Gertrude Gertrud Reif Kanitz

Do alter this Profile without consulting D. Lavender first.

Birth record from Wien (alle Bezirke), Geburtsanzeigen 1894 Nr. 0313-0781 (Feb.-Apr.), Image #170 of 1166, derived from record # 371. Born at Wien I, Schottenring 17. Given Hebrew name Esther (the name of her great-grandmother, Esther Reif geb. Singer).

Married June 28, 1920 in Vienna: Num. 8343 (record not viewable online)

"Gertud Reif and her siblings always had governesses. The longest-serving one was Miss Cadno from Scotland. One of those governesses would hit Gerty's hand if she blew her nose anywhere near the governess. Then there was left-handedness, Gerty's natural inclination. Everyone in close contact punished the use of the left hand for writing, cutting, etc. Both the English and French governesses were strict about it, including hitting that left hand. Gerty's brother, Paul, loved Miss Cadno, saw her in his adulthood in the UK, and often received cases of Scotch from her." -- Liz Kanitz Canfield 2016. See also below.

For high school, Gertrud attended Gymnasium Luithlen (Private Mädchenlyceum Luithlen). Luithlen had been founded in 1861 by an early advocate of advanced education for girls, Marie Luithlen geb. Hanke, to promote "Protestant teaching and education for daughters of the educated classes."

High school was not to be taken for granted: "In the 1860s and 1870s various private associations had begun to take the initiative to develop vocational schools for women, but publicly supported Gymnasien and Realschulen [%E2%80%A6] would not admit them as regular students. Officials and authorities still opposed opening academic secondary education to women, for they saw no need for it as long as women were given no employment opportunities which would require higher education. Further, ministerial officials based their arguments on 'overcrowding of the men’s Gymnasien and Realschulen and the ‘natural inequality’ of the sexes'. Therefore, the central government provided no funds for women’s Gymnasien and it was private associations, who from the 1870s onwards, initiated the first academic secondary schools for women in Austria. These schools took the form of 6-year girls’ lyceums... While, initially, enrollment rates were relatively low in comparison to boys’ schools and girls’ lyceums still furthered the existence of social elites, they soon became popular within the first decade of the 20th century, thereby causing an opening of higher women’s education for less privileged families. Initially girls’ lyceums differed considerably from male-oriented schools...modern languages prevailed in most , serving as a substitute for Greek and Latin, the languages usually taught in men’s Gymnasien. This had the unpleasant consequence that passing the final exam in girls’ schools would not enable pupils to attend university. The aim of girls’ lyceums was not to prepare for academic education but rather to provide students with a form of higher education which is in accordance with their female nature and at the same time to prepare them for vocational training. As for their conservative goals, lyceums were particularly supported by conservatives, as lyceums were considered the ideal preparation for typical female tasks and professions. Hence, the content taught in such schools was still largely conforming to traditional ideas of women’s gender roles in society and family life. In 1900 a symposium for advanced women’s education was conducted in Vienna; for the first time the organization of girls’ lyceums was defined in a statute to standardize tasks and structure of the schools. The educational goal of lyceums still was formulated as the mediation of a certain degree of thorough general education that is adjusted to female characteristics. It was determined that between 24 and 26 lessons should be given per week, depending on the specific grade, and further, that the education of girls would require the cooperation of male and female teachers. A special school-leaving exam was implemented in 1910-11, whereafter girls could sit final exams. Before that, female pupils had to attend supplementary courses in order to sit their Matura exams in boys’ secondary schools, where they were registered as special external students. Nevertheless, even with the novel school-leaving exam, attending university as ordinary students remained an impossibility for women of the Empire. In 1902, graduates from a lyceum had finally been allowed access to university but only as special students (in contrast to ordinary students) of the department of philosophy. At the turn of the 20th century, the majority of the social elites was still against higher education for women."

"Attending the Lyceum Luithlen in Vienna was far more expensive than [other girls' lyceums]. Founded in 1861 as “Evangelische Lehr - und Erziehungsanstalt für Töchter gebildeter Stände”, this private institution was more exclusive. Its history is recorded in the school report of 1910-11, at its 50-year-jubilee... At the turn of the 20th century the school moved to Tuchlauben 14, Vienna, an upper-class area, where it was still located during WWI. In 1909-10, when it was the oldest privately-funded, non-religious girls’ school in Vienna, the lyceum adopted the new standardised curriculum provided by the government; the first Matura exam was held in 1912.... In 1910-11, 230 students were registered, thereof 150 were pupils of the lyceum; the remaining students attended the preparatory school."

