Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Page 9

  If I try to put myself into my parents’ shoes I go down a dizzying spiral and all thought stops. I am just so grateful not to be in their shoes. And I long to be rid of every trace of this creeping sickness that assaults me unawares, over a newspaper photograph, or a researcher’s question conjuring up Yiddish. I do not want to accept it, I want it rooted out.

  Chapter 43

  I have two photographs taken of my father while he was in the army. In the first he is nineteen and home on leave. “He saw a picture in the photographer’s window,” says Aunt Pepi, “and he decided, right there on the spot, that he had to have one just like it.”

  He looks out at me dreamily, his beautiful mouth not yet set, still vulnerable; one hand in a pocket, a little self-conscious. He has gained whatever weight he needed to gain, he looks as if he has lived through the smoothest of childhoods, he is strikingly handsome in a white shirt with a stiff, stand-up collar, a silk tie, dark coat and vest, pin-striped trousers.

  “Where did he get these gorgeous clothes?”

  Pepi laughs. “All borrowed. It took him a while to get the pieces together, what a hubbub, he was so determined to look good.”

  My nineteen-year-old father in a borrowed suit, his perseverance and musical talent all his own. The talent he passed on to his son. For himself, it came to no more than playing the violin some evenings in the basement of “Seiler’s Bunker,” during the couple of years before he died. I stare and stare at my vulnerable nineteen-year-old father, as if—had I only sufficient insight, patience, wisdom—I could make him tell me what made him happy, what he feared and hoped for. At his age I had undergone the best schooling Austria offers its adolescents, I had been abroad, I was marrying a foreigner; I was full of earnest intentions of being a good wife, dreamed of raising a large family, and took it for granted that I would, once married, miraculously stop biting my nails. What similarities are there to be found between myself at nineteen and my country-hick father of the same age, the boy who had made locks twelve hours a day, had rolled off a set of tracks in time, and, carrying his belongings under one arm, had run to enlist in an army despised by his family? No similarity at all. Except that, at nineteen, what I wanted above all else was an extreme, unequivocal change, a radical break, a new start. He may well have longed for the essence of what drove me.

  But I am speculating. The facts I know consist mainly of certain dates and initials: he played in a military band until March 30, 1930; March 31, 1930, was his first day in a different band, that of the Graz police, whose conductor had heard about him through an army buddy; and at some point he joined a group called NSR.

  I first heard about this organization through a polite reply to various queries I had addressed to the Graz police archives. The letter relates, in formal officialese, that Ernst Seiler was dismissed from the police force in 1945 because of his membership in the NSDAP, his membership in the SS, and his membership in the NSR. “SS” is clear enough, so is the National Socialist German Workers Party. But what could this NSR have been? It is not to be found in the Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, it is ignored by Toland and Shirer and Irving and Speer and Fest and everyone else I’ve read. An Austrian acquaintance, himself a former Nazi, comes to my rescue. “That was an illegal group,” he writes. “Underground. Mostly kids to begin with, it started in the army.”

  A week after his letter I come across a scholarly and comparatively obscure book, and there it is, the elusive NSR, finally documented in print. The group is noted as being instrumental, particularly in Graz, as working toward—agitating for?—the Anschluss. Since the historian who wrote the book merely names the association without elucidating further, I write to his London publisher. Was that possibly some sort of veterans’ organization, I ask—hoping my Austrian source is mistaken—a group of soldiers and former soldiers meeting once a year at a picnic, boozing it up and reminiscing about army days? “Quite definitely not a veterans’ organization,” is the historian’s reply. “The National Socialist Soldiers’ Ring was comprised of National Socialist cells of activists in the army and the police.” A secret underground group, whose members saw themselves as revolutionaries. “He clearly joined in the army,” adds my Austrian acquaintance in a follow-up letter. “And then he stayed in it, once he switched to the police. He must have continued to actively work for the NSR, that’s how they finally somehow got it on his record.”

  Chapter 44

  And there is the second photograph from my father’s army years. He is amid the military band of what I presume to be the Ninth Alpine Hunters Regiment. It is a klutzy-looking group, assembled under a large tree, in front of one of the miniature chapels common in rural Austria. (They flank country roads or stand, forlorn, in the middle of a forest, high up on a mountain—chapels the size of a phone booth housing a crucifix or a plaster Virgin, and wild flowers in a chipped vase.) The farmers—onlookers in the background—wear suits, it’s Sunday.

  The tree shelters the entire band. Someone has clearly given thought to logistics, this is no snapshot. Twenty men in rumpled uniforms stand in a row, waiting uncomfortably and patiently as if for a train, hands folded stiffly over their genitals or behind their backs; four more kneel awkwardly, two drummers recline in the foreground, an elbow each propped on their instruments.

