Between the ghetto and

the Gotha

Philip Mansel

FANNY VON ARNSTEIN: A DAUGHTER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT, 1758-1818 by Hilde Spiel, translated by Christine Shuttleworth

Berg, £40 , pp. 368 ♦ ienna is the true subect of this fasci- nating biography. Fanny von Arnstein lived in Vienna at the end of the 18th and begin- ning of the 19th century, when it was the capital of the multinational monarchy of the Habsburgs. The 'new Rome', as it was sometimes called, was the rival of Paris and the crossroads of Europe, confident, frivolous, and pro-Jewish.

Fanny Itzig, the daughter of a prosper- ous Jewish businessman of Berlin, moved to Vienna on her marriage to Nathan Adam Arnsteiner in 1776. The chief pleasures in Fanny's life were conversation and society, and she soon opened a salon in their house on the Graben, the Piccadilly of Vienna.

Fanny's salon was her career, and it became a bridge across the abyss between Jews and Christians. Helped by her beauty, and radiant cheerfulness, her salon became as important to Vienna as those citadels of culture, the salons of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin in Paris. She had an ideal husband. Herr von Arnstein (in the greatest court city in Europe, plain `Arnsteiner' soon disappeared) was a banker so rich that they kept 18 servants. Moreover, he was perfectly happy to eat `downstairs' if it suited his wife.

Fanny von Arnstein soon knew 'every- one'. The Emperor Joseph TI stopped to talk to her when he saw her in the park or the ballroom: her pleas may have helped persuade him to issue the Edict of Toleration in 1781, which gave the Jews of Austria greater rights than in any European state, except perhaps the Netherlands. Her guests included Schopen- hauer, Metternich's eminence grise, Friedrich von Gentz, and Admiral Nelson. Mozart lived in her house for eight months in 1782. Even the Papal Nuncio accepted the invitations of the Jewish hostess.

An English visitor called Mrs St George wrote that although

Madame Arnstein [was] a banker's wife and of the second class of noblesse. . . I found there a pleasant society and an easier ton

than in most houses at Vienna. She keeps open house every evening to a few women and all the best company in Vienna as to men. She is a pretty woman with an excellent address.

Among her regular visitors was a member of the grandest family of the Austrian aristocracy, Prince Charles von and zu Liechtenstein. He became Fanny's lover as well, but died during a duel fought with a rival who had wanted to escort Fanny to the opera.

The Arnsteins' ascent received imperial consecration in 1798. In return for his services to the Austrian war effort against France, Fanny's husband became the first unconverted Jew to be made a Freiherr (Baron) of the Holy Roman Empire long before a Rothschild entered the House of Lords in England. The Prince de Ligne, the most amusing man of the 18th century, who had taken refuge in Vienna from the French revolution, called him 'the first Baron of the Old Testament'. The Arnsteins were in a limbo between the ghetto and the Almanach de Gotha — and revelled in their cultural and intellectual freedom.

Fanny von Amstein is a tract for our times, which shows that Europe is behind us as well as in front of us. In Fanny von Arnstein's lifetime, Vienna was a city where people met, talked, loved, or worked irrespective of their national origins. One of Fanny's admirers, Gottlieb Hiller, wrote:

One not infrequently meets Greeks, Russians, Frenchmen and Dutchmen together at her table on a single occasion... these various nations flow together as it were into one European peo- ple, through a common French conversation.

For although Fanny could read in English, Italian, Czech and German, the language of her salon — and her intimate notebooks — was French.

Despite her French culture, like most central Europeans Fanny von Arnstein detested the French Republic and Empire. The Congress of Vienna, when dynastic Europe was put back on its thrones for the next 100 years and France was reduced to its pre-revolutionary frontiers, was Fanny von Arnstein's moment of glory. The ladies as well as the gentlemen of the Viennese nobility finally succumbed to the lure of her Tuesday soirees. With the imperious- ness of a hostess and the Francophobia of an Austrian, she turned on a stray Bonapartist at the beginning of the Hundred Days:

Now, Monsieur, are you not ashamed to be a Frenchman after everything that has just happened? And those traitors Ney and Suchet!

Fanny von Arnstein died in 1818 at the age of 60. The German Romantic writer Varnhagen wrote a tribute which Hilde Spiel calls 'the justification of her whole existence':

The free respected position, removed from the constraints of prejudice, which the adher- ents of the Mosaic faith have enjoyed and now enjoy in Vienna was quite undeniably only won with and through the influence and activity of Frau von Arnstein.

By then, however, 'Christian', antisemitic German nationalism was infecting even great thinkers like Alexander von Humboldt. In 1816 a physics professor at Heidelberg University dared to publish a pamphlet advocating extermination of the Jews.

Few of Fanny's letters survive; the trans- lation does not always flow easily; and there are no illustrations. Nevertheless, this book is a lively recreation of a golden age of Vienna. It is a reminder that, whatever Austria's subsequent aberrations, in 1789- 1814, while most of Europe was trauma- tised by war and revolution, it was a haven of sanity and civilisation.

A Jew who loved Austria so much that she returned to live there after the second world war, Hilde Spiel was the ideal person to write about Fanny von Arnstein. She could sympathise with her heroine's `unrequited love' for Austria, Prussia and German culture, writing that 'the tragedy of German Jewry was anticipated in her'.

Moreover, Hilde Spiel was a multination- al figure, torn between Austria and Eng- land, as Fanny von Arnstein was between Austria and Prussia. A novelist, journalist and playwright, she translated Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden among many others, and wrote an excellent elegy to another glorious epoch in the history of her native city, Vienna's Golden Autumn 1866- 1938 (1987). Hilde Spiel's memoirs, Which World is My World? — a question she never wanted to answer — helped make her a grande dame of Austrian letters. She was a fighter as well as a writer. Two years before her death in 1990, she refused to give the opening address at the Salzburg Festival, in protest at the presence of President Waldheim.

`Fine! Fine! And when we've finished these we'll open that little blue bag!'