Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  Vienna finally got a memorial dedicated specifically to Austria's Jewish victims in 2000. The work of British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, the monument is a twelve-foot-high white square meant to resemble a library with the books turned backward so that their spines can't be viewed. At the base of the monument are the names of the camps where 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed.

  The Jewish memorial occupies a good portion of Juden-platz, a baroque square where archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a fifteenth-century synagogue destroyed when several hundred Jews burned themselves alive inside rather than submit to baptism. You can still see a sixteenth-century relief in the square with a Latin inscription commemorating the death of the “Hebrew dogs.” The Catholic Church recently added a plaque that apologizes for the Church's historic role in stirring up hatred against Jews and refers to the fifteenth-century attacks as “an ominous portent for what happened, in our century, all over Europe during the National Socialist dictatorship.”

  From Judenplatz, the others went back to Christine's apartment, but it was Thursday, and I wanted to check out a new Viennese tradition. Every Thursday night since the new government had formed in February of 2000, there had been a rally and march through downtown Vienna. The protestors met in Ballhausplatz, a small square from which you can gaze on the sprawling Hofburg (Imperial Palace) to the east and on the parliament building to the west. In the first months the marches had drawn thousands. On that Thursday in June, more than a year later, there were only a hundred or so protesters, a motley mix of potbellied ex-hippies and young leftists in Che Guevara T-shirts. It wasn't exactly May ’68, but considering that the marches had been going on every week for a year, it was an impressive turnout. And there was discontent in the air. On the sidewalk someone had chalked FPÖ: Fascho Partei Österreich. Banners and flags bearing the word Widerstand (resistance) fluttered in the light breeze. Under a small tent, set up by the organizers, you could buy I DIDN'T VOTE FOR THIS GOVERNMENT postcards and GIVE NAZIS NO CHANCE shirts.

  I looked around for Irene, but she wasn't there. It had been less than forty-eight hours since I had seen her, but already our night together was beginning to feel like a dream. I wanted to call her, but I was scared, convinced she had awakened in the morning thinking that the whole thing hadn't made any sense after all.

  Around me the protesters gathered in groups and chatted. I asked a young woman dressed in all black why she had come to the march. “The FPÖ is using harmful language,” she said. “Also, there's so much stupid racism and sexism in this government.” She stopped to think for a moment, then continued. “We are showing the world that not all Austrians are Nazis.”

  Off to the side, several dozen policemen waited to escort the marchers through the city. Three of the policemen near me stood shoulder to shoulder, looking straight ahead. Unsure of which of the three to address, I announced to all of them that I was a journalist from New York. They seemed unimpressed. The line had failed me for the first time. “I'm here from New York to write about Austria,” I said again. The meanest looking of the three told me I could ask him questions if I didn't use my tape recorder.

  I brought up the charges I had heard about racism in the Austrian police force. The officer said there was no such thing as racism in the Austrian police force. As I stood fumbling for another question, the march started and I began to walk along with the officers. When I looked up from my notebook, I found myself in the middle of a circle of about ten Austrian policemen.

  I escaped and joined the protesters, who were now banging drums and blowing whistles. Walking through the heart of the city, I took in Vienna's grand buildings and creamy palaces and thought about how awful it would be to have to paint them. An old woman with long white hair and a red whistle around her neck was shouting at a few of the other marchers. I was sure I heard her use the word “anti-Semite,” and concerned that I might have just missed an interesting exchange, I asked her what was going on.

  “I'm telling them they shouldn't bring their dogs with them,” the old woman said, and then she looked into my eyes inquisitively, as though she recognized me.

  “You must be Armenian,” she said.

  “No,” I said, smiling. “But I'll take that as a compliment.”

  “Yes, it's a compliment,” she said. She looked at me again, her face now scrunched in confusion.

  “But you must be Armenian,” she said.

  Again I denied it. We went back and forth several more times on this point until she gave up and asked me where my family was from.

