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 into such company, or did he stand out and attract envy and resentment? He regularly took Mitzi to his box at the Freudenau racecourse where one day she heard an officer in an adjoining box remark to another, “What a pity the little Springer girl looks so Jewish.” Comte Vasili, for one, observes, “Anti-Semitism is making progress day by day, in all classes of this society.” Dr Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, is remembered for declaring that he decided who was a Jew, and an aphorism of Gustav’s seems a practical response to this kind of discrimination, “Jude muss man sein, aber nicht zum Abattoir” – one must be Jewish though not going into the slaughter house for it. Max Springer had set up and paid for the Jewish orphanage, the Springerische Waisenhaus in the Goldschlagstrasse in the 14th district. Gustav took on the responsibility. For Jewish high holidays he and Mitzi used to attend the synagogue there. Less fortunate Jews made demands on her father and on her, as though Judaism really was a common identity. At a pinch, she might quote with approval the lament of a friend, the Comtesse Fitz James, née Gutmann, “Mes nerfs juifs me font mal,” My Jewish nerves are troubling me. Ibok, a word with no known derivation, was the family code for Jew, used in contexts when that direct and giveaway monosyllable might be better concealed.
A formal photograph was taken in the park of Meidling on Mitzi’s eighteenth birthday. She, her nurse Moumel, and her Scottish governess are the only women among a retinue of well over a hundred men: lawyers and accountants in top hats, clerks in bowler hats, a handful of orphans dressed as page-boys – and in this self-contained circle all have Jewish names with the exception of some foresters and keepers from Czechoslovakia and Hungary in folk costumes.
Singular, set apart by her expectations and the Jewish milieu of her upbringing, Mitzi seems to have protected herself by preserving everything that had a personal bearing from childhood to her death. What an archive she amassed of almost fifty volumes of large thick diaries, correspondence in five languages with many of the German letters respectfully addressed to “Euer Hochwohlgeboren Gnädigste Frau Baronin,” little drawings, scraps, billets doux, telegrams, business dossiers, bank accounts, lawyers’ opinions on the regular forays of the dozen or so governments trying to get their hands on Mitzi’s money through taxes or political chicanery, postcards from the resorts