[ . . . ]
The Ringstrasse was uniquely Franz-Josef’s own creation. In 1858 the Emperor, who wanted a capital worthy of the Habsburg Empire, determined that Vienna needed to grow outward beyond the narrow confines of the old inner city. He ordered the destruction of the moats and bastions that had surrounded the city for centuries. But before Franz-Josef could realize his plan, he had to overcome the determined opposition of his generals. The shock of the 1848 revolution was still embedded in the very marrow of their bones. In the end a compromise solution was found. The Emperor could have his grand boulevard, the generals agreed, if they could have the last word in its design. The elegant squares and attractive open spaces which interrupt the Ringstrasse at intervals and give it lightness, air and variety pleasing to the eye are the creation of Franz-Josef’s general staff. Once again the Austrian genius for hiding hard-faced decisions behind elegance and charm had asserted itself. Most of these open spaces are on the side of the Ring from which the main roads radiate towards the outer districts with their crowded tenements of the proletariat. If one has one’s infantry and artillery drawn up on the other side of the Ring, closer to the inner city with its ministries and palaces, then those lovely squares offer a clear field of fire at the rabble from the outer districts, should it ever dare to threaten the established order again. The very top of the Ring, its most select section, the centre of the upper curve of the horseshoe, is the Opernring.
Let us look out through Julie’s window in that house on Opernring 3 and view the scene at the very heart of the Imperial capital through Julie’s eyes. When evening came she looked straight across the Opera Square at the elegant carriages driving up the ramp to the main entrance of the Opera House, disgorging the gorgeously dressed and jewelled ladies of society, their husbands or lovers – or sometimes both – dressed in white tie and tails or in the splendid uniforms of the Imperial Army: the white tunics and gold lace of the dragoons, their blood-red breeches disappearing into the glistening patent leather of their black boots; the blue of the infantry officers; the chocolate-brown tunics and red collar flashes of the artillery; the short, fur-trimmed and golden-frogged cloaks of the hussars nonchalantly thrown over one shoulder; the staid, dark green uniforms of the higher echelons of the general staff, jangling spurs, sabre scabbards glinting in the light of the gas candelabra; golden belts and buckles, the whole panoply of operetta come to life. It was a scene of incredible richness and splendour; no stage setting anywhere in the world could compete with it.
How could young Julie know that all this was only stage glitter, that all the glory of the Empire displayed before her eyes was nothing but elegant futility and that underneath that sparkling surface was hiding the decay of the nineteenth century and of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy? How could she know that out of all this the foul creed of murderous envy and hatred was already worming itself to the surface of this lovely city, and would condemn her to die in poverty surrounded by terror? Race hatred and anti-Semitism were not invented by Adolf Hitler. He was only the executor of the vile thoughts of others before him. All the venom of the nineteenth century spurted into the mind of this one man. He was the personification of the evil of a whole century. He alone brought to a conclusion the thoughts and writings of others and thus arrived at the ultimate, the final, solution to the hatred of centuries: murder on a such a huge scale that the human mind cannot grasp it. We cannot identify with millions, we can only identify with single human beings. That is one reason why this book is not about the defenceless millions who were murdered in Hitler’s holocaust and who, because of their numbers, must remain strange, shadowy, unreal, but tells the story of only a few men and women who were my ancestors. Their sufferings can be grasped because the victims can be described and named.
In 1882, four years before Julie Schatz married Dr Ludwig Klaar, the German-Austrian student fraternities passed the Waidhofer Resolution. It was one of the first occasions when that hateful worm gnawing at the vitals of humanity showed his head. The problem that concerned them was, whether a Jewish student was fit to duel with a non-Jewish student. In My Youth in Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler, the famous Austro-Jewish writer, quotes the Waidhofer Resolution. It said:
Every son of a Jewish mother, every human being with Jewish blood in its veins, is born without honour and must therefore lack in every decent human feeling. Such a person cannot differentiate between what is pure and what is dirty. Ethically he is the lowest of the low. It follows from this that contact with a Jew dishonours; hence any contact with a Jew must be avoided. It is impossible to offend a Jew and therefore no Jew can demand satisfaction for any insult he may have experienced.
One Jewish student, a member of the German-Austrian Students’ Organization, proudly walking about Vienna university sporting the blue cap and ivory-handled black ebony stick which was the sign of membership, was the young Theodor Herzl. The impact of the Waidhofer Resolution on the thoughts of the future founding father of the state of Israel went very deep. He resigned from his fraternity. It was his first step on the road to Zionism.
It is unlikely that young Julie from Czernowitz knew about the Waidhofer Resolution. She was captivated by life in the metropolis, so different from provincial Czernowitz. The glamour of the evening scene in front of the Opera House was, if anything, even surpassed by the view from her window during the daytime. From her flat on Opernring one could watch almost the whole length of the famous ‘Corso’, those five or six hundred metres of pavement, café terraces and luxury shops on that section of the Ring which starts at the corner of the Opera Square and leads past the elegant Hotel Bristol to the end of Akademiestrasse. There, from eleven o’clock in the morning till lunchtime, elegant Vienna strolled, heel-clicked, hand-kissed, flirted. The most delicious intrigues began on this short stretch of pavement with glances bold or shy, with smiles half-hidden, but, oh, so meaningful, with whispers of promise or of despair.
[ . . . ]
It is easy to record the few facts I know about Grandmother Julie: where and when she was born and married, where and when she died. But the facts are less than nothing. I knew and remember an old lady. But who was this woman when she was twenty, thirty, forty? I see her before my eyes on her last visit to our flat. I was ill at the time, with measles or chickenpox, one of those illnesses one has at the age of nine or ten. Grandmother took a good ten minutes to walk up the two flights of stairs. Her legs, tightly laced in black half-length boots, could hardly support the weight of her huge body. Painfully she puffed her way up step by step. Finally, on my mother’s arm, the old lady arrived at my bedside. There she was, dressed in a long, black silk dress, a black bonnet pinned to her grey hair, fighting to get her breath back as she settled in the chair by my bedside. She had brought me a present. One of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories. I adored Doctor Dolittle, and at that moment I adored my grandmother for bringing me this lovely book. Julie was my ‘number one’ grandmother, and not only because she, on the whole, provided better if less expensive presents than my mother’s mother, who was the ‘rich’ granny, while Julie was the ‘poor’ one. There were also other reasons. Most important, I could talk to Grandmother Julie, or rather she knew how to talk to me. Indeed, much of what I remember about the family comes from tales she told me. But also on other subjects she could talk in a way that aroused and held the interest of a little boy.
Extract from Last Waltz in Vienna, Part One
© The Estate of George Clare, 1980
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