by Sam Apple
Hans liked the sheep but hated dealing with the city bureaucrats. Every time a ewe fell sick, he would have to place a written request to buy medicine. By the time he received a response, it would often be too late. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats began to catch on that Hans didn't know much about shepherding. After some months the city sent him off to shepherd's school in West Germany for three weeks to learn from the experts. Hans took the same courses as the other shepherds, but because he didn't have the requisite nine years of experience working with sheep, he wasn't able to get what he referred to as his “master's of shepherding.”
To get a master's in shepherding, you have to take a final exam: The shepherd is given a flock of 500 sheep, which he has to lead over a bridge with his dogs standing on either side until the last sheep has passed. No lamb herders are allowed at the back. The shepherd also has to take the sheep into the streets amid traffic and then drive them back into a fenced-off grazing area. “If the dog does not do things just right, then you can go home,” Hans said.
There is also a written test with a wide range of questions about sheep and the finances of keeping a flock. “They will ask you: If you have a flock of one thousand sheep, how much food will you need for the winter?” Hans explained. “And if you start to tell some numbers, then again you can go home because you first must ask in what region the flock is and how much energy they get from the food there and so on.”
Like a lot of good schools, the shepherd's academy turned out to be as useful for the connections you could make as for its curriculum. While there, Hans met a handful of shepherds from an alternative community in southwest Germany called Finkhof—a much less radical version of Longo Maï. The Finkhof community had several shepherds with degrees, and later these Finkhof shepherds would be the ones to really teach Hans the secrets of the trade.
After his schooling, Hans went back to Vienna and continued to herd the city sheep. He brought his first dogs back from Germany and began to train them. But having seen real German shepherds in action, Hans found his daily routine of leading his sheep back and forth within the same small area even less appealing.
The dissatisfaction was heightened by Hans's loneliness. For all its many drawbacks, Longo Maï had provided Hans with a community that was now entirely absent from his life. And making new friends was hard. Hans was still a radical and still largely incapable of getting along with anyone who didn't share his extreme opinions—which was almost everyone. “I fought with everyone like they were enemies, only now I see that they were not enemies, only critical friends,” Hans said.
Whenever he had a chance, Hans visited his friends at Finkhof, and with each trip, he grew more impressed with the young shepherds in the community. It wasn't just the way the Finkhof shepherds kept perfect control over the flock— although that certainly excited Hans; it was the way they had integrated their sheep into the life of the countryside.
Finkhof's flock wandered through Upper Swabia, a stretch of gentle foothills in southern Germany known for its mild winters and lean grasslands. For centuries the countryside had been maintained by grazing sheep, but as small-scale village shepherding disappeared over the decades, the green pastures and riverbanks in the region had been overtaken by shrubbery and weeds. The Finkhof shepherds had an idea: They approached the local officials and arranged to bring sheep back to the region as makeshift lawn mowers. For the shepherds it would mean a small wage and free food for the flock. For the local officials it would be a cheap and environmentally friendly way to keep the countryside beautiful. The Finkhof shepherds made similar arrangements with farmers in the area. In the late autumn, when the crops had been harvested, the sheep could move onto the farmers’ fields and eat the leftover leaves and seedlings. For the shepherd it was again free food. For the farmer it was old-fashioned weeding and fertilizer. The great insight was that the same voracious sheep appetite that made it so tricky to keep a flock near other people's property could be a valuable tool if properly harnessed. (The urban equivalent of this idea, which I wholeheartedly endorse, would be to have large herds of goats replace our current trash-collecting system.)
As Hans too came to appreciate the social and economic potential in sheep hunger, the shepherding life took on a great new appeal for him. By eating what would otherwise go to waste, the sheep were making the world more efficient and allowing Hans to stay true to his Marxist roots. If he followed the Finkhof model, he would own no property and monopolize no resources. And, even better, since Hans had no money, this system required almost no investment once a shepherd had some sheep—there was no need even to buy hay. But perhaps best of all, considering that Hans was still having a hard time getting along with just about everyone and still capable of seeing capitalist corruption and fascism just about everywhere, the job of a wandering shepherd would isolate him from the rest of society.
