Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  Hannah has always lived in Vienna. She has always lived in the shadow of death. Her parents insisted she go to the Lycée Français and become fluent in French, lest they need to flee. The Jewish community, after the war, existed here, uncomfortably, quietly, occasionally defiantly. An exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Vienna on the postwar life of Jews in the imperial city is called simply Leben! (Life!). It is a strident imperative, a thumbed nose.

  The history of expulsion and hatred never sat well in the general community of postwar Vienna. The city, and the country, came late to commemorations, came late to the feeling that they were in some way, or in any way, culpable. There were many who preferred it to just disappear. The first paean to the destroyed Jewish community was a statue of a Jew, on his knees, condemned, Sisyphus-like, to scrub the street in front of the Albertina Museum in perpetuity, his back covered in barbed wire. “This honors us?” my father asks dubiously as we emerge from the museum; my parents have come to visit. Indeed, the monument, erected in 1988, was an immediate source of vexation to the remaining Jews of Vienna; tourists were sitting on it, dogs were peeing on it, others weren’t noticing it. Somehow I am not surprised. “Hitler’s first victims,” as Austrians called themselves for decades, were not quick to reject that label. The memory continues to feel contested, or at least contentious.

  And yet Hitler’s sweep into Austria in March 1938 was by no means the country’s introduction to Nazism. The party hung on the margins of Austrian society for decades, first appearing (with a dismal showing) on the ballot of 1919. Membership grew. Nazis began to show up in city councils, first in Linz, then in the province of Styria. They upended the 1925 World Zionist Congress, filling the streets with vigilante hordes, and began over the next decade to set off small bombs. Surely my grandfather knew of this, by age fifteen or so, surely he had heard of the violence, of the virulence—but perhaps it still seemed (mostly) marginal, almost manageable, not all that different from the casual persistent racism of other political parties. By the early 1930s, political upheaval and economic meltdown made for fertile Nazi recruiting ground. I sit in the library reading books on the period, attend lectures on the history, and begin to understand better that interwar politics in Austria in the post-Hapsburg period was a morass of petty small dictators (first Engelbert Dollfuss, then Kurt von Schuschnigg when the former was assassinated) who espoused a kind of Italian-style fascism that was mildly anti-Semitic. Nazism itself, along with the Social Democratic and Communist parties, was banned in 1933—after Hitler took power next door. But the people did not stop believing. Instead, when the swastika and other Nazi symbols were banned, sympathizers wore long white socks, a symbol to one another.

  In the box of letters there was one indication that even my grandfather wasn’t so sure of his footing in Austria, far earlier than I had once thought. It is a small note, a flyer, advertising a debate: “How to Get to Palestine Without Money,” it says, in a bold, modern German typeface. “A lecture about the political and economic possibilities of resettlement of Jews without capital. Speaker: Chaim Wildmann,” and then, in tiny letters at the bottom: “Managing editor/publisher: Valerie Scheftel.” It is dated June 1933; he was twenty-one.

  So, yes, Karl was conscious of the rising xenophobia, of the need to leave—even then. And yet what I hadn’t realized was that the crucible of the most aggressive, the most brutal anti-Semitism, and nascent Nazism, was the University of Vienna itself.

  Herwig introduces me to Herbert Posch, a young historian at the university. It was Posch who personally pushed the school at last (in 1999!) to formally recognize—and apologize to—all those expelled after the Anschluss. Posch assumed most of those he wanted to commemorate were dead. But he was wrong. Many were still alive, and he rushed to interview as many as he could. Over the next decade and a half, they began to die at an alarming clip. Each man he suggests I talk to is either dead or dies soon after I contact him. It is terribly unnerving.

