by Sam Apple
I had contacted Loewy after reading about the incident, but he was already back in the United States and recommended I speak with his friend Dr. Frühwald instead.
Frühwald and I met at Café Frauenhuber, the oldest surviving coffeehouse in Vienna—Beethoven was once a regular. The café had vaulted ceilings and burgundy seats. The waiters wear formal attire and serious expressions, as though they are doing something much more important than serving strudel and flavorful coffees. On the front wall was a large wood-framed photo of a distinguished-looking man with a well-shorn beard and a white bow tie. Shortly after we sat down, Frühwald pointed out that the man in the photo was Karl Lueger, Vienna's mayor at the turn of the twentieth century, whose famously skillful use of anti-Semitism in politics inspired Hitler and helped pave the way for Nazi politicians in the decades ahead.
“And there's no shame in having his picture up?” I asked.
Frühwald laughed. “Why should this café be any different from the rest of the city? There's a statue of him not far from here, and the University of Vienna sits on Karl Lueger Ring.”
Frühwald had come to the interview prepared, with more of a sense of what we were going to talk about than I had. After I ordered my Melange, he opened his briefcase and removed a newspaper article about a recent poll that had been conducted on Austrian feelings toward Jews. The poll had found that 45 percent of Austrians agreed with the statement that “Jews are exploiting the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews for their own purpose.” In 1995 only 28 percent of Austrians agreed with the statement.
The increase may have reflected the recent skirmishes in Austria's decades-old battle with Jewish organizations and Western governments over restitution payments to Holocaust survivors, which Frühwald and I discussed for the next hour. Just eight months earlier the People's Party—Freedom Party coalition government had agreed to a settlement that would pay $415 million in reparations to Jewish slave laborers. It was still an insultingly small sum in the eyes of the Viennese Jewish community, and the move was seemingly a political ploy to undermine critics of the new government, but it was nevertheless another small step forward for Austria. Unlike postwar German leaders, who recognized the importance of reparations as a statement to the West that Germany was serious about denazification, Austrian leaders had spent the decades after the war repeatedly refusing to pay survivors or making insufficient offers under pressure from the United States and then failing to fully implement them.
And even as the Austrian government was systematically ignoring and undermining the issue of reparations to Jewish victims, it was bending over backward to accommodate the former Nazis who, as the argument went, had been the victims of a cruel campaign against them in the first few years after the war (when Austria briefly attempted denazification). “The victims of Nazi oppression are always told that the impoverished state lacks the means to pay,” Austrian minister of education Felix Hurdes complained to his fellow cabinet ministers in 1950, “but where Nazis are concerned, the impoverished state always finds the money.”
The reparations story is part of the same story as Austria's failure to imprison its Nazi criminals. Once voting rights had been restored to Austria's former Nazis in 1948, they immediately became a powerful voting bloc, and they had no interest in doling out money to Jews or handing over their stolen apartments, particularly in the first years after the war, when Austria experienced severe food and housing shortages. Not only did they not want to help the Jewish survivors, there was even a postwar protest outside of a camp for displaced persons, with angry Austrians falsely claiming that there was no money for them because the state was spending all its funds on the Jews. (In fact, Austria was paying nothing, leaving the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American army to address the needs of the survivors.) In 1946 a poll found that only 28 percent of Austrians were in favor of Jewish survivors returning to the country, with 46 percent against the idea. Taking its cue from the population, the Austrian government made no effort to entice its many Jewish emigrants back home.
But it wasn't just pressure from the Nazi voting bloc that kept Austria from paying for its crimes. Austrian leaders couldn't embrace the idea of reparations because to do so would have been to acknowledge guilt and thus to undermine the entire “victims rather than perpetrators” facade upon which postwar Austria was built. In the few instances where Austria was pressured to make a payment, the leaders were always careful to point out that they were doing so on moral rather than legal grounds. The government's line was always the same: If you have a complaint about the Nazis, take it to Germany. As the story goes, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer once remarked that if he heard Austrian diplomats try to shift all responsibility to Germany one more time, he was going to send Hitler's ashes home to the Austrian prime minister as a present.