Hans thought about moving to Finkhof to become a shepherd in Germany. But Finkhof already had more than enough shepherds. Hans wondered if he could bring the Finkhof system back to Austria, but it didn't seem likely. He would need to find a place that had both little snowfall in winter (sheep, according to Hans, will dig through only about forty centimeters of snow), plenty of unused land, and local officials who had a bit of imagination.
Hans didn't realize such a place might exist in Austria until the winter of 1979, when two young women from the Lower Austrian town of Krems came to visit Hans at Finkhof. They mentioned that not far from where they lived were overgrown pastures just like ones grazed by the Finkhof sheep and that the Danube valley that spreads across Lower Austria also has microclimates with little snowfall—due to the mixing of the Mediterranean climate from the south and the Continental climate from the east. The two women even volunteered to ask local officials how they would feel about Hans bringing a flock to the area.
Hans was thrilled. The prospect of being a wandering shepherd in Austria seemed suddenly close at hand. But before he took the next monumental step, he wanted to go to Scandinavia. Remi had always talked about Scandinavia as a place where the people were more open-minded and less sexually repressed, and Hans wanted to check this out for himself. He never imagined he would begin to discover his Jewish heritage on the journey.
Twenty-eight
Everybody Knows in Which Echo I Write
In less than a week I was scheduled to leave for Israel, where I was going to visit my sister and her family. On my way home to New York, I would stop over in Vienna for one night. That was it. I had entered another world of sheep, sex, and Nazis, and just like that, it would be gone.
The morning after the festival I interviewed Doron Ra-binovici, a well-known Austrian Jewish writer who has explored the theme of Jewish life in Austria in both his fiction and nonfiction. Rabinovici is also a prominent political activist and had helped to organize the huge protests that filled the streets of Vienna in the days after the new government had formed. Prior to my trip, when I asked around for names of people to talk to about the Jewish experience in Austria, Rabinovici was usually the first person mentioned.
I arrived at the café where Rabinovici had suggested we meet to find him already sitting at a table sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. He was thin, with close-cropped brown hair and small black-framed glasses that gave him the air of a cutting-edge intellectual, the kind of guy you suspected of writing academic jargon in the margins of nonaca-demic books.
Rabinovici told me that he had moved to Vienna from Tel Aviv when he was three. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors, and he had grown up with the sense that the past wasn't really over, that what happened between 1938 and 1945 could happen again. He sounded like Hans, but, unlike Hans, Rabinovici had always had a strong Jewish identity and been active in Zionist youth groups.
“In Vienna, I was very aware of Jewish questions in a way that I maybe would not have been in Tel Aviv, and quite certainly not in New York,” Rabinovici said, his eyes intense. “In other big cities, you live in the Diaspora, but there's s
till a large Jewish community—you're not ‘you people.’ In Vienna you're always some kind of last member of a murdered people.” Rabinovici looked down into his coffee, then back up at me. “To be a Jew in Austria after the war and not feel that you are a Jew would be very, very strange,” he said.
I asked Rabinovici how living in Vienna affected his fiction.
“Just to write as a Jew in a German-speaking country— in a country where once the National Socialists were in power—is always a contradiction to what the murderers wanted,” he said. “And even more so, to write as a Jew in German.” He thought for a moment. “I would maybe say that what I'm doing is indirect or second-degree writing. I can write a novel or a history work or an article, but it's indirect in a sense because what I do is always a reaction. When I write about a tree, I don't write only about a tree. And when I write about the Jewish child dancing in the street, I don't write only about the Jewish child dancing in the street because everybody knows in which echo I write. In the eyes of the murderers, Jews in Austria are people who should not exist. And in the moment when you open a book by such a person, you're aware of it and read it in a different way.”
