My Mother, Lisa Zirner
(13 April 1927 – 9 May 2024), A Memoir, Part 1
Here follows Part 1 of memoir of my mother, Lisa Zirner.
On the face of it, my mother, Lisa Zirner, was the product of a most unlikely union. How it ever came to pass is a mystery, and one which we are unlikely to solve. There are just two certainties: My grandparents married in Paris on 13 November 1926, and Lisa was born in Vienna on 13 April 1927.
Lisa’s father, Felix Zirner, was an Austrian Jew, born in Vienna on 10 January 1905. His parents were ‘Max’ (Marton) and Gisela. Max was jeweller by appointment to both the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph and the Shah of Persia. He was also on the board of the 200,000 -strong Jewish community.
His wife was born Gisela Zwieback, the eldest surviving child of the industrialist Ludwig Zwieback, another purveyor to the court, Imperial Commercial Counsellor and Knight of the Russian Order of St Anna, who had founded several department stores in Vienna since his arrival from Bonyhad near Szekszárd in Hungary in 1872. The flagship was the Modehaus or ‘Maison’ Zwieback in the Kärntnerstrasse which was often compared to Liberty in London’s Regent Street. Max Zirner also came from Bonyhad and it is probable the two were already related. Both became millionaires at a time when such wealth was rare in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when you could still live a genteel life on around 3,000 crowns a year.
Much of what we know about the Zirners’ home life comes from the writings of the feminist novelist Gina Kaus, who married their eldest son Josef or ‘Pepi’. When Gina met the Zirners, they were at the summit of their fortunes. They lived in the Villa Zirner in Hietzing, close to the imperial summer palace at Schönbrunn. A copy of Michelangelo’s naked ‘David’ met you in the hall. There was a music room and two rooms filled with books in leather jackets. They had a car when few people had cars, a chauffeur and five indoor servants. They also possessed a summer house in St Gilgen on the Mondsee in the Salzkammergut.[1]
Gina did not think Max had married for love. Gisela confessed to being ‘short and fat’ and that her daughter was ‘also not pretty.’[2] Even in her youth, Gisela had not been an attractive woman: she had a squint. Gina Kaus tells us that in her family, Gisela was referred to affectionately as ‘the Old Hen.’ Max had learned to love her, helped, perhaps by the fact she had arrived bearing a large dowry but also by her good sense of humour, good taste and all-round cultural progressiveness. There were rumours that Max occasionally betrayed his wife, but if this was true, Gina says he was remarkably discrete, because he always came home after work.
Max and Gisela’s children were delivered in two batches: Kapellmeister Josef Zirner was born in 1889. He might have satisfied the aspirations of his assimilated Viennese Jewish family by becoming a rich lawyer, but at the last moment he switched to music, serving as a repetiteur first in Hamburg and later an assistant conductor at the Opera House in Breslau. Gisela, however, did not object and she was proud that Pepi had abandoned the law for music. Pepi married a poor Jewish girl from the 9th Bezirk called Regina Wiener,[3] who later achieved fame as Gina Kaus. Gina’s descriptions of the Zirner household are to be found in her novel Die Schwestern Kleh of 1933 and in her autobiography Und was für ein Leben of 1979. When the First World War broke out, Josef joined the King of Saxony’s Third Dragoons as an ensign or ‘Kadettaspirant.’ In 1915 he was mortally wounded fighting the Russians in the Bukovina. He died in the arms of his best friend Georg Fröschl, who as ‘George Froeschel’ was to become an Oscar-winning screenwriter for films like Mrs Miniver, Waterloo Bridge and Random Harvest. Josef was posthumously awarded a Silver Tapferkeitsmedaille First Class for bravery.
Katharina (‘Kati’) was born in 1890 and became a painter after studying with Anton Faistauer. She joined the ‘Freie Bewegung’ (Free Movement) group with Friede Salvendy. She was also smitten by the Buddhist-inspired teachings of theosophy. In her autobiography, Gina Kaus tells us that in 1912, Kati bore an illegitimate child to a married man in Paris. Concealed behind the saintly name of ‘Bonifazius’, she kept the boy in a home in nearby Klosterneuburg. Kati had a friend called Wanda pay all Bonifazius’s bills because Kati’s parents didn’t want to know. The story of Bonifazius reemerged with wondrous alterations in Die Schwestern Kleh.
