Patrick Comerford
Marianne Faithfull, the singer, muse and actor who helped write and inspired some of the Rolling Stones’ greatest songs, died last week at the age of 78. She was 17 and I had just started secondary school when she took every teenage boy’s world by storm with her hit version of ‘As Tears Go By.’
The story of Marianne Faithfull’s disturbing early life, her brave efforts at recovery, and her death last week brought back so many of my teenage and school years. They reminded me too of the amazing story of her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, who styled herself Baroness Erisso, and called me back again to a blog series, ‘Tales of the Viennese Jews,’ which I began in November 2019, although I had not returned to it since the story of Max Perutz almost for four years ago (18 May 2021).
The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.
However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.
Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I decided after a visit to Vienna in November 2019 to post occasional blog postings that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.
The newspaper obituaries last week focussed on Marianne Faithfull as a singer, actor, her brave battle for recovery from addiction and against cancer, and her short relationship with Mick Jagger, and portrayed her as the archetypal wild child of the 1960s.
She had a convent school education, and was often described as the daughter of an aristocratic baroness who had survived the Nazi occupation of Austria. Both details added to the media attention to her lifestyle in the 1960s and 1970s.
In recent years, the singer also explored her Jewish background and her Jewish ancestry featured in the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?. She once declared she had to thank her Jewish roots for her renditions of the songs of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill and for an innate flair for their music.
Recent genealogical research reveals that, despite her Catholic background and schooling, Marianne Faithfull was Jewish by all rabbinical definitions. Although she never practised Judaism, her mother, her maternal grandmother, and all her ancestors on that side of her family are Jewish, which meets the definition of being Jewish according to halacha or Jewish traditional law.
Her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, who called herself Baroness Erisso, was a dancer in Weimar Berlin and was then living in Vienna when World War II began. Eva’s mother Flora was born into a well-known Jewish family; she converted to Christianity when she married an Austrian aristocrat Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1875-1953), but she still attended synagogue on High Holy Days.
Marianne Faithfull’s father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer during World War II and later Professor of Italian Literature at Bedford College, London University. He met Eva in Vienna after the defeat of the Nazis.
Marianne Faithfull’s mother was known as Eva but was born Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991) on 4 December 1912 in Budapest, then the second city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Eva’s father, Artur Wolfgang von Sacher-Masoch, was an Austrian writer who used the pseudonym Michael Zorn. His family was descended from central European minor nobility through Leopold Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Sacher – the title ritter indicates an hereditary knight, and is somewhat equivalent to the title of baronet. Leopold combined his own family name with that of von Masoch, to keep alive the name of the family of his wife, who was the last descendant of a Slovak family of minor aristocrats. He did this when the Habsburg emperor gave him the title of ritter to recognise his work as the imperial police commissioner in Lemberg, present-day Lviv in Ukraine.
Another family member was the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), whose last name and scandalous novel Venus in Furs gave rise to the word ‘masochism’.
Eva’s mother, Flora Ziprisz (1881-1955), was born into a central European Jewish family whose members included many prominent medical doctors. She was known in her family as Flora but was born Elisabeth Rosa Ziprisz on 29 September 1881 in Karánsebes, then in Hungary and now Caransebeș in the Banat region in south-west Romania. Flora’s mother, Therese (Deutsch) Ziprisz, was also born in Caransebeş.
Flora’s father, Eva’s grandfather, Dr Wilhelm ‘Vilmos’ Ziprisz (1844-1922), was born in the Banat region on 23 November 1844 in Neusatz or Novi Sad, once known as the ‘Serbian Athens’. It was then an important city on the Danube in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian. Today it is the second largest city in Serbia.
He was a son of Salamon Ziprisz, a member of a leading Jewish family from Bač, now in Vojvodina in Serbia. He studied medicine in Vienna under Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, and later became a doctor battling the diphtheria and cholera in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He publicly vaccinated his daughter Flora with the smallpox vaccine to show villagers that it would not poison them. He died in Vienna at the age of 78 on 28 April 1922.
Despite strong disapproval from both their families, Flora married Artur Wolfgang Sacher-Masoch in Caransebeș on 9 January 1901 when she was 18. She converted to Christianity – not an uncommon experience at the time – but continued to attended synagogue on High Holy days.
After the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, Austrian abolished and outlawed all aristocratic titles. As a child, Eva was known as Eva Sacher-Masoch. She spent her early childhood living on her family’s estates near Caransebeș, and moved with her family to Vienna in 1918. Her brother was the novelist Alexander Sacher-Masoch (1901-1972), author of Die Parade.
