New York Times, April 2005

Women Who Conquered Europe With Their Wit

'Hail to the most marvelous and witty woman in Vienna,' exclaimed the waltz king, Johann Strauss, one day, falling to his knees before the subject of his admiration. Her name was Berta Zuckerkandl, an art critic and champion of Viennese modernism, a name whose obscurity today contrasts sharply with the enduring fame of many who gathered around her: Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, Maurice Ravel, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to name a few. They all came to her home for one of the liveliest salons of late 19th-century Vienna, credited by one guest as the birthplace of the Vienna Secession. Zuckerkandl was duly proud. 'On my divan,' she once said, 'Austria comes alive.'

At the same time, divans and the salonnières who reigned over them were bringing life to culture and politics in capitals across Europe. The atmosphere of the grand salon has long been mythologized with its witty banter and star-studded guest lists. But as an engaging new exhibition opening today at the Jewish Museum suggests, the story of salons is much more than just tails and top hats, play and repartee. 'The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons calls these gatherings nothing less than central to the development of modernity.'

They were certainly a continuing fixture of European high society, beginning in 17th-century France, when the Marquise de Rambouillet broke with the traditions of the court and invited guests to gather at her home. In the 18th century, salons became incubators of an emerging public sphere. They were places where ideas could be debated, new art, literature and music were consumed, and spirited discussion of politics could take place free of the influence of the court.

And since a charming hostess was at the heart of just about every salon, the gatherings have also been seen as islands of proto-feminism, places where exceptional women could advance their private ambitions at a time when they were largely blocked from public life.

If this was true for women in general, it was especially so for Jewish women, who were doubly marginalized in their societies on the basis of both gender and faith. The new exhibition focuses on 14 such women whose salons ranged in date (from the late-18th through the mid-20th centuries), in location (Berlin, Vienna, London, Paris, Rome, New York and Los Angeles) and in the dominant interests of their guests (politics, art, literature and music).

Some of the featured salonnières are already well known, like Gertrude Stein, whose 'at-homes' on 27 rue de Fleurus were a site of pilgrimage for art lovers hoping to snatch a glimpse of provocative new work, and for snooty Parisians to see, in the words of one chronicler, 'the incredible trash the two gullible Americans had hung on their walls.'

A Fleeting Achievement

But most hostesses profiled in this show are, like Zuckerkandl, fascinating figures little remembered today. The reasons go beyond the obvious social norms that limited their public activities. A good salon, like a good dinner party, is the most fleeting of achievements, and precisely the qualities that made salons so memorable - the conversations, the bons mots, the musical performances, the very ambience itself - disappeared the moment the guests went home.

Still, the curators, Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, have struggled admirably to bring these fabled spaces to life. They have culled documents of the times as well as artifacts from the historical salons, from wine glasses and furniture to letters and artwork. In each room, portraits of the regular salon guests hang in a circle from the ceiling, and an audio guide, perhaps more central here than in most exhibitions, provides memories of the atmosphere and snippets of the conversations, excerpted from letters and diaries.

In a way, each salon offers a prismatic glimpse of a separate moment of European Jewish history. One overarching theme is the ever-shifting relationship between Jews and German culture, a hopeful flirtation that becomes a love affair. Not surprisingly, the earliest Jewish salons begin in late 18th-century Berlin, when Enlightenment ideals had created a space for Jewish participation in society, and within the Jewish world figures like Moses Mendelssohn encouraged secular learning and the rational reform of religious traditions.

The new dream of Jewish-German unity was embodied in the figure of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771-1833). Often referred to simply as Rahel, she was not particularly beautiful or wealthy, as were many other salonnières, but she had a tremendous verbal gift and an eloquent vision of a free society, which she expressed through literally thousands of letters but also through the salon she began holding while still living with her widowed mother.

Rahel was able to draw a remarkable range of guests up into her attic gatherings: Jews and Christians, philosophers, diplomats, actors and poets. Her status on the margins of her society allowed for encounters that were remarkably unscripted and free. They were also short lived, unfortunately, as war against the French broke out in 1806 and resurgent patriotism (and anti-Semitism) spelled the end of Rahel's early salon. And yet, setbacks and advances went hand in hand. Just six years later, in 1812, Jews in Prussia received official emancipation.

The Siblings Mendelssohn

If the ideals of Moses Mendelssohn laid the groundwork for German-Jewish integration, his grandchildren, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, showed just how far this integration could be carried. Their father, Abraham Mendelssohn, was a successful businessman who baptized his children at a young age and provided them with a powerful private education, fueled by a commitment to 'Bildung,' an ideal of self-improvement through broad cultural knowledge that Jews hoped would grant them full entry into German life. Literature and philosophy were central pillars of this education. So was music.

Felix, of course, went on to great renown as a composer, but his talented sister was not permitted a public career. As her father reassured her, 'the joy you manifest when Felix wins applause proves that you would have deserved it equally, had you been in his place.'

In spite of, or perhaps because of, her lack of a public exposure, Fanny convened and performed in one of the liveliest musical salons in Berlin, with as many as 200 guests coming to her Sunday musicales to hear both older works and brand new music, including her own. The guests included the most prominent cultural elite, figures like Hegel, Liszt and Heinrich Heine. Her husband, the court painter Wilhelm Hensel, sketched many of these attendees, and the exhibition includes a collection of his original portraits.