“It seems so confining,” I said.
“Yes, but it's not just a restraint, it's also a possibility,” Rabinovici said. “There was a great pianist who had a disease that affected his fingers and made his playing different, made something special about it. So someone like this might have limitations, but maybe there are things he can do better. He has possibilities other people don't have. The moment when you accept that, you can tell more stories. That's the interesting thing. If you don't accept it, you're more restricted. If you accept it, you can go on.”
Rabinovici and I continued to talk for some time, about Haider and Austrian racism, but from the moment he had mentioned the inescapability of a Jewish identity in postwar Austria, my thoughts kept drifting back to Irene and the rapist. It struck me that she thought of him not just as a rapist, but as a Jewish rapist. I wondered if Irene was any more capable of seeing me outside of a Jewish context than I was capable of seeing her outside of an Austrian context. Maybe we were both hopelessly trapped in the past?
Before leaving, I asked Rabinovici if he ever felt worn-out by the ongoing struggle against anti-Semitism and racism in Austria.
“Well, I don't think you stay here because you have to fulfill a duty,” he said. “But if you stay here, then you have to fight anti-Semitism. It's not that I'm staying here to fight, but if I stay here, I fight.”
Later that day Irene and I biked along the banks of the Danube to a nudist swimming spot. I had understood that people would be swimming naked in the lake, but I hadn't anticipated that everyone would be hanging around without clothes even out of the water. Everywhere I turned there was flesh: naked kids kicking soccer balls and naked old men riding bicycles and naked families eating ice-cream cones together at picnic tables.
I had never seen so many naked people before, and I didn't particularly like it. I had always imagined a nude beach as some sort of erotic wonderland. Hairy old men on bikes, their large guts sagging over their shriveled dicks, had not been a part of that vision.
Irene and I arrived and put out a blanket on the grass. She took off her clothes and wrapped herself in a small Tibetan tapestry. “It's okay, you can undress,” she said.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Irene asked, removing a box of cherries from her bag.
I was sure. I didn't want to be naked in front of the Viennese.
“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I'll be fine.”
“Do you like swimming?” Irene asked.
“Not really,” I said. I have always been a terrible swimmer—I suspect because, deep down, I can never fully convince myself that I'm not going to drown each time I put my face in the water.
Irene leaned back on her elbows and ate cherries. I couldn't stop thinking about Rabinovici's dancing children, about Jewish echoes. I wanted to say something but I was worried she'd get upset again. Instead I asked her how she thought Austria's past affected her personally, if there was a link between the Nazi years and all of the work she did on behalf of refugees in the country.
“My father and aunt were both sent to Nazi schools,” she said, “and my grandfather was away in Poland during the war. My family told me lots of stories—some I didn't believe and still don't, but I've started to understand the pressure they were under.” Irene took a joint out of her bag and lit it. “I was still in the generation in which you weren't allowed to speak about that ‘special chapter in Austrian history’ with your family, so I was only told about the horror of the U.S. bombs and the lack of food. When I learned in school about the Holocaust and then visited Mauthausen, it really touched me deeply. It was a new version of history, like falling out of a warm, cozy cloud. So then I was confronted with trusting my family again. There were so many questions, like ‘Why didn't you do anything?’ and ‘Don't you feel guilty?’—questions I never got an answer to. I still think that my grandfather, who died before I was born, had some secrets. I don't know what he did in Poland or Russia. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, since I didn't find anything about him when I looked up his name. It's just a feeling.” She exhaled a plume of smoke. “I think I somehow just don't want to look away when I feel that there is injustice,” she said.
We walked to the edge of the lake, where I removed my shirt, socks, and shoes. Irene removed her tapestry and led me across the lake to a rope swing that hung from a high branch overlooking the water. “Watch,” she said. She climbed out of the lake onto a lower branch and took the rope in her hands. Then she swung, naked, limbs cascading through the air, and down beneath the water. Seconds later she reemerged with a “Whooo.”
