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

  One such Serb decided to turn luck’s tide. He assassinated “our” Crown Prince and managed, through his beastly deed and all by himself, to cause the First World War—or so I was taught in Austrian history classes in the 1950s. In the 1960s, on a visit to Sarajevo, I was shocked to see a bridge and a street named after the assassin; to have a place on the sidewalk, where he might have stood while aiming his pistol, pointed out proudly by local tourist guides; to watch the “assassin” of my history classes turn a corner and reappear a “hero,” a “revolutionary,” a “saint.”

  In an American high school in 1979, my daughter seems to be learning the “assassin” version. I have become fond of Gavrilo Princip’s wardrobe of mantles; I am glad he lived. When it gets too tiresome to muddle through the complex issues that precipitated that war, simplicity and comfort await me in the fairy tale that Princip caused it all.

  Chapter 30

  For a long time, measured by the passage of centuries, there had existed a vast, many-checkered, multicolored, often glorious piece of fabric crisscrossed with seams, a territory. At times, bloodstained stretches had been concealed by embroidery, possibly stitched so crudely as to perpetuate an original affront from great-grandfather to son; in luckier times a light hand had been at work, using patience, and hair for thread, a gold thimble thrown in for good measure.

  To me, the operetta names of those countries sound like an ecclesiastical litany, or like a list of sophisticated foods, the victors’ banquet in a restaurant of class. What shall it be . . . L’Autriche à la Russe? Spicy paprikash stirred at your table by an authentic Gypsy, a choice morsel of veal called “Bohemian Night Life,” many an Englishman’s longings fulfilled; a success all around. And now our French guest requires dessert, he pouts, a sweet is called for and here it is: light as air, lacy as spun sugar, lovely Moravia.

  This culinary approach—which slice of territory or influence ends up on whose victor’s serving platter—is mere fantasy, of course. Fact is, by the end of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was snipped into different pieces. The Empire was dead, a group of new nations had been born. “Austria” was one. A major question concerning this new Austria soon became urgent: What is it?

  While it proved arduous to come up with an answer, someone did turn up with a name. The new Austria was dubbed a “torso” or, variously, a “rump” nation.

  Once, late at night, I tried a variation of counting sheep, enumerating body parts that might have been more closely descriptive of my country’s relative new size and shape. But if ventures into gore seem fatuous when all that is called for is a better label, and if one can get used to the idea of an empire as a house instead of a body, then it becomes appropriate to call the new Austria a short, dead-end hallway.

  Chapter 31

  Once the First World War was over, the Allies’ two-year blockade kept all food and coal out of the new Austria, that segment of the former monarchy that had depended on the Empire’s southern and eastern regions for such necessities; most Austrian farms barely supported the people who lived on them. While the Allies may have seen this blockade as a diplomatic tool (now that the world had been made “safe for democracy,” it was time to ensure a lasting peace), Austrians saw it as revenge at its most vicious.

  At the same time, all those German-speaking civil servants who had administered the Empire for Franz Josef I came home, along with a stream of former career officers of the Austro-Hungarian army; they received pensions that did not support their families, forcing all of them to look for work and, of course, places to live. Graz was soon dubbed Pensionopolis. Simultaneously, an extraordinary number of refugees from the east poured into Austrian cities and tried to make do, twelve to a basement room. Jewish and Christian city dwellers alike went on forays into the countryside, attempting to buy food. But there are no calories in money, and farmers were not willing to sell what they needed to survive. As people in cities became desperate, they stole what food they could find in the fields, sometimes fighting farmers for their lives. Memories of marauders, crazed with hunger and on the rampage, were to fester in the hearts of city and country people alike. The raids benefited few. The poorest—Galician Jews along with Viennese Christians—starved.

  Who was there to turn to? Who could help? Who would?

  As a newly landlocked country, Austria had seven next-door neighbors. There was Italy to the south, but, in this World War, Italy had been one of the Allies. To the south and east were those former family members, exuberant at having watched the Empire croak, reeling with talk of freedom and self-determination. In 1979, their grandchildren are ruled by committees of commissars. I hope they are happier under the commissars than their grandparents were under Franz Josef I, among whose more repressive measures had been an insistence that birth certificates were to be printed in German. (Of course, I would not relish having mine printed in Serbo-Croatian either.)

  To the west was Liechtenstein, a lovely country of sixty-two square miles, populated by roughly twenty thousand inhabitants, not a power to rely on in a crisis. Also to the west, next to Liechtenstein and somewhat larger, was a prosperous country unblemished by war and turmoil. “But those Swiss are a joke,” as one aging Styrian tells me. “If so much as a baby deer farts near one of their scrawny little borders, they lock up for good. Three people I know, all of them skilled laborers, applied for visas to get in there and work at a time when the Swiss had jobs going wanting. Not one got in. No slot for a hungry neighbor, never a place for a refugee. All the Swiss ever have room for is banks.”

  He spits vigorously on the ground beneath the park bench on which we both sit. “Well, never mind. When did an Austrian ever have anything in common with a Swiss? They’ve got higher mountains than we do and they can’t even yodel, did you know that?”

