The Fall of the House of Herzl

The founder of Zionism spent his life fighting for a home for his people. His orphaned children spent their lives searching for a home
of their own.

by David Zax

On the morning of November 25, 1946, a young British Army officer walked down Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., not far from the small house in which he boarded. A taxi driver coming up the avenue saw the officer from his car. As the driver came to the high arch bridge that spans Rock Creek below, he saw the man come to a stop. Thinking him a fare, the driver slowed.

The man took off his tweed topcoat, set it on the bridge's railing and looked out over the crowns of the trees and the cemetery lining the side of a hill that descends into the creek. He might have been thinking of land, and of family—of his parents, surely, and perhaps of his grandfather.

Theodor Herzl was an artist first, a statesman second. Even after he abandoned his career as a playwright in his home city of Vienna and traveled throughout Europe to drum up support for the Zionist movement he founded, he wrote in his diary, "Come to think of it, in all this I am still the dramatist. I picked poor people in rags off the streets, put gorgeous costumes on them, and had them perform for the world a wonderful pageant of my composition."

Like other artists he longed for immortality, whether attained through work or descendants. From his student days he strove for the first and had an elated taste of the second shortly after his marriage to Julie Naschauer in 1889. "This little one," he wrote upon learning of her pregnancy in an essay called "Der Sohn," "has given me a tangible, sensuous love of life. For he is my son, my never-ending continuation, the guarantee that I shall forever inherit the earth, forever renewed as my son, my grandson, forever young, forever beautiful, forever strong."

Julie gave birth to a girl, named Pauline after Herzl's sister, but a son followed the next year, to whom he bestowed the thoroughly German name Hans. When Hans was only four, and Herzl's frustration with European anti-Semitism had led to his vision of a Jewish state, Herzl began to imagine the role his children might play in that new nation. In his fantasy, his family would inherit his life's work, the two immortal strains uniting. He envisioned the coronation of Hans as "doge," or head of state: "While all are marching in gold-studded gala uniforms, the high priests under canopies, the doge himself will wear the garb of shame of a medieval ghetto Jew: the pointed hat, the yellow badge," he wrote. "When I thought that someday I might crown Hans as doge…I had tears in my eyes."

"If you will it, it is no dream," he famously wrote in his book Old-New Land. And though that statement was borne out with Israel's birth decades later, Herzl's dream of his family's role in that state was one continually deferred, and finally dashed. The story of its death has been little known and only sketchily drawn, its details obscured from view by the loss of historical documents and the glare of the halo given Herzl after his death. "So much of his intimate life has been shrouded with man-made clouds," laments Herzl biographer, Desmond Stewart, and indeed an early biography of Hans was suppressed. Still, the basic thrust of the tale of the House of Herzl is clear. Writes another biographer, Ernst Pawel. "The end of the Herzl bloodline has about it the inexorable fatality of a Greek tragedy."

One thing is certain: To grow up in the Herzl home was a lonely business. Margarethe Gertrude (known to the family as Trude) joined Pauline and Hans in 1893, and Herzl soon decided, in keeping with his dynastic ambitions, that the children should have private tutors and a nanny. Time with father was strictly rationed to half an hour a day. They would be raised like royalty, shielded from contact with other children to avoid infection. "Shall we go to school when Papa is king?" a visitor once overheard one of the young ones say, according to Ilse Sternberger, author of the 1994 book Princes Without a Home: Modern Zionism and the Strange Fate of Theodore Herzl's Children.

Many bemoan the need to choose between family and work, but for Herzl the choice was easy. His love for his children was "theoretical," writes Desmond Stewart, and "while sentimentalizing about them—'Children are our greatest teachers'—he proved ready to desert them at the least temptation." His marriage to Julie had become unbearable astonishingly fast; even their honeymoon was a disaster. (He wrote a friend a postcard: "I've grown older again—much, much older. Farewell and be happy.") She was spoiled and unstable, prone to threatening suicide merely to win an argument, and Herzl more than once "stopped her from cutting her wrists or jumping out of the window, and kept her from deliberately inducing miscarriage," writes Pawel.

