by Lara Feigel
At the start of 1946, Vienna was a city of ruins. ‘Nine months after the war, the city is still in chaos,’ Hilde wrote in her diary account. ‘Gigantic piles of rubble obstruct doors and thoroughfares, bomb-damaged buildings remain dangerous.’ In every district she saw shuttered shops, empty cafés and closed restaurants. Life had retreated from the streets, though here and there a window display included a finely cut decanter or a single elegant shoe on well-draped cloth. And, though devastated, toothless and singed, the face of the city still had its old features. Its Baroque churches and palaces were untouched.
Whenever the uncertain weather permits, a shy early spring sun glistens on the patina of their roofs and domes. The tower of St Stephen’s Cathedral, shrouded in wavering blue-grey mist, rises above the delicate lines of the Vienna woods; at its feet lie empty shells; everything in its immediate surroundings is destroyed.
Vienna in 1946
Hilde was initially installed in the Hotel Astoria on the Führichgasse near the opera house. Looking out onto the once fashionable street she saw that the joke shops of her childhood were still there, selling boxes of magic tricks – ‘the spiders which you can slip into people’s drinks, the wax apples inviting the guileless bite’ – tokens of a whimsicality the Viennese had little interest in at present. On her first afternoon she went to a British press conference and was invited by fellow journalists to live with the other war correspondents in the British Press camp in a dilapidated palace called the Salmschlössl. This was once the home of the aristocratic Salm family and the house was still heavy with the past, its rooms lined with mirrored cupboards and decorated with stags’ antlers and stuffed grouse.
From this point, Hilde was immersed in a new and heady world. In leaving war-torn London she had come to a city where the war was even harder to forget, but the result was exhilarating. ‘Darling, this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me and I’m really quite unable to say what I feel,’ she wrote to Peter in Wimbledon. ‘I walk about, not in a daze, but aware that every minute is of the utmost importance to me.’ ‘This is still the most exciting, heartbreaking, enthralling thing that could have happened to me,’ she wrote again two days later. ‘It’s almost worth having gone away into a new life to have this incredible return, an emotional experience unlike anything that might have happened otherwise.’ She had spent her time attending press conferences, socialising with the British, meeting the Viennese, and revisiting the haunting landscape of her past.
Hilde cried on her first day while visiting the rather ugly home she had left behind in 1936, at Stanislaugasse 2. It was here that she had spent her teenage years after the First World War, sitting beside her father in his laboratory as he carried out incomplete experiments, or typing in her bedroom. She discovered on the way there that the park and playground of her youth had been bombed out of existence. The next day she visited her old family servant Marie, whom she found surrounded by her parents’ Jugendstil bedroom furniture, bitter but triumphant, her own socialist convictions vindicated by the defeat of the Nazis. Hilde then returned to her earlier childhood district of Heiligenstadt where, in melting snow in the late afternoon, she encountered a scene ‘a hundred times more heartbreaking’ than she had expected. Entering the leafy village of Döbling, where generations of her mother’s family had grown up, she found that every alley and corner was familiar. She passed the house of her grandmother Melanie, who had been deported and had then died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. She saw the houses of old friends, now dead, and found the narrow street where she had spent the first ten years of her life. Their apartment was now hidden but she could sense the cold hallway, the staircase on the left, the passage leading to the garden where, on the branches of a forked apple tree, she had read her first fairy tales.
In the failing light she entered the church of St Jakob which she had dreamed of during all those lonely nights spent listening to Beethoven and Schubert in wartime Wimbledon. Now, she was returning as an intruder: ‘where my roots reach deep into the earth as nowhere else, I am a complete stranger, as disconnected in time and space as a ghostly visitor’. But bowing her head over her hands as she listened to a children’s service in progress at the front of the church, Hilde still found herself overwhelmed by ‘all the bottled-up emotion, repressed for years, when courage had to be bought at the price of dulled sensation – all the misery over the degradation of my home, all the anxiety over my children in the war, all the grief over my father’s death’. Boys in the front pews turned and stared at the foreign woman in military uniform kneeling near the door and weeping openly. Quietly, the priest continued to read the mass. ‘Heiligenstadt unchanged,’ Hilde noted in her diary that night. ‘Walked in sinking light. Heartbreak beyond words.’
