Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Read online

  The shining new symbol of this idealistic new order of the future, its guiding principle and First Commandment would be, “The Common Good before the Private Good.” Everyone would share, all classes would work together. (“When Hitler first carried on about how we were all going to be equal, ‘the workers of the head and the workers of the fist,’ well, I just wrote that off as talk,” a retired factory worker from Frankfurt told me in 1977. “Class is class, and class is everything to Germans. But I was wrong. There was a camaraderie, the kind we had in the trenches, except that after the war’s over you forget about it again. That handful of years under Hitler was the one time in my life when I got the same respect as a teacher.”) What’s more, everyone would lead a wholesome life, enthusiasts would jog before breakfast, women were beautiful without artifice, makeup was French, anyway. All would believe in nutritious food, a fit body, the healthy outdoors, each other, and the man who would lead them.

  He would lead them along a path of sacrifice at first, but toward great glory. They would put their hopes in tomorrow—might as well, there was nothing to hope for today. They would hope and work for tomorrow, all they’d need was confidence, if only they stuck together they could drag this unholy mess that the old ones had made of their country out of the morass, and clean it and buff it and polish it to a shine, a brand-new gem, let the past be damned.

  Chapter 46

  And yes, National Socialists were anti-Semitic. In fact, anti-Semitism may have been the one common denominator among all Austrian parties, from the extreme and moderate left, over middle-of-the-road conservatives, to the various factions of the extreme right. Anti-Semitism pervaded Austria’s political parties because anti-Semitism pervaded Austria. While a hostile and clearly defined tradition of religious anti-Semitism had, during much of the nineteenth century, subsided into a vague sentiment, increasingly now this traditional kind of anti-Semitism was giving way to a different kind, the worst kind, an anti-Semitism based more and more on fear.

  A farmer who barely produces enough for his family to survive does not take it lightly when a group of Polish Jews digs unripe potatoes from his field. That the refugees had been driven into Austria by extraordinary savagery in their own country, and that they were near starvation and desperate, might have struck even an impoverished farmer as reasons enough to sell them food. But in 1919, or 1920, the loss of half a potato crop in July meant that the farmer’s family starved in January. And if there were Austrian Christians among the marauders in his field, that farmer would remember their thievery far less vividly than the same act committed by equally hungry Jewish foreigners who looked clearly, even strikingly, “different.”

  It might not have occurred to such a farmer to complain (as members of the urban middle class were fond of doing) that most newspapers were owned by Jews, or that Jews dominated Austria’s cultural and intellectual life. However, he would have known who owned the railroads. And whether or not this farmer truly longed to visit his sister, who had happened to move to a different province, he would have blamed the Rothschilds for his inability to afford the fare.

  His city counterpart, a carpenter or a shoemaker, lived next door to the members of the proletariat. At night, he watched his neighbors come home, exhausted from a day working on someone else’s machines for someone else’s gain. During the day he watched his goods be passed up in favor of newly mass-produced items, he let his journeyman go, he faced the fact that he would not be able to afford the raw materials for his trade for longer than another six weeks. He was deeply aware of the ever-narrowing gap between himself and the wretches next door, and he would not have perceived industrialization in terms of economic development. He would blame Jewish industrialists instead.

  His counterpart among those Austrian workers, who had managed to forge unions, may have felt a measure of security, trusting in the protection of contracts. He may even have looked forward to flexing some muscle under the spell of a newly gained class consciousness. But day after day, month after month, year after year, a seemingly inexhaustible stream of fresh labor continued to pour into Austrian cities from the east. Polish refugees were willing to work for a fraction of the hourly wage, agreed on after sometimes violent struggles between workers and management. The Austrian factory worker would watch a recently forged solidarity crumble, and he would lose his job.

  A good part of Austria’s middle class, nearly all of Austria’s lower-middle class, and a good part of Austria’s working class perceived—perceived—itself to be under severe pressure, equally threatened from above and below; perceived, furthermore: above and below were Jews.

  Given what shaped him, and his time and place, I can understand why my father might have joined the Nazis. I do not understand why he remained one for over two decades. I do not want to try. I am too frightened by the specter of such rigidity, I listen to its echo in myself: an allegiance pledged, one’s lot cast, no dissenting thought or feeling allowed to enter one’s mind or heart, worship at the altar of the most repressive of gods, loyalty as an absolute.

  Chapter 47

  There are all those sociologists’ studies of prejudice, cleverly worded tests devised and administered, answers broken down into categories, analyzed, evaluated. And scholars have vividly described those periods of history in which prejudice flourished, and given us various reasons of why here but not there, why then and not earlier, all those reasons of economics and personality structure and religion and patriotism and how threatened (not necessarily by Jews; just threatened at large) Gentiles feel at any one point. And there are nightmare libraries full of books on the results of prejudice in my lifetime alone.

  We’ve got them down pat, the whys and the wheres, the causes, conditions, and effects. But where is the body of research and knowledge, telling us what to do about it?