It was six o'clock when I left Café Frauenhuber. I thought about shopping for a new bag, but most of the stores were closed. I sat down on a bench near a tired-looking blind man who was singing for money. It occurred to me that if I were to lose the napkin in my pocket with the directions to Christine's apartment, I would have nowhere to go. A wave of despair washed over me. After all, it's one thing to be alone in a new city and another to be alone in a new city after spending the day discussing its ties to the Third Reich.
I thought about calling Hans on his cell phone just to say hi, but I wanted to hold on to my last scraps of journalistic integrity. Then it hit me: You can never be truly alone in Vienna—there are always the Mozarts. I walked back to Stephansdom and was immediately approached by a white-wigged young man holding a clipboard and brochures. He asked me if I liked music. I told him that I did, and he told me that I was then sure to be very interested in an upcoming concert he had tickets for. I told him that I was a journalist and then asked him how long he had been selling tickets. He said for about a month. We chatted for a few minutes, and I learned that he was a newly arrived Bulgarian immigrant. “All of these people are from different countries,” he said, pointing to the other costumed salespeople. (In addition to Mozarts, there were women in dirndls and other men seemingly dressed as generic eighteenth-century aristocrats.)
Before I left, the Mozart and I shook hands, and he told me that his name was Dimo.
I asked him why his name tag said ALEX.
“It's just easier to use that name here,” Dimo said.
This name change bothered me, but Dimo didn't seem to mind. We traded numbers, and he told me that I should come to his birthday party next week, that I would enjoy meeting his older sister. I thanked him, thought briefly about the likelihood of his sister being beautiful and wanting to make love to me, then headed back to the U-bahn.
Fourteen
Spartakus
For an athletic sixteen-year-old like Hans, climbing the scaffolding in the back of Vienna's Hotel Bristol wasn't hard. He was known as the best climber in Spartakus, which is why he had been assigned this mission. As Hans made his way across the roof of the hotel in the heart of downtown Vienna, the diplomats for the peace conference began filing in below. Hans knew there was a good chance he'd get arrested, but his comrades in Spartakus were counting on him. And this was what it meant to be a part of Spartakus, to take risks, to make a stand.
This is how a Spartakus newspaper from 1969 described the group:
The name of the organization is Spartakus, but Spartakus is more than an organization. Spartakus means to have broken away from everything, Spartakus means to be ready for anything.
We have set no limits. We stand outside this society, its laws, its petty considerations, compromises, comforts and lies. They know that, and hence they hate us.
This wasn't just rhetoric for Hans. His teenage revolt was not against his parents, but against an entire society. He continued to go to school after joining Spartakus, but it was hard to take his education seriously when he thought the teachers were fascists and the books full of lies. Hans told me that he had one teacher who would enter
his classroom with a Nazi salute. Another teacher would shout commands like a military officer during gym class and would sometimes hit students with an iron rod. After witnessing one teacher slap a student, Hans dragged the student out of the school and led him to a nearby police station.
“I looked at the teachers as though they had tortured my mother,” Hans told me. “Now when I tell Austrians about these teachers, they don't believe it. They don't want to realize that it's true. They forget that in the fifties and sixties, whenever there was professions where you needed a high school or university degree, we had a majority of horrible conservatives or fascists or National Socialists. All of the people who could very well survive Hitler were still around. The few others who were humanists or liberals or progressives did not come back after the war. They were killed or had emigrated or were in complete resignation—ill from the past and no longer able to teach. The result was that I was confronted with all these assholes.”
Austria has a two-track high school system, and after a year Hans gave up on academics and opted for professional training. It didn't help. Even at a high school for graphic artists, Hans saw corruption everywhere. He talked back to the teachers, disrupted classes, and handed out flyers for protests. Before the year was over, he was not only kicked out of the school, but an order had also gone out that he should not be admitted to any public school in Austria.
