I dryly answered that this was certainly not the reason I had been given this name, and he threw in, “Very well, let’s stay with the Carolingians. We are then not far from Bishop Agobard, and we can look forward to a new De insolentia Judaeorum or, even worse, a new De Judaicis superstitionibus with a few blood libels. Today, you see, there are two schools of thought—two camps, I must involuntarily say: one outside and one inside the concentration camps. And uncomfortable as the latter may be, it is, still and all, the only one for decent people.”
“And I would rather end up there myself than let Brommy get in,” said Minka. “But just tell him seriously how things look politically. He’s straight out of the Middle Ages, you know. That’s where his father lives, in the Carpathians.”
Now I realized that Poldi’s irony was put on in order to conceal an enormous fear. Most of the things he told us, in a whisper, looking around to make sure he wasn’t overheard, did not make much sense to me. In the landscape of my mind, politics had not figured prominently. As a subject of Rumania—that is, of His Majesty King Carol II—I knew, and was expected to know, that he was the sovereign of a constitutional monarchy, and that in Bucharest there was a parliament where deputies represented the party of the peasants and the party of the liberals and whatnot, and that they were a bunch of crooks who did nothing but steal the money of the state. There were also some Jews, who were Communists, and therefore, rightly, were treated as such—that is, as Russian spies and agents provocateurs. But fortunately there were also some young Rumanians who, under their leader, a certain Mr. Cuza—which was a good and noble name, though only adopted by that gentleman—beat up those Jews from time to time, thus keeping them in a hell of a fright, and preventing them from spreading more Communist propaganda and provocation. I knew, too, that in Austria there were many socialists, called Reds, who were beaten up by or beat up the Heimwehr, which was a national guard defending the ethical values—such as the cleanliness of mind guaranteed by the fresh mountain air, and the love for shooting goats and plucking edelweiss—of Styria, Tirol, Carinthia, and others of the old Austrian lands. With the help of the Heimwehr, Chancellor Dollfuss had cannonaded the Reds, only to be shot down later by a Nazi. Nazis, in Austria, were rowdies who dynamited telephone booths, but that was not necessarily true of German Nazis, who, after all, had done very well. They had built up a state of order, and justice, and genuine social welfare, in spite of the fact that Adolf Hitler was a frightful proletarian, as my father said, and looked exactly like a Bohemian footman my grandmother had once employed, against his advice. The footman turned out to be a thief and stole my father’s cuff links and some other items, including a very nice hunting knife. Only people like my mother’s family could be wrong about somebody with such a face, my father said.
The Reds were bad because they were proletarians and wanted to do away with people of our kind, as had happened in Russia. Jews had a fatal inclination for Reds; therefore they ought to be kept in a hell of a fright, so they would keep quiet. Nazis were also proletarians, but they had some very sound ideas, like the theory of breeding, and some exemplary laws about hunting only in season, which gave the game the chance to regenerate and even improve in number as well as in size. And on the whole they were against Jews and Reds, so it was quite obvious that we had to stick with them. I really did not think there was much more to the subject, and I got rather bored with Poldi’s Cassandra-like whispering, so I proposed that we go to the Kärntnerbar for a whiskey. If, as Poldi said, the Germans wanted to conquer Austria, so much the better. The German-speaking peoples would be united again, as they had been in the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. And if the Jews were frightened, it served them right. It would keep them from becoming Russian spies and propagandists of Communism and also make them behave a little more decently at the Salzburg Festival. As for the reaction of the English and French and so on, they should mind their own business. I did not see any reason to start a war just because the German-speaking peoples did what the Czechs and Poles and Rumanians had been encouraged to do by the very same French and English. Of course, I did not say any of this to Poldi and Minka, because they were friends and it would have hurt their feelings. So we went to the Kärntnerbar.