Music fans will appreciate the color provided here by the audio guide, which in addition to musical excerpts relates the story of Paganini's performance at the salon in 1829. Fanny describes him in her diary as having 'the look of an insane murderer and the movements of a monkey ... plumbing the depths of his soul and yet simultaneously ripping the heart out of the poor violin.'

Proust and Straus

The importance of the cultural salons ebbed after the mid-19th century, but the exhibition still highlights 'the literary salon,' including Ada Leverson's gatherings in London of the 1890's, where the most famous guest was Oscar Wilde. Geneviève Straus's salon in Paris is also featured, but it receives only a short film that is far richer in atmosphere than it is in detail or analysis. Straus was the daughter of Fromental Halévy (composer of the popular opera 'La Juive') and the wife of Georges Bizet, who died not long after the 1875 premiere of 'Carmen.' She later remarried, and in the home of her new husband, a wealthy lawyer who called himself his wife's 'senior valet,' she began holding a popular literary salon attended by the young Marcel Proust.

Proust's correspondence is full of flirtatious letters to Straus, speaking of flowers sent to her and beseeching her to give more credence to the merits of platonic love. But fawning is not the only tone Proust strikes in his letters. He also found words for the hollow aspects of salon life, a charge from which the salonnières featured in this exhibition are largely spared. In a letter he titled 'The truth about Mme Straus,' Proust wrote to her: 'I believe that you love only a certain mode of life which brings out not so much your intelligence as your wit, not so much your wit as your tact, not so much your tact as your dress.'

It was a moment of tough love in a long friendship, as Straus nevertheless supported Proust's work, introducing him to luminaries of the day and providing him with not just the early notebooks on which he sketched his great novel, 'Remembrance of Things Past,' but also endless material with which to fill them. At Straus's salon, Proust met Charles Haas, on whom the character of Swann is based, and Straus herself was a model for the Duchess de Guermantes.

By the 1890's, French Jews had attained a measure of comfort and integration into French society, all of which was called into question virtually overnight with the Dreyfus Affair, when Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish officer, was framed as a traitor. In Straus's salon, Proust and friends organized an early petition defending Dreyfus's innocence. The issue split the salon in two, and some prominent guests did not return.

A Haven for Refugees

The 20th-century salons featured here are a more complicated affair, including one maintained by Margherita Sarfatti, an Italian-Jewish art critic who championed the aesthetics of Fascism and carried on an affair with Mussolini. Florine Stettheimer's New York salon (home to figures like Virgil Thomson, H. L. Mencken and Marcel Duchamp) provides curlicued levity in New York between the world wars. But the exhibition comes to a poignant and bittersweet conclusion in the figure of Salka Viertel.

Viertel was a successful Austrian actress and protégée of the great director Max Reinhardt. After Hitler's rise to power, she fled Europe and settled in Southern California, where she became a screenwriter and coach for Greta Garbo. The prospect of Hollywood studio work and the mild weather attracted many other German-speaking writers, artists and intellectuals, and they came in droves after it was no longer safe to remain at home.

In the case of men like Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Mann, they arrived with little beyond the tattered remains of reputations once great in Europe. Under such conditions, the gatherings at Viertel's home in Santa Monica, just a few blocks from the ocean, were much more than salons. They were life rafts in the form of a few cherished hours of speaking in a native tongue, commiserating with friends and compatriots. Ultimately they were also a moving attempt to protect a liberal vision of German culture at the very moment it was being so gruesomely perverted on the world stage.

To be sure, as the exhibition shows, the Third Reich marked the ultimate death of the Enlightenment ideals to which the early Jewish salonnières had subscribed, but it is not always clear what conclusions to draw from there. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered her own version when she wrote a biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, the early salonnière. She finished it in 1933 but almost lost the unpublished manuscript in her emigration from Germany to New York.

The Burden of Hindsight

Arendt identified deeply with her subject, but she also viewed Rahel's predicament with the painful burden of hindsight. She was thus highly skeptical of Rahel's eagerness to cast off her Jewish roots in exchange for a passionate embrace of German culture. Arendt could hardly have viewed Rahel's story otherwise, given her own plight as a deeply acculturated German-Jewish intellectual suddenly forced to flee her homeland. The work's final chapter is entitled 'One Does Not Escape Jewishness.' It was added after her flight.

But such searing hindsight comes with its own risks. The historian Peter Gay has argued against so-called 'backshadowing' in German-Jewish history: the temptation to see the ideas and events of past centuries as merely 'clues of crimes to come.' This approach can breed an ill-founded fatalism, as if the German-Jewish tragedy was predetermined, as if any bright moments in the past were simply naïve delusions, or at best momentary pauses in a downward spiral.

It is a troubling viewpoint, not least because it denies free will to those who lived through the earlier era, but also because it threatens to homogenize or even invalidate a tremendously rich and variegated German-Jewish past. For those actually living in that past, the omens were seldom in agreement on the future they symbolized. Certainly in the 19th century and up through World War I, German-speaking Jews had at least as many grounds for optimism as there were hints of impending tragedy.

The salons on view at the Jewish Museum can remind us of this. They were forums for the talent and social skills of a handful of elite Jewish women, and havens for the fortunate artists, writers and thinkers who thrived within their walls. But many of the salons can also be seen as bookmarks in this more complex history, placeholders of a certain hope for a European culture whose future was not yet written.

By JEREMY EICHLER

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