There was a fat dowry offered for any half-way suitable man who would take Kati off Max and Gisela’s hands, but Kati refused them all. Kati and Wanda were inseparable and it was suggested they were lesbians. Wanda was also a painter, also unmarried, and also getting on in years. Gisela hated her, as she thought Wanda the reason why she had no grandchildren. By 1926, when Lisa was conceived, the thirty-six-year-old Kati finally agreed to marriage. The lucky man was the Latvian Jewish legal-clerk-turned-painter Dr Rudolf Rapaport (he later changed his surname to ‘Ray’). The Old Hen was so excited that she agreed to fund a year-long trip to India as a wedding present on condition Wanda was not told. The trip turned out to be fatal. Kati died in Kasauli in the Himalayas shortly after giving birth to a paraplegic son called Martin ‘Ray’. Like ‘Bonifazius’ Martin Ray was ‘hidden’ in Klosterneuburg where he was looked after by Rapaport’s doctor sister Eugenie together with her surgeon husband Sigurd Andermann.
Gisela Zirner had no more children for thirteen years until 1903, when her second son Walter was born. Max probably needed an heir to take over the business, and it didn’t look like being Pepi. Walter became a jeweller and married a Jewish girl called Lilly Hartmann who converted to Anglicanism in the Anglican chapel in Vienna in 1938. His second wife was a Maria Eichinger, a Bavarian Catholic he married shortly before the birth of his daughter (also called) Gisela in 1934. Felix was Gisela Zirner’s last child. He was born in Vienna two years later. It seems likely that Felix was educated in Hietzing and it has always been said that he trained as a jeweller in his father’s shop on the Graben. I am not aware of any details of Felix’s education. His friend and my godfather the archaeologist Dr Alfons Barb said that he used to make jewellery in the vaults under the shop in the Graben. Barb must have known both the two younger Zirner boys from school.
Lisa’s mother was the English Catholic Katharine Agnes Rose Bacon, daughter of the academic painter John Henry Frederick Bacon MVO ARA (1866 – 1914) and his wife Mary ‘Minnie’ Elizabeth White. My great-grandfather was the son of a lithographer and was a successful painter who trained at the Royal Academy Schools. He was chosen to record the coronation of George V. Bacon’s family were mostly fishermen from Wivenhoe in Essex. His branch converted to Catholicism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Bacon met his wife in Broadway in Worcestershire, which was something of an artists’ colony at the time. ‘Gangy,’ as my mother called her grandmother, came from a recusant family long protected by the Lygons, the local magnates in the centuries before Catholic Emancipation. One of her uncles was a Benedictine monk. Gangy was the village schoolmistress and lived in St Joseph’s Cottage next to the Catholic church.[4]
John Henry Bacon was born in lowly Walworth, but by 1908, Katharine’s father was living in some luxury at 11 Queen’s Gate Terrace, a huge house with a studio at the back still visible today. He also had a country house in Harwell, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) where Katharine was born. His daughter Christine told me that Bacon lined his children up once a week after Sunday lunch and fed each of them a sugar lump dipped in his coffee. That was the only time he took any notice of them.[5] Lisa’s grandfather died aged forty-eight in 1914. Christine told me that King George had ordered that straw be put down in Queen’s Gate Terrace to lessen the noise of traffic in his last days. I couldn’t say if that were true or false. He left heaps of debts. Recently I found a 1914 Christies’ sales catalogue of his last works on the Internet, a desperate ploy to raise cash for the stricken family. His widow together with the six surviving children (one died in infancy) had to move into a modest suburban house at 16 Duke’s Avenue, Chiswick, conveniently close to a big, red-brick Catholic Church. Gangy survived as best she could on a small, grace and favour pension from the crown.
The Bacons were rigidly Catholic. Almost the only means of escape from the daily grind of prayers and mass was flight. My great-aunt Joan, who studied chemistry at Leeds before becoming a nurse, managed to flee to the United States. Joan’s two sisters Frieda and Christine remained chained to the Church, Frieda working for the Servite nuns, and Christine keeping house for a monsignor Long, who had long been parish priest at the church at the top of Duke’s Avenue. The two surviving boys were allowed to roam a little further from their mother’s apron-strings. After colour-blindness debarred him from flying in the RAF, Lawrence became a car-salesman in Gerrard’s Cross, but Bernard managed to read law at Cambridge and pass the ICS exam. He rose high in the service but his career was cut short by Independence. He returned from India to become an in-house lawyer for Shell. Laurence was the only boy to produce an heir, a girl called Caroline who my great-aunts always held up to us as a shining light. She also possibly had the virtue of being free of Jewish blood!
