At bottom my Viennese family found any other way of life than that before 1914 inconceivable, and carried on with it, against the odds. Thus my mother, even when unable to pay the grocery bills, let alone the rent and utilities, always employed servants. Nor were these old retainers, such as Helene Demuth, who is buried with the Karl Marxes in Highgate Cemetery. They were and remained the quintessential ‘servant problem’ of middle-class ladies, an endless succession of young women from agencies who stayed a month or two, ranging from the rare ‘eine Perle’ (a pearl), to the clumsy arrival straight from the country, who had never seen a gas-stove, let alone a telephone. When my mother visited England for the first time in 1925, to take care of her sister Mimi who was then ill in Barrow-in-Furness, she wrote to her other sister, impressed not only with the efficiency, equanimity and lack of fuss with which households were run (so different from Vienna Jewish families …), but that it was done without servants. ‘Here you find ladies who do everything themselves, and have children, and even do all the laundry themselves, and still remain ladies.’2
Even so, she never seriously considered the British option. ‘As someone with years of experience of being broke,’ she wrote to her sister who complained of money troubles in Berlin,
let me give you one major piece of advice, which I urge you to take seriously. Try not ever to admit that you could do without a maid!! In the long run you can’t manage without one anyway, and so it is best to start with the assumption that a maid is just as much a necessity as food or a roof over your head. What you save is nothing compared to the loss in health, comfort, and above all the state of your nerves: and the worse things get, the more you need them. True, just lately I wondered whether to give Marianne notice – not that I could do it before Christmas, it’s too late, and she was always so good – but the only reason I did was that I’m ashamed that she should see that I can’t pay the grocer etc. And, deep down I know perfectly well it is best to grow a thick skin and to keep her. 3
Of all this we knew or understood nothing except that the parents had rows, possibly with increasing frequency – but whose parents do not have rows? – and, in the central European winters, that the rooms were icy. (Had we lived in Britain in the era of coal-fired fireplaces, very nearly the most inefficient form of indoor heating invented, this would not necessarily have been due to lack of money to buy winter fuel.)
Firm and cohesive, partly because of the very precariousness of its material base, the family divided the world, and therefore my life, into two parts: inside and outside. In effect, so far as we children were concerned, the family and its close friends constituted, or determined, the world of adults that I knew as people and not merely as service providers or, as it were, stage extras on the filmset of our life. (It also determined which children would remain permanently part of our lives and we of theirs, like the Gold girls, or the daughter of the Szanas.) The adults I knew consisted almost entirely of relatives, or of the friends of parents and relatives. Thus I have no memory as a person, of the dentist my mother took me to, even though the experience of going there was only too unforgettable, for he was not someone she ‘knew’. On the other hand I remember Doktor Strasser as a real person, presumably because the family knew him and his family. Curiously enough, teachers do not appear to have belonged to the world of individual adults until my last year in Vienna, and only became people with whom I had personal relations, in Berlin.
School was strictly outside. And ‘outside’, lacking adults as real persons, consisted essentially of other children. The world of children, whether ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, was one which the adults did not really understand, just as we did not really understand what they were about. At best, each side of the generation gap accepted what the other side did as ‘how like children’ or ‘that’s what grown-ups do’. Only puberty, arriving in my last year in Vienna, began to undermine the walls between these separate spheres.
Of course the two spheres overlapped. My reading, especially my English reading, was largely supplied by adults, although I found Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which well-meaning relatives sent from London both boring and incomprehensible. On the other hand from an early age I gobbled up the German books on birdlife and animals which I received as presents, and after primary school, plunged into the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, a society for the popularization of the – mainly biological and evolutionary – natural sciences, to which they subscribed for me. We were taken to the theatre from an early age to plays we might enjoy, but which adults also admired – say, to Schiller’s William Tell (but not to Goethe’s Faust), and the works of the early nineteenth-century Viennese popular playwrights – the charming sentimental magic plays of Raimund, the savagely funny comedies of the great Johann Nestroy, whose bitter wit we did not yet understand. But we would be sent with other primary schoolchildren to the morning sessions of films at the local cinema, the long-gone Maxim-Bio, to see shorts of Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, and, more surprisingly, Fritz Lang’s rather longer Nibelungen epic. In my Viennese experience adults and children did not go to the movies together. Again, intellectual children would naturally make their choice among the books on their parents’ and relatives’ shelves, perhaps influenced by what they heard at home, perhaps not. To this extent the generations shared some tastes. On the other hand, the reading material selected for children by our elders was not, in general, supposed to be of serious interest to adults. Conversely, of all adults with whom we had any dealings, only teachers (who disapproved) were even aware of the passionate interest of thirteen-year-olds in the pocket-sized adventures of detectives with invariably English names which circulated in our classes under such titles as Sherlock Holmes the World Detective – no connection with the original – Sexton Blake, Frank Allen, the Avenger of the Disinherited and the most popular of all, the Berlin detective Tom Shark, with his buddy Pitt Strong, who operated out of the Motzstrasse, familiar to readers of Christopher Isherwood, but as remote to Viennese boys as Holmes’s Baker Street.