-- From Girls Schools in the Habsburg Monarchy 1910-1918, which specifically discusses Luithlen.

Those against higher education for women included Gertrude Reif's father. Her children said she sneaked out of the house (with her brother's assistance) to attend university courses in Art History.

Although her [then future-] husband Ernst Kanitz had officially left the Jewish faith in 1914, at age 20, and been baptised a Presbyterian, Gertrud Reif never formalized such a move: a relative had been president of the IKG-Wien in the past, and she did not wish to hurt the feelings of the people connected. (It is believed the "relative" would have been 1872-84 IKG-Wien President Ignaz Kuranda, who was among the extended family of Gertrud's mother's close 1st cousin, Helene Karpeles-Schenker.)

Gertrud was an accomplished pianist, frequently playing four-hand piano pieces with her mother (as her daughter EKC put it, "that's what women did.") Gertrude's parents had two Bösendorfer pianos in the apartment where she grew up (at least one was eventually brought to America: EK told an interviewer in 1964 that the family had left Vienna with three pianos).

Gertrud studied with Paul de Conne in Vienna (among other teachers). De Conne (1874-1959) was a Russian pianist and student of Anton Rubinstein, who lived and taught in Vienna. From Oct. 1918-May 1919 Gertrud studied Harmonielehre I and Kontrapunkt I (Analyse) in Arnold Schönberg's “Seminar for Composition,” which was offered in 1918-19 and 1919-20 (Die Wiener Schülerinnen Arnold Schönberg, p. 86). (A list of all Schönberg's students appears here, p. 291.)

In 1918, at the home of a musical acquaintance, she met Ernst Kanitz, who was a musical composer, although he held a doctorate in law (earned at the insistence of his father). They married on June 28, 1920. Gertrud moved in with Ernst in the apartment of his widowed mother, Jenni (she died in April 1921) at Wien III, Landstraßer Hauptstraße 1, "Wiener Bürger-Hof". Ernst and family lived there until their forced departure from Vienna on June 6, 1938 (for Holland, then New York). One of their apartment's rooms was the Klavierzimmer, where Ernst worked on his music, rehearsed his Vienna Women's Chorus, and where Gertrude copied all his music, often long into the night (there were no mechanical methods for reproducing the pages). EK told an interviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Oct. 16, 1964) that Gertrud "was wonderfully sensitive to music. If I changed tones in a piece, she could tell it two rooms away. None of my pupils could do that."

Gertrude had been raised in a strict Victorian household. No makeup, lipstick, or nail polish was ever permitted; that was for "cheap" girls or actresses (then considered "cheap"). Once she had her own home, Gertrude rebelled against most Victorian ways. She had linoleum installed in her kitchen and children's room; put an eating table in the kitchen to reduce the carrying of food; did all her own shipping and cooking, although she let the family's one maid do the dishes. Interested in new inventions and gadgets of all kinds, she went to local fairs featuring them. She bought a wringer washing machine from a catalogue instead of turning everything over to a laundry-woman.

Her daughter EKC notes that GR worked with Anna Freud in a project Freud had to "take care of little children." This likely refers to Anna Freud's work in 1937 on "a nursery school for the children of the poor in Vienna. Anna and her friend Dorothy, who ran the school, were able to observe infant behavior and to experiment with feeding patterns. They allowed the children to choose their own food and respected their freedom to organize their own play. Though some of the children’s parents had been reduced to begging, Anna wrote “... we were very struck by the fact that they brought the children to us, not because we fed and clothed them and kept them for the length of the day, but because ‘they learned so much,’ i.e. they learned to move freely, to eat independently, to speak, to express their preferences, etc. To our own surprise the parents valued this beyond everything.” However, within a few months, in March 1938, the nursery had to close following Hitler's invasion of Austria." (Anna Freud at jwa.org).

"(Anna Freud (1895-1982), stimulated by the ideas of Maria Montessori, had begun a career as an elementary school teacher in 1914 after the war broke out. She taught in her own former school [the Cottage Lyceum, where she finished in 1912] during the war, but abandoned teaching soon afterwards to begin working more closely with her father ... Anna Freud's work as a teacher served as a bridge to what was emerging as her life's work—the psychoanalytic study of the child. In 1923 she ... established her own private practice ... In 1925 Anna met Dorothy Burlingham, who had brought her children to Vienna for analytic treatment. During this time she also began a private analytically-oriented nursery school together with several other analysts, and also set up what is now regarded as the first modern day care center for underprivileged infants. The city of Vienna asked her in 1926 to train nursery workers and elementary teachers in applying the new analytic knowledge to education theory. She published An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, which marked the recognition of child analysis as a legitimate sub-specialty. In 1929, she first warned childcare professionals against mistaking professional child care for mothering. Throughout her career, Freud continued to stress that child care and analysis itself cannot substitute for the early parental attachments which shape personality development."