It is likely that Herzl felt most at home on the train, hurtling to yet another country to meet another imperial leader with too much land, or another Jewish philanthropist with too much money. Herzl's 1,600 pages of diaries are full of accounts of such journeys. His efforts on behalf of Zionism were indeed all-consuming, and biographers agree that Herzl essentially worked himself to death. He had always been in ill health, suffering increasingly from heart palpitations and blackouts as he entered his forties. "I feel the autumn of my life approaching," he wrote. "I am in danger of leaving no work to the world and no property to my children." In 1898, he spoke with a colleague about how to manage his Zionist newspaper, Die Welt, in the event of his death. "The paper itself is, of course, the property of my children, because during the period I have been working on behalf of the Jews, I have neglected to earn for them." (It would never turn a profit anyway.)

His copious diary cuts off on May 16, 1904, just days after Hans's 13th birthday, which was not marked by a bar mitzvah because Theodor and Julie had declined to have the future Crown Prince of the Jews circumcised. (Herzl was highly secular; his first proposed solutions to the Jewish Question had, after all, been assimilation and mass conversion.) Two months later, Herzl was dead at 44. He was buried in Vienna, but stated in his will that he hoped someday to be interred with his children in Palestine.

A letter ostensibly from Julie appeared in Die Welt and The Jewish Chronicle. "I will serve the Zionist movement with all my strength, and will do all that is possible to initiate my children in the life's work of their father, and to make them worthy champions in the movement for the deliverance of our people, for which he strove," it said.

Historians agree that she did not write the letter, which, according to Stewart, was "part of a campaign by Herzl's associates to conceal truths that embarrassed them acutely." Julie died three years later after a protracted period of mental and physical instability; she was cremated, her ashes entrusted to Hans, then 16, who accidentally left them on a train. His sisters, Pauline and Trude, were 17 and 14. The orphaned children of a man who forged a home for his entire people would spend the rest of their lives in search of a home of their own.

After the deaths of their parents, the Herzl children became wards of the Zionist Organization. Hans and Pauline reacted differently. Herzl's older daughter began misusing her stipend almost immediately. She married an older man, she drank, she cheated, she divorced and with her physical and mental health failing due to a morphine addiction, she was in and out of sanatoriums. Hans accepted with embarrassment the Zionists' offer to finance his education in England. He struggled with his Jewish identity, and at 15, probably at the urging of a guardian, he was circumcised.

The Zionists nurtured the hope that Hans might assume his father's mantle but were soon disappointed. When World War I broke out, Hans joined the English Army; it was a repudiation of his native land, since England was Austria's enemy, and it was an action that caused him to forfeit his stipend. After the war, he lived in London, alone and poor. He was painfully sensitive and shy, and though an early treatment by Karl Jung enabled him to flirt with women, he never sustained a romantic relationship.

By the 1920s, Hans and Pauline had become outright embarrassments to the Zionists. Pauline came to resemble a decadent character in a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, frequenting nightclubs, sleeping with strangers. Hans, meanwhile, in his quest to find his own solution to the Jewish question, rejected his father's beliefs entirely. "My father was a great man, whom I loved," he wrote in 1929. "But I've come to see that he made a great historical error in his attempt to rebuild the Jewish State…. My father did not realize the true mission of the Jewish people, which has proven that the living and fertilizing spirit does not need territorial boundaries, and that a people can live and exist even when fortifications and borders have disappeared." He urged the Zionists "not to attempt to add to the decadent civilizations but to remember their true identity and work for the cultural reconstruction of their homeland—and this homeland is the entire world."

His search for universalism led him to convert to Christianity, and he cycled through different denominations: Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, Quaker. His moods were equally volatile, swinging between deep depression and wild delusions of grandeur.

Meanwhile, by 1930, Pauline had made her way to Bordeaux. She was broke and tried to find a place to sleep, but few would help her despite her famous name. By the time the police picked her up as a vagrant, she was seriously ill. Hans, having begged the Zionists for the fare, rushed to her bedside and stayed with her until he was confident that she was improving. But not long after returning to London, he learned that she had died. He flew to Bordeaux to bury her, and the next day, overcome with grief, wrote a last, despairing letter.