  If I had a phobia—of heights, dogs, you name it—there would not only be an established psychiatric manner of dealing with my complaint, there would also be all sorts of newly discovered methods of treatment to choose from; research in phobias is booming. Unraveling at the sound of Yiddish seems as irrational to me, as deserving of the label “phobia,” as an inability to look down from the Empire State Building. But how is it being treated? When will scholars and psychiatrists and sociologists stop measuring and studying and reflecting on what percentage of blue-collar workers (and white-collar workers, and veterans, and college students) believe that “money is their god,” and start working on a method of treatment? It is as if we’re going around and around, describing the onset of palpitations at the height of five feet, or the first appearance of the rash typical of a disease called measles. Describing measles: who is most prone to it, how long do outbreaks last, number of casualties, theories of what brought about the very last epidemic, and oft-repeated rhetoric about how measles are a curse of humanity.

  A merely descriptive approach would not be tolerated for either phobias or measles. We have vaccines for the latter, a whole range of psychiatric services for the former. People gather in groups to become more assertive, less angry, more affectionate; to end smoking, drinking, overeating, impotence, drug addiction, and who knows what else. There are no consciousness-raising groups for bigots.

  Of course, prejudice is not considered to be in the same category as either measles or phobias. At worst, it is simply a taboo, to be exorcised by being ignored. At best it is a sin, my very own responsibility to be struggled with at the peril of my immortal soul; entitling me to absolution whenever I repent and confess, and an admonition to try harder next time.

  Chapter 48

  Never to hold on to money, to laugh at the idea of savings accounts, immediately to spend what you manage to earn, and to spend every cent not essential for staying alive on the one thing on earth that lasts: dirt; land; a chunk of Earth itself—my father had been taught these lessons twice. He did not draw his Seiler Bunker conclusions until years later, and then moved by powers only marginally connected to money, but he did draw them.

&nb
sp; The first inflation, culminating in 1923, was dreadful, ghastly, mind-numbing—but also unique, a disaster no one imagined could ever repeat itself. When it was over, Austrians began to save again. They opened new accounts, they stuck to a regimen of putting aside an inviolable sum each week, small as it may be. Then came the second inflation.

  Neither the first nor the second, less than a decade later, was the sort of inflation that currently causes concern among Americans. “Seven percent one quarter, then nine, double digits now, where the hell will it end. . . .”

  Just like the first inflation my father lived through, the second one, too, did not bother with a stately progression of seven percent here, nine there; it was a more radical process. Not that it erupted overnight. Still, all it took was a couple of years. No one could help see it coming, no one was able to head it off. When it hit, it was a catastrophe.

  Let us assume, by way of illustration, that I am a married man, and that my wife and I have three children under the age of ten. I’m a line supervisor for a battery company in Brooklyn, my wife works three afternoons a week in a neighborhood beauty shop. For the past five years we’ve been living in a semidetached house in Queens, almost a third of it paid up, thanks in part to my parents-in-law, they’ve been a great help.

  My wife and I have $8,000 in our savings account. Mostly we don’t go to movies, we watch television, play with the kids. I gave up bowling, all I drink is a couple of beers. Sometimes we kid around about taking off, just clean out the account and go on a trip, something. But we were both brought up thrifty and you don’t mind scrimping a little if you know why you’re doing it. You watch the food bills, vacations we spend at my brother’s in Florida, it all adds up.

  Except that today I stop at the subway booth to buy my token and it costs $6,000. There is a deli next to the plant, a coffee-to-go, light, no sugar, is $4,500. My wife bought a loaf of bread, the supermarket brand, you want to know what it cost? It cost $8,150. What we saved up in eleven years, starting the day we got back from our honeymoon, it’s not enough to buy a loaf of bread.

  While this example gives an idea of the general proportions at work, it fails to mention the farcical amounts of money in circulation, and it is hopelessly inadequate in conveying what these inflations were like, near and at their peak.

  The battery-company man from Queens will soon stop worrying about the price of bread. His weekly salary will be in ten figures, but he will barely manage to buy potatoes for his family. On payday, he will run from his plant to the subway, push his way through a panic-stricken crowd, charge down the stairs four steps at a time. If the doors of the train have closed in his face, he might pound them with his fists, deprived of the option open to his European counterparts, groups of whom would cling to the outsides of streetcars. He will know what a ten-minute wait for the next train means. The weekly salary check in his hand has just lost three quarters of the buying power it would have represented had he been able to get to the bank, and a nearby food store, on the train now moving out of the station without him.

  Americans find it difficult to imagine such a turn of events, since this sort of inflation has not yet occurred in their country. What I find most elusive is trying to speculate on how long, and how vividly, the financial equivalent of an earthquake hitting the top of the Richter scale remains a force among the private memories of each of those human beings who combine to make up that organism we call a nation.

  While the inflations affected everyone, they hit the middle, lower-middle, and working class hardest, and, of course, anyone living on a pension. But if the financial blow had been catastrophic, there occurred yet another loss, no less devastating or real but largely invisible, not to be charted on graphs, outside the realm—at least for the moment—of statisticians’ wizardry. To some degree as an outcome of the first inflation, but certainly after the second one, a sliding began. There had been certain assumptions, held on to through war and deprivation, the kind so taken for granted that they were only alluded to, one was aware of saying nothing new. “Things have a way of turning out for the best.” “God helps those who help themselves.” “Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.” Humble and timeworn code words, meant to express what one did not voice in the course of ordinary conversation: the hope for a small amount of predictability inherent in one’s life, a modest confidence in one’s ability to survive.