  It is Posch who explains to me, finally, that when my grandfather and Valy enrolled in the University of Vienna medical school in 1931, it had a vibrant Jewish population, and an equally vibrant Nazi faction. The latter was so aggressive that Jews were constantly plotting ways to manage the problem of getting to and from class without incident. Beginning in the 1920s, every Jewish (male) student knew that he was going to be beaten at school. Beaten badly, and often. The school was rabidly, overtly anti-Semitic. Though most of the Jews attending the university weren’t visibly religious, it was obvious, immediately, who was who. The Jews took classes from Jews, the Nazis from Nazis. More than half the faculty of the university were Jews, so it wasn’t hard to find a class to take.

  The school hewed closely to the free ideas of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century education philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who believed in a separation of state, church, and university, an entirely free world of education, unencumbered by the government. That might have been a liberal, Enlightenment ideal in theory; in practice it meant the police were barred from the campus until sometime after Engelbert Dollfuss’s dictatorship assumed power. After he settled into office, Dollfuss cracked down on the Nazis on campus and installed a police station within the university, to quell the riots—not for any love of Jews but in a brutal attempt to restore order and keep the Nazis away from his own regime.

  Before that, Jewish blood ran on the walkways and sidewalks and marble stairwells. In the anatomy school, there is a central staircase, marble and grand. The smell of formaldehyde hangs heavy in the air, the lectures on pumping blood through the heart sounded like every other medical school. Except here the central stairs once denoted a schism in the student body. To one side would go the Jews, to a Jewish adviser. Up the other staircase would go their peers, to study with a Nazi. The staircase revealed each student’s identity; battles were fought on the landing.

  “In Gymnasium,” the school years before university, “there was nothing yet, no Hitler yet, but at university we experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism,” one of the old alumnae, Dr. Gerda Poll, tells me. She is ninety-seven years old when we meet, frail and white, with the type of skin that’s oft described as “papery,” wild white hair and a difficult time hearing my questions. But she is still very sharp, still the Freudian scholar—and psychoanalyst—she was trained to be. Dr. Poll was at the University of Vienna at the same time as my grandfather and Valy, though, as with many other things, she cannot remember them.

  “There was a very famous internist,” Poll says, referring to one of her professors. “He is written up in books here. Eppinger was his name. He was a big anti-Semite. I was a very good student but for my internal medicine, my oral examination—the Rigorosum—he gave me three questions and I couldn’t answer a single one. He had researched them purposefully. It was the only subject I ever didn’t pass—he flunked me. Because of this I lost three months. When I went back, students demonstrated against him and they all went with me for the second exam—it was a public exam. Oral. Second time he asked normal questions and I passed.”

  This was typical, I learn. Jews were often taunted this way, given atrociously, conspicuously punishing tests to upend their studies. Poll remembered Eppinger marching alongside Hitler at the Anschluss. I don’t know if this is a real memory or a constructed one, but it doesn’t much matter. In Valy and my grandfather’s school papers, I see that they, too, were studying under Hans Eppinger. And Poll’s memory of his brutality was not exaggerated: during the war he went on to conduct gruesome experiments with seawater at Dachau. Roma prisoners were forced to drink salinated water until they literally died of thirst, until they were licking the floor hoping for a drop of lifesaving clear water. It was an effort to understand if a man could survive on seawater. Eppinger committed suicide just before his turn at the Nuremberg trials.

  Back in Vienna, Posch offers me what he says is the best short narration of the horrific pre-Nazi-period violence against Jews on campus. It
is a German adaptation of a chapter in Benno Weiser Varon’s book Professions of a Lucky Jew. “Louis Pasteur and Madame Curie risked their lives in medical research. I risked mine on the first day I set foot on ‘academic territory,’” Varon wrote in the English version of the same. “Aware of the risks of studying as a Jew at Vienna University, I had, even before matriculating, joined a Jewish self-defense organization named Haganah [defense].” I flip back to the author’s name again—Benno. I am shocked, despite myself. I know this man: Benno was one of my grandfather’s lifelong best friends, one of the buddies he called the Musketeers. I remember seeing the book on my father’s shelf. This was no longer a theoretical passage about what my grandfather and Valy might have experienced—this was one of their closest friends, narrating what he and his classmates had actually been subject to.

