Exodus from Vienna

Fault Lines
by David Pryce-Jones
Criterion Books, 2015, 364 pages, $24.95
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While living in Czechoslovakia for six months in 1994 after the collapse of communism, I became aware of a group of aristocratic families spread over Central Europe, the Kinskys, Harrachs, Lobkovitzes and others, some returning to claim their palaces and castles around Prague. One of them, Prince Karl Schwarzenberg, became Foreign Minister in President Havel’s government. In parallel with them there existed in Central Europe a group of assimilated Jewish families who had made fortunes as Europe industrialised in the nineteenth century. On his mother’s side David Pryce-Jones came from a family of this kind. His great-grandfather, Gustav Springer of Vienna, created a baron by Emperor Franz Joseph, had accumulated such an immense fortune from coal and railways he could afford to hire his own train, and to send his shirts to Paris to be laundered. The family owned a grand house in central Vienna and another next to the Emperor’s Schönbruun Palace on the city’s outskirts. In Paris their town house was next to the President’s Élysée Palace, and their country house was formerly the abbot’s residence at a Cistercian monastery. These Jewish families had business interests and houses spread across the continent, in this case horse studs in Hungary, farms in Slovakia, businesses in Austria and France, and holidays in the Tyrol.

Baron Springer’s daughter, Mitzi, married first a French Jew and then an English gentile, a representative progress as these families often moved westward from Austro-Hungary to France and England as they assimilated. Western Europe had higher esteem and was more secure than places further east. Mitzi’s decision to marry out of the Jewish community was not uncommon at the time. The succeeding generations of these families could not normally hope to marry into the old aristocracy, but their daughters could marry into the rising Europe-wide cultural aristocracy. The new artistic establishment, with its raffish bohemian outliers and fashionistas, determined high taste in the twentieth century. This was a neat solution—the wives had security and the husbands cultural cachet.

One of Mitzi’s daughters, Thérèse, David Pryce-Jones’s mother, married Alan Pryce-Jones in Vienna in 1934. The Welsh Pryce-Jones family had business and political roots. The great-grandfather had built up his draper’s business into an international trading company, the Royal Welsh Warehouse, which pioneered mail-order marketing along the lines of Sears Roebuck. Alan, a novelist and travel writer, became for a decade after the Second World War editor of the Times Literary Supplement, close to the top of the English cultural tree.

Between the wars this well-off set lived fortunate but frivolous lives which David Pryce-Jones vividly recreates from recollections and family letters. Louche parties in London were all the rage. Even better was hopping into a roadster and driving at high speed through France to the sunny Riviera, where the ménages of Somerset Maugham and Cyril Connolly, with Noel Coward and others in tow, set the tone. This was what we know today as celebrity culture.

David had a grandfather, two uncles (a Springer and a Rothschild), and a father-in-law who were all barons. The index of this book reads in part like extracts from the Almanac de Gotha, Debrett’s Peerage, and The Tatler and Country Life. Once when David was staying at a Welsh family retreat, Svetlana Stalin was in residence and Princess Margaret popped in. In his early days at Magdalene College he had Greta Garbo as a guest on the lawns. The college master, accompanied by Peggy Ashcroft, came across anxious to meet the famous film actress, but averse to publicity, she slipped sway. At a party after the war Enoch Powell, Cyril Connolly, Sacheverell Sitwell and Jascha Heifetz were among those present. Such gatherings were all in a day’s work.

Mitzi’s first husband was bisexual. When he died she, remarkably, married his gay lover. David’s father, Alan, was gay all his life (Harold Nicolson was one of his early lovers) except for the bisexual period of his short marriage—his wife, nicknamed Poppy, died young at thirty-nine. The Jewish wives had to rationalise these marriages by saying gay man were charming, courteous and no threat. But the apologias didn’t fully work—Poppy was given to fits of unexplained weeping. There was a lot of neuralgia leading to depression around, partly caused by having plenty of money but nothing much to do in life.

More major worries were the multiple fault lines of the book’s title. The family was Central European moving to Western Europe, business marrying into culture, Jewish moving to Christian or agnostic, upper class moving to déclassé, heterosexual but accommodating homosexuals. Together these strains threatened to tear the family apart. Hitler delivered the final blow, as the extended family moved to their houses and businesses in France as a refuge, and then desperately fled to England at the last moment in the early 1940s.

Among the many family members whose lives are recalled in this memoir four portraits stand out, two sympathetic ones of women, and two unfavourable ones of men. Mitzi, David’s Viennese grandmother, kept the family going, supporting her children through recurrent family crises while managing a vast business empire. Her two marriages were not a recipe for success or peace of mind. Her long life, 1886 to 1978, saw unimaginable changes in Europe, many of which affected her disastrously, but she never wilted, until near the end when as a Christian she succumbed to religious mania. David’s mother Poppy comes across as innocent, lovable but unhappy, not seeking her own ends like some others in the family, and finally a victim of her marriage, and of a cancer which rapidly overcame her. Her early death left the young David, who was close to her, to make his own way in an increasingly difficult family and security situation.

The portrait of his father must have been the most difficult for the author to handle. In it he maintains detachment, but the facts are hard to face. His father had no firm core, being weak, indolent, fashion-conscious, a personality who sought luxury but avoided pressure, and became as a result a failed writer and husband. David could never work out whether his opaque father admired or envied his own successful career as a writer. Behind the filial loyalty the reader senses the son was appalled by his father’s lifestyle. But with the portrait of Baron Elie de Rothschild, who married David’s aunt, the gloves are off. He is shown to be a ruthless, domineering personality, who won’t be brooked as he, the lawyer dispersing the family fortune after Mitzi’s death, sequesters part of it for himself: “a forceful, lawless and very rich man was on the loose”.

Like Hal Porter in his autobiography, the young David adopts the role of watcher, as growing up entails making sense of a dysfunctional background. He reacts by becoming serious, not frivolous, normal, not bohemian, and a successful writer. So far from revelling in the fashions of the day, he disdains during his undergraduate years the standard Left groupthink of the post-war decades. Isaiah Berlin, whose family had fled from Riga after the Russian Revolution, agrees with him on this privately, but won’t say so publicly for fear of offending certain sections of public opinion. David becomes a journalist covering, among other events, the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, the US counter-culture of the 1970s, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s. As well as working for newspapers like the London Financial Times, he engages in higher journalism by writing for Encounter, the Spectator, Commentary, Quadrant and Roger Kimball’s New Criterion, publisher of this book. He becomes an articulate defender of Israel, and part of a worldwide network of those who, during the Cold War and subsequently, have effectively defended Western values at times when they have been under attack.

I happened to have recently read Alexander Waugh’s equally enthralling The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. The similarities are remarkable—another assimilated Viennese Jewish family who made a fortune in industry but who in later generations became shattered and scattered, some of whose members moved to Western Europe, to Christianity, to gay life, and to the arts and intellectual pursuits. Both books provide us with unforgettable insights into less known but important components of European society between 1850 to 1950, all the more enthralling because told through family histories rather than through general historical surveys.