  I did not.

  “They pretend,” he concludes. “But they never quite bring it off.”

  That left Germany.

  Germans and Austrians had fought and lost on the same side of a disastrous war, and Germany was not to be written off as a ghost; it had suffered overwhelming defeat, but it was, compared to Austria, still vast. “Besides, Germany is like a Wienerschnitzel,” as one of my relatives explains to me. “The more you beat it, the bigger and better it gets.” Austrians implicitly believed in the stereotype of Prussian efficiency and determination; if anyone could manage to rebuild a broken country, Germans would, and a recovered Germany might come to Austria’s aid.

  For their part, the efficient Germans tended to regard Austrians in terms of those familiar assumptions held about “south-of-the-border” folk anywhere, a set of clichés so pervasive as to be not only hilarious in its repetitiveness but nearly endearing. (What does it do to a nation’s psyche not to have a southern neighbor? Whom do you feel superior to on the South Pole?) To many Germans, Austrians were and are a slovenly lot, shiftless, slow, and lazy by nature. Austrians retaliate with jokes:

  Six burly Austrians are trying to dislodge a rock from a path they want to make into a road. Eventually they give up. They are discussing their project, standing in a circle around the rock, when who should come along but two Germans.

  Guten Tag! say the Germans, and, Gibt’s hier ein Problem? The Austrians explain: road, rock. The Germans look at each other, four eyes briefly roll upward, two men approach the rock, each gets a good grip, one of them counts, eins, zwei, drei, the rock has been dislodged.

  The Austrians sit down on a grassy boulder at the side of the path, get out their lunch, and begin to eat. The Germans, sweaty and triumphant, survey the chomping group. Six of them had not been able to budge a rock!

  When none of the Austrians says a word, the Germans get annoyed. “Well?” asks the first. “Nothing?” And the second one adds, “Maybe a quick ‘thank you’ might suit the occasion?”

  Finally an Austrian does speak up. “Force,” he says, and shakes his head. “You moved it by force. Any fool can move a rock using force. . . .”

  But Germany
was not merely a neighbor to latch on to in need. If nationalism is pride in one’s country—or excessive pride, coupled with indifference, callousness, or hostility toward other countries—Austrian nationalism had a twist of its own. Even before the First World War, the most nationalistic of Austrians had simultaneously been those most fervently Pan-German. As the Empire’s German-speaking minority had come to feel increasingly hemmed in by Pan-Slavism, its most nationalistic segment longed ever more ardently to be united with Germany; a nationalism based on language, imbued with passions more primary than any aroused by political boundaries.

  “German” was shorthand for an immensely rich culture shared by both nations, a common heritage of literature, music, and philosophy, a joint realm of ideas, one state of mind. To define this state in political terms was, for the time being, out of the question. The Treaty of Versailles expressly forbade a union between Germany and Austria. But there were people in both countries who resolved, and obstinately so, that a unity of heritage and language would, eventually, take precedence over lines on a map.

  Chapter 32

  I have almost finished reading The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport. “Not that old thing,” exclaims a friend on the phone, and I surmise, accurately, that he had to read it as an undergraduate many years ago. But I had never heard of the book and find it fascinating.

  Allport separates prejudice into attitude and beliefs. The attitude is inculcated early, while the beliefs are formulated later and serve as “rational” bolsters for the attitude.

  I study the beliefs, amazed. “Jews are clannish,” it says, in a list of stereotypes held by American Christians about Jews. “They are grasping and covetous,” “money is their god,” “they are noisy and cause commotions. . . .” I have to laugh out loud.

  I put down the book and try to formulate what beliefs I have about Jews, Jews in general, Jews as a category. “Clannish,” “covetous,” “money-hungry,” and “noisy” don’t apply. I concentrate for a while, trying to come up with a stereotype of my own, but to no avail. So I count the Jews I know instead, I consciously sort them, I separate them from the general body of my friends and put them into a special group. No longer Barry and Janie and Judith and David and Henry, Gerry, Wendy, Suzanne, and Fred, but “my Jewish friends.” What is there to be said about them? Some are writers or editors, all are smart, otherwise they have nothing in common. Some of my Christian friends happen to be in the same field, they are not dullards either, nor do they have anything else in common. I would be unable to complete the sentence: all my Jewish friends . . . Or this one: all the Christians I know . . .

  According to Allport, what I am doing is called refencing. “When a fact cannot fit into a mental field, the exception is acknowledged, but the field is hastily fenced in again. . . . By excluding a few favored cases, the negative rubric is kept intact for all other cases.” But this negative rubric is, for me, a category devoid not only of specific people, but unencumbered by a single stereotype. Allport does not allow for that. “Without some generalized beliefs concerning a group as a whole,” he says, “a hostile attitude could not long be sustained.” That’s where Allport is wrong, that’s where he severely underrates the power of the irrational.

  Chapter 33

  My father was six when his father died, and eight at the start of the First World War. The last two war years were bad; the family lived on potatoes. Still, they made it through.

