by Sam Apple
“As an Austrian,” I asked, “can you listen to Yiddish music as though it's just another type of music, or does it have special meaning in light of what happened in this country?”
The man looked annoyed by the question. “I was born in 1962, a long time after the war,” he said. “I've heard a lot of things about concentration camps. Maybe I'm not close enough to it. But I've done nothing wrong. Maybe I'm free to listen to this music and to enjoy it. Sure, I think about the words. I've been to Israel to take a look around.”
“So you don't think Austrians should focus on the country's past?”
“I think there has to be a point for all things,” he said. “It's only been a couple of generations, but we should be far enough away to say, ‘Okay, we can't change the past.’ There has to be a point, just like with African blacks who were slaves in America or the American Indians. Sure, it's good to remember, but we have to look to the future, not only to the past.”
I turned, and Hans was standing behind me.
“You found the right man,” Hans said. “They have been telling us this for sixty years.”
The man looked at Hans, then glanced at the ground. There was an awkward silence. I thanked him for the interview and walked away with Hans.
I was bothered by the encounter—not because I was offended, but because the man's arguments weren't all that easily dismissed. Although I remained firm in my belief that Austria had a long way to go before the country would be ready to move on, I hadn't stopped to think exactly what it would take to satisfy me. Certainly Austria can't mull over its war crimes forever. Vienna now had a beautiful memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis; a new settlement had just been reached with the Jewish community on reparations for slave laborers; and the Austrian public schools now teach about the Holocaust and take students on trips to concentration camps. What, exactly, would the Austrians have to do before the country would be off the hook in my mind?
Hans put his hand on my arm and said there was someone he wanted me to meet. In the corner, sitting hunched on a stool, was a petite elderly woman with round glasses and short white hair.
“This is Ilse Aschner. She was in England during the war, like my father,” Hans said. “When she came back, she worked at the Communist newspaper with my mother.”
Several people standing by observed that I was interviewing Ilse and gathered around to listen. I asked her why she had come back to Austria after the war.
“I thought they were waiting for us to come home and build a new Austria,” Ilse said. A few of the onlookers chuckled at the irony, but Ilse didn't seem to notice. “But I was wrong. Nobody wanted us. Nobody helped us find a job or a flat.” The laughing stopped. “It wasn't about being Jewish or Communist. They just thought we were on the wrong side. They said to us, ‘You've been on the side of the enemies.’ There was this new ‘we’ feeling in the country, and the refugees who returned disturbed this.”
I asked her if she regretted moving back to Austria.
“I've got family here and it's hard to move, but I've always been sorry that I left England. I don't feel at home here. Especially with the new government, I really feel it's not my country. My parents are Jewish, but I was baptized as a child. I went to a Protestant school. Yet I still feel the anti-Semitism, people clinging to Nazi thoughts.”
Ilse's shaky voice was growing more firm.
“I talk to men of my generation, and they tell me how wonderful it was in the war and how great it was when they marched through Paris—what great adventures they had. Recently, I was talking to some people about anti-Semitism, and an old man came by and said, ‘They forgot you, you should have gone into the gas too.’ ”
It was hard to imagine anyone saying something so awful to the tiny old woman sitting in front of me. This was my answer to the guy in the blue jean jacket, I thought. It doesn't matter how many symbolic gestures Austria makes. Austria can let go of its history when the symbolic gestures become more than symbols.
In the morning I had breakfast with Christine while Hans organized some of his things and showered. As I sipped my coffee, Christine showed me a book of photos of sculptures found in European cemeteries. The sculptures were of young lovers embracing, and some of them were fairly erotic.
Hans emerged from the bedroom in a gray V-neck that said YUTU on the left breast and a Nike JUST DO IT baseball cap. Knowing that Hans didn't buy his clothes so much as end up with them, I decided not to point out that Nike had become the embodiment of the capitalist ethic Hans had spent his entire life denouncing. Besides, “Just Do It” was a pretty good slogan for Hans.
Hans was taking me to meet his parents in a southern working-class district of Vienna. The Breuers still lived in the apartment where Hans grew up, part of a block of plain, white, four-story buildings separated by long rectangular lawns. The inside of the cramped two-bedroom was as modest as the building's exterior, the walls decorated only with framed photographs of the family. More photos were lined up across the top of the piano in the corner. In one of them, a twenty-something, bearded Hans is wearing a yellow hat that, amazingly, looks significantly larger than his current shepherd's hat.
There was no sign of Hans's parents. Hans led me into their bedroom and pointed to the cracks in the wooden floor. “For years my father hurt his foot on this wood, but he would not spend money on himself to fix it,” Hans said. “You see these values he gave me.”
We stepped back into the living room, and Hans's mother, Rosa, emerged from the kitchen in a blue housedress. She was solid and squat, barely five feet tall, with Hans's broad features and a helmet of fluffy white hair. She might have been a fullback on a football team of elderly midgets.
Rosa sat me down at the table in the center of the room, placed an unsolicited egg in front of me, then disappeared back into the kitchen. The egg had its own stand, and I spent the next few minutes unsure of how to eat it, until Hans (“I see you do not know how to eat soft egg”) leaned over and cracked the top for me.
