Tragedy in a Jewish family. The story of the Herzls

The man who envisaged the Judenstaat – not as a romantic utopia, but as a historical necessity – left no descendants behind him. His Viennese home, the scene of a spiritual and political revolution, fell into ruin as Europe plunged into the abyss he had foretold. Following Theodor Herzl’s death, a scenario blending Greek fate, Central European melancholy and twentieth-century horror befell the home of the patriarch of Zionism. A tragedy that was also irrefutable proof of Herzl’s thesis. Assimilation, religious conversions, mixed marriages, exile: nothing could save his children and his only grandson from the fate that Herzl had denounced as inevitable for the Jews of Europe unless they embraced Zionism.

Neither Hans’s religious trials, nor Stephen’s exile in England, nor Pauline’s wealthy marriage saved the Herzls. Anti-Semitism is not appeased by illustrious surnames, mixed marriages or cultural contributions. It devours everything. Stefan Zweig recalls the day of Herzl’s funeral, 7 July 1904: “It was a strange day in July, unforgettable for those who lived through it. The endless procession made it clear to Vienna that it was not merely a writer or poet who had died, but one of those rare creators of ideas who emerge victorious over a country and a people perhaps once in a generation. Chaos broke out at the cemetery as people crowded round his coffin, weeping, wailing and screaming wildly and desperately. All order dissolved into a primal, ecstatic mourning, unlike anything I had ever seen before or since at a funeral. Through this unprecedented grief, which erupted from the depths of an entire people, I finally realised how much passion and hope this solitary man had unleashed upon the world through the power of his thought.”

Herzl’s wife, Julie, died in 1907, three years after him. Pauline, their eldest daughter, died of a heroin overdose following a scandalous marriage. Their other son, Hans, became a Baptist, then a Catholic, then a Unitarian and finally a Quaker; he eventually shot himself in the head the day after his sister’s funeral. He left a note asking to be buried alongside Pauline and to one day join their beloved father, who was buried in his native Vienna. Albert Einstein wrote about Hans Herzl to the latter’s friend, Marcel Sternberger: “Your articles on Hans Herzl have moved me deeply. His wasted life serves as a warning to all Jews against abandoning their own people”. Trude, the youngest of the Herzl children, married a famous Viennese industrialist, Richard Neumann, and gave Herzl his only grandson. Trude’s life, too, came to an end in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Nazi machine swallowed her up, transforming the descendant of the prophet of Zionism into one of the countless shadows of the Holocaust. Just like Freud’s four younger sisters – Rosa, Marie, Pauline and Adolfine – who were deported to Theresienstadt and murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. Or Franz Kafka’s sisters: Otylia, the sister dearest to the Prague-born novelist, died in Auschwitz after passing through the Theresienstadt camp; Gabriela and Valerie were deported by the Nazis to the Łódź ghetto and killed in the nearby Chelmno extermination camp, whilst Milena, one of the women Kafka loved, to whom he dedicated "The Letters", was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died.

Trude Herzl’s son, Stephen, was spared because he was sent to study in England and his name was anglicised to ‘Stephen Theodore Norman’. He was the only one of Herzl’s descendants to make a brief visit to what was then British Palestine in 1945, a year before taking his own life by jumping from a bridge in Washington, where he was stationed as an officer at the British Embassy. In 1938, Stephen urged his parents to leave Europe for Eretz Yisrael, but it was too late. When Stephen received the news in 1946 that his parents had been murdered by the Nazis, he responded by throwing himself from the Massachusetts Bridge. The morning papers reported the suicide of a British embassy employee from the bridge over Rock Creek Park. The evening papers merely specified that the man who had taken his own life was the grandson and last living descendant of the late Zionist leader. The funeral barely had a minyan for prayer.

Thus, two of Herzl’s children took their own lives, whilst the third fell victim to the forces of hatred that Herzl had foreseen and feared. ‘Dead Herzls’ by Joshua Cohen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the Netanyahus, is due to be published by Penguin and now tells the tragic and terrible story of the father of the Judenstaat. None of Herzl’s descendants are alive today. A cousin, Hadasa Herzl, died in Israel in 2005. There are Liora and Tova Herzl, who served as Israeli ambassadors to Europe, but they are third-degree cousins. There was Frederika (Pnina) Herzl, a first cousin of Herzl. She was born in 1933 in Vienna to Max Herzl. In 1938, when she was five years old, her parents felt it was too dangerous for a Jewish girl with the surname Herzl to live under the Nazi regime and sent her to her mother’s aunt and uncle in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Prague, her parents signed a fictitious adoption order so that Frederika could emigrate to Israel with her aunt and uncle. Her parents managed to escape the Nazis and survived the Holocaust; in 1948 they too arrived in Israel, with a court order annulling the adoption. But when they asked to have their daughter back, their request was refused. In early 1948, before the establishment of the State of Israel, a painful legal battle over the child broke out. The adoptive parents said they feared the biological parents would take her back to Vienna, but the court ordered them to allow the biological parents to meet her from time to time. These meetings increased the biological parents’ suffering, and Frederika was aloof towards them, introducing her mother to friends as her aunt. In 1949, the Tel Aviv court ruled that Frederika should spend the holidays with her biological parents. When she turned eighteen in 1951, Frederika asked to renew contact with her parents and met them. It was their last meeting. After that, all trace of her was lost, but research suggests she returned to Vienna, where she worked as a librarian and died in 2009.

