The Valentine Story of Ludwig and Margit von Mises

He talked to her after dinner, and they went to a dance club. Apparently Mises was a poor dancer -- at least by Margit's standards -- and so they spent most of the night talking. Actually she did most of the talking and he listened attentively. Margit was an attractive woman of five-foot-four, with brown hair and grey-blue eyes. Now, as they talked, he discovered she was also a witty and warm person. He must have fallen in love with her that evening. The next day, he sent her red roses and asked her out for dinner. It was the first of many such dinners over the next two years. Margit Serény was an actress from a bourgeois background in Hamburg. During the war, she had performed on one of the leading stages in Vienna, the Deutsche Volkstheater. When Mises met her, she was thirty-five years old and a very attractive widow with two children, Guido and Gitta. Shortly after her arrival in Vienna in early 1917, she had married Ferdinand Serény, a Hungarian aristocrat who died in 1923, bequeathing to her assets that had lost most of their value during the inflation. FULL ARTICLE