna, and approved the formation of a “German society,” which was to promote art and science and purify the language. Nicolai had long since expressed the hope that, once the “philosophical manner of thinking” had been disseminated in Austria, writers of the first importance would arise there. Klopstock had dedicated his drama Hermannsschlacht to the Emperor who wished to bring this about. But it was only now, after Joseph had moderated the severity of censorship, that the writers were daring to emerge from their cautious restraint.

The result was at first disappointing, even embarrassing. A swarm of inferior pamphlets, so-called Sechskreuzerhefte (sixpenny booklets), flooded the capital. The Büchelschreiber (scribblers), still using a language combining “monastery German, provincial dialect and clumsy officialese,” released a torrent of the flattest effusions on any subject to their liking, “from the chambermaid to the Pope, and from the dogs and cats in Vienna to the Archbishop.” There was self-mockery in their own ranks. “Now of course we have freedom of the press. Everyone scribbles away as best he can,” sighed the anonymous author of a Lamentation of the Gracious Ladies of the Present Time. It continues:

My God! These people just write for money, impossible that they should do so for the sake of honor; for all the rigmarole that is dashed off these days cannot possibly, so people say, all be good healthy common sense. The writers slop everything in together, higgledy-piggledy. One rushes into print with a little pamphlet about something or other, another opposes him. The third abuses both of them; then follows a whole legion of critics who scold each other in writing like riff-raff, and would pitch each other straight into hell; if only the general public took more care how they spend their cash!

There was a long way to go before the emergence of “writers of the first importance,” who could be measured against Herder, Lessing or Klopstock, or even Wieland or Gottsched. But not all authors were verbally incontinent, as the indignant Johann Friedel called it, in Austria. There were poets and scholars who, closely conforming to their German models, clung to the wings of true creative writers if their own moderate talent was incapable of reaching such heights. Under Maria Theresa the two Jesuits Michael Denis and Karl Mastalier had achieved some fame as imitators of the odes of Klopstock and the nature studies of Albrecht von Haller. Beside them, the lyricist Lorenz Leopold Haschka, formerly also a Jesuit, sunned himself in the approval of his contemporaries and the protection of his landlady, the wife of Hofrat von Greiner, who “every week held sundry learned assemblies.” Of him the anonymous author of the Lamentation reported that he had once written to Goethe “that he, Haschka, was exactly the same age as Goethe, so that Germany had produced two great geniuses on the same day,” but had received no reply. Now he contented himself with wearing his hair and clothing à la Goethe.

Meanwhile this Haschka encouraged a high-thinking young nobleman, Johann Baptist von Alxinger, to dedicate himself to the art of poetry, whereupon the latter began to compose odes in the manner of Wieland. The worthy Alxinger also wrote well-meant and moralistic verse such as the “song of an Old Jew,” a plea for tolerance which reminds one of Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” in its touching simplicity.

Among the minor talents a few others stood out: the dramatist Ayrenhoff, a lieutenant-general who wrote in the French style, the malicious polemicist Blumauer and the worthy poet Ratschky — three authors whose reputations, like that of Alxinger, succeeded in spreading beyond the Austrian borders. But of all the adherents of literature in Joseph’s Vienna, hardly one is known to posterity, and it is only thanks to the circumstance that Johann Friedel, himself scarcely better remembered, told his friend in Berlin of them, that they are mentioned here at all.

Nevertheless, among many bad writers there were a few good scholars. There was the vain and eclectic, but deserving Sonnenfels, whose diction was based on that of Lessing. There were men like Jacquin, Petrasch, Birkenstock and Born, who in their respective fields were of service to the movement of enlightenment. Finally, there were aesthetes in the political world such as Gerhart van Swieten’s son Gottfried, Baron Spielmann or Count Pergen. If literature and science were not elevated to the same heights in Vienna as music, if they had not as yet brought forth a figure of European standing, the Viennese possessed enough sensitivity, taste and true admiration for the greatness of contemporary German writing for a salon after the French model to be formed from among their circles, so long as a common focus could be found.

Was Fanny, in those first years of Joseph’s reign, already achieving her aim of making her house a meeting-place of distinguished connoisseurs? It would seem so. Nathan was well enough known in 1781 to appear, in lace jabot and tie-wig, his good-humored face already boasting a slight double chin, among other personalities of public life in a collection of silhouettes published by François Gonord. Franz Gräffer — the famous bookseller, journalist and anecdotist, “ein Mann von Kopf” (a man of intelligence), as one used to say in the Rococo era, a co-author of the Austrian National Encyclopaedia, and, in his easy-going, butterfly-like way an Austrian counterpart to the serious Nicolai — in a Vision of the Augarten of the early 1780s, describes Fanny as a greatly admired lady, whose opinion was authoritative in the great world:

Everyone was flocking to the Augarten. The firework-maker Girandolini wished to provide a particularly impressive entertainment today, in defiance of Stuwer, his hot-headed rival in the Prater. The weather was delightful, as was the continuous airy concert of a chorus of those nightingales which the Emperor procured from time to time, to let them fly about and make themselves at home there.