(World War I, at first, scarcely interrupted the usual rhythms of life. Vacations and travel in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany continued, and the mail continued to function well. Only gradually did difficulties at borders arise and some problems with food appear. In the summer of 1915, the hotels in Bad Ischl (Austria) were crowded in August, and the war seemed distant. However, the next year in Bad Gastein, there was a shortage of white bread. However, in nearby Altaussee the bread supply was fine. In 1917, vacations continued, and to offset anticipated shortages, some brought with them supplies of eggs, cheese, butter, and bread sent by friends. Travel continued even in the fateful last months of the war when Anna Freud went to Budapest. But now, she brought back food to Vienna, and in September recorded living on beans and potatoes. Her trip to Budapest was for a psychoanalytic congress, which was duly held the autumn of 1918 while cataclysmic events were ripping apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. -- From a review of the Anna Freud-Sigmund Freud Letters).

On the effects of World War I on the city of Vienna, see Vienna in the First World War -- How the City Changed and Vienna in the First World War -- Overthrow of Old Values: "At the end of the war, the Austrian economy was in tatters. Energy, heating and food were in short supply [which] in turn had a negative impact on industrial employment. Austrian farmers were not in the slightest able to cover the demand for food. It was not until 1920 and later that rationing was gradually lifted. Inflation destroyed many fortunes and made business activity more difficult. The end of the war and of the Monarchy turned the former imperial capital into the capital of a small state with an overmanned civil service and administration, excessive population and an impractical geographical location. A move to break away from Vienna was heard in practically all Austrian provinces [which] refused, for example, to give up any of their supplies. In Vienna the food rations were not enough to live on. Theatres and cinemas were closed, trains were irregular, tram service was reduced. The cold winter of 1918/19 made it even more difficult, and the Spanish flu claimed thousands of victims. The health of Viennese children in particular was dire."

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Gertrude was always interested in things modern; she would "buy oatmeal or conrflakes at the American Store and make us eat it; she bought special American toilet paper there..." (EKC). Gertrude favored the simple style of design represented by the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop, 1903-32). Wiener Werkstätte sold furniture and small articles of everyday use made in glass, ceramics, silver and metal, as well as jewelery and clothing. Wiener Werkstätte aimed at pursuing elegance using simplified shapes, geometric patterns, and minimal decoration, and sought to ensure "the proper integration of art and daily life, including the clothes the cultivated Viennese should wear," epitomizing the ideal that "the total work of art was all-embracing."

Always lovers of nature, Gertrude and Ernst took their children to the Vienna Woods "suburb" of Tullnerbach on Saturdays after school until Sunday night. Gertrude would take in international children during the summer, to stay with the family in Mitterndorf. In 1939, these included two girls from France, Anise Girard (b. 1922-) and Claire Girard (b. 1921-d. 1944). Both were active in the French Resistance; Claire was shot by the Nazis on August 27, 1944 as they pulled out of Cournimanche, northwest Paris.

Gertrude "had the world's most prominent Christmas tree -- to the ceiling. She loved the tree and had Czech glass ornaments for it. I do not think that there was any Christmas tree in her home when Gertrude was a girl" (EKC 2016).

In late 1937 and early 1938 Gertrude's brother Paul, living in Amsterdam and seeing the newspapers there, pressed the point that the Kanitz family should "throw everything you've got into the Danube and get out." Paul and his sister were very close (she wrote to him every day), but Gertrude and Ernest resisted the idea -- until German tanks crossed the border to take over Austria (the Anschluß) on March 12, 1938. (Hitler / Germany was forbidden from such acts by the World War I Treaty of Versailles, so he had to arrange for it look like the Austrians had "invited" him in. The Austrians went along.) Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna on March 14, met by cheering crowds. The Nazi parade was seen from the Kanitz family's apartment window, which overlooked the large boulevard Landstrasser-Haupstrasse near Vienna's center.