Katharine Agnes Rose Bacon was born in Pillar House, Harwell on 10 December 1897. After a schooling at the Convent of the Assumption in Ramsgate, Katharine proceeded to art-school. If I remember rightly this was the Hammersmith College of Art, founded in 1890, and not at the Slade School as was often said in my childhood. It was always maintained that she won a travelling scholarship, but I assume that she was too old to have been still travelling on a scholarship at twenty-eight? My mother said she had been working for various newspapers doing illustrations and cartoons. Great-aunt Christine told me on one occasion that Katharine had been in Vienna on a mission for Martin Travers, the church architect, but I contacted an expert on Travers, who told me that he had never seen a reference to Katharine Bacon in Travers’ papers.
The meeting between Felix and Katharine must have occurred in Vienna, but it is hard to imagine how. In Vienna, Felix would have lived with his mother Gisela and during the day, he would have been busy working in the shop in the centre of the city. After Max’s death, Gebrüder Zirner was owned by Gisela, Walter and Felix. On a yellowing paper bag, my mother once wrote down a number of Katharine’s addresses for me, accompanied by dates, while refusing to hand over the letters she’d taken them from. Two of them show Katharine to have been in Vienna both in 1924 and 1926. She lived at III Neulinggasse 14, and after that c/o ‘Baronin Cornaro Atelier’. Katharine seemed to come and go, however, and in 1925 she was back in Duke’s Avenue, then in the rue de l’Estrapade in Paris. Was Katharine living from painting? Or did she attend art classes? Gangy would not have had anything to spare to support her. Katharine had somehow found a way to break loose and spend protracted periods in Vienna and Paris. One thing is certain; however, Katharine could not have returned to her mother in London unmarried and pregnant.
My mother said that Felix met Katharine in Vienna, and Katharine had fled to Paris after they had slept together; and that Felix had followed in hot pursuit once he realised Katharine was pregnant. Felix also managed to escape to Paris for a while to see Katharine in the summer of 1926. There was a big discrepancy in age: at the time Lisa was conceived Felix was twenty-one and Katharine twenty-eight. One possibility is that Katharine had met Felix’s elder sister, the painter Kati, who was older than Katharine and establishing her own career as an artist. Lisa always suspected that her mother was a lesbian and I recall seeing some photographs of her kissing and cuddling a woman in what might have been a suggestive way. There was also a tenuous link through the Wiener Frauenakademie, headed by Adalbert Seligmann, who had painted the murals in Gisela’s sister Ella’s music room commissioned to celebrate the success of Ella’s lover Franz Schmidt’s Second Symphony.[6] Another possibility was that Katharine taught Felix English. Felix spoke English to Lisa, for example, who called her father ‘Morning’ because that’s what he said when he came to see her after the marriage broke up. Katharine certainly gave English lessons after Lisa was born, and she may well have earned extra cash from teaching when she was in Vienna in 1924 and 1926. It could also be possible that Kati suggested Felix as a pupil?
Given Katharine’s strict background it is very unlikely that she had any experience of the opposite sex, and Felix was still very young, but my mother was nonetheless conceived in the summer of 1926, so something went right. Whether the act of sex took place in Vienna or Paris is impossible to say but we can safely assume that Felix was told once Katharine knew she was pregnant, and that Felix went to Paris to offer to marry her. She accepted and the ceremony took place in the town hall of the 14e Arrondissement on 13 November 1926.
The entry in the book contains some interesting information: Felix gave his address as the Villa Zirner at 9 Neue Weltgasse, Vienna, and previously 24 rue des Fossés St Jacques in Paris. His profession was entered as ‘jeweller’. As for Catherine (sic) Agnes Rose Bacon, she was an ‘artiste peintre’, and living at 29 rue Campagne Première. There was no marriage contract. The witnesses were the journalist Elisabeth Jaustein and Rose Berkten (no profession). No one from either the bride or the groom’s families attended the wedding. The address in the rue des Fossés St Jacques was presumably where he lived in the summer and Felix might have stayed there for a while before returning to the Villa Zirner. The building is now a centre for psychiatric medicine built in the thirties or forties. In those days it might have been a university hostel or a hotel used by students, and consequently largely empty in the summer months. Most of the places nearby are in some way attached to the local universities or the Ecole Normale Supérieur. It seems unlikely the jeweller Felix was following a course. It is much more likely he had come to see Katharine.
Katharine’s address was the famous Hôtel Istria. Today a plaque records celebrated residents, some of whom must have been there at the same time as Katharine: Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse, Satie, Rilke, Mayakovski, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. A couple of years later, Aragon wrote
‘Ne s’eteint ce qu’il brilla…
Lorsque tu descendais de l’Hôtel Istria.