  “We rarely managed to extricate Jewish fellow students who, trapped in a lecture room, were beaten up once the lecture was over,” Benno wrote. “But we attacked Nazis who lay in wait outside the lecture halls and we generally gave a good account of ourselves. . . . There was a certain ritual when we entered an institute after being notified the Nazis were preparing a brawl. The Nazis formed a phalanx when they saw us enter, and so did we. First came a verbal exchange.” This turned into a brawl, with “injuries on both sides.” From February 1934, “Austrofascism came to the rescue. . . . One of the first things the dictatorship did was to abolish the ‘inviolability of academic territory.’ Dollfuss would not allow the university to remain a Nazi enclave he could not touch. From February 1934, onwards we could concentrate on studying without fear. For once we were beneficiaries of Fascism.”

  I think, when I am back in the States, I should visit Benno. But when I contact him, I discover I am too late: his wife, Miriam, tells me that Benno can no longer speak—Alzheimer’s had taken all but his soul by then. My grandfather’s old friend could tell me nothing.

  Herbert Posch is dismayed to hear of Benno’s condition. Posch is gentle, despite his enormous height and large physical presence. He wears purple the first time we meet, with matching purple Dr. Martens boots. A lightning bolt hangs in one ear; his hair is short, close to his head, the top left a bit long, and what hair there is, is blond. He is fond of large silver rings. There are many like me, he says, trying not to offend me, not to say I’m not original—but he means many seekers who have sought him out since his Gedenkbuch (memorial book) project began. We are the relatives of those expelled. We have contacted him and asked him for help filling in what our family members did not tell us about those prewar years. Many of us struggle to understand why anyone would have stayed in Austria at all. It is the eternal question; one of the few we actually asked my grandfather when he was alive. For Karl, it was about the “best medical education in the world”; he would tell my father he just wanted his degree, and then a ticket out. When he returned in the 1950s to take more courses, some of the Nazi professors were still there, still teaching, as if nothing had happened at all. But all his fellow Jewish students were gone.

  By the time my grandfather and Valy were well ensconced in their studies, those Jewish students were still hanging in, hoping to graduate and then emigrate before Hitler came. But all the while they tried to lead an intellectual life: they took in music, debated philosophy. They were fiercely addicted to cultural life. “They had a very close connection to German culture,” says Posch, as bells chime behind us, poetically marking the time. And yet their entire world was Jewish, assimilated or not. They weren’t integrated at all. “They were connected to German idealistic romantic culture, with Goethe and Schiller and high culture,” Posch continues, “and the idea that, in such a civilized romantic culture, nothing really bad can happen to us.” Which of course created a sense of false security and, strangely, adaptation. “They knew Saturdays were bad,” he says. It was the day the German Student Union convened; word of mouth kept Jewish students away, for fear of riots and beatings.

  Posch has photographed Valy’s and my grandfather’s files for me inside the archives of the medical school in advance of my visit: a series of yellowed handwritten registrations for school classes over the years. The scrawl is as familiar to me as my own—my grandfather filled out the class cards for Valy. Nationality is filled in as “Jewish,” a sign of Zionist thinking, says Posch. Valy lists no father on her forms. Her mother was alone.

  It is a rainy afternoon when Posch and I first meet, cold when it isn’t wet, and he and I walk through campus and down the side streets into the anatomy building, home to the university’s most brutal anti-Semitic pogroms. We stand on the central landing and contemplate the students in their white coats, rushing in twos and threes up the stairwells that once directed Jewish students and Nazi students to their classes; we duck into a cardiology lecture and stand a moment, watching a professor narrate the valves of the heart as students, silent, scratch notes and glance at us observing them from the corner. Earlier, in his office, Posch showed me photographs of students escaping out the windows, trying to avoid attack at the hands of their classmates. “This is 1933, after a riot,” he said, pulling out a photo, “they crawl out the window trying to escape here.” He has image after image, from throughout the 1930s, all showing campus oppression.