When Minka went to the Kärntnerbar, it was the crest of the wave. We let her down to the ladies’ room by a rope and pulled her up again, and Poldi became his old self and was highly amusing. At three o’clock in the morning, we found ourselves in the beer cellar of the Paulanerbräu, sitting between a stone-drunk chap—who shouted in a loud voice that he was a former cavalry officer with a golden decoration for bravery and the official title of the Hero of Zaleszczyki—and a shy little tart I knew fairly well from midnight strolls on the Kärntnerstrasse. We had hardly had a spoonful of our gulash soup and a sip of beer when a huge, rather shabby-looking young man roared in our faces, “Juden raus!” “Jews out!”
The former cavalry officer got up in stiff dignity and said that he felt offended by having been called a Jew, and would the gentleman instantly follow him to the men’s room in the basement in order to fix the place and conditions of the duel. Poldi pushed him back on his stool. The rowdy then, surprisingly, sat down on the other side of the little tart and stared with a dull expression at the wooden table. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me. “Don’t you remember me, you swine?” he roared. “Arnulf! I’m Oskar. Oskar Koloman.”
I could scarcely believe my eyes. He was one of the boys at the boarding school in Styria, a good deal older than I but in the same class. “Where the hell have you come from?” I asked.
He rose to his full height and volume. “You really want to know?” He nearly fell over the table in the attempt to grasp my shoulder. “Come with me to the men’s room in the basement. I’ll tell you where I’ve come from.”
“I think you’d better go,” Minka said, in a low voice. “It’ll give Poldi and me a chance to disappear.”
I followed my schoolmate past a row of gentlemen standing against a tarred wall, showing us their backs, till he found a gap where we could stand next to one another. He had that very day been released from Steinhausen, the Austrian concentration camp for Nazis under the regime of Chancellor Schuschnigg. As one of a group of Nazi students, he had blown up a telephone booth in Graz and had been caught doing it. He had spent three years in the camp. “For a cigarette butt no bigger than this,” he howled into my face, showing as well as he could with his thick fingers how small, “for such a tiny little butt, they made me clean the latrines for a week!” Then, hammering his fists against the tarred wall, “They have forsaken us! They have betrayed us—our brethren of the Reich! They left us in the mire while they became great and mighty. Now they will come and take over here, too!” He leaned his forehead against the wall and wept.
So that was Austria. Hadn’t my father been right to keep out of it? Again I fled to the clean mountains of Styria to ski for a couple of weeks. I had nothing to do anyway but wait for the lady I still loved. We had made an appointment to meet in Vienna on the eleventh of March. I was there a day earlier, and felt as if I had wandered into a madhouse. A sort of regimented revolution was going on under the watchful eyes of fat Viennese policemen in long bottle-green coats. On one side of the Kärntnerstrasse, people with swastikas in their buttonholes promenaded, shouted “Heil!” and sneered at the people on the other side. The people on the other side, young workers—many Jews among them—shook their fists at the Nazis and shouted “Rotfront!” I could not get hold of Minka, who was helping relatives in Mödling prepare their departure, somebody in the Café Rebhuhn told me. So I went home to my grandmother’s flat, where I found that my beloved had already arrived in Vienna and would be waiting for me next evening at ten o’clock in an apartment house on the Opernring. I did not go out all the next day but spent the day in great uneasiness waiting for the telephone to ring. The cable with that precise information could only mean that something had gone wrong. But no call came. When I left the house at
a quarter to ten, the streets were strangely dark and empty. I walked the short distance from the Florianigasse to the Rathaus, and through the Rathaus arcade—one of my grandfather’s dubious architectural masterpieces. Coming out, I found myself in the middle of an uncanny procession. In blocks that in their disciplined compactness seemed made of cast iron, people marched by thousands, men only, in total silence. The morbid, rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic swinging cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna. This cord seemed to originate somewhere in the outskirts. I could detect it through the length of the Alserstrasse, then winding round toward the Rathaus and leading down the Ringstrasse. Parades of all kinds were not rare in Vienna. They were nearly always led by a detachment of streetcar conductors and were in protest against something or other—unemployment, or the rise in the price of milk, or the pollution of the city water, brought in from the clean mountains of Styria by aqueducts. But this was different. It had an uncomfortably decisive character. I tried to break through between the blocks, but I did not succeed. Two or three times I asked a bystander what was going on, and got no answer. Impatient, fearing I would be late for the appointment with my beloved, I squeezed myself into the last row of a marching block and marched with them.
