Utz (2 page)

All the same, I wanted to see the gloomy palacefortress, the Hradschin, where this secretive bachelor — who spoke Italian to his mistresses, Spanish to his God, German to his courtiers and Czech, seldom, to his rebellious peasants — would, for weeks on end, neglect the affairs of his Holy and Roman Empire and shut himself away with his astronomers (Tycho Brahé and Kepler were his protégés). Or search with his alchemists for the Philosopher's Stone. Or debate with learned rabbis the mysteries of the Cabbala. Or, as the crises of his reign intensified, imagine himself a hermit in the mountains. Or have his portrait done by Arcimboldo, who painted the Emperor's visage as a mound of fruit and vegetables, with a courgette and aubergine for the neck, and a radish for the Adam's apple.

K
nowing no one in Prague, I asked a friend, a historian who specialised in the Iron Curtain countries, if there was anyone he'd recommend me to see.

He replied that Prague was still the most mysterious of European cities, where the supernatural was always a possibility. The Czechs' propensity to ‘bend' before superior force was not necessarily a weakness. Rather, their metaphysical view of life encouraged them to look on acts of force as ephemera.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘I could send you to any number of intellectuals. Poets, painters, filmmakers. ' Providing I could face an interminable whine about the role of the artist in a totalitarian state, or wished to go to a party that would end in a partouse.

I protested. Surely he was exaggerating?

‘No,' he shook his head. ‘I don't think so.'

He would be the last to denigrate a man who risked the labour camp for publishing a poem in a foreign journal. But, in his view, the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn't raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads.

‘With their silence,' he said, ‘they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.'

Where else would one find, as he had, a tram-ticket salesman who was a scholar of the Elizabethan stage? Or a street-sweeper who had written a philosophical commentary on the Anaximander Fragment?

He finished by observing that Marx's vision of an age of infinite leisure had, in one sense, come true. The State, in its efforts to wipe out ‘traces of individualism', offered limitless time for the intelligent individual to dream his private and heretical thoughts.

I said my motive for visiting Prague was perhaps more frivolous than his – and I explained my interest in the Emperor Rudolf.

‘In that case I'll send you to Utz,' he said. ‘Utz is a Rudolf of our time.'

U
tz was the owner of a spectacular collection of Meissen porcelain which, through his adroit manoeuvres, had survived the Second World War and the years of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. By 1967 it numbered over a thousand pieces — all crammed into the tiny two-roomed flat on Široká Street.

The Utzes of Krondorf had been a family of minor Saxon landowners with farms in the Sudetenland, prosperous enough to maintain a town house in Dresden, insufficiently grand to figure on the Almanach de Gotha. Among their ancestors they could point to a Crusading Knight. But better-born Saxons would pronounce their name with an air of bewilderment, even of disgust: ‘Utz? Utz? No. It is impossible. Who is this people?'

There were reasons for their scorn. In Grimm's Etymological Wordbook, ‘utz' carries any number of negative connotations: ‘drunk', ‘dimwit', ‘cardsharp', ‘dealer in dud horses'. ‘Heinzen, Kunzen, Utzen oder Butzen', in the dialect of Lower Swabia, is the equivalent of ‘Any old Tom, Dick or Harry'.

Utz's father was killed on the Somme in 1916, not before he had redeemed the family honour by winning Germany's highest military decoration ‘Pour le Mérite'. His widow, whom he had met at Marienbad in 1905 – and had married to the anguish of his parents – was the daughter of a Czech revivalist historian, and of a Jewish heiress whose fortune came from railway shares.

Kaspar was her only grandchild.

As a boy, he spent a month of each summer at České Křížové, a neo-mediaeval castle between Prague and Tabor where this wasted old woman, whose sallow skin refused to wrinkle or hair turn to grey, sat crippled with arthritis in a salon hung with crimson brocade and overvarnished paintings of the Virgin.

