by Sam Apple
“I just got a text message from Irene,” Dani said when I phoned. “She'll be home from Italy in a few days. She wants you to stay in Austria and wait for her.”
I didn't know what to do. When I had offered to stay weeks before, I hadn't really thought it through. And I wasn't even sure if I could still change my plane ticket. I told Hans and Christine about the new development and then continued to frantically stuff my things into my backpack as the pros and cons raced through my head. Pros: I'd get to spend more time with Irene and finish some of the reporting I had left undone. Cons: I'd grow more attached to Irene, which would just make the separation more painful; money was running low; my AIDS test would have to be delayed.
Just as I was hitting full panic mode, Hans brought over the Mordecai Gebirtig book and asked me to write a note in it. When I gave the book back, he was sitting at the table eating a banana.
“You know what I think?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“I think you should stay,” Hans said. “The love of a woman is very rare and special.”
I thought about this for a moment. Hans knew what he was talking about. I had come to Austria because I wanted to learn about sheep and Yiddish music and anti-Semitism, but maybe, I thought, this is what I'd take away most from knowing Hans: The love of a woman is very rare and special. Hans meant lovers, but I couldn't help but think of mothers too.
I decided to stay.
Irene wouldn't be back for three more days; in the meantime, I had some unfinished business to attend to. I was going to go back to Carinthia, back to the heart of Haider country.
Thirty-six
Searching for Anti-Semites
The next morning I drove to Carinthia with Jürgen, one of theno-racism.net administrators I met on the same evening I met Irene. Jürgen was thirty years old and stocky. He had dark wavy hair, a long straight nose, and a swallowed laugh that was usually accompanied by a nodding of the head. He was unemployed, and when I asked him if he wanted to travel with me and serve as my translator, he said, “Why not, it's not like I'm doing something else right now,” then shook quietly with laughter.
My plan was to finally find and talk to the Freedom Party supporters everyone had been telling me about. I had met the guy at Hans's concert who was against reparations, and the ignorant boy on the train, but I hadn't yet met anyone other than Sichiovsky who openly endorsed the Freedom Party or the current government. Carinthia, where 42 percent of the 1999 regional vote had gone to the Freedom Party, was the obvious place to look.
Jürgen stopped at a gas station just after crossing the border into Carinthia. I took my notebook in with me. “Let's do it,” I said without irony.
We stood at a Formica counter and sipped Melanges that came with small glasses of water and pieces of chocolate on the side—just like in the Viennese cafés. “How about him?” I said, gesturing toward a mustached man sitting alone in the corner. Jürgen approached the man and repeated the pitch we had gone over in the car: “My friend is a journalist from America. He is writing about his travels in Austria and would like to talk to you in order to better understand the Austrian character.”
The mustached man turned to look at me—untucked neon blue polo shirt with big ’70s-style collar, hair frizzing this way and that, overstuffed wallet bulging from pants pocket—and shook his head. Jürgen shrugged and tried someone else. Another rejection and then another.
It looked bleak, but I wasn't ready to give up. I bought a big red and white baseball cap that said AUSTRIA across the front. Jürgen couldn't look at me without laughing, but when we approached our next victim, a stern-looking elderly man with exceptionally hairy forearms, he agreed to speak with us.
The man was eating a bowl of soup. I asked him his favorite thing about Austria, and he put down his spoon and said, “Skiing.” I asked for his least favorite, and he said, “All the political fighting.” He didn't smile and he didn't seem willing to respond in more than two sentences. “Yes,” he supported this government and the Freedom Party, and “No,” there was not a lot of anti-Semitism or racism in Carinthia.
“But when you think about this government, does it make you question whether Austria has adequately addressed its past with respect to World War II?”
“Austria must look to the future,” he said, pausing for a spoonful of soup. “Of course what happened to the Jews is horrible.”
