Most of the Jews ennobled were industrialists like the distiller Goldreich, the glass manufacturer Inwald, the coal baron Gutmann, the sugar refiner Bloch von Brodnegg, the railway baron Fröhlich von Feldau, the canner Eisler von Terramare, the foundry-owner Bondy and the brewer Kuffner; merchants like the Gomperz, the Liebens, the Doctors and the Adlers; lawyers like the Boschans or Bachrachs; and the bankers Auspitz, Frank, and Biedermann. One Kubinzky, scion of a cotton magnate dynasty from Prague, aspired to become Marquis von Hohenkubin.

Of course Austria was not just their land of milk and honey: it had its own brand of anti-Semitism which was every bit as virulent as that which had taken root north of the River Inn, if not more so. If neither emperor nor empire was anti-Jewish, many of its citizens were just the opposite. It was on the streets of Vienna, after all, that Adolf Hitler served his apprenticeship in anti-Semitism, picking up the ideas of Jew-baiters like Georg von Schönerer. In March 1938 the German Nazis had to stay the hands of the Viennese, who made Hitler's arrival a pretext to beat up their Jewish fellow citizens with enormous gusto. Five years into the Third Reich, public humiliations of this sort were rare occurences in Germany proper.

It is generally said that most of the richer Jews escaped from Vienna and were not among the 65,000 or so citizens who perished in the Holocaust, most of whom would have been from the communities of poorer Ostjuden in the 2nd District. It is notable, however, that many members of the elite listed in Wer einmal War were "deported" to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz or one of the other camps or ghettos, often people who were too old or too tired to run. Shocking too is the number of deaths by suicide recorded in 1938, a testament to despair.

Great-great aunt Ella had been planning a big celebration for the summer. It was to have been the 70th anniversary of the founding of the family department store — I presume it opened in Budapest, because I can't see any trace of my great-great-grandfather in Lehmann's business directory before 1875. Special wrapping paper was designed by a leading designer in Budapest showing the previous building on the site, as taken from a painting by Rudolf von Alt, contrasted with its successor by the same Friedrich Ohmann who designed the Palais Kranz. 

Of course the party never took place. Hitler and his henchmen put a stop to that and Ella was forced to sell the shop for a song to an Aryan proprietor. A few months later she was ocean-bound for New York. The 70-year story had come to an abrupt end.