by A G Mogan
Everyone else in the house is still asleep. I dread goodbyes. So, besides the reduction on the ticket, this is the other reason for leaving early in the morning. Gustl is the only person I allow to accompany me to the station.
Once there, the sound made by the train’s brakes shakes me to the core. It is not my first time traveling a long distance, as the past summer, I had visited my relatives in Spital, a hamlet in the Waldviertel, Lower Austria. However, this time the destination is the one that gives rise to my excitement. I purchase the discounted ticket and allow Gustl to help me lift the heavy suitcase onto the train.
He is puffing and panting heavily. “For Heaven’s sake, Adolf! What are you carrying with you?”
“Books.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” he mocks, and continues to push at the suitcase. He then turns around, arms outstretched to hug me. I gently push him back, shaking his hand instead.
“See you soon, dear chap,” I say. “And don’t forget to send me any letter you might receive, right away. You shall have my address in a few days.”
I wave him off and climb the train’s narrow stairs.
When the train whistles for departure, profound emotions overrun me again. This time, however, they are triggered by something else, a deep wretchedness attached to the sweet face of my beloved, who I leave behind. I drop onto a window seat and spend the entire trip lost in thoughts, staring out the window.
When the train pulls into Vienna’s Westbanhof Railway Station, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. I stick my head out the window and search the platform. My godparents are nowhere to be seen. I grab my suitcase, start dragging it along the aisle, and then off the train, all the while scrutinizing the platform for my hosts. They’re still not here, so I sit on a bench and wait.
I begin to get the sense of Vienna. Everything seems so big, so grasping, so different from Linz, and I wonder how it looks beyond the station’s walls. Enthusiasm invades me again and I start fidgeting on the bench. I wait, and then wait some more. When the huge station clock beats five o’clock, I decide no one is coming for me.
Although I am alone in a big unknown city, somehow I am not afraid. I begin to drag my suitcase again, this time toward the ticket office. The young saleswoman gives me a broad smile. Encouraged by her attitude, I ask if there is any way she could hold my suitcase, just for a couple of hours. She hesitates, so I pull out a painting and hand it over to her. It is the one with the sad people standing in front of the Opera in the gloomy, rainy weather. I no longer need it, as it no longer represents my reality.
When I leave the train station, I am instantly captivated. The spectacle unraveling before my eyes seems surreal. I drag my body like a sleepwalker, my mouth open and eyes wide, afraid of losing any architectural detail. The whole Ring Boulevard has a magical effect on me, as if it were a scene from the Thousand-and-One-Nights.
I have never seen anything as magnificent as the Vienna Opera House or the Parliament building, and must admit that even my fruitful imagination had failed to surpass them.
I now stand before Hof Museum and check my pockets for change to buy an entrance ticket. Studying the paintings of the great masters, I dream about how one day, not too far in the future, mine will also be hanging from these walls. The golden curls of Dürer’s Madonna, which remind me of the northern goddesses, and my beautiful Stefanie, fascinate me, yet I find baby Jesus rather hideous. Defregger’s rural landscapes excite me also, as they are so similar to my birthplace, Braunau am Inn. Grutzner’s drunken monks with swollen bellies amuse me, and I am deeply satisfied with the natural, authentic representation of Makart’s cadavers in Plague.
I lose myself for a long time in the shapes, colors, shadows, and contrasts of the paintings, scrutinizing every corner in the museum. In the last hall, I am acquainted for the first time with the art of Franz von Stuck. Mouth half-open, I inspect the enormous snakes entwining nonchalant female nudes, crawling between their legs, giving them unsuspecting pleasures. They seem so vulgar, yet so addictive. I can hardly take my eyes off them. The perfection of these buxom nudes, their pale skin and sensual, inviting eyes are enthralling.
Their voluptuous forms remind me of the first sexual impulse I had, years past, when I was no older than three or four. It was around Easter, and as per tradition, the house needed a general cleaning. So, Mother called in a woman to help her.