Much of the beau monde had already assembled. Not a few families had already taken their midday meal at the restaurant kept by the Emperor’s own caterer in the Augarten. Pleasing music from wind instruments, known as Harmonie, rang out. The avenues began to fill with people. In the shady walk, close to the little house, still standing, which the Emperor often occupied during the season of fine weather, Frau von Arnstein, resplendent with youthful charm, grace, culture and intellect, strolled with her husband. Among their party were the remarkable royal Negro, Angelo Soliman, in his Turkish costume of pure white, and General Ayrenhoff in uniform.

The conversation concerned the play given the day before, The Great Battery. Angelo heaped praise on the author. “It pleased us,” he said, “and no less my princely friend (he meant the then ruler of Liechtenstein) far better even than your Mail Train, however much the great Frederick may patronize it. The piece has some very effective scenes, and the characters are admirably drawn.”

Gräffer then describes how Ayrenhoff complacently listens to this flattery and how Angelo goes so far as to remark that the work was worthy of a Voltaire.

Frau von Arnstein smiled and cooled her goddess-like visage with a costly fan. She refrained from speech. Ayrenhoff waited anxiously for the pronouncement of this highly cultured lady whose judgment rightly counted for so much, even more than that of a whole academy.

As an indirect demand or polite invitation to express her opinion, Ayrenhoff, turning towards the lady, again removed his hat. She however continued to smile gently and sweetly. The poet, in torment, studied this smile; but he discovered there not the remotest expression of a critical nature, neither of approval nor censure. This circumstance soon plunged him into desperation. The fate of The Great Battery depended on the words of Frau von Arnstein.

This crisis did not go unobserved by Herr von Arnstein or Angelo Soliman. They began to feel uneasy. But Fanny possessed mercy and generosity. In order to put an end to the embarrassing situation of the three men, she was just opening her charming, rosy lips to speak, when a giant of a man, in a major’s uniform, his hand on his sword-hilt, stormed up from the side towards General Ayrenhoff.

Now the writer describes how Baron Friedrich von der Trenck — for this was none other than the well-known adventurer, military man and writer of memoirs — apostrophises Ayrenhoff “coram publico: ‘Intellect is what I demand — intellect and power and life, not flat, feeble Frenchified imitation.’” The two gentlemen are at each other’s throats, Arnstein tries to withdraw, but Trenck promises to moderate his behavior. He falls in with Ayrenhoff, obliging him to take his arm, “and so the two sons of Mars strode along behind the satin dress, in ‘Emperor’s-eyes blue,’ of Frau von Arnstein, on whose right Angelo was proceeding.” Trenck asks Ayrenhoff how, as a soldier, he could write such stuff; the latter tries to bid him farewell, saying that he must speak urgently with Herr von Arnstein on business matters. “Nothing of the kind!” cries Trenck, becoming heated again. “Your friends are intriguing against me with the military councilor to the court.” Gräffer continues:

Meanwhile, the Emperor had returned from a ride on horseback. According to his habit, he had mingled with the strollers. Among them he noticed Fanny von Arnstein. As was his wont whenever he caught sight of her taking a walk or at a ball, he singled her out by saluting and addressing her.

He walked along with her, close at her side. “Girandolini will put on a fine show,” he remarked. “He has offered all sorts of attractions, for he knew that you would be an observer. And you are wearing my color,” he added, with a glance at her gown. “I love this color above all others,” answered the lady. “May that which it expresses, cheerfulness and gaiety of mind, always be granted to Your Majesty.”

Joseph replied, slightly raising his hat and with a bowing motion: “That, unfortunately, is not possible, because you, the representative of these desirable qualities, cannot always be near me.” Fanny cast down her eyes. In a deferential, gentle tone, she said: “I must count myself all the more fortunate, when chance sometimes brings me to your presence.”

“Oh, chance,” remarked Joseph, in happy excitement, “is, thanks to the blue heavens, often wiser and cleverer than intention and premeditated plan. Herr von Arnstein, are you not of my opinion? And you, dear Soliman? What have you done with our Liechtenstein?”

At this moment the clash of swords was heard from the bushes nearby. People rushed up to the spot. An unseemly scuffle ensued. “A duel,” the people cried, “a duel!” In the confusion, Angelo Soliman tried to make room for the Emperor. But the latter was much quicker and more energetic. Respectfully the crowd moved aside. It was but twenty steps to the Emperor’s little house. He offered temporary refuge there to the lady and her escorts. Frau von Arnstein, however, seemed to hesitate.

Then Joseph said: “Have no misgivings; beauty is queen everywhere.”