“It was 1968, and I had respect in front of nobody other than these old fighters like my mother or grandfather,” Hans said. “And there was this pressure that we should make a better world. It was a pressure we felt thinking of our parents, who suffered under the Nazis and fought against it. We thought about their courage to laugh in the face of death, to fight like my mother had, so that there would not be fascism again or such suffering, and we made emotional link, if you want, between our struggles and these struggles that took place in World War II.”
Standing atop the hotel, Hans could see the security guards below with their guns in their hands. He looked out over Vienna, the city where he was born but had never felt at home. Then he walked over to the flagpole on the hotel's roof, pulled a blue and red Vietcong flag from his jacket pocket, and raised it high above the Austrian capital.
Fifteen
Jews for Haider
My next morning in Vienna made the previous one look smooth. Christine had moved me down the hall into the apartment of her friend, who was out of town. When my green alarm clock went off, I noticed that it was half an hour ahead of the nearly identical red alarm clock I had discovered in the apartment. Both of the clocks had shown the same time when I went to sleep, meaning that one of them was not working.
I had either an hour or half an hour before I had to leave to meet Peter Sichrovsky. I had read about Sichrovsky in the months prior to my trip and hadn't been able to get him entirely out of my mind since. Sichrovsky is an Austrian Jew, the child of Holocaust survivors (both of his grandmothers were killed at Auschwitz), and the author of several books on Jewish themes. One of those books, Strangers in Their Own Land, is comprised of Sichrovsky's interviews with young Austrian and German Jews who recount the hardships of growing up “among the murderers.”
Sichrovsky, at the time, was also the general secretary of Haider's Freedom Party. It made no sense, especially since Sichrovsky himself had denounced Haider in the past. Strangest of all, in an interview with The Jerusalem Report, Sichrovsky had readily acknowledged that Haider was using him as a Jew to deflect criticism from the Freedom Party.
Putting on my suit was out of the question, as I need a full forty-five minutes to tie, untie, and retie my tie until the knot no longer looks laughably gigantic. But I at least wanted my shoes to look respectable, so I took out the shoeshine kit I had purchased the day before and went to work on my sheep-feces-caked designer Australian boots. The polishing didn't go so well, and my boots ended up two different shades of brown and reeking of polish.
Since I had no way of knowing which of the two alarm clocks wasn't working, I shoved both of them into my pockets. At the time my only thought was that my pockets looked ridiculously overstuffed, but now it strikes me that the two clocks in my pockets keeping different time—and my not knowing which one was right—make a good metaphor for my state of mind that summer.
After several minutes in front of the mirror patting down the poof of my hair with wetted palms, I noticed that if I tilted my head just a bit to the right, it was possible, upon close inspection, to detect the tiny end of a hair peeking out from the abyss of my left nostril. I was not amused. Now, even if by some miracle I met a woman who wasn't bothered by my strangely bulging pockets, the nose hair would surely scare her off. I pinched and then yanked the hair, but it had its own agenda. After searching for and failing to find a pair of scissors, I began to panic.
Seeing no other obvious solution, I removed a key from my pocket and began to saw back and forth over the hair. I'm not sure how long this continued, but at some point I thought, I've come to Vienna to explore anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and I am standing in front of a mirror sawing my nose hair with a key. I stopped in shame, then sniffled several times, hoping that the hair might somehow be sucked back in.
When I arrived at the address Sichrovsky's secretary had given me, the first thing I noticed were the letters “FPÖ” on the wall of the lobby. It was only then that I realized I was meeting Sichrovsky at the Vienna offices of the Freedom Party. Seeing the three big letters on the wall gave me a nervous chill. In my mind I had entered the lair of the enemy, and part of me wanted to turn around and run. Another part of me wanted to urinate in the lobby before turning around and running.
