Roman Sandgruber:
PRETTY KITTY
AND THE WOMEN OF THE ROTHSCHILDS.
304 pages, Molden Verlag in the Styria publishing group, 2023
There was recently a comprehensive book about the women of the Rothschilds, but the topic was viewed vertically, so to speak, through the generations, with the aim of covering as many of the fates of the generally neglected women as possible.
Roman Sandgruber, a specialist in economic history, Jewish wealth in Austria in general and the Rothschilds in particular, is now taking the other path. He has taken a generation of the “Viennese Rothschilds,” the children of Albert Rothschild, the richest man in Austria. It’s about the wives and a lover of his three sons as well as the surviving daughter. Five women of a special kind.
Albert had seven children, a daughter died at birth, two sons lost their jobs in the family business – Georg, the eldest, spent his life in a mental institution, Oscar, the youngest, died at the age of 20. The brothers Alfons, Louis and Eugen as well as the daughter Valentine remained. They are the real heroes of the book, although the interesting brothers also had very interesting wives.
The title character “Kitty” flitted through Viennese society for some time as Countess Schönborn (married since 1911) before she married Eugen Rothschild in 1925, but essentially she was an American adventurer of German descent who made her career as the wife of rich men and a fashion icon of her time planned quite precisely, as Roman Sandgruber explains in detail in his conscientious biography, which reads as pleasantly as a novel. Her father emigrated to the USA, where Katharina Franziska Wolff’s first marriage was to an American before she married the Austrian count in Europe. The fact that she managed to marry a Rothschild when there was an internal agreement in the family to only marry Jews was not only a scandal in the family, but also showed how much Eugen loved her.
Kitty spent his fortune so generously that it was rumored in Vienna that she had turned her husband from a billionaire into a millionaire. A beauty, always dressed in the latest fashion and with the highest taste, she was photographed and often painted countless times. She led a classic jet-set life, which was also a provocation for many people (those poor people who read about her in the newspapers).
It is not without reason that the author compares the not necessarily likeable lady with Wallis Simpson, who belonged to Kitty’s circle of acquaintances – both Americans, two marriages behind them, style icons who finally landed the man of their dreams. In Wallis’s case, this was the future Duke of Windsor, who gave up England’s crown because of her. For an agonizing 15 weeks that he was not allowed to be with Wallis while their divorce was pending, the impatient lover spent the Rothschilds’ Enzesfeld Castle in Lower Austria, which was not a particularly pleasant experience for either party.
Sandgruber deals with the five women’s chapters first up to the emigration and only concludes with the fates afterwards at the end. So now follows Clarice von Rothschild, the wife of Alfons, whom Sandgruber describes as “wise and learned like an old rabbi”. However, this did not stop the intellectual, scientist and collector from running the family business with his brothers. Clarice came from the British banking family Montefiore, immigrated from Italy (like the English Rothschilds from Germany), ennobled in England and often connected to the Rothschilds through marriages. Clarice, who was a voluptuous Rubensian beauty in contrast to Kitty’s slender silhouette, couldn’t exactly make friends with an Aryan sister-in-law. She wasn’t a socialite either, but rather a true adventurer and passionate traveler to all continents. The trips to the Orient that Clarice undertook with her husband were also aimed at Palestine and the hope that a home would be found there for the Jews, in which the Rothschilds contributed financially. Nevertheless, not a single one of them later emigrated to the Promised Land…
To their grief, Alfons and Clarice’s only son died of throat cancer when he was barely sixteen, and their two daughters lived until the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
The third woman, who is at the center of her own story, is Aline “Liny” Ringhofer, who was Louis Rothschild’s loyal lover for many years. She came from a Protestant background, was married to Baron Friedrich Ringhofer as a Catholic and moved half and half like that in the world of her Jewish lover – tensions that (the author suspects) were not easy to bear. The relationship between the two was tragic, especially when the National Socialists, who were the only Rothschild able to arrest Louis, also took Liny “hostage” in order to extort all of his fortune from him. After the war the two no longer got together.
Instead, Louis, who had always been considered a notorious bachelor, married in exile in America the woman he already knew from Vienna: Countess Hilda Karoline Johanna Maria von Auersperg came from this aristocratic family, but from a somewhat frowned upon branch of the family, as she had a Jewish mother and also a Jewish grandmother on her father’s side. And she also married twice as a Jew – first in 1922 to Otto von Pollack-Parnegg from the textile giant family, then to the French department store millionaire Auguste-Olympe Hériot, who had a sensational Bauhaus-style villa built for her on Rustenschacherallee in Vienna, and finally then Louis Rothschild emigrated to the USA.
And there is the story of Valentine Rothschild, who bravely fought her fate as a deaf mute, was a passionate reader, hunter and photographer and of whom the author says: “Of Albert Rothschild’s children, Valentine Noemi was undoubtedly the most amiable.” She married him Viennese banker Sigmund Springer, who couldn’t really compete with the Rothschilds, which Sandgruber proves with a handy example: His assets amounted to about one percent of what Valentine’s father, the legendary Albert, paid tax on in one year…
The marriage was happy, Springer became quite rich and unfortunately died early, they had two children, Albert and Bettina, and since the Springers had wisely secured British citizenship, the National Socialists were only able to make limited use of their assets. Valentine returned from exile in England after the war and lived and died highly respected in Lunz am See.
After these five women’s fates, there is still a collective report to be made about the further war and post-war fortunes of the Rothschilds, who found themselves in the USA (not completely impoverished). Kitty and Eugen, Clarice and Alfons as well as Louis came. As mentioned, Louis married Hilda, but always identified himself as Austrian and insisted (to the family’s outrage) on being buried in Vienna. He rests in the Rothschild crypt at the Vienna Central Cemetery, 1st gate.
Eugen mourned Kitty, who died in 1946 and had her buried in Enzesfeld, but in 1952 he found his second happiness with an English actress. He died in Monaco, Alfons and Clarice also died in American exile, although she often returned to Austria to negotiate with her daughters for the restitution of the stolen property. So the story of the Rothschilds, which is told here from the 1920s onwards, ends decades later with a bitter aftertaste.
After all, in this book Sandruger takes the reader and his heroines into a world of archdukes, princes, counts, barons, court councilors, bankers and adabeis. There is glamor and glory, human conflicts, and ultimately tragedies. Except that the Rothschilds always had more money involved than normal people could imagine. An absolutely fabulous, rich picture section shows who it was about in photos and many newspaper reports.
Renate Wagner
2024-01-01 09:14:31
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