This little story is only one of the “historical novellas, genre scenes, frescoes, sketches, personages and facts, anecdotes and curiosa, visions and notes” published by the zealous Franz Gräffer towards the end of his life, in the last years of the so-called Vormärz (the period immediately before the revolution of 1848). One should not, however, make the mistake of taking him literally, as so many historians and encyclopaedists have done. One should neither believe that Fanny’s judgment, at that time or at any other, could have outweighed that of a whole academy, nor conclude from his description that Emperor Joseph had bestowed his affections on her as well as on all the middle-class girls and stationmasters’ daughters with whom posterity has linked his name. Indeed, it might be worth asking whether a scene such as he describes could ever actually have taken place.

Gräffer gives no date for the encounter. But Ayrenhoff’s comedy The Great Battery was given its first performance on 1 September 1783, in the Fasantheater, and Frederick the Great, whose preference for the same author’s Mail Train is mentioned, was still alive in that year. The fireworks of Stuwer and Girandolini in the Prater and Augarten fall into the same period which saw the black prince Soliman being taken up by Viennese society. As for the improbable supposition that Joseph could have been susceptible to the charms of a Jewess, this too finds support in history. This unusual man, who could be described by a biographer as “cold and passionless, looking at women as though they were statues,” was too much a son of his time to shun all adventures. Without question he had genuinely loved his first wife. But popular gossip was right in ascribing to him a number of secret liaisons. He was for many years the affectionate friend of Princess Eleonore Liechtenstein, whom we shall meet again later. Many “natural” offspring, among them the “toll-collector’s wife” Anna Maria Wewerka, might serve as proofs of the favors which Joseph bestowed on certain of his female subjects. Among these was the daughter of a Jewish cantor from Schlosshof, to whom a son was born, who grew up under the name of Joseph Gottfried Pargfrieder, amassed a mighty fortune by means of successful speculation, and finally was buried at the side of Field-Marshal Radetzky.

In short, it is quite possible that Franz Gräffer’s artificial “vision” conceals a true story which may have come to his ears as a child. He himself had later offered Fanny, whom he here prematurely ennobles with the honorific von, the greatest admiration, again described her charm in glowing colors in another sketch, At the Masked Ball, and also commemorated her in his National Encyclopaedia. But was she really beautiful? This cannot be assumed from any of the extant portraits of her, neither her portrait as a young woman by an unknown hand, nor Kriehuber’s medallion from her maturer years, nor Kininger’s mezzotint, nor even the little drawing which shows her in a tall, beribboned straw hat in the 1790s; yet so it was asserted by many of her contemporaries.

“A tall, slim figure, radiant with beauty and grace” is how she is described by Karl August Varnhagen, who did not meet her face to face for the first time until after the turn of the century. She was called “the fair Hebrew” by another memoirist, “the beautiful, magnificent lady of the house” by a German musician who had known her since her youth. Gräffer may therefore have simply been expressing the true feeling of contemporary taste. But in his description of the way in which Arnstein retreats behind his wife and is honored by being addressed only with a sidelong glance, there is concealed a very exact knowledge of the couple.

Finally, that Fanny achieved access to the Emperor, and at such an early stage, is confirmed by a more reliable witness. In a letter of April 1819 to his friend Benzenberg, the Prussian councilor of state Stägemann — a frequent guest at the Arnstein house during the Congress of Vienna — had the following anecdote to relate, from the weeks before the issuing of the Edict of Tolerance: “When Frau von Arnstein in Vienna at that time, like Esther before Ahasuerus, begged the Emperor Joseph for benevolence towards her people, he answered her: ‘I will do everything for them that I can; but I cannot like them; just look at them! Can you like them?’” Stägemann’s story, which undoubtedly he heard from her own mouth, does not relate Fanny’s reply to the Emperor. Perhaps she, who possessed intelligence above all else, was disarmed by the confidential sincerity of his words. Indeed, perhaps she even shared the antipathy of the Emperor, who had condescended as low as to a cantor’s daughter, towards some excessively ill-favored and unprepossessing children of the Old Testament.

How she attained her proximity to the throne in the first place is easy to imagine. There was more than one link between her world and that of the court. One, which was to bring both joy and sorrow, was the infatuation of the imperial cabinet secretary Günther for the Jewess Eleonore Eskeles.