Tout était différent rue Campagne Première
En mille neuf cent vingt-neuf, vers l’heure du midi…’
Felix brought his bride back to Vienna, where they lived in the single-storey chauffeur’s house round the corner in the Eitelbergergasse. Katharine was already suffering from the TB that would kill her, and according to Lisa, not well enough to have her baby at home; so, Lisa was born in the Sanatorium Hera in the Löblichgasse in Vienna’s Ninth District on 13 April 1927. She was delivered by a midwife called Anna Jelinek and baptised on the 22nd in the parish church in Lichtenthal, the famous ‘Schubert Church,’ by the priest Anton Fischer. The witnesses were Bernardina Gruber, the director of a Catholic institute in Purkersdorf (near Hietzing) and Katharine’s rebellious sister Joan.
Photographs Lisa sent me show her as a baby of about a year old in the arms of her grandmother, Gangy, who had not been present at either her parents’ wedding or her baptism; so, some sort of reconciliation must have taken place. It is not clear whether the picture was taken in England or Austria, but it is likely that Katharine brought Lisa home to show her family. Others are of a slightly bigger Lisa with her mother and Austrian grandmother in the garden at 9 Neue-Weltgasse. After Pepi’s death his widow Gina lived with the family at the Villa Zirner until she agreed to being ‘adopted’ as a daughter by the financier Josef Kranz – or ‘Onkel Josef’, as my great-grandfather called him. Kranz’s brother Siegmund had married Malwida Zwieback, Gisela Zirner’s middle sister and had thereby become a part of the Zirner family. Kranz wanted Gina for a mistress, but the latter insisted on a different arrangement and wriggled out of any of the more onerous tasks she was expected to perform by claiming a semi-permanent headache.
Even after she left Kranz and married Otto Kaus, Gina remained close to both her former mother-in-law and sister-in-law Kati. The fact that Gisela didn’t get on well with her new daughter-in-law is recorded in Gina Kaus’s autobiography. Gisela told her about the ‘English woman’ in the house who did not approve of her mother-in-law carrying her daughter around for her own pleasure: “My daughter-in-law is a bad woman,” said the Old Hen, “She’s such a pretty baby, but I am hardly allowed to look at her.”[7]
Meanwhile the war, hyperinflation and the collapse of the Bodencreditanstalt bank had taken its toll: the fortunes of the Zirners had dwindled since Max’s death in 1918. Max left around 3.4 million crowns to Gisela. When Gina visited her former mother-in-law in 1926, there was no more car and only two servants worked at the Villa Zirner. Gisela spent part of her time on the French Riviera. In 1927, Gina says she had a stroke, which stopped her travelling. The stroke permanently damaged her brain, affecting her speech, so that ‘k’s became ‘m’s for example. She died in 1930, when the estate was worth only a tenth of what it might have fetched a decade before; what’s more Martin Rapaport was hammering on the door claiming his wife’s dowry for his son.[8] Effectively ruined, Walter and Felix stopped trading. On 13 August 1937, the firm was removed from the city’s commercial register.[9]
This may have been the moment when Felix and Katharine split up: the Villa Zirner was worth 160,000 Schillings, the rest of Gisela’s estate about the same.[10] Felix would have got half of what was left over after they paid off Rapaport. My mother said it became a school, where she was a confused pupil, wondering why all these children were in her grandmother’s house. There was a new address nearby: Reichgasse 52, walking distance from the Neue-Weltgasse. Later she boarded at a Catholic school and remembered having to bathe in a special costume to preserve her modesty in front of the other little girls.
After Ludwig Zwieback’s death in 1906, the family department store was run by Alexander Zirner, Max Zirner’s younger brother, who had married the youngest of the Zwieback girls, Ella. Following Alexander’s demise in 1924, Ella ran it single-handedly, eventually bringing in her (and Franz Schmidt’s) son Ludwig Zirner in as her managing director. Alexander was buried with great pomp in the Jewish Section of the Zentralfriedhof, in a tomb designed by the great art nouveau architect Friedrich Ohmann.[11] Ohmann had redesigned the department store in 1906, and at the time of Alexander’s death he had been fitting out the restaurant to a new design. Ludwig wanted to be a musician like his cousin Pepi, but gave in to his mother who handled him roughly. Ella had always designed and modelled clothes for the shop and she drew many of the pictures used in the firm’s advertising. Despite the grim economic climate of the twenties, she lived in grand style with an estate in Slovenia, a house in Mauer in the southern suburbs of Vienna and a palatial flat next to the Bristol Hotel on the Ring. Ella was increasingly burdened by debt. There was a settlement in 1930 but the department store and the Palais Arnstein (the former stock exchange) next door remained heavily mortgaged to the bank. That year Felix began to work for her as a salesman.[12] Later he went back into business with his brother Walter, but he was still described as a ‘rep’ on papers issued after the Anschluss.