  “Originally from Poland and Lithuania,” I said.

  The old woman looked suspicious.

  “I'm Jewish,” I said.

  With that, she grabbed my neck, pulled me strongly toward her, and kissed me hard on the cheek. When I broke free, she gazed at me, eyes full of disbelief. “What are you doing in this country?” she asked.

  “Just hanging out,” I said.

  The woman, who I was beginning to think was drunk, smiled, blew her whistle a few times, and walked on.

  I walked on as well, still shaken from the embrace. I had been kissed for being a Jew. In this case it was clearly some sort of creepy philo-Semitism, but it left me wondering if Irene too had kissed me for being a Jew. Maybe, despite her insistence that she didn't want to think of things that way, she couldn't help seeing our affair—or whatever it was—through the lens of the Holocaust any more than I could. Maybe, at some only partially conscious level, she had gone to bed with me to make amends for what her countrymen had done to the Jews.

  I suppose this insight should have troubled me, especially since I felt terrible about the possibility that I had become involved with her for the wrong reasons. And yet, try as I did to feel used, I couldn't quite muster it. By all means, I thought, kiss me for being a Jew. Give me a blow job for being a Jew. Let all the young attractive women in the country work through their guilt in bed with me. Hell, the German women might as well get in on the act too.

  The thought that Irene might like me for the wrong reasons gave me an unexpected boost of confidence. It was the first time since I had awoken next to her that I considered that she might like me at all.

  I broke away from the march and found a pay phone to call her.

  “I want to see you again,” I said.

  “Yes, that would be fun,” she said.

  I met Irene for a picnic the next day, in the shadow of the Neue Burg (New Wing) of the Hofburg Palace. The building that had once been the seat of one of the world's great empires was now occupied by an assortment of museums and government offices. We spread out a blanket on the same lawn that sixty years earlier had been filled with tens of thousands of delirious Austrians cheering on Hitler as he addressed them from the balcony of the Hofburg upon his arrival in Vienna in 1938. I had brought a yogurt drink and chocolate eggs that come with toys inside. Irene had brought cherries, a bag of mini-croissants, chocolate spread, and a thick joint she had rolled for the occasion. As I nibbled on my egg, Irene told me about her childhood. She had grown up in a Catholic family. On special occasions the family dressed in traditional Austrian attire.

  “You wear a dirndl?” I asked.

  Irene giggled. “Why not?”

  It seemed a bit ridiculous, although I suppose she would find it equally ridiculous were she to picture me in synagogue with a white shawl around my shoulders and a round piece of cloth on my head.

  I asked Irene if she had witnessed a lot of anti-Semitism in Austria. “Yes, but of course,” she said. “Little kids on the playground would tell lots of Jewish jokes. And in school I went on a trip to Mauthausen with my class, and it was scary. Most of the students were more interested in where to get the best desserts than in the concentration camp.”

  Those fuckers, I thought.

  “Kids will be kids,” I said.

  “No, they were sixteen,” she said. “They don't realize how recently it happened, that people who did these things are still alive.”

&nbs
p; Irene also told me that Austrians, even those who don't intend to be anti-Semitic, regularly use the expression bis zur Vergasung (“to the point of gassing [someone]”) to mean “ad nauseam.”

  Ten yards from us, a man and a woman were sitting cross-legged and juggling oranges. I tried to put together the minitrain that had come in my egg. Irene smoked her joint. I took a few entirely ineffective hits and then lay down on my back and looked at the neo-Renaissance pillars of the Hof-burg in silence.

  “What should we do next?” Irene said.

  “Well, we could always go make love in the Hofburg,” I said, entirely joking, although fully prepared to act on the joke should Irene give a remotely positive response.

