Читать книгу Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Hilde Spiel - Страница 6

WRITING A BIOGRAPHY IN THE OSTENSIBLE ABSENCE OF SOURCE material is no easy task. Drawing a life’s portrait of Fanny von Arnstein was that kind of challenge, since she left no significant written work behind – neither letters nor diaries. Yet the Austrian author Hilde Spiel, driven by a keen affinity for her subject, reconstructs the image of an emblematic European woman from the accounts of her contemporaries and painstaking historical research. In so doing, Spiel provides a portrait of a brave and passionate champion for the rights and acceptance of Jews while illuminating a central era in European cultural and social history.

“Not what Fanny was like,” Spiel writes, “but what effect she had on others, concerns us here.” With its broad sweep through both peaceable, pleasure pursuits and the bloody Napoleonic wars that convulsed Europe, Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment nonetheless gives a palpable sense of its heroine, and simultaneously excavates the liberal foundations of our own 21st-century society.

Observers of her day praised Fanny’s “goddess-like visage,” calling her “the fair Hebrew,” a highly cultivated, witty and radiant figure with sea-blue eyes for whose sake a prince of Liechtenstein lost his life in a duel. The city of Vienna is the main setting for her dramatic story, at a time when the Austrian imperial capital was the de facto capital of all Europe, the place where the continent’s dynastic leadership struggled to reconstitute itself and achieve a stable balance of power. There in the years leading up to and including the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, Fanny hosted an ever more legendary salon, attracting luminaries like Madame de Staël, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, his lover Lady Hamilton and the young Arthur Schopenhauer.

Fanny was at home in both the Jewish and Christian worlds, a shining symbol of the emancipation of European Jews and the liberation of women. Born in 1758 as Franziska Itzig, Fanny grew up in a wealthy Berlin household hung with paintings by Rubens and Watteau. Her father, Prussian King Frederick II’s Master of the Mint, was a friend and patron of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who became a primary force enabling Jews to enter the European mainstream. Fanny’s innately optimistic disposition and upbringing in a privileged Enlightenment-era family gave her a buoyant hope that religious barriers could be transcended. That the Jewish presence in Vienna and in other German-speaking lands ultimately met with a tragic fate lends a decided poignancy to Spiel’s book, written less than two decades after the Holocaust and first published in German in 1962. “Did she realize in her last years what a chimera she had been pursuing?” Spiel asks near the book’s end.

Like Fanny, Spiel had a complicated relationship to Judaism and to Vienna. Hilde Maria Spiel was born in Vienna in 1911 to Catholic parents who had converted from Judaism; her grandmother died in There-sienstadt. Fanny von Arnstein was the most important work by Spiel, who had an illustrious career as a novelist, essayist and cultural correspondent. It arose out of admiration for a figure Spiel considered a paradigm of successful assimilation who managed to bridge the world of her ancestors and that of current knowledge and culture, something many Viennese Jews in Fanny’s time and closer to our own failed to pull off.

Fanny left Berlin behind at the age of 18 to marry the son of another court financier. But soon after moving to Vienna, she became aware that Jews were barely tolerated there. Just one year after Fanny had traded the Prussian capital for the Austrian, Empress Maria Theresa wrote of the Jews: “I know no worse plague to the state than this nation, for bringing people to a state of beggary through their deceit, usury and financial dealings, for practicing all the misdeeds which another, honest man would despise; consequently, as far as possible, they are to be kept away from here and their numbers are to be decreased.”

To Fanny’s good fortune, the situation for Jews improved after the Empress’s death in 1780, when her reforming successor Joseph II took the throne. Early in his reign, Fanny opened up her home where she hosted her salon. She dressed fashionably, refusing to modestly cover her hair like other married women of her faith, and instead piled her curls high on her head, donning elegant gowns and glittering jewels on her swan-like neck. It took this liberated, trend-setting Jewess from Berlin to introduce Vienna to the Christmas tree, a heretofore northern German custom.

