Lost world: a Who’s Who of prewar Jewish Vienna

It’s done, finished. It took fifteen years’ hard work to create four stout volumes (or rather three stout volumes and one rather slimmer tome) totalling 5,370 pages. The book we have all been waiting for, Georg Gaugusch’s Wer einmal war (“Who Was Once Who”), may now be obtained for the modest price of €650.

All been waiting for? Well, perhaps not, but certainly I have been waiting for it, and plenty of others too. Right up to the last moment there were doubts about whether it would actually see the light of day, given that Austrian publishing is in turmoil. But when the house of Amalthea quailed, Randy Schoenberg — the composer Arnold’s grandson and the lawyer who won a celebrated case against the Belvedere Gallery to return Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to family ownership — tossed a sum into the kitty to ensure the appearance of the last two volumes.

In short (perhaps not the right word here), Wer einmal war is a genealogy of the 500 leading Jewish families of Vienna between 1800 and 1938. Nowhere else in Europe did the Jews prosper as they did in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: a fantastic flowering which came to a terrible end.

The author, Georg Gaugusch, is actually the owner of Jungmann und Neffe, Vienna’s most prominent tailor. It adjoins Sacher’s Hotel, between the two cultural poles of the Opera House and the Albertina. It surprises many to learn that Gaugusch is not Jewish; his family acquired the shop from Jews in the 1940s. The author is neither tailor nor historian: by training he’s a chemical engineer. In the cellars of the shop, however, he found an archive of its pre-war customers, many of whom were rich Jews. This he turned into a database, which became the starting point for the book. He befriended the archivist at the Synagogue, Wolf-Erich Eckstein, who has been a pillar of support for him. He also worked in the Adler genealogical society, with its library of cuttings, and it was there that I met him when he was just starting out, and dined with him that night. The next day I found him at my elbow in the Municipal Archives. I was looking at my great-great-grandfather’s will. He picked it up and weighed it in his hands – “very contested”, he said, and smiled.

The first volume (A – K) was published twelve years ago. L – R followed in 2016. Covid proved a help in that it meant less work in the shop, and he was able to complete both the mighty S – T and the lighter U – Z this year.  He has now achieved his goal of producing a “prosopography”, or collective portrait, of the 500 leading families of the Jewish élite or “Grossbürgertum”.

There were just a handful at first: some were “protected” Jews, such as the Arnsteins, patrons of Mozart. Real change only took place after the 1848 Revolution, but most Jews still had to live outside the old city walls in the Leopoldstadt, a district now rendered famous by Sir Tom Stoppard’s latest play. That limitation broke down with Austria’s defeat in the war against Prussia in 1866. The door was left ajar and the Hungarian Jews came in. My great-great-grandfather was one. In 1872 he established the “Maison” or Modehaus Zwieback, one of the three most important department stores in the city until the arrival of Hitler’s troops in 1938.

In the decade from 1860, the Jewish community grew from a little over 6,000 to 40,000. By 1900 it was nearer 150,000. It reached its greatest extent, some 200,000 souls (8.6% of the city population), just before the Great War. At first there were bankers: Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, Ephrussi, Gutmann, Taussig and Weisweiler; some, like the Gomperz family, Todescos and Wertheimsteins, acquired fabulous wealth and built palaces in Vienna’s new Ringstraße boulevard. Then came the industrialists and the cloth-merchants, many from Bohemia and Moravia, but also from Hungary. The last Jews to arrive were from the shtetl lands of Galicia (now in Ukraine) and beyond. By that time Russian pogroms in the east were exerting pressure on largely agrarian communities to flee west, but few of these poor Jews aspired to join the Viennese élite.

The Viennese Jews did fantastically well. Gaugusch’s book brings home the sheer scale of ennoblement. At the basic level, a Jew might aspire to become an “Edler” (noble). A little more impressive was “Ritter” (knight) or the even more prestigious “Freiherr” (baron), permitting entry into Vienna’s house of lords. All three afforded the title-bearer the particle “von” (or “de” in Hungary – where it was said to be easier to obtain). One thinks of the nouveau-riche Edler von Faninal in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. The librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, knew his onions: his Jewish grandfather had been ennobled as an Edler. For the Hofmannsthals, it was not even the end of their social escalation: Hugo’s son Raimund married an Astor (the former Princess Obolensky) and later a daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey. Other upwardly mobile Viennese married into top international Jewish families: the Rothschilds (naturally), the Morpurgos (barons from Trieste), Nissim de Camondos and Cahen d’Anvers.

Only a handful of Jews were ennobled as army officers, resembling the Trotta family in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March. The war hero Wolf Bardach took thirty-eight years to reach the rank of captain first class. He was ennobled when he was made a simple captain and thereafter styled himself Bardach von Chlumberg. He died in 1911. His widow committed suicide in 1938. Wilhelm Hecht von Eleda actually made major general, forty years after joining up as a squaddie. Unlike Bardach, he converted before his ennoblement.