“What the hell are we marching for?” I asked the man beside me.
“Anschluss,” he barked.
Well, that literally meant “connection,” and that was exactly what I was looking for. If I could march with them down to the Opernring and get out of the parade there, I’d be in time for my appointment. But they wouldn’t let me. I was pushed out. I had come far enough to see the full height of the tower of the Rathaus, toward which the marchers turned their heads, starry-eyed. The tower was surmounted by the statue of a knight in armor, a statue I had loved as a child, so I turned my head, too, and saw a huge flag hanging down from the tower’s peak, attached to my knight’s armored feet—a red flag with a white circle, in which there was a black swastika. “So that’s it. It’s come, finally,” I said to myself. “Austria has united with the German Reich.”
It was not unexpected. For weeks people had spoken of little else. Yet how did all these people know that it would happen this very night? And how, for heaven’s sake, did they know their place in the serried ranks? They must have been drilled for months—but where? In cellars? Austrian Nazis had been underground up to this moment, an underground everybody knew about and spoke about quite openly and—with the exception of Jews and Reds, of course—with a certain sympathy. And now here it was. The whole male population of Vienna seemed to be marching in that silent parade. I felt a sudden resentment at being left out. After all, I was an Austrian myself; I had been born under the flag of the double-headed eagle as well as they, and though I was a subject of Rumania, it seemed unjust to deny me a place in one of their marching blocks as if I were a Red, or even a Jew. Politically, too, I wasn’t much different from them. Anyway, the event in itself was something I welcomed, even if I didn’t much care for the Pieffkes (as we Austrians called Germans). These people probably didn’t care for them either. Oskar Koloman had already expressed his disillusion. In any case, the unity of the Reich was restored. The dream of a century had come true. Such a political reversal would change many things, perhaps even the decision of my beloved to get a divorce from her husband, whom, unfortunately, I liked so much. There was a promise of hope in the atmosphere. In spite of that uncanny silence all over Vienna, something was happening, something important, and not merely a protest against the diminishing size of Wiener Kipfeln—the beloved Viennese croissants—and the pollution of the city water. Again and again I inserted myself into the marching blocks, trying to keep step so it wouldn’t be too obvious that I did not belong, and was pushed out of the ranks each time. At last, I came to the Opernring and hurried up the staircase of a certain house, and there she was. We both burst into hysterical laughter. “Can you imagine!” we said. “What an effort to celebrate our union!”
It wasn’t a union, though; it was the opposite. With great emotion, and not without tears, she had to tell me that in spite of all her love for me she couldn’t divorce the man whom we both liked so much. She had been married to him for too many years. It was the old story of an engagement more or less arranged by their parents; then, suddenly, she had felt that she could not marry him, and was about to tell him so when he went on a trip, and while she was waiting for him to come back so she could tell him how she really felt, he wrote her such charming, loving letters that—well, she finally married him. And he had been sweet to her and decent, and everything I knew so well, too, and—well, that was that. I had to accept it.
Next morning, we stood at the windows and looked down at the Opernring, now empty, where all the night through there had been ecstasy—a sudden ecstasy that had its source in the silent marching blocks, and that drew people out of their houses and made them run toward the marchers, shouting, roaring, embracing one another, swinging flags with swastikas, throwing their arms to heaven, jumping and dancing in delirium. It was an icy-cold yet gloriously sunny day, quite unusual for the middle of March. It was so cold that you would not allow your dog to stay outdoors for longer than five minutes. There was nobody as far as you could see except two or three of the old hags, wrapped, onionlike, in layers of frocks and coats, who sold flowers in the New Market. They were running across the Ring and throwing their roses and carnations in the air, yelling “Heil!” What did they have to do with it, anyway? Over the radio we had learned that Austria was about to unite with the German Reich, and the Germans were expected to come here triumphantly, as our brethren, in a huge parade, under a rain of flowers. And that the great unifier and renewer of the German-speaking peoples, Adolf Hitler, was also about to arrive in Austria any moment and would come down the Danube, the old stream of the Nibelungen, to Vienna, the former capital of the Holy Roman Empire.