  I have shown the photograph to friends, asking each time, “Which one seems most sure of himself, posing instead of just standing willy-nilly, striking an attitude for the camera?” They always pick him.

  He wears a mustache now. Is he twenty-one? Twenty-two? He is the only one of the group whose arms are crossed in front of his chest, his weight rests on one leg while the other one is thrust forward and bent slightly at the knee. The flared bell of a French horn is cradled casually in the crook of one arm. He looks straight into the camera. There is nothing dreamy about him now, but something dashing instead and something amused, he will burst out laughing as soon as the shutter has clicked. This young man is at ease, assured. If he is neither, he has become adept at putting on a very good front.

  Chapter 45

  Since untold millions on more than one continent have been slaughtered in the name of Communism, and since the abominations that continue to be committed by Communist governments have nothing to do with the tenets formulated by the original theorists of this ideology, I assume that any contemporary Communist must be aware of upholding a set of ideals that has yet to be put into practice. Even so, I count among my acquaintances several people to whom the label “revolutionary Marxist” or “Communist revolutionary” carries overtones of romantic appeal. And while a book called The Romance of American Communism does not cause a stir in Manhattan in 1979, I find it difficult to envision the windows of my local bookstore decked out with volumes entitled The Appeal of Fascism or, specifically, The Romance of National Socialism.

  It would horrify me to encounter such a sight. And if an otherwise intelligent acquaintance of mine professes a kinship to Communism, that’s fine with me. I do not ask if he would like to live in the Soviet Republic of New York, I listen politely, and sometimes with interest, to the old litanies. The mulling over of such abstractions is harmless as far as it goes, its end product most often the writing of articles for small journals—as honorable a way of spending one’s time as any.

  But the objective distance with which we generally study the theories and early phases of political movements does not hold when the movement under scrutiny is National Socialism. The fire ignited, stoked, fanned, and finally unleashed under the aegis of this movement left so vast and desolate a landscape of human suffering that an objective consideration of its other aspects is nearly impossible. “They made the trains run on time” is the single most sickening sentence in the world.

  To me, both Communism and National Socialism are drearily devoid of all romantic appeal. But while I have yet to lose sleep over the appeal of Communism, I am engaged in the slippery pursuit of attempting to fathom why my father joined the Nazis. A woman not her father’s d
aughter, a woman unlike me, might have put aside being cut off at the age of seventeen, might have tried his patience and her luck again, might have asked, carefully choosing her words, at twenty-three, or at twenty-eight, or at thirty-two. I could not, and I regret it. What I am left with is conjecture.

  Only when I turn the question upside down do I feel on firmer ground. What might have prevented him from becoming a Nazi? Or: For what reasons might he not have joined? Or: What might have repelled him? These answers seem simpler. Nothing. None. Nothing.

  A great many Austrians of my father’s youth were driven by what is commonly expressed in an abstract noun. At the best of times, it is not a one-definition word. At that time, in that place, it carried extraordinary emotional weight. Nationalism.

  Prospering citizens of a nation at peace and threatened by no one can afford to take their country for granted, to be casually critical of this or that national quirk or policy, to appreciate virtues and values of other countries, perhaps all countries. Hungry and deprived citizens of an impoverished and beleaguered country tend to assume a different stance. The perception of oneself as surrounded by enemies generally belongs in the realm of psychopathology, under the heading of paranoia, and a severely ill paranoiac can be dangerous to those around him. But if this perception is fostered by prolonged, intense, and physical deprivation, pathology gives way to dreadful “health.” Faced with the reality of being stuck in a dead-end hallway encircled by hostile forces, even normally thoughtful people tend to abandon the rational point of view, which would hold that the nations causing the suffering must surely consist of humans just as nice and ordinary as one’s underweight neighbors up and down the street.

  To have lost a war is difficult. To be excluded from the family of nations in peacetime, and for years, is lethal. If a war has long been over, and one’s powerful “former” enemies continue to behave in a relentlessly vindictive manner, it is tempting to conclude: During the war, those enemies aimed to defeat my country; now they aim to destroy it, and me. Driven to such a conclusion, one fears and hates one’s enemies, and one tends to fall back on a vastly stepped up, near-mythical loyalty to what is left: one’s own backyard, one’s country.

  But Nationalism was not enough. Before you can spare the time and energy to be proud of your family, you need to see all of its members eat a full meal in front of your eyes. Before you can be proud of your country, you need to see that you and your neighbors and friends are able to find a job and a place to live. It also helps to know that you can afford a doctor if your children get sick, and, should you as a line worker get mangled for life, that those children will not have to take turns selling pencils on the street.

  A desperate desire to be protected, to help and protect one another—who else was going to do it?—that desire had an abstract noun label as well. It was called Socialism.