Emperor Joseph issued his Edict of Tolerance in 1782, Europe’s first and until then most decisive step towards the emancipation of Jews. It lifted many but not all of the restrictions on Jews within the Austro-Hungarian empire, allowing them to enter secular trades, attend schools and universities with Christians, and slip out of previously obligatory distinguishing garb. But many restrictions remained: Jews still were not permitted to own land, have a communal life, or freely take up residence wherever they chose. Meanwhile, the crowds at Fanny’s soirees sparked concern among the Austrian authorities who used a wide-ranging network of informants to keep watch on potentially subversive activity; Spiel drew on secret police reports to write the biography. But Fanny bridled against these controls and, through her courage and personal allure, did her utmost to contribute to putting her fellow Jews on an equal footing with Gentiles.

Such activism prompted two prominent statesmen attending the Congress of Vienna to liken her to “Esther before Ahasuerus,” the heroine in the Biblical story involving a beautiful woman’s intercession with the King of Persia to spare her people. Fanny intervened personally with Joseph II and then again with high-ranking officials under and around Emperor Francis I during the Vienna congress when the status of Jews in the Hanseatic states came under debate. The Prussian diplomat Karl August Varnhagen concluded that “the free, respected position, removed from the constraint of prejudice, which the adherents of the Mosaic faith have enjoyed and now enjoy in Vienna was quite undeniably won only with and through the influence and activity of Frau von Arnstein.”

She certainly owed her own position to her husband Nathan, whose bank Arnstein & Eskeles long did a lively business as a financier servicing the imperial army, until it was eventually overshadowed by the house of Rothschild. Nathan was ennobled by Emperor Francis, becoming in 1798 the first unconverted Jewish baron in Austria. But it was Fanny’s unique dynamism and spirited role as a salonnière—not just a charming hostess but a sort of muse for intellectual exchange and progressive activity—that helped pave the way for a more liberal era in which no longer the aristocracy alone, but an enlightened bourgeoisie, determined the cultural agenda.

In her drawing rooms, aristocrats and burghers mixed with poets and artists, a recipe that helped release the hothouse atmosphere of frenzied creativity in early-20th-century Vienna. Her guests included a multi-national mélange of princes, archbishops, ambassadors, military officers and merchants. Fanny’s own emancipation was prelude to the world of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler, and her appearance wearing a triple strand of pearls and bulbous pearl earrings in an 1804 portrait by Vincenz Georg Kininger can be seen as a precursor to Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrayal a century later in a far more dazzling field of gold painted by Gustav Klimt.

Young noblemen found it more appealing to while away their time at Fanny’s house than in their own stuffy palaces, where the guest list was restricted to ossified bluebloods and the tenor was stiflingly formal. “Here one could listen to free speech and good music,” Spiel recounts, “converse about writers—including those with rebellious or progressive leanings—without being prevented by an abbé, meet interesting foreigners, artists and scholars, such as were never admitted among the high nobility, and pass one’s time in a far more exciting manner than in the stiff and silent atmosphere at home.” Her salon proved irresistible in part because Fanny herself “spoke fluently and stylishly, ‘played the piano charmingly,’ sang delightfully, was well-read and well-travelled and was always opening new windows to a world which one had never known or with which one had not maintained any connection.”

Fanny avidly hankered after the new and the intriguing, but patriotism, charitable generosity and high-mindedness kept her from being merely a slavish follower of fashion or a conniving social climber. Like any savvy, glamour-loving Manhattan hostess or Georgetown doyenne, Fanny knew how to mix it up. In her opulently furnished residences, originally a sprawling townhouse on the Graben in the heart of Vienna and then in an even larger mansion on the Hoher Markt a short walk away from the imperial palace, she pioneered a kind of at-home entertainment that was previously the province of the public sphere.