A few minutes later Georg walked into the apartment in a white undershirt and blue shorts that looked uncomfortably small. His exposed limbs were skinny and draped in sagging flesh. His hair had receded to the back of his head, where it grew unruly, making him look a bit like a less rotund David Ben-Gurion. Additional small tufts of gray hair gathered like tumbleweed in his ears.
Georg said hello to me and sat down to my right. It wasn't clear that he knew who I was. He turned to Hans and told him that someone in the building wanted to buy a lamb from him. Hans wrote down the customer's name and phone number in a notebook—momentarily seeming like a normal businessman—then explained that I wanted to do an interview.
Ever since Hans had given me the outline of Georg's story during our initial conversation in New York, I had wondered why Georg had chosen to come back to Austria after the war. The product of a middle-class and very assimilated Viennese Jewish family, Georg was studying to become a symphony conductor until politics and then the Nazis got in the way. After the Austrian fascists took control of the government in 1934, Georg, then fifteen, felt obliged to do something. He founded a leftist activist group with friends at school and began planning actions along with the Communist Youth. In 1936 the police showed up at Georg's school and threw him in jail for a month. Two years later, on the night before the German troops crossed the border into Austria, Georg fled to Italy and then to Switzerland, worried more about his political ties than about being Jewish. After a year in Switzerland, he joined his parents in England, where, along with other refugees who held German and Austrian passports, he was declared an “enemy alien” and sent to an internment camp for six months. With the end of the war in 1945, Georg returned home with dreams of rebuilding a new Communist Austria.
“If it's okay, I'd like to ask some questions,” I said. Hans left the room to talk with his mother in the kitchen.
“Fine,” Georg said, “but first I would like to ask you a question. What do you think of your country's nuclear
policy?”
“Um, I'm not sure,” I said.
Georg stood up, walked to his bedroom, and returned with a fact sheet on recent U.S. violations of various nuclear treaties. “It's hard to believe what your president is doing,” he said. He had a German accent and the raspy voice of an old man, but his English was fairly good.
“Yes,” I said. “So can I ask why you came back to Austria after the war? Weren't you angry at the country?”
Georg smiled, as though it were an absurd question. “Was I angry at the country? You know, there were different people in Austria,” he said. “Not everybody was a Nazi, of course. And my mother and I came back because neither she nor I was prepared to accept that some nationalistic idiots could say that we are not Austrians. We are.”
“And you've never regretted the decision to return?”
“You see, I am angry about Nazis and anti-Semites,” Georg said. “I am angry about the way the government since 1945 has been handling this—not because they were anti-Semitic, but because they were afraid of losing votes. But I am not angry about the Austrians because this is not a clear-cut case, and I think the general trend is rather positive. Comparing the time when I first came back with today, I would say there are fewer anti-Semites. Fewer Nazis.”
“But when I think about how the Austrians accepted the Nazis…”
Georg made a face like he had just swallowed a little too much horseradish. “It is not true that the Austrian people as a whole were Nazis. This is not true,” he said. “There should have been a vote in Austria in March of 1938 about whether Austria would become part of Germany.”
“But there was a vote, and 99 percent—”
“That's not true! Hitler marched in to prevent the real vote, and then there was this fake ballot you mention. I am not sure whether the majority was pro or con, but Hitler wasn't sure either.”
The “real vote” Georg was referring to was an initiative of the Christian Social fascist leader Kurt von Schuschnigg. In February 1938, even before the Germans arrived, the Austrian Nazis were taking control of one Austrian city after another. On March 9, 1938, in a desperate last effort to maintain his country's independence, Schuschnigg called for an emergency plebiscite. Austrians were to go to the polls on March 13 to determine if Austria was to remain an independent nation or unite with Germany. Hitler, having already decided to include Austria in the German Reich, was outraged at Schuschnigg's last-minute attempt to derail the process. Two days later German troops were in Vienna. The next month the Nazis held their own plebiscite on the unification, and, at least according to the Nazis, 99.73 percent of Austrians had voted in favor of Austria becoming a part of the Reich. Scholars have since called the number into question, but few dispute that it was a great majority.
Hans had warned me that Georg was an unshakable optimist, but even so, I was surprised. Georg had had a nearly identical experience to that of Ilse Aschner, the woman I had spoken with after Hans's performance at the gallery. And yet they seemed to see the postwar Austrian experience in almost opposite lights.
I wasn't sure what to make of it. I had been in Austria for weeks, waiting patiently for that instant when all of the conflicting stories I had heard would come together in one blaringly clear conclusion. But with each day I was growing more rather than less confused.
I shifted directions and asked Georg how he felt about Hans having left home at the age of fifteen to join Spartakus.
Georg let out a long sigh. “I was just glad he didn't become a terrorist,” he said.
“A terrorist?”