A convert to Catholicism, she surrounded herself with unctuous and genuflecting priests who would extol the purity of her faith in the hope of financial rewards. The banks of begonias and cinerarias in her conservatory protected her from a magnificent sweep of the Central Bohemian countryside.

Various neighbours were affronted that a woman of her race should affect the outward forms of aristocratic life: to the extent of peopling her staircase with suits of armour, and of keeping a bear in a walled-off section of the moat. Yet, even before Sarajevo, she had foreseen the rising tide of Socialism in Europe, and, twirling a terrestrial globe as another woman might recite the rosary, she would point a finger to the far-flung places in which she had diversified her investments: a copper-mine in Chile, cotton in Egypt, a cannery in Australia, gold in South Africa.

She rejoiced in the thought that her fortune would go on increasing after her death.
Theirs
would vanish: in war or revolution; on horses, women and the gaming-tables. In Kaspar, a dark-haired, introspective boy with none of his father's high complexion, she recognised the pallor of the ghetto – and adored him.

It was at České Křížové that this precocious child, standing on tiptoe before a vitrine of antique porcelain, found himself bewitched by a figurine of Harlequin that had been modelled by the greatest of Meissen modellers, J. J. Kaendler.

The Harlequin sat on a tree trunk. His taut frame was sheathed in a costume of multi-coloured chevrons. In one hand he waved an oxidised silver tankard; in the other a floppy yellow hat. Over his face there was a leering orange mask.

‘I want him,' said Kaspar.

The grandmother blanched. Her impulse was to give him everything he asked for. But this time she said, ‘No! One day perhaps. Not now.'

Four years later, to console him for the death of his father, the Harlequin arrived in Dresden in a specially made leather box, in time for a dismal Christmas celebration. Kaspar pivoted the figurine in the flickering candlelight and ran his pudgy fingers, lovingly, over the glaze and brilliant enamels. He had found his vocation: he would devote his life to collecting – ‘rescuing' as he came to call it – the porcelains of the Meissen factory.

He neglected his schoolroom studies, yet studied the history of porcelain manufacture, from its origins in China to its rediscovery in Saxony in the reign of Augustus the Strong. He bought new pieces. He sold off those which were inferior, or cracked. By the age of nineteen he had published in the journal
Nunc
a lively defence of the Rococo style in porcelain — an art of playful curves from an age when men adored women — against the slur of the pederast Winckelmann : ‘Porcelain is almost always made into idiotic puppets.'

Utz spent hours in the museums of Dresden, scrutinising the ranks of Commedia dell' Arte figures that had come from the royal collections. Locked behind glass, they seemed to beckon him into their secret, Lilliputian world – and also to cry for their release. His second publication was entitled ‘The Private Collector':

‘An object in a museum case', he wrote, ‘must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies – of suffocation and the public gaze – whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch. As a young child will reach out to handle the thing it names, so the passionate collector, his eye in harmony with his hand, restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker. The collector's enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation . . .'

‘What', Utz's mother asked the family physician, ‘is this mania of Kaspar's for porcelain?'

‘A perversion,' he answered. ‘Same as any other.'

The sexual career of Augustus the Strong, as recounted by Von Pöllnitz in ‘La Saxe Galant', served Utz as an exemplary model. But when, in a Viennese establishment, he aspired to imitate the conquests of that grandiose and insatiable monarch — hoping to discover in Mitzi, Suzi and Liesl the charms of an Aurora, Countess of Königsmark, a Mlle Kessel or any other goddess of the Dresden court — the girls were perplexed by the scientific seriousness of the young man's approach, and collapsed with giggles at the minuscule scale of his equipment.

He left, walking the wet streets alone to his hotel.

He got a warmer welcome from the antiquaires. The sale of his Sudetenland farms, in 1932, allowed him to spend money freely. The deaths, in quick succession, of his mother and grandmother, allowed him to bid against a Rothschild.

Politically, Utz was neutral. There was a timid side to his character that would tolerate any ideology providing it left him in peace. There was a stubborn side that refused to be bullied. He detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. ‘Wars, pogroms and revolutions', he used to say, ‘offer excellent opportunities for the collector.'