Clear now that they would have to leave Vienna, they began to seek exit visas. The children could no longer go to school. In the late evening of June 3, 1938, the family boarded a train bound for Holland, the three children having been instructed to say nothing, speak to no one. The family's faithful maid, Hedi (a Catholic girl who had been trained in the household arts entirely by Gertrude) came to the station to see them off, as did Gertrude's oldest friend, Ada Goldschmid, as well as Gertrude's parents. The family sat up all night in their train compartment, relaxing a bit only late the next day after the train crossed the German-Dutch border. After spending six weeks in Bergen, outside Amsterdam, they sailed on July 12, 1938 for America on the SS Veendaam. The ship docked in Hoboken, NJ, on July 26, 1938.

They went to live on the Upper West Side of New York (not a nice area then), in a cockroach-infested apartment on 135th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. The apartment had been found for them by a committee to aid Christian refugees from Hitler's invaded territories. Daughter Brigitta, age 13, walked down Broadway to 125th Street to take the subway to junior high school. Later that fall they moved to Due West, South Carolina, where Ernest took a job at Erskine College.

They also made a trip to Vermont in late summer, 1939, at the invitation of a new friend, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958). The family had been put in contact with DCF by their friend Mme Girard (Dr. Louis Girard) of France, who had sent her two daughters to Gertrude in Mitterndorf in earlier summers (for the mountain air, and to learn German). Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an activist in the same vein as Gertrude, having spent World War I in France and established a home for refugee children there. She had a PhD from Columbia University (1904, with a thesis on Corneille and Racine), and spoke five languages fluently (a fact commented on in a memoir of Gertrude Reif Kanitz's). Another couple Dorothy Canfield Fisher invited to stay at her farm was Enit Kaufman, a portrait painter, and her husband Edward Kaufman. In 1939, DCF also "organized and found money for a project that brought sixty German and Austrian refugee children to spend the summer" at her farm in Arlington, Vermont (I.H. Washington biography of DCF) (see in MEDIA). DCF's friend and colleague from the publishing world, Merle S. Haas, helped fund the project, and asked GRK to head the Vermont camp. GRK and her two younger children spent the summer of 1939 in Arlington, and were still there on September 1 when World War II officially began.

DCF and friends had also arranged a summer job in Vermont for Helmut Kanitz, as well as his admission to the Oakwood Friends School, a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, New York, starting in Fall 1938.

(In 1911 Dorothy Canfield Fisher / DCF visited Maria Montessori's "children's houses" in Rome. Much impressed, she took up the cause of bringing the Montessori educational method back to America, translating Montessori's book into English and writing five of her own: three nonfiction and two novels. DCF was a supporter of racial and gender equality, writing a novel on the latter subject entitled The Home-Maker . She was an AAUW member in Vermont, and arranged for Gertrude Reif Kanitz to give a talk in 1939 to the AAUW (see text in MEDIA). DCF's works concern "the problems of personal life and individual growth" (per Dorothy Canfield Collection, Univ. of Vermont). At the height of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s career, Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the 10 most influential women in the United States.)

By Spring 1940 Ernest Kanitz family appears in the 1940 US census for Rock Hill, South Carolina, since Ernest had obtained a teaching job there, at Winthrop College, in late October, 1939.

Gertrude Reif Kanitz became ill in the early 1940s and was eventually taken by her brother to a major hospital on the Upper East Side of New York for treatment. She died there, of Hodgkin's disease, on January 15, 1943, shortly before her 49th birthday.

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In 1908 the Ringstrasse was the scene of a historical procession, held to mark the 60-year jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. It centred ... on the demonstration of the importance of the bourgeoisie and more on invoking the desperately needed unity of the multinational state. High points from the history of the Habsburg Empire were presented in tribute to the dynasty, with great attention being paid to the authenticity of the historical costumes worn. These scenes were followed by the guilds and representatives of all the Empire’s nationalities dressed in their traditional costumes and accompanied by bands. Consisting of more than 12,000 participants, the procession attracted countless spectators to the Ring. (Ringstrasse as Stage).

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From In Search of Myself: Autobiography, Identity, and Imposture in Wartime Croatia. Zagreb's community of longtime assimilated Jews was not unlike Vienna's.