The titles they chose for themselves were occasionally comic. Many adhered to the Austrian formula of embedding the surname in the fiefdom, as in the gentile composer Ditters von Dittersdorf, so we see Hofmann von Hofmannsthal or Hönig von Hönigsberg. Families like Pollaks and Poppers had endless titles scattered over their various branches. My favourite must be Backofen von Echt, which sounds like an advertisement for cookers.

Another striking aspect of the Jewish elite was the level of conversion. Rich Austrian Jews reveal themselves as pragmatic beyond anything else. It is another trait highlighted in Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Lots of grand gentile families were on their uppers. In France they talked of “redorer son blazon” (regilding your coat of arms). Good connections were worth a Mass. Elsewhere conversion may have been a means to get round a numerus clausus in some branch of endeavour: Gustav Mahler converted in order to direct the court orchestra. The numbers of Jews in the professions were legally limited, but rules weren’t always enforced.

My great-grandfather’s jewellery shop in the Graben was not only by appointment to the Shah of Persia — it was a “Hof und Kammerlieferant” (purveyor to the imperial court and household). The household was supposed to be reserved for Catholic tradesmen, but my great-grandfather was no ordinary Jew: he served on the board of the Jewish Community. These new converts adopted Christian names or tweaked their surnames. “Adalbert” Seligmann, for instance, was an academic painter who painted friezes for my great-great aunt Ella, the mistress of the gentile composer Franz Schmidt.

Once they had achieved success, many Jewish families patronised the arts and gentile artists were glad to work for them. Klimt painted several, not just Adele Bloch-Bauer. Laura Wärndorfer, who married my grandfather’s first cousin Ludwig Zirner, was the niece of Fritz Wärndorfer, founder of the Wiener Werkstätte (the equivalent of the Guild and School of Handicraft), a patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and owner of Klimt’s Pallas Athena. Laura’s mother-in-law Ella patronised Friedrich Ohmann, architect of the glorious art nouveau Stadtpark and much more. The most famous Viennese architect of his generation, Otto Wagner, began his career by building the Orthodox Synagogue in Budapest and he later worked for Samuel Ritter von Hahn. Otto Marmorek was another prominent architect, and himself a well-connected Jew.

In the second and third generation, Jews began to excel in the arts and sciences: Freud is the most famous, but the grander families were able to field the writers Stefan Zweig (son of a rich cloth-merchant), Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg (actually Engländer – one of the first families to settle in Vienna after the middle ages), the philosopher Karl Popper, the economist Ludwig von Mises and the scientist Lise Meitner.

Fortunes declined after 1914. The Viennese starved during the war. The relatively philosemitic Emperor Francis Joseph died in 1916, and was succeeded by his great-nephew Charles, who stood down in 1919. There was hyperinflation and many Jewish families had to mortgage and remortgage. The Creditanstalt, a leading Viennese bank, collapsed in 1931, ruining many more. By the time of Hitler’s Anschluss, most Jewish fortunes had already been wiped out. When the Nazis crossed the border on 12 March 1938, the gloves were off. The Viennese population had long resented the power and prominence of the Jews. There was an outpouring of hatred even before German troops reached the capital on the 13^th. The cultural historian Egon Friedell (Friedmann) threw himself out of a window on 16 March. His sister Elsa shot herself.

Most packed their bags and left as soon as they could find a country to let them in. A few went to Palestine, but Zionism was in general more popular with the eastern Jews. The élite headed for London or New York.  Of those who failed to get out, more than 60,000 were murdered. Few came back in 1945, although the Mautner (von) Markhof family is still prominent, and I know a charming Ritter von Frank who has returned to live in Lower Austria after an impoverished boyhood in Cheshire.

Wer einmal war is not exactly a fun book. It was and is intended to be a purely scientific study. Each family gets an essay covering its activities, then the details of births, marriages and deaths are listed as well as their networks. Jewish traders worked closely with the people they trusted most: their families in Bohemia, Moravia or Hungary. Only at the highest level of banking were the ties more likely to be dynastic. The book contains no tittle-tattle: it is quite simply a vital work of reference to this lost world. The last volume was particularly poignant to me, as Zirner and Zwieback both begin with “Z”. Zwieback is the penultimate entry.

On 1 September 2020, a law was promulgated in Austria allowing the descendants of Jews and non-Jews persecuted by the Nazis to become citizens while retaining whatever nationality they had taken out in exile. Previously they often needed to renounce their acquired nationality to become Austrian. The consul in London told me that his government expects around 27,000 people worldwide to take up the offer. Maybe a few of the old élite will be among them? For them, Gaugusch’s book will be the perfect starting point for discovering who they once were.

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