"I am destitute and bitter," he said. "I have no home. Nobody would regret it if I were to put a bullet through my head. Could I undo my errors that way? I realize how right my father had been when he once said: 'Only the withered branches fall off a tree—the healthy ones flourish.'" (Herzl had written in The Jewish State: "Branches of the Jewish people may perish. Its tree will live.")

Though Hans had been grateful for the welcoming arms of the church, he now admitted that his conversion had been a wasted exercise. "A Jew remains a Jew," he wrote, "no matter how eagerly he may submit himself to the disciplines of his new religion, how humbly he may place the redeeming cross upon his shoulders for the sake of his former coreligionists, to save them from eternal damnation: a Jew remains a Jew."

Hans penned a brief note to the hotel manager, apologizing for the mess he was about to make and with a single gunshot, pierced the head his father had dreamed would wear the crown of Israel.

Though the last to bear the Herzl name, Hans was not the last of Herzl's descendants. Trude, after her mother's death, had been sent to live with an aunt whose strictness drove her into a world of fantasy. Her fits of mania and depression became so severe that by 17 she, too, was in and out of sanatoriums.

In 1914, when she was 21, her health had improved enough for her to move into her own place in Vienna. That year she met a divorced businessman named Richard Neumann, 26 years her senior. They married in 1917, and a year later had a son, Stephan Theodor. Soon thereafter, Trude relapsed—Neumann would ultimately record 14 institutionalizations. Diagnosed with a form of psychosis, she would shoot off grandiose letters, for instance, to the King of England: "I should like to reign: would it be quite impossible to get me the British throne?" While Hans was excessively introspective and Pauline self-destructively libertine, Trude, writes Herzl biographer Stewart, was clinically insane.

It was from a mental hospital that Trude was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She arrived ostentatiously dressed and bearing fine luggage, announcing, "I am Herzl's daughter. I wish to establish special, personal contact with the highest of Jewish authorities in Theresienstadt." She was delivered to the camp's psychiatric ward, where her one luxury was a notebook, whose pages she rapidly filled, describing her meals and treatment by the nurses until finally, one day, she wrote: "My last sheet of paper. What is left to me without the possibility of writing?"

Trude died on March 15, 1943, probably of disease, possibly of starvation, and her corpse was incinerated. Her husband died there the same year.

The last of Theodor Herzl's descendants, Stephan Theodor Neumann, was born too late to meet his grandfather, but those who had known both said Stephan strongly resembled him.

Stephan's childhood in Vienna was predictably difficult, what with Trude's constant relapses and his family's financial ruin brought on by the Depression and exacerbated by hospital bills. Still, it was a childhood filled with great love, especially for his father, with whom he was very close. Unable to provide for Stephan, Neumann appealed to the Zionist Organization for aid. Still bitter about Hans's conversion, the Zionist leadership would agree only on the condition that Stephan be schooled in Palestine. But the prospect frightened Neumann, to whom Palestine seemed too remote and dangerous.

Neumann wrote a friend, a Dr. Stybovitch, who intervened on Stephan's behalf, and the movement agreed that Stephan could attend a Jewish school in London on the condition that he would some day move to Palestine. He arrived in England in 1933 and, according to his mother, liked it there. It was during these years that Stephan gradually acquired an interest in Zionism, not because of anything he was taught, but out of a longing to learn more about his family roots. "I cannot say that my upbringing had been markedly Jewish or Orthodox," he reflected in his diary late in his life. "Nor was the idea of Zionism, in spite of my family connection with it, ever at any time rammed down my throat, either at home or subsequently at school and university. But I had found and read my grandfather's writings, which make, I think, fascinating reading to anyone even remotely interested in Judaism, and which were, of course, of considerable interest to me."

Stephan came to be the closest thing to a Zionist in his family. He wrote that he believed "in the idea and aims of Zionism, and in the moral, ethical, economic, and social need for it that had been made even more urgent and important by world events and the tremendous problems created by the new scientific anti-Semitism of the last decades."

In 1938, he urged his parents to flee to Palestine in the face of rising German aggression, but by then they were unable to leave Austria. With the outbreak of war Stephan lost touch with them, and his plans to visit Palestine upon his graduation in 1939 were put aside. Instead, he joined the Royal Artillery, anglicizing his name to Stephen Theodore Norman to avoid anti-German sentiment, and served during the war in India and Ceylon, rising to the rank of captain.