As a young woman, Eva moved to Berlin where she studied ballet at the Max Reinhardt Company. She danced in productions by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, as well as in the cabaret scene of Weimar Berlin, depicted in the film Cabaret. In one anecdote, she recalled how she was befriended by a prostitute on the Kurfurstendamm who would see her home safely at night.
As World War II loomed, Eva returned to her parents’ home in Vienna and lived with them throughout the war. The family opposed Hitler since the Anschluss or forced annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Flora thought of herself as a Hungarian patriot, first and foremost, but was as shocked as any other Jew by the Nazi racial laws.
Despite their Jewish ancestry, Flora and Eva were protected to a degree because of Artur’s World War I military record, his standing as the writer Michael Zorn, and perhaps his aristocratic claims. This may have saved Flora from having to wear a yellow star and from being sent to the death camps but did not remove the constant fear, and Eva was officially labelled a mischling or ‘a mongrel’.
At times, the family secretly helped Jews fleeing Austria, and hid socialist pamphlets in their home. Artur joined the anti-Nazi resistance, and ended up being arrested and hung by his hands in torture chambers in his 60s.
Soviet troops liberated Vienna in April 1945, but Eva and Flora were among 100,000 or so women in Vienna who were raped by Red Army troops. A Russian soldier found Eva and Flora hiding in a room. He raped Eva, but she then picked up a gun and shot him before he could do the same to Flora; later Eva had an abortion.
In post-war Vienna, Eva met a British intelligence officer, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull (1912-1998), a lecturer in Italian at Liverpool University. They married in 1946, moved to England and were the parents of a daughter Marianne, born Marian Evelyn Gabrielle Faithfull in Hampstead, London, on 29 December 1946.
The family lived for a time in Ormskirk, Lancashire while the father completed his PhD at Liverpool University. Marianne then spent part of her childhood in Braziers Park, a commune in Oxfordshire formed by John Norman Glaister in which Robert Faithfull played an instrumental role.
The couple divorced in 1952. Despite Austrian law, Eva chose to style herself Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, despite Austrian constitutional laws. Research for Who Do You Think You Are? revealed Eva’s claim to a title was exaggerated though rooted in reality.
To help support her daughter, Eva taught dance at Bylands School, a private boarding school near Basingstoke, Hampshire. She later lived in Reading, Berkshire, where she worked as a waitress at a Sally’s Café on Friar Street. Eva’s mother Flora came to live with them and died in Reading at the age of 74 in July 1955.
Eva and Marianne seem to have lived in straitened circumstances, and Marianne’s childhood included bouts of tuberculosis. She went to a primary school in Brixton, London, and had a bursary to attend Saint Joseph’s Convent School, Reading, where she was a weekly boarder and part of the Progress Theatre’s student group.
Eva died on 22 May 1991. Dr Robert Glyn Faithfull died on 5 February 1998, aged 85.
Despite Eva’s bohemian past, Marianne Faithfull said she broke her mother’s heart when she embarked on her own wild time. As a singer, she was discovered at 17 by the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham. Her first single, ‘As Tears Go By’, was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and made her a star. She would dismiss any rumours that she had had a hand in writing the song.
Her life quickly became a whirlwind. By 18, she was married to the artist John Dunbar and the mother of a son, Nicholas. Her affair with Mick Jagger ended in 1970, and that same year she lost custody of her son. She survived a suicide attempt and spiralled downwards, spending two years sleeping rough in Soho and addicted to heroin. Later in life, she was seen as the rock ’n’ roll casualty who had survived to tell her tale.
She acted in films including The Girl On A Motorcycle with French actor Alain Delon, as well as theatre productions. She entered a new phase with an understated performance as Maggie in Sam Garbaski’s film comedy-drama Irina Palm that was lauded by critics at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007.
She also fought anorexia, hepatitis and breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was in hospital with Covid-19. Her final album was an experimental collaboration in 2021 with the Australian multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, She Walks In Beauty.
Although Marianne Faithfull was raised a Catholic, she was proud of her Jewish heritage through her mother and grandmother and once said music by Kurt Weill, a cantor’s son, was ‘very much the tonic scale from the temple.’ She had never been to a synagogue nor heard the music there. ‘But I think there must really be some genetic memory of my Jewish background,’ she once told the Jewish Chronicle.
Marianne Faithfull would say she had lived out her dreams and her nightmares. She died on 30 January 2025.
May her memory be a blessing, זיכרונה לברכה
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Tales of the Viennese Jews:
1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’
2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean
3, portraits of two imperial court financiers
4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis
5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist
6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle
7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions
8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen
9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’
10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents
11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist
12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna
13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew
14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna
15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship
16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.
17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.
18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.
19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.
20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.
21, Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) and her mother Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991)
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