A devotee of music who held weekly musical soirees, as well as a slew of balls, receptions and suppers, she helped establish the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (The Society of Music Lovers) that sponsored public concerts and later created the music hall now home to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart spent eight months living in the third-floor servant quarters of her home, and while there wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Fanny heard the composer playing the piano daily overhead and she later attended that opera’s premiere.

Spiel is acutely sensitive to the social hierarchies of the day—wading with care and discernment through assorted strands of hoary titles from the Almanach de Gotha and other dignitaries who comprised Fanny’s circle. Spiel’s keen observations about the particularities of her hometown will also be recognized by those who know Vienna nowadays, and have experienced first-hand the ongoing Viennese love of comfort and joviality—Gemütlichkeit und Schmäh—as well as sensuality and aesthetic refinement, and how unpleasantness too can underlie the city’s polished veneer.

She captures the sense of Vienna at play, but Spiel also shows us a place not only swathed in indolence but one that is at times besieged then twice conquered: in 1805 and again in 1809, Napoleon breached the fortified walls, and the French tricolor was hoisted above the Hofburg palace. Through thick and thin, Fanny, Spiel writes, “was able to display the charming malice indispensable in that world, but she also possessed considerable esprit … The small change of real slander, of spiteful arrows and pointed remarks tossed around in the Vienna salons was seldom, if ever, used by her.”

Fanny’s only child, her daughter Henriette, had her own if somewhat less brilliant salon in the successive Biedermeier era. Henriette married into another distinguished and ennobled Sephardic Jewish family but when she, her husband and their child were baptized, Fanny did not raise objection. While she refused to convert herself, Fanny believed in the equality of all religions before God, taking seriously the message of her contemporary Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s parable of the three rings in his play Nathan the Wise, where Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all true and deserving of respect. Her steadfast decision to remain a Jew came at a time when thousands of others were being baptized not out of fealty to Christianity but simply to obtain what one of them, the poet Heinrich Heine, called the “entrance ticket to European culture.” Heine later lived to regret his own conversion, finding that it merely brought him hatred of Jews and Christians alike.

Within just a few generations, the Arnstein family’s ties to Judaism—like those of the descendants of Moses Mendelssohn—had been loosened entirely. Nonetheless, as if the murder of 65,000 Austrian Jews under the Third Reich were not enough, Fanny von Arnstein’s name appeared on a list of bodies drawn up by the Nazis for exhumation from Vienna’s Währinger Cemetery in 1942 as part of so-called scientific research measuring the bones of prominent Jewish families. Some of these were then kept at the Museum of Natural History, in front of which stands a massive statue of Empress Maria Theresa, who penned such poisonous anti-Semitic musings. What finally happened to Fanny’s bones is unclear, and their precise location is still unknown today.

Spiel’s biography appeared in German four years after the publication of Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess by Hannah Arendt. Varnhagen, who was among those who renounced Judaism to convert to Christianity, had an influential salon in Berlin and was in frequent contact with Fanny. Arendt, born in Hanover, Germany, who chose to reside in New York after fleeing Hitler, said she herself cherished Varnhagen as her “closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years.” Just as Arendt identified with Varnhagen, Spiel found Fanny to be a kindred spirit, although each biographer had her own reasons behind her respective affinity.

Thus Spiel, who became the grande dame of 20th-century Austrian letters, was especially well suited to chronicle Fanny’s life. Spiel too had suffered Vienna’s burn and savored its balm, as recounted in her own memoir Return to Vienna, which she wrote when she came back to Austria after emigrating to England in 1936 amid the rise of clerico-fascism and anti-Semitism before World War Two. “Which World is My World?”—the question posed by the title of Spiel’s second volume of memoirs—was one that she never seemed to fully answer. The exile she sought in London two years before the Nazi Anschluss and the problematic post-war return to her native Vienna became a dilemma that occupied Spiel for most of her life.