By chance in 1945, while shuttling between Ceylon and England, he had the opportunity to make two brief stops in Palestine, becoming the first of Theodor Herzl's descendants to set foot there. Though these two visits each lasted only a few days, they were a revelation to him. He landed in Lydda (now Lod) and hitched a ride to Tel Aviv, where one of the first things he noticed were the children. "These children bore the mark of freedom," he wrote. "It was quite unmistakable: In their bearing, in their eyes….I thought of the dark, sallow, unhappy Jewish children of Europe. I had seen pictures of their faces; their youthful frames had borne the feature of old men and women, and now I saw these little ones who looked like children again."

Stephen was an honored guest of the Zionist leadership, visiting the building of the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund, where Theodor Herzl's Vienna study had been transplanted whole. "It is difficult for me to describe my feeling as I entered that room," he wrote. He stood there marveling at the desk topped with pens and rulers and blotting paper, just as they had been when Herzl lived. "I could have spent many hours in the room." It lay, for Stephen, at the intersection of an entire nation's future and a lost family's past.

Stephen had a plane to catch, but he knew he would someday be back. "I know that when I went away from Erez Israel, I died a little," he wrote. "But sure, then, to return is somehow to be reborn. And I will return."

But it was a promise he wouldn't keep. Stephen Norman was the young officer who stopped on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge in Washington, D.C., folded his topcoat and draped it over the railing. As the taxi approached, slowing to pick up its presumed fare, Stephen vaulted over the edge.

A morbidly curious crowd gathered on the bridge; cars slowed and stopped, and traffic gridlocked. About a hundred feet below, police examining the body on Rock Creek Parkway had no trouble ruling the death a suicide. Searching the deceased's pockets, the police, as they told The Washington Post, found little of interest: "a small china charm—a Walt Disney dog with one ear broken off." The man's wristwatch, they said, was still ticking. There was no note.

Coming upon the article about the suicide in The Post (which made no mention of Stephen T. Norman's famous grandfather), Elihu Elath was devastated. Elath, head of the Jewish Agency in the United States, was one of Stephen's only friends in Washington, where Stephen had recently been assigned a minor post with the British Board of Trade. Stephen had left some documents and belongings with Elath—"for a few days," Stephen had said. One of these items was a letter to Stephen from his former nanny that confirmed that his parents had died in Theresienstadt.

Elath arranged for Stephen's burial in Adas Israel's cemetery in southeast Washington. He was 28 years old. "With the death of Captain Norman, no descendant is left of the great founder of the Zionist movement," declared Moshe Frelichov, who had known both Stephen and his grandfather, at the ceremony. "The great Herzl now lives only in his great work."

The State of Israel was born 18 months later, its independence proclaimed under the watchful, weary eyes of the portrait of Theodor Herzl.

This might seem to be the end of the story of the fall of the House of Herzl. But founding families have afterlives as their stories become part of a greater public mythology.

The new Israeli government proudly fulfilled one request in Herzl's will: that "the Jewish people…transfer my remains to Palestine." This they did promptly in 1949, and in a ceremony called a "victory procession" by then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Herzl was reinterred on a Jerusalem mount named in his honor. The government was less keen to comply with another of Herzl's wishes—that "members of my immediate family (mother and children) should be brought to Palestine. My wife only if she so desires in her last will." A drug-addicted daughter, a suicidal son, an unstable wife—these didn't fit the image of Herzl that Israeli leaders were hoping to establish, and so Hans and Pauline were left quietly in their cemetery plot in Bordeaux. Trude's body was never recovered from Theresienstadt.

In 2004, Israeli historian Ariel Feldestein committed what he calls a historian's sin: He decided to try to change the course of history (albeit slightly), rather than merely record it. After studying Herzl's will, he lobbied the government to make good on Herzl's request. Israel's Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar ruled that Hans could be buried as a Jew since he had returned spiritually to Judaism, and that his suicide was excusable due to his circumstances, and Hans and Pauline were reinterred with their father in 2006. During the ceremony, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert thanked Amar for finding "the halachic basis for this humane decision." The burial would "close a historic circle" he said.