Back in the car I found myself disappointed that the old man had not said something nastier. It took me a moment to realize how profoundly idiotic that was—being upset because someone didn't dislike Jews enough. If only he had called me a “dirty Jew.” If only he had put down his soupspoon and attacked; or better yet, dumped the soup on my head, shouted “Heil Hitler,” and goose-stepped out of the gas station with his right arm extended.
There was no more escaping the paradox that lay just beneath the surface of my entire Austrian escapade. I wanted the Austrians to be anti-Semitic, wanted them to be every bit as awful as the goyim Bashy had spent so many years warning me about. Not in the past, but in the present. Even a willful ignorance of their countrymen's past crimes would not do. I wanted seething Jew hatred, red-hot and stupid.
It may just have been the frustration of unmet expectations. I had been anticipating my encounters with the Carinthians for months, patiently waiting for the dramatic moment when I would come face-to-face with real evil. A quiet man eating soup in a gas station had not been a part of my vision. But I think my perverse longing for anti-Semites was about something larger. I think it was about the very way I'd come to understand myself as a Jew. I've always found lots of things to like about Judaism: the acknowledgment that we need a break from the world every seven days, the hyper-ethical Talmudic dictates, the mysterious sense of comfort that comes from the refusal to eat the same delicious foods my ancestors refused to eat. But there is also another side of my attachment to Judaism that I'm less proud of: the side that clings to Jewishness not as an identity to be celebrated in and of itself, but as a response to Jew haters; the side that forgets that to be Jewish is to be more than anti-anti-Jewish. I try to overcome these reactionary tendencies, but that summer I had become so obsessed with the phenomenon of Jewish persecution that the prospect of not finding anti-Semitism in the great anti-Semitic heartland felt, somehow, like a threat to my sense of self. At the time all I understood was that I wanted to find the Jew-hating bastards, but now I see that as Jürgen and I sped toward the heart of Jörg Haider's capital, I needed the anti-Semites as much as they needed me.
We arrived in Klagenfurt and parked in front of the Min-imundus—a collection of models of famous buildings from different countries. Jürgen and I took turns peering at the miniature world through a hole in the fence and then stood in silence for a moment.
“Now what?” Jürgen asked.
I didn't know. How exactly do you find anti-Semites? If only there was someone standing on the side of a road selling maps to the homes of the biggest Jew haters.
We walked to the center of town and stopped before a statue of a winged dragon. I looked into the open mouth of the dragon, and then I took off my red and white AUSTRIA hat and pulled out the black yarmulke I had found in my suit pocket.
“I'm going to walk through Klagenfurt with my yarmulke on,” I told Jürgen.
“Oh, okay,” Jürgen said, taking out a cigarette.
I put the yarmulke on and asked Jürgen to trail me from behind so that he could record the responses I missed. I walked through the central square and then along the shops on Klagenfurt's main drag. I lounged on a bench. I stood up and sat back down and even adjusted the yarmulke on my head a few times for effect. And yet not one person, not one single citizen of Klagenfurt, made an obvious show of interest in the circle of black cloth on my head. That's when I realized that I had become the absurd character from my imagination, the masturbator on the train, the guy singing with Hans through the night. Fact had caught up to fiction. It was a shameful performance, and I a
pologized to Jürgen for forcing him to participate.
If only I'd brought a big black hat and a fake beard, I thought.
Jürgen and I ate fish in Krumpendorf, the town where Haider had famously praised the character of SS men at the annual gathering of Waffen-SS veterans. We put our feet up on chairs and sipped our coffees in the Mediterranean breeze. Jürgen told me that his grandfather had been an illegal Austrian Nazi, meaning that he had been a part of the party even before the Germans arrived. I thought of what Hans had said about everyone in the country being connected to the crimes. Jürgen thought it was probably inevitable that his knowledge of Austria's past had played a role in his political formation, but he wasn't ready to draw a one-to-one conclusion. “I'd like to think that I'd be concerned for human rights even if Austria did not have this past,” he said.