When the Israeli government arranged for Herzl’s remains to be transferred from Vienna and reinterred in Jerusalem in 1949, it also moved the remains of his parents from Budapest and had them buried in the national memorial on Mount Herzl, the mountain named in his honour. The ashes of the mother of his children, who was cremated in 1907, have been lost, and the ashes of his youngest daughter, Trude, who was murdered by the Nazis, were scattered amongst the countless victims of the Second World War. The bodies of Herzl’s children, Pauline and Hans, were left in the cemetery in Bordeaux, France, like the wreckage of a forgotten shipwreck. In 2004, Israel marked the centenary of Herzl’s death, and the government passed a law setting a date for an annual commemoration of the founder’s legacy. After a lengthy debate, the Israeli government also had the remains of Pauline and Hans exhumed so that they could be reburied on Mount Herzl. The Jewish state that Herzl had envisaged came into being 44 years after his death. The family that he and his wife had founded came to an end with the suicide of their only grandson, Stephen Theodor Norman, Trude’s son.

The Israeli government also arranged for Stephen’s remains to be transferred for reburial in the family plot on Mount Herzl. Today, only the remains of Herzl’s grandparents rest in Europe, buried in the small cemetery at Zemun, on the outskirts of the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

Meanwhile, even the buildings that marked the life of Israel’s founder have suffered a bitter and ironic fate. Places that symbolised the birth of an idea are now the scenes of a conflict that Herzl had foreseen but was unable to prevent.

Herzl was photographed in 1901 leaning out from the balcony of room 117 at the Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois in Basel, Switzerland, during the Fifth Zionist Congress. The famous balcony photograph, in which Herzl is seen gazing out over the Rhine, inspired philosophers and artists who regarded it as an embodiment of the Zionist vision. The Swiss hotel was put up for sale a few years ago, and one of the potential buyers is a Qatari fund owned by the emirate that finances Hamas. At Berggasse 6 in Vienna, Herzl’s past remains unusually present.

The building was constructed in the mid-19th century. Today, the house that once belonged to Herzl is home to a Palestinian-owned pizzeria. A plaque in honour of Herzl was unveiled by Israeli President Isaac Herzog a month before the massacre of 7 October 2023. It was promptly defaced a few days later. Theodor-Herzl-Platz was also desecrated. “The road from Palestine to Paris is beginning to pass through my room,” Herzl wrote in his diary on 6 January 1897. His flat in Vienna played a pivotal role in the creation of a Jewish state. Many of the most important meetings took place there. From his home, Herzl founded the newspaper Die Welt and organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. Years after Herzl lived at number six Berggasse, the need for Jewish self-determination became tragically clearer.

At least three Jewish people were deported from the same building and murdered during the Holocaust. Hugo and Irene Roden were deported on 14 July 1942 to the same concentration camp where Herzl’s daughter died. Of the 1,009 people on their transport, 950 were killed, including Hugo. Camilla Tandler was deported three days after the Rodens. She died at Auschwitz, and her date of death is also unknown. In the very same building where Zionism evolved from an idea into an organised political movement, Hakim Hadid now keeps a framed photograph with Yasser Arafat.

Whilst believing that Israel is an ‘illegal’ state, Hadid says we must accept the reality that it is not going anywhere. ‘We cannot kill all Israelis,’ he repeats.

Basel is a magnificent city. It is home to Erasmus’s tomb; the Goetheanum, the extraordinary auditorium commissioned by Rudolf Steiner; it is the city of Karl Barth, the theologian, and Jakob Bernoulli, the mathematician; one of the greatest historians of all time, Jacob Burckhardt, and the renowned philosopher Karl Jaspers taught there; and it is home to the house where Friedrich Nietzsche lived. In short, a capital of European culture. And in Herzl’s Basel, a protester at the Eurovision parade, brandishing the Palestinian flag, made a throat-slitting gesture towards a Jewish woman who witnessed that gesture become reality with her own eyes: the Israeli singer Yuval Raphael, a survivor of 7 October, when she had to pretend to be dead amongst the lifeless bodies at the Nova Festival for eight hours (364 dead). Herzl had foreseen this mass hatred; he had not reckoned that it would claim his own offspring first and foremost. The idea of a Jewish state came to him after he encountered the anti-Semitic hatred of the French rabble whilst covering the Dreyfus affair as a journalist in Paris. On 5 January 1895, the young correspondent for the "Freie Neue Presse" watched from the balcony of his hotel opposite the Paris Military Academy as the crowd gathered around the gates where Dreyfus’s dismissal ceremony was taking place.

“Mort aux Juifs”, they shouted. 130 years on, there are no more Herzls to be found, but a descendant of Dreyfus has become a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli army. His great-grandson, Uriel Dreyfus, is now a judge in the Israeli military courts. In a way, the circle has come full circle on a note of hope. The captain who was stripped of his French rank has a descendant who today passes judgement under the blue and white flag bearing the Star of David.