Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ German, I used to stay in an apartment in the Kaerntnerring that still belonged to Mitzi. Dr Hans Mailath-Pokorny, all his life her man of business for Central Europe, lived in it. He had the challenging features, the moustache, the corpulent figure, and overbearing manner of a Grosz caricature. He had known the German conservative politician Franz von Papen and liked to argue that everything would have come out all right if von Papen had chucked out Hitler instead of Hitler chucking von Papen out. Upstairs in tiny rooms under the roof was Tante Bébé, otherwise Elizabeth d’Italia, lonely and wizened but still quick with repartees. Interrogating her, a Gestapo officer had said, “You are very sarcastic,” to which she replied, “All Jews are sarcastic.” To survive the war she had gone into hiding in Abbasia near Fiume.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Other racehorse owners had the aristocratic names of Kinsky, Esterhazy, Zichy, and Harrach. Could Gustav really have fitted СКАЧАТЬ