At a bar down the street, I struck up a conversation with a drummer in a jazz band. He had long dark hair and was extremely drunk. “I hate that many, many people don't know about our Nazi history,” he told me, slurring every other word. “I'm not talking about the old people. The old Nazis will die—fuck you, kiss my ass idiots. But I see young people, fourteen and fifteen years old, and they have their own uniform and they are screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ and not knowing what they are talking about. I go to them and say, ‘Funny uniform, why are you wearing it?’ They say, ‘We have to fight for our ideals.’ ”
Before we left, he asked if I was Jewish. When I said yes, he told me that I looked like Seinfeld and pointed to his nose.
The next day, my AUSTRIA hat back on, Jürgen and I found close to a dozen willing conversationalists at a café in the little town of Moosburg. A jovial man with thick jowls told me both that what happened to the Jews was terrible and that Carinthia's bad reputation was the work of international Jewish organizations. A painter with piercing blue eyes told me that too many minorities in Austria think they deserve special rights and don't understand that they have to assimilate. A bearded handyman in a hat that said CARINTHIA pointed out that it's not fair that only Austria is asked to look at its past when so many other countries shared in the guilt. A middle-aged woman, who said she supported the Green Party, compared Austria's Nazi years to what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. “It's amazing that they didn't learn from what happened sixty years ago,” she said.
Confronted with questions about their country's Nazi past and the need for Austrians to address it, the Carinthi-ans’ answers were generally some version of the line I had already heard from the hairy-armed man in the gas station: “Terrible things happened, but Austria must look to the future.” Almost everyone we spoke with said they supported the People's Party—Freedom Party coalition government because it was time for a change or because the previous government was not looking out for their interests.
I wouldn't be surprised if any of the Carinthians I met that morning made an occasional nasty aside about Jews. But much as I wanted to be, I didn't feel like I was in the presence of hard-core anti-Semites. If anything, they seemed more xenophobic in their listing of concerns about immigration than anti-Semitic. Even the man who had blamed Jewish organizations for Austria's reputation didn't strike me as being full of hatred. Nor did I get the sense that the people I spoke with supported the Freedom Party because they thought Haider was an anti-Semite or a Nazi sympathizer.
But how, then, could they go to the polls and cast a vote for Haider's party? There were clearly some genuine Nazis around, but the real phenomenon, I began to think, was not that so many Austrians were still vicious anti-Semites, but that the Nazi background of the Freedom Party officials didn't repel them, didn't cause them to cringe with shame or outrage. They said they thought what happened during World War II was “terrible,” and I believe that they believed it. Perhaps it was a sign of progress? The old line had always been that “Austria was Hitler's first victim.” Now there seemed to be a quiet acknowledgment that Austrians too had played a role. But as I heard the “terrible” line over and over, I couldn't help but notice how casually the sentiment came out, almost like a rehearsed line. It's possible that some of the indignation was lost in the translation, but I got the distinct sense that the “terrible”s I kept hearing were intellectual rather than emotional “terrible”s. If these people really understood for one minute of their lives how truly terrible the Nazis were, I thought, Haider and the Freedom Party would be impossible.
Later that afternoon I took a train to the Styrian city of Graz and met up with Andrea, a friend of Christine's who had offered to show me around southern Styria and to translate my interviews when necessary. Andrea was a tall, forty-four-year-old schoolteacher with a long face and straight brown hair streaked with gray. She wore a hooded rainbow parka and spoke English extremely quickly and with the formality of someone who had been educated in a Victorian boarding school. She seemed kind and yet was so full of nervous energy that I felt myself tensing up whenever she spoke, as though she were my own schoolteacher about to discipline me.
We visited Graz's newly restored synagogue, then headed to Andrea's home just across the border from Slovenia. No longer mesmerized by Austria's mountains, I focused on the shocking number of roadside signs that included the word “schnitzel.”