She stood at one window, I at another. I turned my head toward her and saw her face, pale and suffering. I knew it was not only because we had to part but also for that clear, icy-cold emptiness outside. Out of a sudden intuition, without even thinking about how cruel it was, I said, “I know how you feel about what happened out there last night.” She swung her head round and looked coldly at me. “You feel,” I said, “precisely the way you did on the day of your marriage.” She covered her face with both her hands. “I can’t help feeling the same,” I said. “We are at a wedding day of sad promise.”
I could have gone back to Rumania or somewhere else. But I felt that, at last, I should do something properly. I had wasted so much time, never finishing—if you could say I had ever seriously begun—my studies. Also, there was promise in the air, even if the appearance in Vienna of the great Führer of the now Greater Germany had turned out to be sort of a flop. His voice blared through the loudspeakers, over the heads of some million ecstatic listeners who were crammed together in a compact mass that covered the Heldenplatz. But the voice was choked by emotion (or by the rhythmic uproar of some million voices’ “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”) and could only stutter, “I—I—I—I—I am just so happy!” In spite of all that, as I say, there seemed to be born a new reality, clearer, more transparent, more energetic, more dynamic. It felt as if the fresh mountain air of Styria were blowing through Vienna. Then several divisions of the German Army came down the Danube, in marching blocks that were even more solid, more resolute, more dangerous, in their silence and gray metallic hats, than the ones on the night of Anschluss. After that, German civilians swarmed in and took everything into their administering hands. They filled that mountain air with their snotty Berlin slang and, to our utmost surprise, cynically mocked the great Führer and the Nazi Party, so that the Austrians had to take over the task of enthusiastic confirmation that everything was wonderful, really great, marvelous—particularly my aunts, who had now interrupted their Anschluss with the world beyond and entirely devoted themselves to the Nazi Women’s Union. Mr. Malik, I learned, not only had become
the leader of his department at the Styria Motor Company (which very soon united with a German company and disappeared) but also was a Sturmbannführer of the SS—a very mighty position, so I had better make friends with him and stop saying that his real name was Schweingruber. Old Marie, for whose senile eyes the victorious symbol “SS” read “44,” insisted that he would be made a colonel of the 44th Regiment of the Imperial Infantry, which, as a young girl, she had very much admired. My grandmother shut herself in her rooms and received nobody. Coming back from Mass, she had been laughed at and shouted at in the open street, and nearly manhandled, by a handful of young rowdies who were forcing a group of Jews to wash slogans for the Schuschnigg regime off the wall of a house. Among those Jews, my grandmother recognized a physician who had once cured one of my aunts of a painful otitis media, and she interfered, attacking the young rowdies with her umbrella and shouting that this was going too far. Only the interference of Sturmbannführer Guru Malik saved her from serious trouble.
As for Minka, she was in despair. Of course, I had seen her immediately after the first big events. We were together a few days later when Anschluss was officially declared, in an impressive ceremony that we followed on the radio. And there was a rather embarrassing moment when, for the first time, we heard the “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” and she burst into tears. “Listen, old girl,” I said to her, “it’s not all that bad. It’s just the first letting out of an old hatred that will soon calm down. Don’t be afraid. It appears they really want to build discipline and order.”
She turned to me and shouted, “Don’t you realize, you imbecile, that it’s the ‘Gott Erhalte,’ our old Imperial Austrian anthem, composed by our Haydn, that they’ve embezzled for their dirty anthem of Greater Germany? Why, it’s a breach of … troth!”
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 26
