by Sam Apple
Eighteen
Love in the Time of Anti-Semitism
In one eighteenth-century version of the legend, the Wandering Jew isn't the only one giving Jesus a hard time. The Wandering Jew's wife also has a few unkind words for Jesus when she finds him loitering on the family doorstep, and, as is only fair, she too is ordered to wander for eternity. To ensure that the punishment's isolationist ethos isn't undermined, the Wandering Jew and Jewess are forced to wander in opposite directions. It's a nice tragic touch, and the author might have left it there, husband and wife doomed to parallel lives of longing. But in a wonderful romantic twist, we learn that the two are allowed to meet for a single hour once every hundred years. You might think these meetings would be a good time for the Jew and the Jewess, a chance perhaps to make love and then to quickly catch up on the last century.
Instead, their joy at seeing each other is instantly overwhelmed by the devastating thought that it will be another hundred years before they experience the same joy again.
When I think of this story, I sometimes think of the pain that would overtake Hans's face at the very sight of Kati. Other times I think of my own problems with women.
The next morning after Irene left, a bout of depression hit me out of nowhere. I had all the symptoms: the pit in the stomach, the heavy eyes, the recurring thought that life is little more than endless suffering, interspersed, if you're lucky, with a good meal or two.
I sat at the foot of the bed and tried to force myself to think about the championship years of the Houston Rockets, my favorite basketball team. I've been turning to the Rockets to block out bad thoughts since I was five or six. My father had suggested the technique back then, hoping that it would stop me from coming to his room every night out of a fear that there was a ganef (thief) hanging out in the small space between my bunk beds and the wall.
The technique has been generally successful (and I strongly recommend it to others), but that morning not even the Rockets could help me. No sooner would I call up an image of Hakeem Olajuwon shaking off a double-team than the seven-foot-tall Nigerian would turn into a five-foot-six Austrian giggling at me through a haze of smoke. Irene had left only minutes ago, and yet I felt a powerful urge to see her again, almost as though I needed proof that she would still be there.
I'm not sure what sparked my depression that morning. My best guess is that, knowing I would be leaving Austria soon, my brain had decided to get a head start on the sense of loss I would experience when I separated from Irene. I am not good at many things, but I might be least good of all at saying good-bye to a woman I'm involved with. I met my first girlfriend in Israel when I was a sophomore in high school. She was also an American, and when we returned to the United States—she to Maryland, I to Texas—we maintained a long-distance relationship for a year. We visited each other several times, and when we would part at the airport, I would feel as though I literally were not going to make it, as though I were going to fold over and crumple to the floor and perhaps get run over by a beeping cart with old people perched precariously on the back.
My mini-breakdown that morning continued throughout my train ride to Carinthia, where I was going to interview Adi Wimmer, a professor of English at the University of Klagenfurt. Klagenfurt is the capital of Carinthia, the southernmost Austrian province, known for its Mediterranean climate, its beautiful mountains and lakes, and its people's dislike of their Slovenian neighbors. Because Carinthia is Haider's power base, it was a natural place for me to explore the anti-immigrant prejudices that had contributed to the Freedom Party's recent electoral success. But I had stupidly scheduled an interview in Vienna the following morning and would have no time to hang out in Klagenfurt.
I met Wimmer at a campus pizza shop. Before my trip I had come across a book of interviews with Austrian Jewish exiles Wimmer had edited called Strangers at Home and Abroad, and I had been captivated by Wimmer's personal story in the introduction as much as by the heart-wrenching accounts of the Austrian exiles.
Wimmer was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1949. He had a thin red beard and spoke with the fluidity of a university lecturer. Although he now goes by Adi, just four years after the war his parents named him Adolf after his father. This name might have been a burden anywhere, but in Braunau, the city in Upper Austria where Hitler was born, it carried extra weight. “There were men who would laugh and give me the Hitler salute, and say, ‘Oh, you are our new Führer,’ ” Wimmer told me. “I would stand by speechless, not knowing what was going on.”
Wimmer first learned about the Holocaust from reading journals, which, in those days, his family would rent for a week. In one of those journals he saw pictures of the concentration camps for the first time. “Imagine an impressionable seven-year-old seeing these mountains of dead, the heaps, the bodies, and the bulldozers, and all of that,” Wimmer said. “I turned to my mother, and she said, ‘This is Adolf Hitler's doing.’ So I saw the mountains of the dead, and I understood that it had something to do with somebody called Adolf, my own name. That probably never left me. I was saddled with this name that stood for something really evil.”
Echoing stories Hans had told me, Wimmer described the Austria of his childhood as a place where you didn't talk about National Socialism or Jews. “There is one enduring memory about asking questions on the war,” Wimmer writes in the introduction to his book. “I would always be told that there was no point in talking about it ‘yet again.’ ” On one of the few occasions when the subject did come up in school, Wimmer remembers his history teacher making “glassy-eyed speculations about the glorious future Braunau would have had ‘if we had only won the war.’ ”
Wimmer also remembers how tourists would come to see the house where Hitler was born. Embarrassed to publicly reveal their destination, the Führer enthusiasts would ask local children to help them find the residence. When he was thirteen, Wimmer led one man to the house, then “watched in fascination” as the man chipped mortar from the wall to take home as a souvenir.