When she arrived, I was instantly captivated by her plump red cheeks and could not take my eyes off her. Then, to my surprise, when she rolled up the hem of her dress to kneel and scrub the floor, I caught a glimpse of her naked flesh.
In a flash, a strange, pleasurable feeling swept through me, concentrated in the region of my underwear, and I had the sudden urge to crawl on all fours. I wanted, nay, I needed to get to that woman and bite her bare flesh that was giving me such pleasure. The moment was fleeting though and I did not know what to make of it, being torn between surrendering to or feeling guilty for having such pleasure — or denying it as something evil. Regardless of the struggles of my budding conscience, the pleasure remained with me for a very long time.
I jump when the museum’s guard tells me visiting hours are over and kindly asks me to leave the premises. As I exit, the darkness outside startles me. Remembering my suitcase, I start running toward the train station. Luckily, I manage to recover it and find myself alone again in the gas lamp-lit streets of Vienna.
Dragging the load that is quickly becoming unbearable, I walk up Westbanhof Station Avenue and check in at the first motel that seems inhabitable. I pay for a room overlooking the street and slam into bed. Bloody godparents! Unreliable rascals! I seethe. I don’t need them. I have myself and I’ll prove that’s all I need to become an academic painter.
I finally close my eyelids and slip into a deep, peaceful sleep.
The following morning, before being engulfed in the wonders of Vienna again, I proceed to find a suitable host. Glancing casually down a side street, I see a sign hanging from the wooden fence of a two-story villa that reads: Room to let. I read the street name, Stumpergasse, halt before the villa in question, and then knock heavily on its gate. Out of the corner of my eye I notice someone scrutinizing me from behind one of the window curtains. I knock again, this time harder and steadier. Finally, a middle-aged woman opens the door and looks at me inquiringly.
“Can I help you, boy?”
I wish people would quit calling me “boy”! I am eighteen, for Heaven’s sake! A grown man!
I point my finger at the sign. “It says here that you have a spare room. Can I see it?”
“Why sure, sure, please do!” She rushes to unlock the gate, making effusive gestures of welcome. “Come! Come inside, boy!” The woman sounds Czech or Polish, definitely not Austrian.
All of a sudden, I am no longer a stranger to her and she rubs her hands excitedly. Maybe today she would be lucky enough to take on a new tenant.
“I am Mrs. Zakreys,” she says, as she crosses the courtyard toward the rear of the villa. I trail quietly behind her.
On the ground floor, a rather small room with obstructed street-view and smelling of kerosene awaits its next tenant.
“And how much do you want for this small room, Mrs. Zakreys?” I ask, emphasizing small.
She scratches her head and avoids my look. “Ten crowns, Sugar. You can search for other places, but I assure you, you’ll be back.”
I like this plump woman with red cheeks and comic demeanor, and the room, though small, seems very quiet. I’ll live here only for a short while anyway, I tell myself. As soon as I am officially declared an academic painter, I will rent a renaissance-style place for myself and Stefanie.
“Ten crowns it is,” I say, smiling slyly at the chubby woman.
Almost instantly, she captures me in a suffocating embrace, patting my back with her stocky hands.
“You know, it’s very hard to find an honest tenant these days. Times change before you can even get properly acquainted with
the old ways. Vienna is no longer what it used to be … Thank you for stopping here, young man!” I feel grateful she quit calling me a boy. “Go on, get acquainted with the room! I’ll go bring cookies and lemonade to celebrate your arrival.”
I thank the woman, but ask to keep her hospitality for later, as Vienna is calling me and I cannot possibly remain indoors. I am pleased with my new accommodation, with the host, and with being so close to Ring Boulevard.
The following days I wander through the city, avidly absorbing everything the great metropolis has to offer. The imperial squares, the narrow, medieval alleyways, and the majestic architecture transport me back in time, as if I were living in the age of our ancestors.