But Jerry Klinger—a Jewish history buff who runs a small Jewish American historical society out of Rockville, Maryland—did not share this sense of closure. Klinger first learned of Stephen Norman when reading Amos Elon's Herzl: A Biography in 2003. Stephen's story resonated with Klinger, making him think of his own father's experience during the Holocaust, when after being shuttled from camp to camp, he was bayoneted and left for dead. But a fellow Jew would not leave him behind. Klinger says, "A Jew does not abandon a Jew."

Klinger and Mae Goder, a researcher in Israel, have developed a theory as to why Stephen never made it back to Palestine. It is based on a letter written by Stephen in England on July 2, 1946, shortly before he was assigned to Washington, that Goder found in Jerusalem's Zionist archives. Addressed to a Mrs. Stybovitch-Kann, wife of the Dr. Stybovitch to whom his father had appealed, Stephen asks, "Do you remember me? I am Richard and Trude Neumann's son Stephan. Many, many years ago, when I was a very little boy we met in Vienna….So many dreadful things have happened in the last few years that they are best not spoken of. But you, my dear, and I, are among the millions who have lost our dearest….I would very much like to see you. What are your plans and when do you return to Haifa? Will you be coming to England on the way? It would be so very nice to meet you again after all these years….I should like us to resume the friendship between our families."

Then a possible clue: "I intend to go to Palestine on a long visit in the near future," he writes, "in fact as soon as passport and permit regulations permit. But the dreadful news of the last two days has done nothing to make this easier." The letter, Goder says, was written just days after what Jews came to call "Black Shabbat." The once-friendly relations between the British and the Jews in Palestine (still under the British Mandate) had turned sour, and on June 29, 1946, British soldiers and police conducted several raids in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, arresting thousands, including much of the Zionist leadership.

Did the British, ask Klinger and Goder, deliberately keep Stephen from returning to Palestine because of whose grandson he was? Little evidence exists to confirm or deny this hypothesis, but the British would have been keenly aware of his symbolic value, says Goder, and may have been in no mood to hand over to the Zionists a leader of any sort, symbolic or not. If Stephen made aliyah, might the Zionists have trumpeted the return of Herzl's last descendant, boosting morale and creating an instant figure to rally around—the prince returned from exile, the crowned Herzl at last?

To Klinger and Goder, this is more than a matter of history. They believe the fact that Stephen did not make it to Israel and was instead transferred to the United States may have been one of the factors leading to his suicide. Had he learned the news of his parents' demise in Israel, might he have chosen to live? Klinger answers confidently, "Yes." He doesn't claim Stephen wouldn't have gone on suffering from the depression that had haunted his family and now, in the aftermath of the war, struck him. But "he would have had the purpose he believed in."

It is a bold claim. But reading Stephen's words, it doesn't seem farfetched. "The Jews of the world are an old, old people," he wrote. "But the Jews of Palestine are young—the youngest people in the world. They are not carefree. They have great and difficult problems. And in their hearts they carry the memory of the fate of their brothers and sisters in Europe, a fate that an indifferent world is rapidly forgetting. But they are young and strong, the Jews of Palestine, and they are eager to shoulder their problems, although they will never forget their Jewish brothers and sisters.

"They cannot awaken the dead," he added. "But they can and will succor the living."

If reviving interest in Herzl's children was difficult, Klinger's self-imposed task of rescuing Stephen Norman from oblivion seemed nearly impossible. He lobbied for years to bring Stephen's body home to Israel, years he recalls as a struggle against "apathy, discontent, post-Zionism and Zionist sclerosis." By 2006, he had nothing to show for his efforts. In frustration, he even took a fistful of earth from Stephen's gravesite and brought it to Herzl's grave, where he claimed another handful to bring back to Stephen.

Still, he didn't give up, and last year, after a Herzl-like display of tenacity, Klinger succeeded in willing his dream into being. On December 5, 2007, Klinger stood beside Prime Minister Olmert as Stephen Theodore Norman was reburied with his grandfather, aunt and uncle on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Finally his bones rest in a country where Jews had seemed, as he wrote, "in control of their destiny and in my own land. Land that wants me."