Irene wanted me to swing too. I thought hard. I was worried that I would let go before I made it over the water. Surely it happened sometimes, especially to people who were nervous and had sweaty palms. (CLOTHED TOURIST DIES AT NUDE LAKE: PAGE 5.) But it also looked sort of fun, and Irene was pressuring me. I climbed onto the branch, squeezed the rope in my fists, and swung. When I made it over the water, I dropped straight down, arms at my sides.
“Do you want to go again?” Irene said.
“Let's have a swimming race,” I said.
We raced. I kicked and clawed at the water as hard as I could, but Irene beat me soundly.
On our way out Irene bumped into an old friend, an anarchist with one lazy eye and bad teeth. We ended up in a long argument about moral relativism. He seemed to be all for it. I said, “What if Irene suddenly stood up and for no reason kicked me in the face? Would that be an inherently wrong act?”
“Well, it would certainly be surprising,” he said.
Over the next few days I tracked down some of Hans's old friends. Several former members of Spartakus and Longo Maï told me about the inner workings of the community, but they seemed guarded in talking about Hans. The most I could get out of them was that he was very active and never very happy.
A friend from high school who had been in the same section of the Communist Youth as Hans but hadn't joined Spartakus told me that he thought the entire Spartakus gang was crazy.
“Because they were so extreme?” I asked.
“No, I was very extreme myself.”
“You mean really crazy?”
“Yes. Insane.”
“Hans too?”
“I'm not sure,” he said.
I asked another friend, Renate, who had been an important confidante for Hans during his worst ups and downs with Kati, if she had any understanding of the role foosball played in the family.
“I don't know,” she said. “I only knew that it was very important for Kati and certainly that it gave her a simple and entertaining leisure activity away from Hans and away from discussing things. She could meet people who also just wanted to have fun.”
Hans's younger sister, Lisi, initially agreed to talk to me, then changed her mind. She and Hans haven'
t spoken in years, but they are close with each other's children. As far as I could gather, the problem stemmed from their childhoods. Hans and Lisi had been extremely close, but Hans was always a domineering figure. When he moved out at age fifteen, Lisi first felt abandoned and then felt the need to liberate herself psychologically from Hans's influence.
I did talk to Hans's older half sister, Erna, who had been a baby when the Gestapo took Rosa away. Erna is eleven years older than Hans and had lived with him only when he was very young. A heavy-set woman with a contagious high-pitched laugh, she is also not speaking to Hans, apparently because of a handful of old and somewhat petty disagreements.
We met in Erna's antiques store in Vienna. There was something Dickensian about the scene, the crowded room overflowing with knickknacks—including a ceramic sculpture of a shepherdess leading a small flock—old murky mirrors leaning against the walls, and Erna in a large beaded necklace giggling in her ornate chair in the corner.
I asked her how she would describe Hans's personality.
“I haven't seen him in many years,” she said, breaking into a long laugh. “What I can say is that he is rich in emotions and ideas and that when he has an idea and he thinks this is right, he does it 120 percent. He loves his children and his friends. And he is a very interesting part of all discussions if you have not too many of your own ideas.” Erna laughed. “His weakness is to be not too tolerant. He maybe tries to understand, but he cannot hold his emotions. His emotions are overflowing what the brain can control.”
In the evenings I would stop in to see Hans and Christine. We would play cards and board games with whichever son happened to be around, then I would go over to Irene's place to watch German MTV and eat mini-croissants with chocolate.
I began to have strange dreams at night: In one I am walking with Hans and the sheep through the West Bank when a suicide bomber explodes nearby, killing a number of people. Hans sits on the ground in shock and asks me if I can continue. In another I am on the run from the Nazis, and for some reason I am careful to take a giant potato with me. In yet another I am on a cruise ship. A fraternity boy on board has somehow died by bringing a pan of onions into the shower with him, and I am being blamed in what turns out to be a classic Jewish blood libel.