  But as the nation’s monetary currency plummeted through its month-by-month and finally minute-by-minute devaluation, attitudes often considered unrelated to money began a slithering of their own, began to mirror, in their rate of decline, that of one’s ever more worthless paper currency. One’s sense of self-esteem does not, for the most part, crumble overnight. The earthquakes meant devastation, not the end. But there was unchartable damage.

  “If I work as hard as I possibly can, I will be able to support myself and my family.” This belief had, despite evidence to the contrary, still been a given for an Austrian waiter or factory worker, teacher or salesclerk. The second inflation, coupled with massive unemployment, finally made the folly of such an assumption clear.

  There are few more powerful invitations to nihilism than the conviction: it makes no difference what I do; what I need is beyond my reach, what I want is beside the point, what I stand for means nothing to me or to anyone else, it does not matter what I do.

  A great many Austrians and Germans needed and wanted nothing more urgently than to be told, Damn it, we matter and it matters what we do! We are going to stick together, we will take care of our own, there is nothing—do you hear me?—there is nothing we can’t do! By God, think of our grand history, think of our past glory, think of this great country of ours, let the world watch us astound the world!

  Chapter 49

  Overnight, a new genre of jokes was born. To repeat these jokes to everyone you met, and to hear half a dozen new ones daily, was a balm. In line before soup kitchens people reminded each other, “The situation is desperate, but not serious.”

  My favorite inflation joke is the one about the man who buys a loaf of bread for a million, trades it for a Mercedes, sells that for two million, buys a machine gun to hold up a bank and finds, when he gets there, that the bank has been turned into a bakery, selling a loaf of bread for three million, but only to customers who bring their own flour.

  My second favorite is not a joke. An Austrian friend of mine says it is a true story that he heard from the friend of a friend of the woman.

  This woman is on her way to the store; she carries a wicker basket. Eventually she will cart home her groceries in this basket, but now it is filled with money; the number of banknotes she needs to buy the ingredients for her family’s dinner would not fit into a wallet or purse.

  Halfway between her house and the grocer’s she meets a neighbor. The women stop and greet each other warmly, and the woman carrying the basket proceeds to tell her friend a spicy tidbit involving the female boarder on the ground floor of her building, and the building’s generally disliked, and married, landlord. The denouement of the story proves to be awkward to relate without the use of indiscreet language; what’s more, this storyteller prefers to describe certain matters with the help of her eloquent arms gliding through the air at just the right angle and speed. She sets down the basket and finishes her story with all the mimicry at her command. Her neighbor is shocked and delighted, she laughs so hard that her breasts shake, noticeably, in public. Each woman offers greetings to be conveyed to the other’s husband, then the neighbor walks away. The storyteller bends down to pick up her basket, but all that is left, dumped in a heap on the sidewalk, is the money. A thief has stolen her basket.

  I have heard this story three or four times. According to whim, so I had assumed, my Austrian source either ends the tale as I just did, or adds a concluding chapter.

  In the appended version the grieving woman happens to be wearing an apron and fashions a sack of it, gathering up the apron’s hem. She grabs up the money, fistful
after fistful, and stuffs it into her makeshift bag. Since grocers expect customers to provide their own containers, she carries her groceries as she has earlier carried her money. She puts the two eggs she has bought on top of the little pile, which she hugs, inside the apron, against her stomach.

  On her way home she morosely berates herself. Setting the fool thing down in the first place, on the sidewalk yet, what a careless thing to do, her husband will let her hear about it for weeks and she will deserve it, gossiping when she had better things to do. . . . But her thoughts are interrupted by a curious sensation. She pulls in her stomach and, as unobtrusively as possible, moves her upper body first to the left, then to the right. No doubt about it, her newly bought square of lard has melted through her apron and dress, her underclothes stick to her skin, she is soaked with melting lard.

  She stops in mid-step and stands stiffly in the middle of the sidewalk. All at once, her remorse and shame have left her, her cheeks flush a deep red, she is beside herself, furious.

  As suddenly and as unaccountably she laughs out loud, the heartiest, most brazen belly laugh imaginable. Two feet to her left is the entrance to a bar. She has never been inside alone, but her husband used to take her there, they had not been married yet, he had courted her shyly.

  An agreeable bartender takes a small fish, which had been destined to become her family’s dinner, in exchange for a generous glass of slivovitz. She drinks the first half in a single gulp, the second half slowly, sip after tiny insect sip.

  At the end of the evening she combs her hair and powders herself; there had been times when she had been able to make things up to her husband. But when she gets into bed, he is asleep. She gives herself over to how the slivovitz has etched its way down her throat, enjoying little sips, no longer caring what people thought: What is the woman carrying in her apron, a farm tramp in the city, and isn’t her skirt stained in front? She remembers the moment when she stopped minding the warm lard sliding down her thighs, pleasant really, how could a day that was interrupted by such a mishap round out so pleasantly?