The Eskeles family was a very old one, which came from Worms and had travelled through Poland and Moravia to settle in Vienna. As early as the fourteenth century their ancestor, the wise Löwa the Elder, was living in the Rhineland city of Worms. His descendants produced scholars of importance in every generation, among them the “high Rabbi Löw” in Prague, to whom legend has attributed miraculous powers, thanks to his astronomical and probably also astrological studies. From his brother’s son there descended, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the highly respected Gabriel Eskeles, whose wisdom and knowledge were so extraordinary that he had to be given a double title of rabbi. The great Samson Wertheimer gave Gabriel’s son Bernhard the hand of one of his daughters, without however taking him into his international business, for this young adept of the sacred books also had “the gold-trimmed mantle spread over him at a tender age” and he had been made the spiritual guardian of two Moravian Jewish communities: he inherited his father’s country rabbinate in Moravia and also that of his father-in-law Samson in Hungary (honorary offices, which he discharged from Vienna). After his wife’s death, he was married again, this time to Wertheimer’s niece, who bore him a son and a daughter. The daughter, Eleonore or Lea, was born in 1752. Bernhard did not live to see the birth of another son in the following year.

Eleonore married young. Her marriage brought her to Berlin. There she must already have come to know Fanny’s family, for her husband’s name was Fliess, like that of the doctor who had married Hanna, the eldest Itzig daughter. But the young wife, who sensed in herself the heritage of centuries of spiritual refinement, did not languish for long at the side of the merchant Fliess. She left him to go to Vienna, where her brother Bernhard had lived since coming of age. In her native city she was known as the Prussian, just as, with greater justification, Fanny’s origins in Berlin were never forgotten, but like Fanny she was immediately accepted with warmth in society. She was as learned as her ancestors. But she must also have possessed unusual charm, otherwise she would not, as a thirty-year-old, have bewitched the court official Valentin Günther, who was only a little older.

Not only did Günther find his love for Eleonore reciprocated (as early as 1779 they were already linked by a tender relationship), at about this time he also won favor with the Emperor. As a former officer and military commissioner in Transylvania, he had been taken into Joseph’s cabinet to make copies of the most secret and important dispatches and letters. Joseph had soon become so used to the cheerful, intelligent and handsome young man that the latter became his constant companion. He drove out with him, in a simple green barouche with two greys, holding the reins himself, with Günther at his side on the left. They would walk together in the Augarten and sat tête-à-tête at a reserved table in the court caterer’s restaurant among other people. They were always dressed alike, in long dark-blue greatcoats, with buckskin breeches and gloves of the same, their boots fitted with spurs, and three-cornered hats on their heads. “Günther,” writes Emilie Weckbecker, “was most often at my parents’ house. He divided the evenings which he did not spend with his imperial friend between Fanny Arnstein and them. My father always called him (as it were, in anticipation of what was to come) l’aimable imprudent. He loved him greatly, as he adored everything that came from Emperor Joseph.”

Günther was able to appear openly at Fanny’s receptions. His affair with Eleonore Eskeles was conducted in private; at least it is not established that Joseph, while he spent his days with his favorite, was aware with whom the latter spent his nights. Günther, who was frequently invited to Fanny Arnstein’s, could easily have introduced her to the Emperor, so that the good Gräffer’s claim that Joseph always honored her with a greeting when he met her walking or at a ball seems well founded. While Fanny, as she told Stägemann, had once gone to the Emperor to plead for his benevolence towards her people, her friend Günther, Eleonore’s lover, had done not a little towards the issuing of the Edict of Tolerance in the first winter of Joseph’s reign.

The reforms that the Emperor intended to undertake included a charter for the Jews. That this people within his state, from whom so many duties as well as rights were withheld, must profitably be incorporated into the community, was clearer to his eyes than to those of his officials. On this point too the latter praised his “wise intentions, which would bring fame to the age and to his government,” but advised deliberation, to which Joseph was as little disposed as in any other matter. He intended to free the Jews in his own way. True, he had it in mind neither to increase their privileges nor to recognize them as citizens with equal rights. But he was determined to abolish most of the degrading laws then in force, even at the price of the restriction of Jewish community life and religious worship, their ancient tradition. Here, too, he was ahead of his time. One hundred years later, when their religious ties had loosened, a high proportion of the Viennese Jewish community were ready for complete emancipation. However, in an age when enlightened spirits were to be found only in a small section of the upper classes, the majority of them, despite their manifest gratitude, found Joseph’s concessions to them too dearly bought.

It was Günther, however, in those winter weeks, who gave a special impetus to the Emperor’s decision to issue as speedily as possible a charter for the Jews which should be appropriate to the spirit of the age. He delivered an anonymous document which originated from the circle of his Jewish friends, probably from the pen of the shrewd Bernhard Eskeles. On 13 May, the Emperor announced his “highest intentions” with regard to a new charter for the Jews and demanded that the Lower Austrian government should deliver its report on the “future better clarification and use of the Jewish nation for the state in all the German hereditary lands.” “Likewise,” the imperial document continued, “we are communicating to the aforesaid government the anonymous observations concerning the Jews’ charter of 1764, which have reached this most loyal place with the Emperor’s most gracious signature in his own hand, in order to obtain its exhaustive opinion on the matter, point by point.” The document does not survive. But its contents may be reconstructed from the government’s report of September 1781, which indeed referred to it point by point.