I stepped out of the elevator to the sight of Sichrovsky sitting in his office with the door open. He had close-cropped gray hair and an even tan. I sat down across from him at a small round table, removed my tape recorder and notebook from my garbage bag, and asked him why he had become a supporter of the Freedom Party.
“I've always been a political conservative,” Sichrovsky said, “and in my opinion the Freedom Party was the only interesting conservative party that had the ability and the power to change the system.”
Perhaps Sichrovsky could see in my expression that this answer wouldn't do. The office fell silent. I looked Sichrovsky in the eyes. He leaned back in his chair, projecting an air of confidence. “I met Mr. Haider about ten years ago in 1990,” Sichrovsky continued in nearly perfect English, “and I told him, ‘If you get out of your right-wing corner and become a normal conservative party, then you will make it possible for somebody like me being Jewish to work with you.’ And Haider said, ‘That's a good idea,’ and the whole party has moved more to the center over the last ten years. Today it's a very normal conservative party, and I don't have any problems working with them.”
I scribbled my notes and nodded, but I wasn't buying it. I knew enough about the Freedom Party by then to appreciate that it was not a normal conservative party. The Freedom Party's economic agenda may not differ much from that of other conservative parties, but normal conservative parties don't campaign for elections by plastering cities with posters that read stop der Überfremdung (Stop the foreign infiltration), an old Nazi propaganda slogan used by Goebbels. And the leaders of normal conservative parties don't go around praising the employment policy of the Third Reich, as Haider did in 1991. And, for that matter, rather than moving to the center, Haider had risen to power in the mid-1980s by reenergizing the more extreme elements of the Freedom Party.
I was beginning to wonder if Sichrovsky wasn't simply in denial. I asked him how he could tolerate Haider's comments about the Nazis.
“I'm not shocked by these quotes because, if you like it or not, this is the daily political style in Austria, and it has nothing to do with the Freedom Party,” Sichrovsky said, growing louder and more agitated. “I can go on with a thousand comparisons and examples from the other parties, but I have to accept that the Austrian democracy was built up by ex-Nazis. I don't care
about all this. For me it's more interesting to look at what the parties do—their political program, their political work. The Freedom Party has never done anything anti-Semitic. What Mr. Haider has said is a joke compared to what happened in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, when I grew up here.”
Sichrovsky's voice was now just shy of a yell. “This is an atmosphere that you have to live with or you leave the country,” he said. “But concerning the past of Austria, concerning the anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia, this is an Austrian problem and not the problem of one political party. This is a problem of Austria's postwar history, and the people of Austria have to overcome the situation and work on this problem.”
Sichrovsky paused. “But the worst thing—and this has happened with the support of the Jewish organizations—is that by accusing the Freedom Party of being the bad boys here, they have freed the other two parties that were responsible, particularly the Socialists, who had the closest connection to the ex-Nazis. Now the Socialists don't see any reason to go into their own past. They feel as though they are the big antifascists, the big friends of the Jews. I'm sorry, but I have to throw up if I think about this.”
Sichrovsky had come up with a clever defense: It was okay to join the Freedom Party because the other parties were also full of ex-Nazis. And he was right about the other parties, at least the other two biggest parties. The Social Democrats had made considerable progress in the last decade, but there's no escaping the party's old habit of giving former Nazis leadership positions. Even worse, the Social Democrats had helped reestablish the former Nazis as a voting bloc, in the hope that the new party would steal votes from their main competitor, the conservative People's Party. For its part, the People's Party made almost no effort over the postwar decades to purge the deep-rooted Catholic anti-Semitism that has long permeated the party. The anti-Semitism of the People's Party was never much of a secret, but it became a scandal in the wake of the Waldheim affair. Even in the face of strong evidence that Kurt Waldheim (the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981) had been a Nazi intelligence officer involved with the deportation of at least 70,000 Jews to Auschwitz, the People's Party supporters had elected him president of Austria in 1986 amid cries that he was a victim of a smear campaign by international Jewish organizations.