Berta Zuckerkandl

Origins and early life

Berta Zuckerkandl was born Berta Szeps on 13 April 1864 in Vienna, the daughter of Moritz Szeps, the Jewish publisher from Galicia whose liberal newspaper was the voice of the crown prince Rudolf's circle; she figures in this directory by that Jewish birth, and unlike so many of her Viennese contemporaries she never converted.

Work and career

Married to the anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl, she opened in 1888 the salon that became, for fifty years, one of the engines of Viennese culture: it was at her table that Gustav Klimt and the painters who would found the Secession first gathered, that Mahler met Alma Schindler, and that Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Max Reinhardt, Stefan Zweig and Egon Friedell talked — 'on my divan Austria comes alive', she said. As an art critic in the daily press she fought for the Secession, for Klimt, for Kokoschka and for Otto Wagner's architecture against a hostile establishment; through her sister Sophie, married to Georges Clemenceau's brother, she was a link between Vienna and Paris that she used for peace feelers in 1917.

The Anschluss of 1938 sent her, at seventy-four, into exile in Paris, then Algiers; she returned to liberated Paris and died there on 16 October 1945.