“You were too young to experience 1968. It was not that I thought Hansie in particular would be a terrorist, but there was general trend of youth revolt at the time, and thousands of young people did things which in other times they wouldn't have done. Terrorism was only one part of that trend, but I don't think any parent at that time could say, ‘My son will not do that.’” Georg paused and gave me a “Just wait until you figure out what life is really like” look. “There was this feeling that the world is awful,” he continued, “but I think their response was largely exaggerated compared with the world I have experienced and that my wife experienced under Hitler's rule. At least in sixty-eight, Austria was a democratic country. It was much better than the past we had known—not the most terrible of all worlds you can think of.”
Later I sat down with Rosa. With Hans translating, she recounted her capture by the Gestapo. I hardly spoke as she made her way through the story. Rosa kept her hands in her lap. She seemed at ease, if serious. Hans, by contrast, maintained a pained expression throughout the interview.
When Rosa told me about her suicide attempt at the Gestapo headquarters, she leaned forward and parted her hair with her hands.
“She wants you should see her scar,” Hans said.
I looked. A long curving line like a faded chalk mark ran across the top of her head.
When the story was over, we took a break. Rosa brought me toast, and Hans showed me some of the buttons he had saved from his early teens. They were mostly in English and almost laughably representative of the times: STOP U.S. AGGRESSION IN VIETNAM, FREEDOM NOW, JESUS WORE LONG HAIR, BABY I AM SINGLE, ALL I NEED IS LOVE.
Next Hans took out a handful of old photos. In one, a twelve-year-old, chubby-cheeked Hans is standing at an anti—nuclear proliferation rally organized by Georg in black-rimmed glasses, a small cap, and a jacket with a white-painted peace symbol on the front. Around him people are holding umbrellas, looking up at a speaker, but Hans stands unprotected in the rain, staring off to the side, his face a study in glumness. I wouldn't have imagined there was a photo that could have better summed up Hans's childhood, but Hans produced another picture from 1965 of him at a memorial for an elderly Communist who was knocked down and killed by a neo-Nazi student, the first person killed by a Nazi in Austria after the war. In the crowd of the fifty or so people who are visible in the photo, Hans is the only child. His face is dead serious.
“I was deenosaurus,” Hans said, looking at the photo.
“Dinosaur?”
“Yes, yes,” Hans said. “During these years I was like generation of my parents, only talking with people much older than me. They would look at me and say, ‘He is young, but already he has so many sorrows.’ ”
Twenty-three
Seeds of Fascism
She had blond hair down to the small of her back and a small mouth. Hans wanted her and she wanted him. They moved closer together on the bed. Hans put his arm around her.
“I don't even know your name,” she said.
Hans told her.
“You're ‘the Breuer’ Remi talks about?” The woman looked like she had just seen a ghost. She jumped out of the bed. “I'm sorry,” she said.
The woman's refusal to sleep with him was as clear a sign as Hans could ask for that there was no chance for him to ever be happy at Longo Maï. “She let me fall like hot potatoes,” Hans told me. “I understood from this that I had to leave this place.”
Not that the encounter with the woman was the only incident that had led Hans to rethink his commitment to Longo Maï. There was also the accident at the wool-spinning shop, when a member of the community had gotten his arm stuck on a lever and was slowly being sucked into a machine: “I watched these so-called partisans stand paralyzed as this man was being killed, and I started to see that all this talk of taking action is lies,” Hans said. And then there was the day Hans had been sick with a high fever and unable to work: Remi told him that he was fine, that people who work outdoors have higher temperatures. Hans protested and turned to another member of the group standing nearby. “Tell him it's not true,” Hans had said. The man looked at Hans and then at “the Great Educator.” “It's true what Remi tells you,” the man said.
“Remi could say, ‘This is a black world’ when the world is white, and everybody would agree,” Hans told me. “So I saw a little bit there how people participate in a fascist system and don't see what they're doing. Th
ey create their own inner world, where what's right and wrong can be changed by the group. It becomes possible that collective crimes are done without people feeling guilty.”
Hans had come full circle. He had joined Spartakus to fight fascism only to discover the seeds of fascism within the group. But no matter how miserable he was at Longo Maï, leaving wasn't easy. For months Hans had been changing his mind, and just the thought of cutting himself off from the community could cause him to break into a sweat. Then there were the logistical problems to tackle: He had no money and no property of his own—to take even a rucksack would be to steal from the collective; he would have to make it by the guards and the packs of roaming dogs Remi had installed, supposedly to keep the enemies out, but, Hans was discovering, really to keep the residents of Longo Maï in.
Weeks after his encounter with the woman, Hans stood by himself at three in the morning and thought about the look on her face when he had revealed his name. Then he grabbed a rucksack and headed into the night. After slipping by the guards and making his way through several thorny fields, Hans arrived at a road where he could hail a ride in the direction of Austria. When he had made it several hours away, Hans still felt Longo Maï's grip. He got out of the car that had picked him up and found a phone to call the community. The phone was passed to Remi, who told Hans that a car would be sent to pick him up and bring him back. Hans thought hard about it, then stuck out his thumb and caught another car in the direction of Vienna. “Even then,” Hans told me, “I was convinced that it was my defeat—not that the place was bad, but that I was bad.”
Twenty-four
The Caravan