The anonymous correspondent cited religious intolerance as the main cause of the various oppressions and limitations suffered by the Jews. This, according to the government report, was not true; rather, the Jews for their part had “political defects.” The first sentence of the anonymous document referred to the excessive restrictions on the Jews’ ability to earn their livelihoods; the government agreed with these remarks. In the second sentence, the writer declaimed against the denial of respect to the Jews by their fellow-citizens and considered it contrary to the natural law that they should be obliged to wear beards, to live only in certain houses, to lodge only in their own inns, to give neither food nor paid employment to Christians, and not to go out before twelve on Sundays and holidays; to which the government replied that it was they themselves who chose to wear beards, that they should be allowed to go out on Sundays, but that the regulations regarding inns and servants could hardly be moderated. “An exception could always be made for particularly well-known and accredited persons.” In the third sentence, certain requests regarding Jewish servants were made, which the government was prepared partially to grant. To the complaint of the fourth sentence, that privileged Jews were obliged to make contributions “under a number of categories,” the reply was that they could by all means pay a higher tolerance tax in exchange for exemption from other taxes.

Under the pretext of making an impartial statement in reply to these anonymous requests, the government had in fact rejected all the most crucial points. Enclosed with their report, however, was a separate statement by the adviser to the court chancery, von Greiner, in which this freethinking and progressive man expressed himself, with necessary caution, but unmistakably in favor of total equality for the Jews. In contrast to his colleagues of the Lower Austrian government he touched on the root of the matter: “The question is this, whether the Jews in Lower Austria and in Vienna, despite their circumstances which are to be changed so radically, should nevertheless in future, as before, be only suffered or tolerated, or whether, like other religious sects, to whom only the most secret acts of worship are permitted, they should, as they are in Poland and in Holland, actually be received and accepted among other subjects, with those limitations which that other religion makes necessary for itself.”

The government, wrote Greiner, believe that it would be better to retain the existing system of tolerance. He, however, was of the opinion that from time immemorial the only mainsprings of all human conduct had been ambition and hope. When these languished, the result was nothing but total inactivity or, at the best, a very small measure of co-operation, within the state as in the case of local Jews.

Deprived of their livelihoods by the present manner of administration on their account, degraded to the status of cattle or at least of slaves both by tolerance payments and by personal taxation [Leibmaut], everywhere singled out and always cast out of the community of righteous people, they could be of little use to the state, and, in fact, could not even wish to be of use; indeed, it would have been better for them and for other subjects if they had not been settled here at all, rather than to be tolerated in the way that they have been.

Greiner knew very well that the Lower Austrian government, the overwhelming majority of his colleagues and even the Emperor himself were opposed to the idea of “reception,” a total inclusion of the Jews in the middle-class community. He did not make such a demand, but he did make it sufficiently clear that he himself saw this as the only possibility for healing the present ills. The next step was an imperial resolution which was proclaimed in October. It began with the ceremonious declaration that the Emperor by no means intended “to diffuse the Jewish nation further into the hereditary lands, or to introduce it newly where it is not tolerated, but only to make it useful to the state where it is, and to the extent that it is now tolerated,” and decreed that “the Jews’ charter de anno 1764 shall be entirely discarded” and a new charter was to be drawn up. An original draft by the Lower Austrian government failed to be approved because of numerous errors in form, and Sonnenfels, who was highly esteemed for his style of composition, was enlisted to re-draft it. No representative of the Jews was consulted, although the anonymous document was taken into account; the opinions of the various court and state councilors were combined into a single form, the possibility of “reception” was disavowed and the Emperor’s demand for the utilization as far as possible of the Jewish community was translated into fact. The result was the charter of tolerance which had been awaited for so long and so ardently by the Jews, and which was announced on 2 January 1782.

With amazement, wonder and much shaking of heads the Austrians received the news of Joseph’s latest reform. Freethinking spirits throughout Europe instantly united in praise of the monarch who had taken the first and decisive step towards the emancipation of the Jews and, if he had not at a stroke corrected their dishonored and outlawed state, had substantially relieved it. Klopstock, in a poetic rapture, wrote:

Du lösest ihnen, Retter, die rostige,

Engangelegte Fessel vom wunden Arm!

Sie fühlen’s, glauben’s kaum. So lange

Hat’s um die Elenden hergeklirret.

[You, their savior, release the rusty fetters / Tightly bound about their injured limbs! / They hardly feel, hardly believe it. So long / Have the poor wretches lived amid the rattling chains.]