The Danube River follows me here, too, and I sometimes pause on its banks, hypnotized by the moving water. Dipping my fingers into the cold, dark-blue liquid, I think of her, of Stefanie. It makes me feel closer to her, as if in touching the water connecting the cities we’re in, I am actually touching her.
To my profound stupefaction, however, not everything about Vienna is wonderful.
Confused by the mass of impressions I receive from the architectural surroundings and depressed by my own troubles, I do not at first distinguish between the different social strata of which the population of this mammoth city is composed.
After my eyes and spirit are saturated by the impressive paintings at the art gallery and the beauty and abundance of architectural masterpieces, I begin, almost unwillingly, to notice the ugliness attached to Vienna. But, what metropolis does not hide, behind her majestic beauty, those side-alleys filled with beggars, who outnumber the infected rats? Which great city could delight you indefinitely without eventually showing you the misery that lurks in its suburbs? Vienna does not prove any different.
From the moment I take my eyes off its fascinating architectural facade, all I see is its dark, ugly side, which resembles a foul, toothless mouth, a failed painting in which you can easily detect the artist’s frustration. It looks the way my family looked when Father was still alive. Like a rotten apple.
Not until I gradually settle down to my surroundings, and the confused picture begins to grow clearer, do I acquire a more discriminating view of my new world, and come up against the many problems the great city is having.
For one, Vienna reveals thousands, if not tens of thousands of unemployed, all with their hands extended toward those favored by fate ─ only to get disgusted, smug glares in return. Those glares arouse such an aversion in me that I cannot avoid the uncomfortable feeling that comes over me whenever I see them.
The hundreds of beggars in these infamous streets continuously humiliate themselves for the few coins so necessary for their survival. Together, they look like a spreading disease. Separately, they all have faces riddled with the uncertainty of tomorrow. I vow to my own conscience never to end up like them. My vow is not for lack of empathy, but because their wretched faces instill in me a dreadful fear, a fear I struggle unsuccessfully to suppress. When it becomes overwhelming, I run back to my little room and pull the shutters down, another gesture made to keep all that ugliness away from me.
I finally decide I know too little of the city and the people in it to be able to form a sound opinion. I made another vow to ignore the things that frighten me until better equipped with the knowledge I need. To that end, I resolve to explore the libraries, loan out books, and buy newspapers and pamphlets. To my surprise, most of them burst with anti-Semitic attention, and I realize such a large concern is worth investigating.
For the first time in my life, I buy myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pence.
And this is how I come up against the second problem of this city.
The Jewish problem.
It’s been two weeks since I stepped on Viennese soil. I envisioned myself experiencing joy, enchantment, and the smooth beginning of my artistic career. To my astonishment, however, this city had much more to reveal than I expected. A new, strange, yet exciting, world opened up to me and I found myself thirsty for its knowledge.
The violence with which the Jew is attacked through the press has such a strong hold on me I almost forget about my reason for coming to the capital: the admission at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Painting Department.
I had never encountered such hatred in Linz, where everything is peaceful and welcoming, a marked contrast to the pulse of Vienna. Very few Jews reside in Linz, and they all became Europeanized in external appearance, seeming so much like other human beings.
The only dissimilarity is their religion, and therefore, within bounds of human tolerance. Isn’t it strange that the Jew should be attacked because he has a different faith? The tone adopted by the anti-Semitic Press is unworthy of the cultural traditions of a great people. The memory of certain events, which happened in the Middle Ages, comes to mind and I feel I should not like to see them repeated.
Generally speaking, these anti-Semitic newspapers don’t belong to the first rank, so their hateful outpouring must be more the product of jealousy and envy, rather than the expression of a sincere, though wrong-headed, feeling.
And it’s not only the Anti-Semitic Press that’s demeaning the Jews.