Returning from these wrenching trips around the city of her childhood, Hilde spent her evenings drinking in bars and going to parties. On 1 February there was a big party given by Peter Smollett, who in his former incarnation had been Peter Smolka, Peter de Mendelssohn’s boss at the Exchange Telegraph in London. He was working as a correspondent for the Daily Express and encouraged Hilde to meet the leading Viennese Communists. In 1987 Hilde would discover that throughout the 1940s Smollett worked as a Russian spy. She nonetheless looked back on him as ‘one of the most remarkable persons of this century that I ever met’, despite his inconsistencies. Now his party provided her with a chance to meet the Viennese intelligentsia alongside the usual Allied officers and correspondents. There was a mixture of Catholic Communists and returned intellectuals, all of whom had offered active resistance to the National Socialists and were now imbued with faith in the Second Republic.
These were people who were involved in the renewed cultural scene. Already, walking through the ruins, Hilde could see exhibitions of crafts whose beauty overwhelmed her. And the opera had been revived, playing each night to packed audiences. Indeed, the opera house and theatres had been reopened immediately after the liberation of the city, with the Red Army allocating special rations to the company members and allowing the black sheep to return where possible. Hilde went to the opera, now held in the Theater an der Wien, and heard a finer performance of Verdi’s Otello than she could imagine hearing anywhere else. In Vienna, as in London, Shakespeare was providing catharsis amid the ruins; here was tragedy with rhythm, structure and meaning after the sprawling, apparently meaningless tragedy of the war. ‘The opera still seems to be the most perfect in Europe outside Italy,’ Hilde wrote in a report on Vienna which was published in the New Statesman in April. ‘The miracle of Austria’s cultural rejuvenation is about to repeat itself once more.’
Despite her delight in Vienna as a city, Hilde had very little patience with the Viennese people. She found them more relaxed-looking than the people she had seen in Frankfurt. ‘Quite definitely not the same fury and darkness,’ she told Peter, assuring him that she had a completely open mind and was ‘not balanced towards the Austrians rationally, only emotionally’. The Austrians, she wrote, simply could not take things so seriously and suffer so utterly from them as the Germans. She had seen smiles from the start, even in the most badly bombed areas. But because Austria had been categorised as a victim of Hitler’s aggression, denazification had been less stringent than in Germany and the Austrians were now less guilt-ridden than the Germans. Hilde thought they were too self-satisfied and not apologetic enough, and she began to suspect that most of the people she saw in the streets were fascists. In her later account of Vienna she described how all the jackbooted women wandering through the city seemed to resemble concentration camp guards. ‘Hungry looks in defiant or lifeless faces. Derisive or obsequious smiles on facing an Allied uniform.’ Now, Hilde denounced the opportunism of the Viennese in her New Statesman article. They were ‘as rude to each other and as rancorous to the Russians as they are sugary to the Western troops’. Their own language had become coarser, resembling a rural dialect. Their urbane graces had gone.
‘Everything is lovable here but th
e attitude of the Viennese,’ she wrote to Peter on 7 February, less tolerant than in her initial letters. The people were
either Nazis (whose sting has been completely removed) or charmingly insane Volkspartei, or prosy, bourgeois Sozialdemokraten, or doctrinaire Communists, or charming, but insane Communists . . . They are either corrupt or fatigued or politically stupid or fanatical, but they’ve got one relieving factor, their great interest in the arts.
She was convinced that the only hope for the Austrians was to immerse themselves in the arts, making the most of their exquisite taste and artistic sensitivity. If they could learn to behave discreetly and leave politics to others then they could hope for a future in Europe.