We stopped for dinner in a restaurant where the waitresses wore dirndls. Earlier that year Andrea had organized a ceremony at her school in honor of the rededication of the Graz synagogue. Hans had sung at the event. I asked how she had become involved with the project.
“I am a very passionate Christian, and the roots of Christianity are Jewish,” Andrea said, sitting with back erect and speaking at full speed. “So just as you esteem your grandfather very much because he is your grandfather, I love Jews because of that and because Jesus Christ was a Jew.”
I smiled and ordered a cheese toast. I had already decided that Jew lovers didn't particularly worry me, but then Andrea would not turn out to be your everyday philo-Semite. Instead, she would turn out to be a philo-Semite who was in love, she confessed, with a “terrible anti-Semite.”
“It's really a big problem,” she said, emitting a loud burst of embarrassed laughter. “I love him. I love him more than I have ever loved a man. He's brilliant and the conductor of many choirs. He is a very good man in many ways.”
Andrea told me that her anti-Semitic dreamboat would call her a Jew whenever he was angry with her and that he would sometimes even do so in public. Andrea's response was to tell the anti-Semite that she herself was a Jew and that if he didn't like Jews, he shouldn't visit her anymore. As she explained this to me, Andrea repeatedly referred to herself as a Jew, and I had to clarify whether or not she was in fact Jewish.
“I don't know what percent Jew I am, and that does not matter to me,” she said. “I just said this because all of his arguments made no sense. But then when I said it, I could see how it felt to be attacked as a Jew in public. It is terrible.”
“So you're not Jewish?”
“Well, I told him that it does not matter that I'm only a false Jew or something. That's not the point. I told him if he didn't like Jews, then he shouldn't befriend me because I am the same.”
“But how can you love him if he's such an anti-Semite?”
“Yes, yes, that's the problem. I believe in his nucleus he is okay, but I don't understand it.”
Andrea told me that the anti-Semite attended the ceremony she organized to celebrate the Graz synagogue but had walked out before Hans took the stage because he didn't want to hear Yiddish singing.
“I'd like to talk with this man,” I said.
Andrea said that she would take me to a mass in the countryside the next morning and that if I'd like, I could meet and speak with the anti-Semite there. “I will translate all the silly things he tells you,” Andrea promised.
Andrea's estate, which she had dubbed “Little Canaan,” was surrounded by spectacular sloping vineyards. Her two white doves, Salomon and Susi, were sitting peacefully in their cage, but her two donkeys, Sulamith and Ma
rgarete, were missing from the stable. Andrea began to pace around anxiously, speaking even more quickly than usual. We found the donkeys hanging out under a tree some twenty yards away. Andrea hugged them and fed them a snack she referred to as “donkey chocolate.”
I slept in the guest room. The rug was covered in cat hair. I sneezed and rubbed my eyes and made Yiddish-sounding chhh noises with my throat all night. Andrea slept on her balcony under the stars. In the morning I tried to plug in the charger to my camera and received a serious electric shock.
“Ah, yes, I should have told you that I do not touch that plug unless I first turn off the power,” Andrea said.
The mass was also a celebration of a newly restored roadside chapel in the tiny village of Wuggau. Andrea announced that on the way there we would pick up the anti-Semite she loved. A few minutes later we stopped in a parking lot. The anti-Semite stood with arms crossed and a look of consternation. He wore a vest over a button-down white shirt and had a line of thin white hair above his lip that looked like a milk mustache.
The anti-Semite climbed into the car, and we drove on for a few more miles. Then it came out with no warning: a long booming “Shhhhhtop!” It was the sort of authoritarian noise only a real fascist could make. Andrea slammed on the brakes. My body flung forward and then back against the car seat. The anti-Semite got out of the car, retrieved a newspaper from a bag hung on a nearby pole, and returned. Ten minutes later another “Shhhhhtop!” and another newspaper.
“Ah, yes, he very much enjoys reading the newspaper,” Andrea said cheerfully.
“Any chance I can walk the rest of the way?” I asked.