  “We were as ready to believe in Socialism as the Reds themselves,” says one of my aging former Nazi relatives. “There was only one thing I couldn’t swallow, and nobody I knew could either, and that was the international thing. International anything had never done me any good. The ‘international brotherhood of workers,’ and ‘workers of the world unite,’ well, that sure didn’t include us, they made that clear enough. Our Russian ‘brothers’ and our French ‘brothers,’ great revolutionaries all, they agreed to the embargo and to Versailles just as gladly as the capitalist Americans, all of them were happy to watch us starve. Not one of those countries out there wanted a thing to do with us. Some ‘brotherhood.’ But when people started talking about throwing ‘international’ out, and keeping the rest of what Socialism stood for, using it how we needed it, well . . .”

  Nationalism and Socialism, Socialism and Nationalism, Nationalism and Socialism, until the two abstractions merged. This notion was far from new, but it had only been yet another dusty notion kicked around in dusty pamphlets. When it caught on, the solution to a previously insoluble dilemma seemed suddenly obvious. What had been contradictory ideological absolutes—Nationalism by definition excluding Socialism, which by definition excluded Nationalism—became one ideal. It took hold of people’s imagination as a revolutionary idea, the magic combination, a daring dream. First entranced were the young.

  Whenever we see photographs of Nazis in history books or on television documentaries, there is always Himmler, the nightmare schoolteacher, grossly fat Göring drooling through obscene sneers, Goebbels, a hybrid of rodent and buzzard, Hitler himself. Has he ever, in a single photograph, looked anything but ludicrous? Either he rants, a lunatic; or he fits into his entourage—well-fed, self-satisfied, beaming, middle-aged men at the top of their power.

  But when my father became a Nazi he was half the age I am now, closer in age to my sixteen-year-old daughter than to me, half the age of most of my friends. He was nowhere near middle-aged, he was far from fat.

  The largest meeting of early-bird Austrian National Socialists took place in the summer of 1923, in Salzburg. Enthusiasts had traveled cross-country to write up a slate, they wanted to run one of their own for office. The convention was important enough for Hitler to make an appearance in his former fatherland. The same man who would, ten years later, win a plurality of Germany’s electorate through the familiar barnstorming process of holding babies for photographers and giving six speeches a day in six different towns, now checked out this crowd and, no fool, swiftly decided that Austrian Nazis were to abstain from the elections, “according to the party’s program, which rejects all parliamentarianism.” A Colonel Bauer expressed a better reason for abstention. “A lot of people were there,” was how he put it, “but most of them were between seventeen and nineteen.” And not even ardent adolescents were allowed either to run for office or to vote.

  Long before their middle-aged parents edged into the party, cautiously, sideways, young people were professing themselves National Socialists in masses. When the Nazis finally took over, they pronounced themselves, and justifiably so, the “Party of Youth.”

  My father’s generation had, in childhood, lived through the deprivations of the war and postwar years, and had, in adolescence, observed how dismally unable to function the adults’ “democracy” was. They had watched their elders be consumed by the effort of keeping families alive, politically ineffectual, cringing with fear.

  What young Nazis had in common above all was a fervent desire to do. The first thing to be done was to throw out whatever one’s parents had tried. Good riddance to the monarchy, which so many of the old ones still mourned and which my father’s generation barely remembered, and let’s throw out this mess that passes for a government now, this pathetic democracy imposed on Austria by its enemies, surely with the intention of keeping Austria crippled forever. Namby-pamby, dilly-dallying old men, going over the same issue month after month, no one able to achieve a majority, no one ever getting a thing done. Democracy was a joke. Something else would have to take its place, this was not the way to live out one’s life, what was needed was a drastic change.

  In terms of idealism, my father’s generation of early Nazis holds its own as compared to the most devoted of Whole Earth purists of our 1960s. Unfortunately, an idealistic dunce is a dunce nonetheless, an idealistic pickpocket a thief, an idealistic bore as dull as the bore who happens to be an opportunist; idealism per se leads nowhere.

  This is what they wanted. A body of government to consult on all issues, yes, by all means, but one person empowered to make decisions. If a decision had to be made about an increase of ten schillings a month for the pension of a soldier’s widow, do it. No more parliamentary sessions stretching over months and years, debating the comparative virtues of nine schillings over eleven, each party far more interested in keeping another party from winning a point than in settling the issue, while the woman starved. Many decisions were begging to be made.

  There would be one people, one leader. The people of this ideal country would love one another, each inhabitant would, after all, be a member of one family,
loyal to the rest of the clan. (I do not know if my father, when thinking his idealistic Nazi thoughts, ever gave a glance in the direction of his brother Eduard, but I doubt it. Idealists tend to be weak in the area of common sense.)