There was jubilation too among the Jews, above all those progressive members of the community who saw no harshness in the Emperor’s intention to wean them away from the age-old precepts of their religion and a “religious authority transplanted hither from the East.” They all wished to believe that their servitude was entirely over because from now on the Emperor was to allow them “to learn all manner of handicrafts and trades here and elsewhere from Christian masters,” and practice these as well as “painting, sculpture and the liberal arts.” They were also to be permitted to turn their hands to all “non-civic branches of business,” to set up “factories and workshops,” “to keep as many Jewish and also Christian servants as their business demand[ed],” not to be obliged to wear beards, not to pay Leibmaut [personal tax], but on the other hand, as wholesale merchants or their sons, or as people of rank, to wear swords, to visit “places of public entertainment,” to go out before noon on Sundays and holidays, and finally “to rent their own dwellings both in the city and in the suburbs.”

A cornucopia of favors had been emptied at their feet. What was still denied them seemed so little. It was no more than that in future, as in the past, they still might not form an “actual community,” hold public religious services, own a synagogue or a printing-press for their Hebrew books, purchase houses or land; no one could live in the capital without a certificate of tolerance, or come to Vienna from the hereditary dominions without special permission; and they were still barred from civic rights and the guild masterships. No more than the difference between toleration and “reception,” between residence subject to revocation — an existence dependent on official caprice and the current level of protection money, without civic rights although with numerous civic duties — and complete equality with their Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Muhammadan compatriots in Austria. A small difference, which did not, however, prevent the world from seeing Joseph as the noblest benefactor of Jewry, since in other parts, except perhaps for Holland and Poland, people were so reactionary that this charter of tolerance had the effect of a fanfare of liberty, and it was only reluctantly and after long hesitation that the German states, particularly Prussia, began to follow the Austrian example.

In Vienna, however, a few weeks after the proclamation of the edict, a scandal blew up that seriously undermined the goodwill of the Emperor.

Valentin Günther, l’aimable imprudent, had, after his more or less successful intercession on behalf of the Jews, continued his amorous double-dealing. Occupied during the day with cabinet business or attendant on imperial entertainment, at night he relaxed from the burden of work and of constantly displaying amiability. Instead, however, of “regis ad exemplu,” as Gräffer writes, “going from one to another, he came to a halt with Madame Eskeles and spent his hours of rest with her. This Jewess was regarded as a Berliner in Vienna, where it was said, as once of Nazareth: can any good thing come out of Berlin? Moreover, she loved to read books, and was known as a learned woman; which epithet in Vienna is subject to very equivocal interpretations.” It seems, therefore, that in the circles of the police, who undoubtedly observed Günther’s private movements, without revealing them to the Emperor as long as they were not requested to do so, there was constant suspicion regarding the favorite’s connection with the “lady from Berlin.” This connection had meanwhile been strengthened by the fact that Eleonore had borne him two children, at that time the almost inevitable consequence of such affairs.

In March 1782, misfortune overtook the two lovers. The manner of this has taken the shape in popular legend of a single fantastic occurrence. The memoirists declare that Günther visited his mistress one evening with a sheaf of important correspondence concerning Prussia in his pocket, spent the night there and next morning, having returned to his apartments, realized to his horror that the official documents were no longer about his person. The lady from Berlin, with her servants, had absconded to Prussian soil in two post-chaises, and Günther had been relieved of his post by the Emperor. The truth is that Günther’s fall and his separation from Eleonore had taken place in a less dramatic manner, but a more disastrous one as far as his innocent mistress was concerned.

Two years earlier a Jew from Breslau called Philipp Joras had turned up in Vienna and, being a skilled engraver, found work with the seal-engraver Philipp Abraham. There he made friends with Abraham’s business partner, Isaak David from Lorraine, who occasionally visited Eleonore’s house to seek recommendations to clients. At one time or another Joras accompanied David and was introduced to Eleonore as a writer. The two engravers, both dubious characters, now began to hatch a plot to extract money from the royal Prussian envoy in Breslau, Herr von Hoym, under the pretext of spurious espionage. Joras was to settle in Breslau again and David, under the name of Müller, was to send him presumptive secret information, which he would pass on to the minister for an annual salary of 1,000 thalers.

Joras returned to Berlin, and they began to put their prearranged plan into action. After half a year had passed, the ingenious Joras had taken on a new task which was to bring him back to Vienna and into possession of a substantial commission. A government minister named Görne in Berlin had a financial claim on the Austrian exchequer and was having difficulty in collecting the sum in question. Joras, remembering the relationship between Eleonore Eskeles and the cabinet secretary, promised Görne’s middleman, a certain Kiewe, to obtain the minister’s money from the exchequer with Günther’s help. In the course of proceedings however he quarrelled with Kiewe as well as with his own subordinate. Kiewe denounced him, and one day in March David and Joras were arrested.