"In Zagreb's German-speaking Ashkenazi community, some had long exhibited a fiercely nationalistic Croatian outlook. In his memoirs, Imre Rochlitz, a young Jewish refugee from Austria in the period immediately before and after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, described the incredulous reaction of many such Jews to the antisemitic laws. As he recalled, many Jews, including in his own family, were susceptible to the very same antisemitic prejudices that they eventually fell victim to, often despising the unassimilated Jews: “A major family dispute ensued. Why should they persecute us? The various accusations of the Nazis did not seem to fit us: We were not rich, we did not exploit Gentiles, we certainly were not international conspirators, financiers, or Zionists, our culture was Germanic, we spoke Hochdeutsch [%E2%80%A6] without an accent and we didn’t even have big noses. They could not possibly mean us; surely their hostility was directed against the Jews of other cultures and nationalities . . . "

Description of assimilated Jewish families in Zagreb, from yadvashem.org:

"In Zagreb, there was a very active Jewish community, and there was a Jewish school (Zidovska Skola) but I wasn’t sent there, even though we lived closer to the Jewish school than to the one where I studied. My home was completely assimilated. My father wasn’t a Zionist, and neither was anyone else in our family, except for one uncle, who was a Zionist and spoke a strange language (Hebrew), which nobody understood then. On Yom Kippur, they fasted and went to synagogue."

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The intellectual emotions ... were bestowed upon me so generously, the countless performances, dramas, comedies, ballets, operas, concerts, sometimes with the best known performers from Western Europe, the wonderful vacations in various summer and winter resorts, with the unforgettably beautiful scenery, all over
Europe. I appreciated the knowledge acquired during my private lessons in music and languages because I had the opportunity to study much more than school could offer – these lessons were never intended for homework, but were much more advanced and interesting. For a few years we had a German Fraulein, Miss Cohn, a Jewish teacher living with us. At that time it was fashionable in our circles to have Frauleins and Mademoiselles living in the family and taking an active part in the education of the children. The bourgeoisie, the ever-growing wealthy middle class, to which we belonged took over some habits from the disappearing aristocracy. I took great advantage of Miss Cohn's extraordinary intelligence and knowledge, especially in German literature and mythology.

The political system in Yugoslavia was tolerant and Jews were free to practice their rites: we stayed home from school during our holidays, after the prayers we gathered in front of the synagogue. I cannot remember any resentment against us, any sign of anti-Semitism, at least not openly. There were some remarks, as 'You are really not like other Jews, nobody would believe that you are Jewish' which was considered as a kind of compliment. Indeed, it was not easy to maintain the right balance in a neighborhood of a Christian majority. Their religious tradition was very attractive to us children and we were sometimes invited to celebrate Christmas Eve in Christian homes. We had not to go far to listen to Christmas carols. My mother's brother married a Catholic and their only son, my first and only cousin, was Catholic too. My grandmother's brother married a Protestant and their children were, of course, not Jewish.

As much as these facts [about the news from Germany in the 1930s] are true, the more embarrassed I am; the less I am able to understand our behavior. Hitler knew his goals exactly; he and his collaborators proclaimed them almost every day for many years; the results showed that he was serious, yet we were blind and deaf and convinced to the very end that Yugoslavia was different from other countries where the peta kolona had more freedom to act. We believed that we should fight Hitler; that, to us Jews who are so loyal to the country that is equally loyal to us, is one of the answers to a paradox which essentially will never be comprehended.

It is certain that my parents were aware of the Nazis' threat . . . but the ethical conception of humanity based on truth, honesty, justice, pity and gratitude was rooted so deeply in them that this awareness was not strong enough to make crucial decisions which would have meant leaving everything behind and emigrating to another place. My father was unable to make such decisions because the wheel of fortune had favored him so far and he was too much engaged in his business to which he gave his heart and soul. As a matter of fact my father had considered the possibility of emigration. His Jewish friends, who lived in the countries occupied by Hitler, Austria and Czechoslovakia, had succeeded in escaping to France or to the United States. During my father's business trips abroad they evidently tried to convince him that he should take appropriate steps to emigrate one day. Indeed, my father deposited considerable sums of money in England and America, and during his visit to the United States in 1939, he obtained an immigration certificate (affidavit) for himself and his family (mother, Mira and me); but this benefit was never put to use.

I remember that the subject of emigration came up during our conversations at home, but I think it was never seriously considered: uncertainty of the unknown, the fear of having to start again, the reluctance of taking risks were perhaps the reasons to stay where we thought we belonged. Neither do I think that the ideal of Zionism -- Palestine as the only solution for Jews – had been seriously considered by my father.

-- From When Heaven's Vault Cracked. Memoir of a Zagreb girl b. 1919 to a German-speaking, assimilated Jewish family.