Moriz Gallia from Moravia and Hermine Hamburger from Silesia met and married in Vienna in 1893, when the city was the third largest European capital after London and Paris. They were rich, from making and supplying gas mantles, and they were generous patrons of Vienna’s exceptionally lively artistic world. When their two daughters, Gretl and Käthe, fled to Australia after Kristallnacht, they took with them the finest collection of central European pictures, furniture, silver, glass, jewellery and porcelain to escape the Nazi looters.
Good Living Street — the author’s translation of Wohllebengasse, the name of the fashionable street on which the family lived — is not only the story of three generations of a wealthy and cultured Jewish family told through the odyssey of their lives across 20th-century European history, but a portrait of fin-de-siècle Vienna in all its artistic glory, with Mahler transforming the opera into the most celebrated orchestra in Europe, and the Secessionist painters, and the Wiener Werkstätte, the celebrated Vienna crafts works, reaching their peak of excellence and popularity. To be rich and cultivated in Austria before the first world war was to have a remarkable life.
Tim Bonyhady is Moriz and Hermine’s great-grandson, the son of Gretl’s daughter Annelore. After his mother’s death, he discovered cupboards full of papers, letters, menus, diaries and autograph books dating back to the late 19th century. It was an archive most biographers only dream of.
As Moriz and Hermine grew richer, so they took to commissioning portraits by Klimt and furniture by Joseph Hoffmann, who worked in ebony and gold leaf. When they came to build their own house, they brought in architects and decorators to design everything, from bookshelves to fabrics and carpets.
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