She could become prickly when pressed about the impact of Jewishness on Viennese artistic creativity. Writing about Leonard Bernstein’s insistent emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the music of Gustav Mahler, Spiel chastised the American composer and conductor for ignorance of the world of central European Jewry in Mahler’s time. Bernstein, she said, was inadequately familiar with “the degree to which these people had achieved a symbiosis with their Christian countrymen and absorbed the German and Austrian cultural past.”

Spiel emerged from this world and proudly regarded herself as its exemplar. Born the year of Mahler’s death and just seven years before the collapse of imperial monarchy, she went on to enjoy youth in Vienna in the days when the city was still modernism’s proving ground, and frequented the Café Herrenhof, haunt of the intelligentsia of Austria’s First Republic. After attending a celebrated girls’ school run by the progressive educator Eugenia Schwarzwald, Spiel studied philosophy at the University of Vienna under the logical positivist Moritz Schlick. At 22, she published her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, a rendering of youthful love and its sufferings. Three years later, having witnessed the remnant of the Habsburg empire’s slide towards fascism, Spiel departed for London where she joined her first husband, the German writer Peter de Mendelssohn.

Virginia Woolf, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal before her, became one of Spiel’s stylistic models. Spiel began to write in English as well as German, contributing to The New Statesman, The Guardian and Horizon, and went on to translate many British writers, including Woolf, W.H. Auden, Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard. But she could not shake off a sense of cultural schizophrenia, recalled in her drama Anna und Anna. In this play about a dual existence, a popular success when staged at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1988 as Austria marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, one Anna joins the Austrian resistance while the other experiences the war in London.

In 1946, Spiel returned to Vienna for the first time but soon moved to Berlin, where de Mendelssohn was press and cultural officer with the British forces. As did most who were spared death in the Holocaust by virtue of having fled abroad, she thought she would never again live permanently in Austria. In the end, the pull of her native language and a cultural heritage she could never renounce regardless of Nazi crimes proved relentless, and in 1954 she purchased a country house in the Salzkammergut. She resettled in Vienna in 1963, where she served for over two decades as cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The years in exile gave her a critical distance from which to view the Viennese scene. Despite the provincialization of the once-great metropolis and the deaths and diminution of the enlightened citizenry who had made its artistic scene flourish, she wrote that she still felt “at one with the city, the landscape, the music, the literature.” Her decision to return was fairly atypical, since most Viennese Jews who fled persecution opted never to look back.

Even so, in one of her last books, a cultural history entitled Vienna’s Golden Autumn, Spiel made a point of observing that other refugees from the fascist takeover displayed an unquenchable longing for their birthplace. Teddy Kollek, who became mayor of Jerusalem, late in life cited an Alpine variety of cyclamen as his favorite flower, she wrote. “In his Californian exile another self-confessed Zionist, Friedrich Torberg, ended a nostalgic poem about Alt-Aussee with the mournful question: ‘But the cyclamen — where are they?’ At the first opportunity he went back to Austria.”

These homecomings were hardly carefree. Spiel’s last decade of life was marked by the revival of a political anti-Semitism in Austria that greatly disturbed her, as did signs of an intolerant populism. The dilemmas faced by Fanny von Arnstein in the early 19th century had not been entirely resolved in late-20th-century Vienna. In 1988, Spiel refused an invitation to deliver the opening address at the Salzburg Festival, in protest against the presence there of President Kurt Waldheim, elected Austrian head of state amid another spasm of political anti-Semitism following the revelation that he had hidden his membership in a German army unit involved in crimes against humanity in World War Two.

Just two months before she died in 1990, Hilde Spiel attended a ceremonial presentation of Which World is My World? at Vienna’s Palais Pallavicini. Ever an elegant woman of sovereign bearing, she listened without comment as the eminent literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki lauded her work, adding that the title of her memoir with its question about a torn identity was no rhetorical exercise, “but rather an admission of frustration.”

Michael Z. Wise