  “Good idea,” she said, and so we walked into the Hofburg. And so, to my own amazement, I found myself with my pants around my ankles, crouching under a stairway of the Hapsburgs’ famous residence—in the very wing of the building where Hitler had triumphantly declared Austria a part of the German Reich. And so, to my horror, moments later an elderly janitor discovered me with my pants around my ankles crouching beneath the stairway of the Hapsburgs’ famous residence in the very wing of the building where Hitler had triumphantly declared Austria a part of the German Reich.

  In a flash I saw a photo of myself pantless and in handcuffs on the front page of the local papers: JEWISH TOURIST CAUGHT FONDLING LOCAL WOMAN IN HOFBURG.

  But the janitor smirked and walked on. I pulled up my pants and we hurried out.

  Twenty-one

  “The Terrible Breuer”

  Remi had decided to move Spartakus to France, but first the group stopped in Switzerland, where they merged with a revolutionary Swiss outfit known as Hydra and set about gathering funds for the new commune. To collect donations, the young radicals would sometimes ride through the streets of Basel in a horse-drawn wagon, eliciting the sympathies of the very petit bourgeois liberals they despised for not joining their revolution. The Swiss members brought in most of the money. Several of them came from wealthy families, and one had ties to a large chemical company that agreed to support the new settlement. In Hans's memory, the irony that the new society would be funded by the same corrupt system the group hoped to one day overthrow didn't cause much internal strife among the members.

  On June 14, 1973, the Spartakus/Hydra collective bought 300 hectares in Provence for the price of 521,500 francs. The new settlement was dubbed Longo Maï (“May It Last Long” in Provençal), and the original two-dozen “pioneers,” as they called themselves, immediately got to work. Spotted with fields of lavender and thyme, the rocky, arid landscape wasn't well suited to farming (the locals had already mostly given up), but the barren earth turned out to be no match for the group's idealism. They fixed up the dilapidated barn that came with the property, dug a reservoir, installed a pipe system for irrigation, and laid out vegetable gardens. At night, when the work was done, they slept outside or all together on the straw-covered floor of the barn. With money flowing in from Switzerland, they were able to buy expensive tools and farm animals. An old Longo Maï document I found among Hans's papers lists the following initial purchases: “3 tractors (large, medium, small); agricultural machinery; axes, machetes, sickles, shovel… 120 sheep.”

  After his six months in the army, Hans made his way to Longo Maï, only to be stunned by what he found. Remi, now referred to as “the Great Educator,” had transformed himself from the leader of a youthful political outfit into the guru of a utopian cult. Remi had always been an authoritarian figure, but during the Spartakus years it was still possible to question him. At Longo Maï his authority was absolute. Remi dictated not just what vegetables the collective should grow, but also who should perform which jobs and often even who should sleep with whom. One of the worst offenses within Longo Maï in the mid-1970s was to carry on a monogamous relationship, and Remi spent a good portion of his time fighting what became known as “the war against the couples.”

  In a book about representations of Longo Maï in the media, the French journalist Gilbert Caty tells the story of a woman named Dominique who felt “criminalized” for refusing to follow Remi's orders to sleep around. “I wanted a child, yet I also wanted to be sure that my boyfriend was the father,” Dominique says.

  Michael Genner, who had been one of the intellectual leaders of the group, was outraged by Remi's constant abuse of couples. “What [Remi] was able to do in Longo Maï was to totally pervert our old objective: sexual freedom,” Genner writes in his reflections. “In place of free love stood the subjugation of people to the collective.”

  Most of the hundreds of young people who came to live at Longo Maï in the ’70s soon left of their own accord. Others who wouldn't submit to Remi's demands were chased away. If a new arrival was young and male and particularly compliant, he might be invited into what became known as Remi's “Boys’ Group.” Made up of a handful of young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty, the group lived separately with Remi in a hut atop the hill and held a special status in the community.