Ella’s fortunes revived, but in 1933, she gave up the restaurant and rented it out to three former officers of the hussars, who, as ‘Zu den drei Husaren’ launched the most fashionable eating house in Vienna.[13] Count Paul Pallfy gave up the lease in 1938 and returned to Slovakia, as he did not wish to continue working in a Nazi Vienna. On 6 April 1938, the restaurant became the property of the Berlin restaurateur Otto Horcher. Jews were no longer allowed to own property.
As for Katharine, she survived at least in part by teaching English over English teas. Her last recorded address in Vienna was I Wallnerstrasse 6. She must also have been increasingly ill with TB, which may have accounted for the decision to send her daughter to board. The sources for Lisa’s life between 1930 and 1935 are largely Lisa, and not always reliable. Part of the problem was that, living mostly with her English mother, Lisa didn’t learn German properly. Lisa was also not musical, and had difficulty learning languages. She expressed some fondness for jazz, but excoriated Beethoven. Her gramophone collection consisted of two LPs: the Mendelssohn Italian Symphony with Schubert’s Unfinished on the flip side, and Sibelius’s Second. I think there was a Sibelius tone poem Finlandia on the other side, but it had been fatally scratched by Monty the cat.
By contrast, her Austrian family was hugely musical: the Kapellmeister Josef Zirner, the concert pianist Ella who travelled with a detached piano keyboard in her luggage, her son Ludwig who taught piano and opera at the state university of Illinois and was one of the spirits behind the Tanglewood Music Festival. Erhard Kranz, Malwida’s youngest son, was a proper prodigy who had lessons from Schoenberg when he was fifteen and later became an accomplished organist who played his instrument in the first Viennese performance of Kodaly’s Psalmus Hungaricus on 6 November 1927. Bartok’s First Piano Concerto was also performed in Vienna for the first time that evening. Erhard disappeared mysteriously in 1933, after marrying a woman he had made pregnant. No one has come up with a convincing explanation as to his fate. Even Walter the jeweller was a music-lover. He washed up in a rain forest in El Salvador, but dreamed of returning to Vienna to attend concerts at the Konzerthaus.
The world she found herself in, living on the fringes of a Jewish family without being a part of it, must have been confusing. It was also a time of great political turbulence, with the development of Austro-Fascism and the Corporate State, the civil war, the shelling of the workers’ flats in Heiligenstadt and the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934. Lisa told us that she was aware of gunfire and street battles, but it is unlikely she knew the cause. Then, in 1935, and probably at death’s door, Katharine took the decision to abandon the Zirners and Vienna and take Lisa home to Chiswick.
Lisa must have travelled on her mother’s passport, but a Foreign Office letter written at the time of her application for naturalisation mentions a ‘Heimatschein des Gatten’ or Felix’s residence permit, dated 27 March 1927.
[1] Kaus, 13. His father-in-law, Ludwig Zweiback also had a house in St Gilgen.
[2] Kaus, 13.
[3] Gina had a half-sister called Stephanie zu Hohenlohe-Waldburg-Schillingsfürst who married a homosexual prince from the Hohenlohe family. She became a favourite of Adolf Hitler, although she was 100% Jewish.
[4] There are still two paintings by JHF Bacon, hung either side of the altar.
[5] Which can’t be entirely true: he painted them, often.
[6] The Nazis removed these pictures from Ella Zirner’s flat. Her grandson, my cousin the actor August Zirner, recuperated them and sold them in Hong Kong.
[7] Kaus, 24.
[8] Rudolf Ray painted a portrait of his son which was illustrated in Stefan Pollatschek, Der Maler Rudolf Rapaport, das Überwirkliche im Porträt, Vienna 1933. Communication from Johanna Tausig, and conversation with Eva Bentzem, who had tended Martin and told me he was unable to lift his head off his pillow.
[9] Kaus, 23, Gaugusch, 5336.
[10] Ibidem.
[11] Ana Zirner, August Zirner, Ella und Laura, von den Müttern unserer Väter, Piper, Munich 2021, 9.
[12] Kauft bei den Juden, 22.
[13] The Zwieback canteen has now been beautifully restored, but the Zs (for Zwieback) were removed from the tops of the columns
.