Leseprobe

94 Building Culture and Social Life 16 November 1911, Anna Gerstle and her official rep- resentative, son-in-law Dr Friedrich Salzburg, applied to the Planning Authority with a request for the care- taker’s apartment on the basement floor to be used as a dwelling, with effect from 1 December of that year. They provided accompanying assurances that the building was sufficiently dried out for human habita- tion. On 12 December 1911, five months after the com- pletion of the bare construction, the developers noti- fied the Planning Authority of the villa’s completion and requested occupancy permission, which was duly granted on 19 December 1911. On 14 May 1912, a devel- opment certificate for a residential building situated on plot no. 103, the site of Tiergartenstrasse 50, was entered in the Dresden-Strehlen land register by the city’s Planning Authority. On the city-wide location list collated by the Royal Fire Insurance Department (Dresden I), the new residential building was assigned number 140 F in division N. In his diaries (published posthumously in 1995 and 1996), the Romance languages scholar Victor Klem- perer made numerous references to the Gerstle and Salzburg families in the period between 1921 and 1942.4 Amember of the educated middle classes who mixed in similar circles to the two families, Klempe­ rer was, however, himself far from wealthy. Indeed, Klemperer was prone to recurrent financial difficul- ties, and his attitude towards the affluent Jewish mercantile classes wavered between reserve and outright rejection. In a self-critical evaluation of his attitude, Klemperer—an intellectual who was him- self of Jewish descent—acknowledged that he had harboured an ‘ancient proletarian hatred towards high society, high finance, and moneyed Jews [ Geld- juden ]’5 and a ‘prejudice of envy’.6 Although he sought to distance himself from his own Jewishness, even to the point of being baptized into the Protes- tant faith in 1912, his written accounts bespeak (an admittedly reluctant) affinity to Dresden’s upper-middle-class Jewish community, whose social gath- erings he very much appreciated. Writing in his diary on 2 March 1923, Victor Klemperer suggested that the Gerstle household’s wealth proba- bly derived from the mother’s side of the family, de- scribing the villa she had had built twelve years earli- er as grand. ‘Upstairs there is a “hall”—odd how this word has taken on a new meaning in recent years. There they have a gramophone, and it is where they dance […].’7 The shift in meaning of the word ‘hall’ ( Diele ) mentioned by Klemperer refers to the change seen during the late 19th century and first decade of the 20th century in the way Dresden homeowners used the central interior space of their villas. All that is known about this room’s furnishings and function during the first development phase of the villa at Tier- gartenstrasse 8 (1874 to 1909) is based on a comment by Adolph Salzburg, the man who commissioned and owned the building. Here, he refers to the ‘sumptuous interior’ of the ‘vestibule’ ( Vorsaal —as this area was still known).8 By contrast, it is possible to infer from the furnishings shown in a photograph of the central hall that, during the second phase of the building’s development and usage (1910 to 1939—by which stage, the ‘hall’ actually extended over two floors), the space not only served as walk-through for people mov- ing between rooms, but also as a lounge and living space. Whereas previously this space had served merely as an entrance and reception area, it was now where the family spent a portion of their daily lives and even entertained guests. Writing in 1951 in her memoir of her youth, Dr Fried­ rich Salzburg’s niece, Erika Plaut, described the ‘so- cial gatherings’ hosted at the villa at Tiergarten- strasse 50. At the start of every season, invitations were sent out by her Uncle Fritz (as Friedrich Salz- burg was known to family and friends) and his wife Grete for an ‘open house’, held on the first Wednesday of the month. They would invite around 50 people to join them for dancing and an evening buffet, while another season featured evenings of string quartets performed by members of the Staatskapelle. Another year, invitees attended a series of lectures held by university professors. The number of guests tripled after a while, as everyone brought along friends. Writ- ing in his memoirs in 1940, the former host described how he and his wife no longer dared continue their tradition of chamber music evenings after the Nazi takeover in January 1933. Initiated in 1928, the eve- nings were held six to eight times a year and routine- ly attracted audiences of between 80 and 100 people. However, Dr Salzburg and his wife decided to put a stop to the tradition, as all social events were now under surveillance by members of the Gestapo and Nazi Party.9 Describing the part of the house used for the chamber music evenings, Grete and Dr Friedrich Salzburg’s daughter wrote that the performances were held in the ground-floor drawing room, where the piano took pride of place along with a glass case for displaying the family’s collection of Meissen por-