Hilde was particularly irritated by those Viennese citizens who implied that she had undergone an easier war than they had. Visiting her old haunt, the Café Herrenhof, she was pleased to find the head waiter, Franz Hnatek, still there. But immediately he launched into a scene that her exiled friends had long predicted, congratulating her on escaping and saving herself a great deal of unpleasantness. ‘The Frau Doktor was right to leave. The air-raids alone – three times they set the city ablaze.’ Disdainful, Hilde offered him cigarettes, which he accepted with a subservient bow. She was depressed by his lack of awareness of the plight of the exile. ‘Expropriation, humiliation, arrest and mortal danger, illegal flight across closed borders, years of exile, life as an enemy alien in a country shattered by war’; all was annihilated, waved away with a snap of his fingers.
Gradually, she found herself learning to compromise as Peter had done in Germany, accepting the equivocal nature of the situation of those who had stayed behind. Meeting an old friend, Stefan B, she was confronted with a man who had come to terms with the powers who took control of his country in 1938. Despite opposing their ideology, he edited a daily newspaper; while bemoaning the vulgarity of the regime and the likelihood of a victory by the Allies, he profited from the situation, living in freedom while others died in jail. But she now realised that everyone had been complicit in some way, except those few who had died as Resistance fighters.
In England, during the war, when we dreamed of seeing our homeland again, we resolved never to shake the hand of anyone who had been in any way linked with the regime. Now this decision seems ludicrous to me; all the borderlines are blurred. Stefan, I feel, cannot be blamed, except that he was not born to be either a hero or a victim.
Back in London, Peter was jealous of Hilde’s expedition but was trying to be gracious about giving her a share of the fun. ‘Of course, I’m envious,’ he wrote on 2 February, not having yet received any of her letters, ‘and should like to be with you but I tell myself that this is your own special province and privilege and I know how necessary it is for you to make this trip all by yourself. I do so hope you have a good and interesting time and rediscover in yourself all the things that you felt were buried these last few years and sometimes gave up for lost, even.’ In her absence he was joining the community in Wimbledon, attending Labour party meetings and getting to know a new set of people. ‘England suits me down to the ground,’ he told Hilde. ‘I should never dream of moving us to any country permanently again. It would be suicide.’ If they could persevere for a while longer then all their immigrant troubles would be gone. A week later he had still not heard from her, and he was starting to begrudge spending time alone with the children and to sympathise with her resentment during his absences. ‘I can just see how it must be for you. Awful, awful, although the winter is rather worse than the summer.’
Hilde too was discovering and affirming her own Englishness. This return to her roots was not a straightforward homecoming. She repeatedly informed Peter that the Viennese were made bearable and enjoyable by the antidote of the English, whom she returned to each night. She was reassured by the comforting incongruity of the khaki army blankets in her Biedermeier Viennese room, which made her feel doubly at home. ‘I lead this curious double life you’ve known yourself, meeting all the important Viennese and then going back to the boys in the mess, drinking and playing darts in the bar at night.’ The British were the most beloved of the occupying forces and she was pleased to be among them. Indeed, she could not imagine a return to Vienna being tolerable except under the auspices of the British – ‘belonging to them and sharing their company’. She was more enraptured by the English than she had been for years. ‘Those that are nice are really infinitely nice and charming, and I do so like to see and live with these clean, good-mannered, gay, witty English people.’ On 4 February she described to Peter a drive round the ruins with a ‘sweet Major’ with whom she had discussed Sitwell and Bowen, neutralising the scenery around them.