  By the time the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed, my father was twelve. Having spent the last four of his six years in school absorbing a wartime version of education (which presented to pupils their own country’s quest versus its foes’ as vividly as wartime propaganda everywhere seems to demand), my father now had two years of peacetime elementary school ahead of him. During those two years his teachers, along with the vast majority of teachers across Austria and Germany, did their utmost to instruct the children in their charge in the necessity for revenge against the enemies in the Great War, in hostility toward anything that might be described as “democratic” (the hated French had “invented” this form of government) and in adulation of everything “German.” Teachers also made a point of explaining that evil—and Jewish—politicians at home had sold out the soldiers at the front, thereby causing this utterly implausible defeat of brave Austrian and German troops. This had clearly not been true. However, what proved to be important was not “truth,” but that a seamy legend ended up being believed by most Austrians, and that Hitler made competent use of this “stab-in-the-back” theory not too much later.

  The two years following the war were harder to endure than the war itself, but my father’s mother managed to continue to feed her family: the cow’s milk—there was less and less of it because of poor feed—sold in minute amounts; the few chickens’ eggs bartered one by one; the potatoes, tended like prize roses, never eaten whole now, but stretched into thinner and thinner soups.

  When my father left school, Austria’s democracy was two years old, and neither Austria nor democracy was doing well. The First Republic had come about not through popular demand or support, but as the result of military collapse. It had been imposed on Austria by the victors of a war the Austrians had lost. There was no tradition of democracy; most Austrians did not understand how this new system was supposed to work, considered their political parties—unable to come to a consensus on any course of action—useless, blamed their new government for the appalling economic situation, and wanted someone, somehow, to relieve their misery. “There is a general cry for a strong government,” says a 1919 police report from socialist Vienna, the one place in Austria where one might not have expected such sentiments, “which would rally all forces to attend to the needs of the people and above all would see to it that the inhabitants of this state have enough to eat and to keep warm.” Three-quarters of Vienna’s population concurred.

  Round about that time, historians tell us, a large part of Austria’s conservative, Catholic population felt “threatened.” Moreover, specific “subgroups”—what historians call the peasantry, small shopkeepers, and craftsmen or artisans—felt, along with other subgroups, particularly threatened.

  It took me a while to figure out who these subgroups were, and that was no historian’s fault but mine. Those terms evoked a hazy imagery in my head, combinations of countless movie and advertising clichés. “Peasantry.” Doesn’t it conjure up thatched roofs, wooden plows, a woman in a long skirt and bits of hay in her hair lacing up her bodice as lusty Tom Jones rides on to new adventures? And ought not a “small shopkeeper” to be someone cozily quaint, a portly man behind a polished counter handing penny-candy to smiling urchins on tiptoes? The “artisan” is surely a Swiss jeweler wearing a gleaming leather apron; he examines gold filigree under an antique magnifying glass, his apple cheeks atwinkle at the prospect of looking up to greet the tourists.

  Only when I got past this nonsense and connected sociohistorical categories with real people did I realize that they were intimately familiar to me. No one in my family, either on my father’s side or on my mother’s, did not fit into one of these categories. It’s simple on my mother’s side—peasantry all. But what about my father’s mother? She ran a grocery store in a room off her kitchen (offering four bolts of fabric, thread, tablets of paper, shoe polish, and nails, in addition to pickles, flour, sugar, salt, and the like) but also kept that cow and half a dozen chickens and planted and harvested her own small potato field. Combining these occupations with relentless, brain-numbing effort, she had been able to feed, if not adequately clothe, six children (the youngest was two when her husband died) even during the last years of the Great War and those first years following it, when people in cities died of starvation. Was she a “small shopkeeper/peasant” or a “small peasant/shopkeeper”? Whatever her sociologically correct label, she did what countless of her peers in either category were also doing. She fought to stay alive.

  When historians point out that large groups of Austrians at that time felt �
�threatened,” they cite a number of factors that might have contributed to such a feeling. What, then, was there to be threatened by?

  There was the disappearance of the monarchy, for a start. Gone, vanished. Those Habsburgs into whose possession Graz had passed in 1278—gone. Centuries and centuries, generation after generation after generation of Habsburgs—vanished. Replaced by whom? No one was too sure. But whatever the replacement consisted of, it offered no protection, it was of no help. Or how about this one: an order, in which all had known their place—no more. An unshakable framework, a cohesive world, not always a pleasant one, often fraught with injustice and hardship, but a world one could depend on, a world that changed very slowly and remained, even in change, secure—gone. Age-old tradition and all that—no more. Now the Bolsheviks were trying to start a Soviet Republic in Austria, Communists and Socialists alike wanted one group of Austrians to fight other groups of Austrians under the banner of something called “class war,” the Social Democrats already ruled Red Vienna. And finally all the rest, all those factors that were not merely disorienting. All those men who had come back, bitter and defeated, from a World War they had lost, the “first total war in history,” all those men who had come back wounded, all those who had not come home at all. The near-starvation of the last war years and the years after the collapse, the continuing scarcity of food, of coal, of living accommodations, of jobs, life savings melting in the inflation and no improvement in sight. One’s helplessness in the face of it all.