As I stuffed my face with an overly cheesy pizza, Wimmer told me about the Austrian exiles he had interviewed. The stories were heartbreaking. Edward Arie, one of the Austrian exiles Wimmer spoke with, was arrested and tortured by the SS, then sent to Dachau, where he barely survived his seven-week stay. Although Arie managed to flee, his father was killed. In the early 1990s it looked as though Austria was finally going to make reparation payments to Arie, but after he worked on his application for seven months, he was told that since he was over eighteen at the time of his father's death, he could not be compensated for the loss. For his seven weeks at Dachau, Arie was offered $150. Arie returned the check with a polite note. He died a year later. “The thought that this kind, unblemished man went to the grave without receiving justice from my country has haunted me ever since,” Wimmer writes in his book.
Another thing that troubles Wimmer is his country's failure to invite Austrian exiles to visit their native country. Unlike the German Jewish exiles, who have been offered free trips back to Germany and who are often treated as honored guests, the vast majority of Austrian Jews who fled for their lives during the Nazi years have been ignored by postwar Austrian governments. In one instance, Wimmer wrote a letter to the Austrian city of Baden suggesting they invite two ex-Badeners living abroad to visit the city where they were born. In a written response from the mayor, Wimmer was told to mind his own business.
On the ride back to Vienna, I had a six-seat compartment to myself. After listening to Wimmer's stories, I was feeling a little less depressed and a lot more angry. And while I preferred the anger to the depression, it felt equally useless.
It's not that there are no outlets for rage against the Nazis. I could probably do a million small things to make the world a better place, to ensure that hateful ideologies never again make their way into the mainstream. But as the train cut through the Styrian countryside, I had another idea. I could masturbate. I had arrived in Vienna to find a semenlike substance on my backpack
. Now I would return the gesture by leaving a semenlike substance on an Austrian train.
You jerk off on me, I jerk off on you.
In the short-story version of my trip, this would be the denouement, the moment when all the different emotions that had been rumbling inside of me would come together in one triumphantly irrational act. I would whip it out and stick it in the window for the entire Nazi country to see. Old and young anti-Semites alike would gaze in confusion as my circumcised penis sped by. Readers would understand that even as I was lashing out against Austria, I was lashing out against myself, against all the neuroses and sexual hang-ups that had left me, in my midtwenties, still trying to smooth over the troubled relationship between my Jewish identity and my johnson. Alex Portnoy goes to the camps!
But I wasn't a character. My pants stayed on. Still, the thought that my penis might be a tool of vengeance was now in the air, and soon it began to morph into even more disturbing thoughts. What if there was something dark in my desire for Irene? What if I was unconsciously conflating lust and anger? The last thing I wanted was for an innocent woman to become a pawn in my psychosexual antics.
I put my head down on an empty seat next to me and thought about the Rockets.
When I made it back to Vienna that evening, Hans and Christine and Wolfi were relaxing around the kitchen table. Hans suggested we play a board game called Action Professional, a version of charades in which players are required to act out German proverbs. Regardless of the proverb he was trying to convey, Hans would get out of his chair and flail around the kitchen. I probably hadn't laughed so hard since I had first seen Hans in concert singing in front of his slides of sheep, and the comic relief couldn't have come at a better time.
Christine tried to explain the proverbs to me, but it was no use, and I was content to watch Hans and laugh and wonder what in the hell he was trying to get me to understand. Another good metaphor, I thought, this one for my entire project.
After the game Hans came back to my apartment with me to help me iron my suit (I accepted his offer to help because even though I know how to iron, things don't look right when I do them) and told me about the tremendous guilt he had experienced throughout his relationship with Kati.
I don't remember how the conversation started, but I remember Hans leaning over my dress pants, iron in hand, telling me that his eldest son, Günter, had recently been helping him to see that he was “not such bad person.”
Something about the son convincing the father of his worth made me sad.
“What did Günter say?” I asked.
“He tells me all these things with Kati are not only my fault,” Hans said. “My problem was that I was always a little bit trapped in this role of chasing Kati. For years I was thinking that if only I am not bad person and not always wanting too much attention and sex, perhaps we would have better relationship.” Hans sprayed boiling water from the head of the iron onto my pants. “I did cause many problems with my wrong behaviors, but in the last years I was working very hard to change my comportment.”
As I stood next to Hans, watching him iron, he fell into one of his spells of raw honesty. “I was on my knees for Kati,” he told me. “It was horrible. I would try to tell myself there are other women in the world, but I was not feeling there are other women in the world. For months I did not sleep, but would go out every night, coming back at three in the morning. I was suffering. My friends would say, ‘Oh, you must not go on like this,’ but they could not help me because I did not want to be helped.”
I asked Hans if he knew that the dentist was a threat before he left for America.
“Yes, he is my dentist,” Hans said. “I have known him many years.”