  Hans had been driven to Spartakus, at least in part, by a sense of inadequacy in the face of his mother's suffering and heroics. But Spartakus had only added a new sense of inadequacy. Remi would mock and even beat members of the group outside of his small circle of power. Because he was one of the youngest members of Spartakus, and because he remained a strong individualist, Hans had always been a favorite target for Remi's abuses. When he wasn't ridiculing Hans for sport, Remi would tell him that his ego was too strong and that everything he did was doomed to failure because he wanted success and praise too badly.

  “The picture he drew of me was exaggerated, but I think Remi was maybe right in how he saw me,” Hans said. “But he left me with no way to deal with my problems other than to play the fool. He fixed me in that role of ‘the terrible Breuer.’ I always felt there was something wrong with me because I was the only one who could not live up to Remi's ideas of how human beings should be.”

  Looking back, Hans feels a different sort of guilt—guilt for being a part of Remi's system, for standing by as others were slapped and humiliated in the name of the collective. “My conscience, my common sense, I had mostly switched off,” Hans said. “I didn't see the injustice that happened before my eyes in this group every day and even less the shit I myself did. And yet I could not leave. It was clear to me—if I leave this group, where the new human is created, then it's like I'm going to hell. Then it's like I'm dead, I'm nothing.” Hans paused. “It was like you leave your mother forever.”

  Twenty-two

  Meet the Parents

  I saw Hans perform in Austria for the first time later that week. The concert was in the basement of Christine's building, where she was holding an opening in the small gallery she had set up in two bare, white rooms.

  When I walked in, Hans was already singing lum Balalaika,” a Yiddish classic that I remembered from a fifth-grade music class at my Jewish day school. It's a song about a young man's search for the perfect bride. In despair, the young man asks a riddle: “Maiden, Maiden,” he says, “I want to ask you something: What can grow without rain? What can burn without being consumed? What can cry without tears?” “Silly boy,” the maiden responds, “why do you need to ask? A stone can grow without rain. Love can burn without being consumed. The heart can cry without tears.” As Hans's voice rose higher and higher with the ascending melody, the audience members, some of them holding glasses of red wine, tapped their feet.

  I wasn't sure how to feel about the scene. All along, Hans's concerts had struck me as something just shy of a heroic act. I imagined the Austrian audience members covered in sweat like the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange absorbing the painful truth with his eyelids taped open. But watching these Viennese yuppies bopping to the music, it hardly seemed like Hans was reeducating anyone. No, this wasn't how it was supposed to be. These people were enjoying Hans's concert way too much.

  The short-story moment came to me in a flash: I stand up, walk into the ce
nter of the room, and begin to bark out the Yiddish songs along with Hans. When I don't know the words, I make loud Yiddish-sounding noises. My crackly voice and my inability to carry a tune leave the audience holding their ears in disgust. Some of them stand up and walk out. One elderly man throws a piece of fruit at me, which I dodge without skipping a note. The Yiddish words gradually began to flow from me as though I've spoken the language my entire life. Hans puts his arm around my shoulder, and we sing until the gallery is empty, until our voices are the only sounds in the sleeping city.

  After the concert I walked around and looked at the exhibit. It had all the staples of the avant-garde art galleries I've occasionally stumbled upon in New York: a piece that depicted a graphic homosexual encounter; a collection of TVs stacked like bricks, playing video snippets you could watch for only about ten seconds without feeling insane; and the requisite mundane artifact hanging on a wall, in this case a pair of white soccer shorts, which Christine told me were the artist's statement on Austrian machismo.

  Looking for someone to interview about the concert, I noticed a man in a blue jean jacket standing alone by the food table. He had wavy blond hair and sunken shoulders. I asked him if he had understood any parts of the songs.

  “Yes,” he said, “I understood about 90 percent. I grew up in the Austrian countryside. We have some dialects that are very similar to Yiddish.”

  I felt a rush of jealousy. I'm not sure if I believed the 90 percent line, but apparently, this non-Jewish Austrian had understood a lot more of the Yiddish than I had. It suddenly dawned on me that most German speakers, Nazis included, could understand the language of my grandparents better than I could.