Yesterday, as I was purchasing my usual newspapers, the seller popped his head out his tiny kiosk’s window, grabbed me by the arm, and said:
“Don’t ever buy from Jews, don’t ever read Jewish newspapers!”
Startled, I pulled back, but he continued shouting, so loud that I could hear him from across the street where I ran.
“Of the million and a half of inhabitants of this capital, 120,000 are Jews! Of the 4,000 physicians, half are Jews, and of 1,000 lawyers, some 650 belong to what that Jew, Lord Beaconsfield calls ‘the superior race’! Be not fooled! Be not fooled!”
The experience scared me, to say the least, and I again ran to my tiny, yet protective, room.
However, my ideas about anti-Semitism slowly begin to change, and it is the change which I find most difficult. It costs me a great internal conflict with myself, and it is only after a struggle between reason and sentiment that victory begins to be decided in favour of the former.
I begin to experience something I call a circular thought: the more I notice this disease of Vienna, the more I want to read about it, and the more I read about it, the more I want to examine it. And the more I read and examine, the faster the truth begins to take shape. I am now almost certain that the Jewish problem, the problem with all the immigrants for that matter, is the actual cause for the unacceptable number of beggars clogging the streets. It becomes clear to me that the Jew isn’t attacked because he has a different faith.
But the truth does not end here. Soon, I am to discover that the beggar problem is only a trifle compared to the great plight hovering about our great nation.
What soon gives me cause for very serious consideration are the activities of the Jews in certain branches of life, into the mystery of which I penetrate little by little. Is there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew does not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess, one immediately discovers, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.
The charge against Judaism becomes a grave one the moment I discover the Jewish activities in the Press, in art, in literature and the theatre. All unctuous protests are now more or less futile. One needs only to look at the posters announcing the hideous productions of the cinema and theatre, and study the names of the authors who were highly lauded there, in order to become permanently adamant on Jewish questions. Here is a pestilence, a moral pestilence, with which the public is being infected. It is worse than the Black Plague of long ago.
The fact that nine-tenths of all the smutty literature, artistic tripe and theatrical banalities, has to be charged to the account of people who form scarcely one per cent of the nation – that fact cannot be gainsaid. It is here, and must be admitte
d.
Thousands of details that I scarcely noticed before seem to me now to deserve attention. I begin to grasp and understand things which I formerly looked at in a different light.
Making an effort to overcome my natural reluctance, I try to read articles published in the Marxist Press; but in doing so my aversion increases all the more. The brilliant theatrical criticisms always praised the Jewish authors and its adverse criticism was reserved exclusively for the Germans. The light pin-pricks against William II shows the persistency of its policy, just as does its systematic commendation of French culture and civilization. The subject matter of the feuilletons is trivial and often pornographic. The language of this Jewish Press as a whole has the accent of a foreign people. The general tone is openly derogatory to the Germans and this must definitely be intentional.
Then something happens which helps me to come to a decision. I begin to see through the meaning of a whole series of events that are taking place in other branches of Viennese life. All these are inspired by a general concept of manners and morals which is openly put into practice by a large section of the Jews and can be established as attributable to them. Here, again, the life which I observe on the streets teaches me what evil really is.
The part which the Jews play in the social phenomenon of prostitution, and more especially in the white slave traffic, can be studied here better than in any other West-European city. And with prostitution comes the process of infecting the nation with syphilis and tuberculosis. A cold shiver runs down my spine as I ascertain that it is the same kind of cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who shows his consummate skill in conducting this revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city, who prostitutes love and infects the Germans with his bloody scourge.
Then I became fired with wrath. I now have no more hesitation about bringing the Jewish problem to light in all its details. But as I learn to track down the Jew in all the different spheres of cultural and artistic life, and in the various manifestations of this life everywhere, I suddenly come upon him in a position where I’ve least expected to find him. I now realize that the Jews are the leaders of Social Democracy. In face of this revelation, the veil falls from my eyes. The Jew is the mastermind behind democracy and capitalism.