His own dentist! I had no idea. “Well, I guess you've found a new person to clean your teeth,” I said.
Hans looked up from his ironing. “No, he is still my dentist,” he said.
“Come on!”
“He is good dentist, and I am not so weak that I must run away because of these things.”
I wasn't sure what to say. Hans told me that during this period of grief, he had gone through a very rare three-month stretch without sex.
“I missed this movement,” he said, putting down the iron and thrusting his hips gently. He wasn't joking. “If you have sex alone,” Hans continued, “you don't move this area.” He pointed to his crotch. “How do you say it?”
“Pelvis?”
“Yes, pelvis. When you are alone, you move only your hand, and I was starting to miss this movement.” Hans thrusted again. “This was new for me. After some time I was looking for woman on every corner.”
“You should have gone on the Internet,” I said, joking.
“Yes, I thought maybe I would do this,” Hans said.
HANS BREUER'S ONLINE DATING PROFILE
User name: SheepGuy2001
Age: 46
Occupation: Wandering shepherd
Interests: Yiddish folksinging, intercourse
In my bedroom you'll find: My three sons and a big hat
For a good time I like to: Talk about the lack of denazification in Austria
Hans put down my pants and picked up my jacket. I told him about Irene. “It's strange,” I said. “I barely know her, but already there's this powerful feeling of vulnerability.”
“Yes, I know very well this feeling,” Hans said. “But does she understand you well?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Good,” Hans said. “This is important.”
“The worst part of the feeling,” I said, “is that it makes you insecure, and then the woman is less attracted to you. I think this was part of your problem with Kati. Sometimes the best strategy is to pretend to be confident.”
“There was no strategy with Kati,” Hans said, “only what was inside of myself.”
Hans's honesty sometimes made me feel like an asshole. I watched him in silence for a moment. Then I told him that journalists didn't usually have their subjects iron their suits. Hans didn't see the humor. “It is okay,” he said. “Now when I say good night to you with the Yiddish words shlof gezunt, shtey uf gezunt, I feel a little bit like you are a son to me.”
It was outrageous. I had really only known the guy for a few weeks. But that was Hans, and I knew he meant it. I gave him an awkward pat on the arm.
Nineteen
In the Army
Hans turned the doorknob over and over. He was trapped. The officer had locked him in a supply shed of the Austrian army without food or a bathroom. Hans pounded on the door and kicked it a few times with his army boots. Then he slumped to the floor in frustration, all too aware of the irony of the situation. He had decided by age twelve that he would never go into the army, even if he was sent to jail for twenty years. Now he was in the Austrian army and imprisoned in a storage shed while his friends were busy creating a new society.
At the time military service was required of all Austrian men (now they can choose to do communal service instead), but Hans could have avoided the army by fleeing Austria with the others. He enlisted on Remi's orders. Remi thought it would be good to have Hans “on the inside,” learning the enemy's techniques so that he would make a good partisan when the fighting broke out. Hans went along with the idea because, deep down, he wanted nothing more than to be a good partisan.
Hans got into trouble almost immediately upon enlisting. He was repeatedly punished and sometimes briefly imprisoned for not showing sufficient respect to his officers. “They shout at you and insult you from early to late in the evening,” Hans recalled. “But I showed them I would not be their slave. And somebody who is not a slave in the heart will never be a slave.”
Several months into Hans's tour of duty, after he and his unit had failed to return from a training exercise that required them to hide in the forest, the Austrian army came to its senses and moved Hans to a desk job in a supply room. Even there Hans managed to be a nuisance, and so an officer had locked him in the supply shed for the entire day.
That night, when the officer came to let Hans out, Hans had a surprise for him. “I gave him my shit in box,” Hans told me.
After six months Hans left the army, anxious to rejoin Remi and the others. Over the next two and a half years, he would discover that Spartakus had, in fact, created a new society—just not the one he had anticipated.
Twenty
Kiss Me, I'm Jewish
The next morning I put on my crisply ironed suit and found an old yarmulke in the pocket. I stuffed it into my bag and headed downtown, where I spoke with a member of Vienna's organized Jewish community. Hans, Christine, and Hans's son Günter met me downtown. Günter was thin but well built. His long brown bangs gave him the air of a member of the Partridge Family. Either because he was shy or didn't like me or had no idea who I was and why I was taking notes on his father's every utterance, he kept his distance after we were introduced.
We spent the afternoon touring some of Vienna's World War II memorials. At Albertinaplatz, where several hundred people were killed in a 1945 air raid, we looked at the Memorial Against War and Fascism. Erected by Alfred Hrdlicka from 1981 to 1991—over protests from conservative politicians—the abstract carving of twisted bodies was a dramatic departure from the typical Austrian war memorial dedicated to the “heroes” who “defended the fatherland.” Vienna had not been ready for a memorial devoted only to Jews, but Hrdlicka's piece does include a small sculpture of a bearded Jew scrubbing the street. The Jew is crouched on his hands and knees, and there is barbed wire on his back— the barbed wire hadn't been a part of the original memorial but was added when it was discovered that the Viennese were using the street-scrubbing Jew as a bench.