The Stock Market Crash had been one such opportunity. Kristallnacht was another. In the same week he hastened to Berlin to buy porcelains, in U.S. dollars, from Jewish connoisseurs who wished to emigrate. At the end of the War he would offer a similar service to aristocrats fleeing from the Soviet Army.

As a citizen of the Reich he accepted the annexation of the Sudetenland, albeit without enthusiasm. The occupation of Prague, however, made him realise that Hitler would soon unleash a European war. He also realised, on the principle that invaders invariably come to grief, that Germany would fail to win.

Acting on this insight, he succeeded in removing thirty-seven crates of porcelain from the family house in Dresden. These arrived at České Křížové during the summer of 1939. He did not unpack them.

About a year later, shortly after the Blitzkrieg, he had a visit from his red-headed second cousin, Reinhold: a clever but fundamentally silly character, who, as a student, had sworn that Kropotkin's ‘Mutual Aid' was the greatest book ever written; who now expounded his views of racial biology with analogies culled from dog-breeding. An Utz, he insinuated, even if tainted with alien blood, should at once assume the uniform of the Wehrmacht.

At dinner, Utz listened politely while his cousin crowed over the victories in France: but when the man prophesied that Germans would occupy Buckingham Palace before the end of the year, he felt, despite his better judgement, a surge of latent anglophilia.

‘I do not believe so,' he heard himself saying. ‘You underestimate this people. I know them. I was in England myself.'

‘
Also
,' the cousin murmured, and, with a click of the heels, marched out towards his waiting staff-car.

Utz had indeed been to England, to learn English at the age of sixteen. During an autumn and dismal December, he had boarded at Bexhill-on-Sea with his mother's former nanny, Miss Beryl Parkinson, in a house of cats and cuckoo-clocks from which he would gaze at the turgid waves that broke across the pier.

He did learn some English – not much! He also made a short trip to London, and came away with a vivid notion of how an English gentleman behaved, and how he dressed. He returned to Dresden in a racily-cut tweed jacket, and a pair of hand-made brogues.

It was this same brown jacket, a little threadbare, a couple of sizes too small, and with leather patches sewn onto the elbows, that he would wear throughout the War – as an act of faith and defiance — whenever German officers were present.

He wore it, too, his racial purity called into question, during the reign of Reinhard Heydrich, ‘The Butcher of Prague': one afternoon, he confounded his interrogators by pulling from its pocket his father's First War decoration. How dare they! he shouted, as he slapped the medal onto the table. How dare they insult the son of a great German soldier?

It was a bold stroke, and it worked. They gave him no further trouble. He lay low at České Křížové and, for the first time in his life, took regular exercise: working with his foresters at the saw-mill. On February 16th 1945 news came that the Dresden house was flattened. His love of England vanished forever on hearing the B.B.C. announcer, ‘There is no china in Dresden today.' He gave the jacket to a gipsy who had escaped the camps.

A month after the surrender, when Germans and German-supporters were being hounded from their homes — or escorted to the frontier ‘in the clothes they stood up in' – Utz succeeded in disavowing his German passport and obtaining Czech nationality. He had a harder time dispelling rumours that he had helped in the activities of Goering's art squad.

The rumours were true. He had collaborated. He had given information: a trickle of information as to the whereabouts of certain works of art — information available to anyone who knew how to use an art library. By doing so, he had been able to protect, even to hide, a number of his Jewish friends: among them the celebrated Hebraist, Zikmund Kraus. What, after all, was the value of a Titian or a Tiepolo if one human life could be saved?

As for the Communists, once he realised the Beneš Government would fall, he began to curry favour with the bosses-to-be. On learning that Klement Gottwald had installed himself in Prague Castle, ‘a worker on the throne of the Bohemian kings', Utz's reaction was to give his lands to a farming collective, and his own castle for use as an insane asylum.