  We leave the anatomy hall and walk over to Berggasse, down the block from Freud’s home and museum, and step into a café. Over tea I ask Posch why he started his big project, why he made this effort to honor those expelled during the Anschluss, and the answer is quite simple: Because, in sixty-nine years, no one else had.

  “I told a friend I was renting to a Jew,” my roommate, Hilke, says to me one morning as she pours her muesli and makes her herbal tea. Around us, crystal prisms dangling on fishing wire projected rainbows onto the yellow kitchen walls. “He said, ‘Oh! Don’t you feel you shouldn’t use that Nazi word, Jude?’”

  No, I reply, startled, Jew is not a Nazi word. But then other Austrians echoed the sentiment. Yes, says Karin, a friend from dance class, that’s how she felt growing up, too. Jude, even “race”—those were words not to be used in polite society. It was strange growing up in Austria, agrees Sophie, a glamorous, chain-smoking philosophy student and, eventually, a good friend. For us, Jews were just dead, she says. It was odd to find them, later, in clubs, bars—living normally, unremarkably.

  “Yes,” says Hilke back at home, impassively. Jews were just victims. And then she adds, as if in explanation: “I dated a skinhead as a teenager.” She hung around his crowd, gleaned his hates. “I rented to you because I realized you were Jewish when you said your grandfather had left in 1938. I didn’t want to be politically correct anymore. I wanted to ask you all the questions I’ve never been allowed to ask.”

  Over lunch at the Institute the next day I blurt the story. The table goes silent, the Germans and Austrians look at one another and sigh. Then each of my dismayed colleagues, in turn, urges me to move. But I go nowhere. I’m curious about her. I think: I can change her. I think: I’ll convert her. So instead, I choose to use her ignorance as cocktail banter; I dip into the cartoon as armor. Vienna offers me a sense of foreignness I haven’t felt anywhere else.

  Occasionally I walk to my grandfather’s old street and look up at its drab exterior. It is not far from my apartment, and not far from the Prater, where I’d gone with Herwig and where Orson Welles’s famous giant Ferris wheel looms. Every night Welles’s postwar classic The Third Man is playing somewhere in Vienna: a metaphor—Vienna, a city stuck in the middle of the twentieth century.

  My roommate’s fascination with me stretched back years further than our acquaintance. As a teenager, she rebelled against her history-teacher parents, picking up Nazi paraphernalia and acting out in ways both juvenile—an illegal-in-Austria Adolf Hitler T-shirt purchased in London—and disturbing—on a mandatory class trip to the death-camp Mauthausen, she and her boyfriend ripped pages from a commemorative book, filled with photos of piles of dead bodies, and posted them
around her bedroom. She told me she hated the “weakness” of the bodies.

  “But the bodies didn’t start out weak,” I complain; even to my ears I sound plaintive. She shrugs. She hated that Jews got to be the ultimate victims. I promise her that I have no interest in being a victim; she is unconvinced.

  If you were to pass Hilke on the street, you wouldn’t notice her. Straight, unremarkable hair that falls just below her shoulders, the color of wet sand, close to blond; a kind of hippie-punk Mittel-European type, with a fondness for skirts worn over pants with hiking boots, and a kohl-lined eye. A few years back she had a shaved head, a style she sported until her early thirties as she studied the extreme Austrian art movement called Aktionism. Born in the 1960s, Aktionism is all about pushing boundaries and norms: it involves blood and semen and violence. In a film that won her a degree of fame in certain Viennese art circles, my roommate was hung from her wrists and beaten until she passed out. She called it The Sleep of Reason—after Goya. When I meet her, she is curating an exhibition called Abuse. One wall highlights an endless video loop of a woman being penetrated by a duck. An artist drops out of the exhibition, and Hilke, half seriously, asks me if I would consider wearing a yellow star as an art installation. I decline.