increasing importance, housing an extensive collection of Swiss artefacts from prehistoric to modern times – bridal coffers, carved altars, old sleighs, tapestries, a distillery from the ancient Benedictine monastery of Muri, musical instruments, local Swiss Trachts (each canton having its own costume), china from the old factory at Schoren, banners and ducal hats and military uniforms of every kind, plus an entire Zürich house from the fourteenth century. But as far as Emma was concerned there was nothing more important than the Zürich Central Library with its collection of 160,000 books and its large, high-ceilinged, silent reading room – open in the morning from ten until twelve, and again after lunch from two till six, entry costing 60 rappen – ideal for her research into the Legend of the Holy Grail, which she now returned to with joy, like greeting an old friend.
Emma found a pleasing anonymity in Zürich: whilst the Rauschenbachs were the foremost family of Schaffhausen, known and respected by everyone, here Emma was mostly unknown and unregarded, in spite of her great wealth. The old ruling families of Zürich kept very much to themselves, entertaining one another in their villas in quiet, prosperous districts such as Seefeld, or meeting for private luncheons in fine restaurants, or at one of their many Vereins: the Yacht Club, the Rifle Club, the Rowing Club, the Riding Club, and the recently founded Automobile Club. Who among them would want to pass the time of day with the wife of an Irrenarzt employed at the Burghölzli asylum – an institution which had, after all, been built high up on the Zollikon hill, well away from the town, for a reason? This snobbery bothered neither Emma nor Carl, who were content, each for their own reasons, to be outsiders: Carl because he was born that way, Emma because society never held much importance for her, preferring as she did the company of close friends and family.
Marguerite often came to visit during that first year and the sisters would wander up and down the Bahnhofstrasse or the Parade Platz, though Emma bored of it quickly, one shop being much like the next. With the exception of the fashion houses. Both sisters were interested in the latest fashions, noting they were distinctly more modern in Zürich than sleepy Schaffhausen. Day wear was much the same: long-skirted and high-necked, worn with hats and button boots, but evening gowns were very décolleté, set off by heavy strings of pearls. The waists seemed narrower in Zürich, fishbone corsets pulled tight every morning by the maid, and the hats seemed larger, decorated with plumes and bows and veils, the hair curled with heated irons and pinned up with combs and grips. Feather boas and tassels were the fashion that year, and no lady went about without gloves, short for the day, long for the evenings. In the summer months the dark patterns gave way to white – long white skirts, high-necked white blouses, white stockings, white shoes. Swiss lace and embroidery came into their own then, along with parasols and wide straw hats decorated with ribbons and cherries and artificial flowers. Perfumes of violets, lilies-of-the-valley or eau de cologne were especially popular. On the Bahnhofstrasse in the recently opened Salon de Beauté there were boxes of rice powder, pots of white and rose creams, tiny bottles of nail polish and glass balls of bath salts displayed in discreetly half-netted windows, offering manicures and pedicures and other beauty treatments in the privacy of curtained-off niches, administered by trained young ladies in white overalls with their hair tightly pulled back.
After their shopping exertions Emma and Marguerite usually went to a café for kaffee or thé citron and pâtisserie. Other days they might take the cable tram up to the Grand Hotel Dolder, with its wide terrace and Zeiss telescope to better appreciate the view of the Alps. There were two picture houses showing newsreels and new features like The Great Train Robbery, jerky and silent except for the piano accompaniment, though good bourgeois people rarely visited them other than incognito, via a private side door. Emma and Marguerite preferred to promenade along the many quais which bordered the lake, or sit in the gardens of the Tonhalle – the grand concert hall built in 1895 in imitation of the Trocadero in Paris – listening to one of the military bands and talking about Marguerite’s fiancé, Ernst Homberger, the son of another of their father’s former business associates in Schaffhausen. One thing they did not do was visit the Panoptikum on the seamier side of the Bahnhof Bridge, with curtains drawn and dimly lit by gaslight, where men could, by looking through small panes, view a tiger hunt in the Sudan, or the ‘Rape of the Sabines’, or a wax Sarah Bernhardt in a negligee, or the ‘medical’ exhibition with lifesize models of naked women.
Sunday was Carl’s day off. In the morning all the church bells, Protestant and Catholic, rang out across Zürich and families put on their Sunday best to attend the services, prayer books in hand, little girls with hair done up Heidi-style, boys in matelot suits. Not the Jungs, however. Carl had vowed never to set foot in a church again, other than on unavoidable occasions such as his own wedding, and he was determined not to have any of his children confirmed, remembering the debilitating boredom and depression which overcame him during the instruction given him by his father, who was all the while denying his own religious doubts, battling with his unnamed torments. Emma accepted Carl’s rejection of formal religion without much trouble, not least because by Sunday they were often on the train to Schaffhausen, to be met at the railway station by coachman Braun as usual, then up the hill to Ölberg where Emma’s mother and Marguerite and the servants waited, and Emma was back to the world she knew and loved.
Their first years of married life were happy for them both. A studio portrait taken at that time shows the couple side by side and close, looking into the lens of the camera with confidence and ease. Emma’s wavy brown hair is done simply in a modern style – softly off the face. Her expression is shy but calm and direct, and quite determined. She is wearing a blouse in the Grecian style, high-necked, modern again. The skirt is long, simple and elegant, very unlike the elaborate outfits displayed in most of the fashion magazines. She may be standing on a box – the custom for studio photographs if the difference in height was too great – but she still looks half Carl’s size. He stands there solid, with his hand nonchalantly in his pocket – dark suit, light waistcoat, a stiff-collared white shirt and small bow tie – a confident man of the world with no trace of the pompous and rather unhappy student of earlier photographs. His gold-rimmed spectacles glint in the studio lights and it is just possible to see the gold chain of his wedding present from Emma. His small moustache is trimmed the way it will be for the rest of his life. In another take of the pose, Emma is smiling more, probably encouraged by the photographer, but Carl is just the same. He looks – there is no other way to put it – like the cat that got the cream.
‘I’m sitting here in the Burghölzli and for a month I’ve been playing the part of the Director, Senior Physician and First Assistant,’ Carl wrote on 22 August 1904 to Andreas Vischer, an old friend from university days. It was summer, and everyone else was away on holiday. ‘So almost every day I’m writing twenty letters, giving twenty interviews, running all over the place and getting very annoyed. I have even lost another fourteen pounds in the last year as a result of this change of life, which otherwise is not a bad thing of course. On the contrary, all that would be fine (for what do we want from life more than real work?) if the public uncertainty of existence were not so great.’ He might claim it annoyed him, but his tone is buoyant, optimistic. There was nothing Carl loved more, he admitted, than work – at least work that made sense to him: investigating the dark corners of the mind. Emma was getting used to the idea that she hardly ever saw him.
By the end of the year it was becoming clear that Jung was not going to find another job elsewhere, certainly not in his home town of Basel, which had been his plan. Apparently his falling-out with Professor Wille had well and truly ruined his chances: the job of director at the Basel asylum, which Carl had applied for, was given to one of Wille’s German colleagues, a man named Wolff. Swinging from high spirits to low, Carl called it the ‘Basel calamity’, which had ‘wrecked for ever’ his academic career in Switzerland. Now he had to consider remaining in Zürich and at the Burghölzli. ‘I might as well sit under a millstone as under Wolff,’ he wrote to Vischer, ‘who will stay up there immovably enthroned for thirty years until he is as old as Wille. For no one in Germany is stupid enough to take Wolff seriously, as Kraepelin has appropriately said, he is not even a psychiatrist. I have been robbed of any possibility of advancement in Basel now.’
Carl