What these complex machinations of Prussian ministers and Jewish pseudo-spies, and all this business of Hoym, Görne and Kiewe, Joras, David and Abraham had to do with the Viennese lovers, nobody knew. The two arrested miscreants did not know either, in fact they explicitly denied having involved the cabinet secretary Günther in their grubby dealings. But the connection of his name with the demand for money, and the circumstance that the family doctor not only of Günther and Eleonore but also of Isaak David bore the name of Joseph Ferdinand Müller, were enough to persuade the police to accuse these four as well as those already under arrest of criminal conspiracy. It was at this point that the case was brought to the Emperor’s attention.

Joseph, who had until now shown Günther only his gentlest, mildest, most communicative and tenderest side, became hard as steel in his wrath. Whether it was really not until that moment that he learnt of Eleonore’s existence, or whether he just wanted to revenge a long-nourished jealousy on the mistress of his favorite — at any rate, he would have nothing to do with a private interrogation of Günther. He responded to the report from the police authorities with a handwritten note, in which he ordered that Günther should be removed from the cabinet and that an investigation into his activities should immediately begin. The same measures should be taken against the Jewess Eskeles and the medico Müller, if necessary Günther’s servants should be questioned “and altogether the whole brood is to be exposed or else the opportunity shall be provided for them to cleanse themselves of all suspicion.”

On 28 June, Eleonore was summoned to the inquiry and taken into police custody. Under questioning, records of which were later discovered, she insisted that she had had no understanding of any kind with Joras and David. Moreover Günther had never trusted her with any confidential matters, just as “it would never have occurred to her to question him on such things, for she knew well that this would have been the surest method of banishing him from her company forever.” The two pseudo-spies, however — who were held to be genuine ones for purposes of state — had never been seen by Günther at all.

Her evidence tallied with the statements of the other accused persons, except that Joras claimed to have met Günther at her house. When he was confronted with the latter, it turned out that he had mistaken Müller, the doctor, for Günther. The total innocence of the two lovers thus seemed to have been proved, or rather it would have been so if the Emperor had decided to accept it as such. But his anger, which was considered by his contemporaries to arise from “love gone sour,” would not be dispelled. Perhaps Gräffer is right in saying that “Madame Eskeles, intimidated by the interrogator, who sought to persuade her that Günther had already confessed all, had related a few little stories of His Majesty’s amorous intrigues which Günther had conveyed to her in confidence.” In this case, Joseph’s obduracy would have been understandable. It would still not have been forgivable.

Joras and David received a sentence of twice-thirty strokes and several years’ penal servitude. “The Jewess,” read the imperial verdict, “as serving no purpose here and as a Berliner, because of her suspicious association with two notorious Prussian spies shall be removed from here without delay in the usual manner by means of a police inspector who shall accompany her to the utmost border, with the warning that should she ever set foot again in His Majesty’s hereditary lands she would render herself liable to the severest penalties, and this shall be made known by order in the usual manner in all of the German and Hungarian hereditary lands.”

So Eleonore was declared guilty before all the world and banished from Austria. The Emperor, having ordered Günther to return his sword to him, summoned him to appear before him once more at three in the afternoon in the Augarten. After this conversation the aimable imprudent was transferred to Hermannstadt, where he became draughtsman to the imperial war council and married a young, blonde, gentle Transylvanian lady. He and Eleonore, whose banishment was by no means to be permanent, never met again.

Fanny, who had been Eleonore’s confidante, whose house Günther had so often visited, must have been shattered by the whole affair. Her sorrow for her unjustly treated friend must have been mingled with shame over the fact that the latter — in the very year of the Edict of Tolerance — had given occasion for new prejudice against the Jews. It was for this reason that Eleonore’s name was never mentioned in the Arnstein house throughout the years that she spent abroad. This deep silence was also preserved towards posterity. Not one remark of Fanny’s, no sign of the despair into which the case must have plunged her, has survived.

On the other hand, another friend of Valentin Günther’s expressed his feelings in a document which tells us more about him than about the case in question. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in his earliest Vienna years, had grown fond of the cabinet secretary, a member of the Freemasons’ lodge known as “The Crowned Hope,” which he himself was to join some time later, and Günther was a frequent visitor to his house. “His house” was as much as to say “Fanny’s house,” for at the beginning of September 1781, having given up his lodging at the house called “The Eye of God,” in the Tuchlauben, of his future mother-in-law, Maria Cäcilie Weber, Mozart moved into a room on the third floor of 1175, Graben. For more than eight months, until his marriage to Constanze, he lodged among the Arnsteins’ coachmen, valets and kitchenmaids. Here he wrote his Entführung aus dem Serail, his Haffner Symphony, three concertos and two sonatas. Here he began to compose fugues, after acquiring a thorough knowledge of “Händl and Sebastian Bach” at the private concerts in the house of Baron van Swieten. From here he daily visited Constanze, who lived but a stone’s throw away from him, occasionally went to court to play for the Emperor, called to pay his respects at many houses of the nobility, and, on 16 July 1782, went to attend the first performance of his “German operetta” in the Turkish style. From here, finally, he rushed with Constanze to St. Stephen’s Cathedral on 4 August, to marry her behind his father’s back.