Hilde did not name this particular major to Peter, and she did not mention him again in her letters home. In her autobiography she refers to him as ‘Sam B’ and describes him as ‘the pleasant, cultured Welshman who was to be my frequent escort during the next few weeks’. She was less discreet in her diary at the time, where she noted a couple of sentences a day about her activities. Here Sam is introduced as Major Beasley, a fellow press officer, and is then mentioned frequently, first as Beasley, and then, from 9 February, as Sam. ‘Cooked at Sam’s flat,’ she writes here; ‘dinner and a prolonged night in the bar until about 1.30 playing darts and drinking heavily. There is a certain danger of forgetting purpose.’ The next morning, terribly hungover, she and Sam went to the Ice Rink and Heumarkt Café. The following day it was worthy of mention that ‘Sam didn’t appear’ and then the next evening she recorded retiring to Sam’s room after drinking in the bar. ‘Quite delightful. Talked.’
Sam wanted to enter the art market when he returned to civilian life, and on 13 February Hilde accompanied him to galleries and introduced him to painters. She encouraged him to buy an Egon Schiele oil painting for only 2,000 schillings. The following day she and Sam got terribly drunk after a party at the Salmschlössl. Her diary cryptically notes ‘Sam: end’, but the next day there was another picture-buying mission and theatre premiere, followed by supper in Sam’s room. ‘What an absurd relation,’ she now reported. The following morning she took him to the studio of her former friend Josef Dobrowsky, who had drawn her twice before the war, and Sam bought a portrait for 100 cigarettes. That evening at the end of another big party she noted an ‘extraordinary scene’ with Sam.
In a novel set in this immediate post-war period called Lisa’s Room, which would be published in 1965, Hilde Spiel gave the character Lisa (based on her own schoolfriend Hansi) a speech expounding the sexual moral codes of twentieth-century bohemian Vienna. ‘You don’t think I have any morals?’ Lisa asks.
Hilde Spiel, painted by Josef Dobrowsky, 1946
You’d be surprised! It is merely a different code altogether . . . I can’t agree that one man or woman should be enough for one lifetime when there are hundreds of trees, flowers, mountains and cities to explore . . . It would seem unnatural to me, unholy even, to forgo any possible sensation. This happens to be my religion. But there are also taboos – don’t you believe that I can do without them! The taboo of breaking off a mood violently. The taboo of talking off-key, too coyly, too earnestly, too dramatically for any given situation. The taboo of saying the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong moment, of play-acting when absolute candour is called for, or of waking someone who is fast asleep. These are deadly sins to me. And there is another one: that of deliberately hurting people – in cold blood.
Hilde Spiel is satirising Hansi’s overblown whimsicality here, but there are elements of Lisa’s moral code that resemble her own. Before the war, Hilde had experienced no compunction when she embarked on several simultaneous love affairs while gradually committing herself more seriously to Peter. Now that she was married with children her attitude had changed; she had been furiously jealous of Peter’s affair with Juliet O’Hea. Nonetheless, she was still capable of a Viennese lightness of touch when it came to affairs of the heart. At this stage she had no intention of leaving Peter and no
real desire to prolong this ‘absurd relation’ with Sam beyond her stay in Vienna. But she was enjoying it as a chance to regain equality with Peter and as another component of the city’s passionate intensity. The scenes were part of the drama; her feelings were alive.
Staying up late, pontificating about the future of Europe and feeling that her opinions mattered, Hilde continued to be elated by the experience. ‘I feel’, she wrote to Peter on 10 February, ‘like someone who’s been sober for seven years and then gulps down ten whiskies all at once, no wonder I’m quite drunk.’ For his part Peter, in a letter of 14 February, was rather patronisingly pleased that she was having a good time – ‘precisely the kind of time I wanted you to have’ – but convinced that in retrospect she would look on it differently. He was happy now to be in London, despite the fact that he and the children all had flu and that Anthony had a runny nose which Christine kept smearing over his face in a disgusting fashion. He promised that when she returned they would arrange their lives to their mutual satisfaction. ‘I don’t want you to stand in a fish queue. But what shall we do with the children? Maybe we shouldn’t have had any, perhaps? Well, that’s too late to change.’