The sound of his piano rang out above Fanny’s head by day — “for until that is standing in the room, I cannot live in it.” Perhaps, like his friend Günther, he was occasionally invited to her apartments in the evening. The name “d’Arnsteiner” certainly turns up on the list of high nobility for his subscription concert of 1 April 1782, among a few patrons of similar origin such as the two Barons Wetzlar, the merchants Bienenfeld and Hönickstein and the court councilor Sonnenfels. Raimund, the younger Baron Wetzlar, whom Mozart knew very well as a converted Jew, soon became his protector and was godfather to his first, short-lived child. None of this prevented Mozart from expressing himself to his father after the Günther scandal in the coarsest tones about the “Jewess Escules”:

The Jewess Escules must indeed have been a very good and useful instrument in the breakdown of friendship between the Emperor and the Russian court — for she was actually taken to Berlin the day before yesterday to give the King the pleasure of her company; — well, she is a sow of the first order — for she was the only cause of Günther’s misfortune — if it be a misfortune to be under arrest for two months in a fine room (while retaining all his books and his fortepiano, etc.), to lose his former post, but then to be installed in another at a salary of 1,200 gulden; for he departed yesterday for Hermannstadt. — Yet — such a matter always causes pain to an honest man, and nothing in the world can replace that sort of thing. — Only you should realize from this that it was not such a great crime that he committed. — His only crime is — étourderie — indiscretion — as a result — not sufficiently strict silence — which of course is a great fault in a cabinet member. — Albeit he confided nothing of importance to anyone, yet his enemies, of whom the first is the former Statthalter [lieutenant-governor] Count von Herberstein, knew how to arrange it so well and finely that the Emperor, who had had such strong confidence in him that he would walk up and down the room arm in arm with him for hours on end, conceived all the greater a distrust of him. — To all this there came the sow Escules (a former amantia of Günther) and accused him most vigorously — but at the investigation of the affair it did not turn out too well for the gentlemen — the great noise caused by the matter had already been made — the great gentlemen always want to be in the right — and so poor Günther’s fate [was sealed], whom I pity from my heart, for he was a very good friend of mine, and (if things had remained as they were) could have rendered me good service with the Emperor. — Imagine how strange and unexpected it was for me, and how it affected me. Stephani — Adamberger — and I supped with him one evening and the next day he was arrested.

Günther must indeed have been a fascinating person. How else could he have aroused not only in the Emperor, but also in Mozart, feelings which filled them with such violent wrath against his presumed destroyer? For the rest, this letter casts a little light on those weaknesses of character which may be found even in an exceptionally good-hearted genius. We see how Mozart, like any other Viennese scandal-monger, unthinkingly parrots what he has heard from gossiping tongues. We see how he unquestioningly believes the rumor that Eleonore had “accused [Günther] most vigorously,” and gives further circulation to another, that the supposed espionage had destroyed the Emperor’s friendship with Catherine the Great, although he knows that Günther “confided nothing of importance to anyone.” We see how he bears a particular grudge against Eleonore because as a result of this scandal he has lost an advocate with the Emperor. And we see finally how in spite of multiple Jewish patronage he falls to abusing the “Jewish sow” as soon as the occasion is offered. In short, we notice not without a certain sadness how bound to their times are even the most immortal geniuses, how little they differ from their everyday surroundings.

From his letter, as from the communication of a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung that “the Jewish nation has few friends here,” it can be recognized what damage the Günther affair had done. David and Joras, the two good-for-nothings, bore a burden of guilt in this that was heavier even than the Emperor’s highhanded justice. The Emperor’s attitude to the Jews, to be sure, remained unchanged after his wrath had cooled. He liked them neither better nor worse than before, but continued in his determination to use them as advantageously as possible in his state. He bore no grudge against the Arnsteins, who in the course of his reign entered into a close business relationship with Eleonore’s brother. For in the very year of these happenings, if we can believe Gräffer’s vision in the Augarten, he behaved with the utmost graciousness to Fanny and her husband. About the same time the latter’s brother became the first of his family to enter the Austrian nobility. And three years later Nathan himself succeeded in achieving a small but significant victory. He had complained that the Viennese magistrate, in summonses addressed to him, used the word Jud (Jew) and omitted the word Herr (gentleman). Thereafter the court chancery issued a decree to the Lower Austrian government that Jewish merchants, except where no specific exceptions were made by the 1782 charter, should be put on the same level as Christian ones and the word Jud should be omitted from judicial summonses and other communications.

Not even Samson Wertheimer with his ten imperial soldiers standing guard over him had achieved as much. The Emperor’s minions were becoming human beings, even “gentlemen.”