VIENNA 1954, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A RETURNING JEW.

Hitler's speech on the Heldenplatz, Vienna

From an untitled novel manuscript by journalist Elizabeth de Waal (b.1899), published posthumously by her grandson, Edmund de Waal:

Kuno Adler, who escaped to New York in 1938, returns to Vienna:

There he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, andin front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz…He sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue, and wept.

In postwar Vienna, Adler finds only a mild kind of anti-Semitism, like a suppressed toothache, but the past is still very much alive.

He encounters a scientist who had worked in a concentration camp, testing and researching with the only biological material that can yield convincing results in the field of medical science (he says) -- not with rats and mice and rabbits, but with live human subjects…but I can tell you for your comfort that our material – I mean my colleagues’ material—were not Jews. They were gypsies.

The infamous Heldenplatz, where Hitler gave a triumphant speech from the balcony of the New Palace in 1938, is the locale of a new beginning for Adler. It is there that he sees the woman he loves. He describes the Heldenplatz in romantic terms:

What first meets the eye and impresses the mind are the broad avenues of chestnut trees lining it on three sides, chestnut trees that bear a profusion of red candles in the spring. They give the square its peaceful, almost countrified look; they are conducive to slow perambulation and quiet contemplation.

My own recollections of the Heldenplatz are very different. The New Palace was headquarters to the Allied Forces occupying Austria until 1955. Every week the armed guard rotated. American, French, British, and Russian soldiers took their turn. When the Russians were on duty, we children were told to take a different route to school. The Russians were known to harass passersby and shake them down, especially women and girls. To them the place was anything but conducive to quiet contemplation.

(Source: De Waal, The Exiles Return, 2013)

MORE FROM KAFKA’S LETTER TO HIS FATHER: LIKE A NOOSE AROUND HIS NECK.

Your most effective method of education (it had an effect on me at any rate) was verbal: abuse, threats, irony, evil laughter and – oddly – self-pity…

I was terrified by your threats, for example: “I’ll tear you to pieces like a fish”. I knew of course that you would not follow up on it (as a small child, however, I did not know that), but the words matched my idea of your power, so that I thought you might be able to realize even that threat. It was terrifying also when you ran around the table, screaming at me, pretending you wanted to catch me (even though you had no real intentions), and my mother finally had to “save” me…

There were cases, where I was entirely in favour of your mean irony, that is, when it was directed toward others, for example, [my sister] Ellie, with whom I was on bad terms for many years. It meant a round of gloating and malice for me when you said at almost every dinner: “She has to sit 10 metres back from the table, my fat gal!” and when you imitated her pulling back your own chair without the faintest trace of good-natured chafing. Like a bitter enemy you exaggerated what was so very distasteful to you in her manner of sitting at table…

That is how you suffered, and how we suffered. In your eyes you were fully justified grinding your teeth and giving out that gurgling laughter (which made a fiendish impression on me as a child) and saying in a bitter tone: “What a bunch of people!”


...It is true that you rarely beat me up, but your shouting and your red face, and the hurried unbuttoning of your garters, which you hung over the back of a chair to have it at the ready – that was almost worse than a beating. The feeling was like that of a man about to be hanged. If he is actually hanged, he is dead, and the whole thing is over. But if he is made to witness all the preparations for the hanging and is told of his pardon only when the noose is already dangling in front of his face, the experience may make him suffer for the remainder of his life.  In addition, there were all those incidents when you made me understand very clearly that I deserved a beating in your opinion, and that I narrowly escaped it on account of your mercy. Collectively, these occasions gave me a profound feeling of guilt. Whichever way you looked at it, I was in your debt.
(Source: Letter to my Father, text at www.kafka.org; my translation)

WHAT KNAUSGAARD THINKS ABOUT IT ALL.

Heaven Up Here by Echo & the Bunnymen: A tremendous wailing springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom.

Girls: Inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a water spout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.

Hemingway: Straight to the point. Simple and clear. With weight behind it.

Familiar places: If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farm any farms, the bridge any bridge.

Separation: We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temperament and his eyes, in a way he disappeared out of my life.

Postmodernism: I liked it, or the whole world that I suspected lay behind what stood in the text, but I didn’t know what it was or where it actually existed.

Living in a small place: I was depressed by being under constant observation, by everyone always knowing who I was, by never being allowed to have any peace.

Booze: Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness… all objections and all judgement are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. Why say no to this?

(From: Dancing in the Dark)

Anders Breivik: a person who has erected a make-believe reality, in which his significance is undisputed.

(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable)

THE ‘80s ACCORDING TO KNAUSGAARD.

The thoughts of 18-year old Karl Ove:

Playing records:  I put on Remain in Light and it was impossible not to move, impossible,it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder. I turned it up full blast, and then I had to dance.

Girls: I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress it was as though everything in my insides was let loose.

Definition of pleasure: Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.

Being in love: Everything hurts but nothing is as good…Life will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. Only a forty-year-old man could have written that. I am forty now.

Older women: She was around fifty with a white shoe-shop bag on her lap. She was chewing gum, which was a mistake, chewing gum didn’t go with her glasses and hair.

What teenagers are good at: Sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.  None of this led anywhere. Well, we probably weren’t very good at doing things that led somewhere…As far as girls were concerned, it was rare we came across one who wouldn’t object if we pulled up her jumper so that we could lower our heads and kiss her nipples. These were great moments.

What a guy from a small town wants: To find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

(#amreading  Dancing in the Dark)

ALFRED NOBEL’S LIFE. A CV FOR THE POLICE BLOTTER.

When Ludvig Nobel asked his brother Alfred to provide biographical information for a history of the Nobel family, he received the following resume – police-blotter style, which seems most informative:

Alfred Nobel – pitiful half-creature, should have been strangled by a humane doctor upon entry into life.

Principal merits: Keeps his nails clean and doesn’t burden the public.

Principal faults: No family, no bonhomie, no appetite.

Chief and only request: Not to be buried alive.

Greatest sin: Does not worship money.

University of Uppsala

Most important events in his life: None.

When he was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Uppsala in 1893, he submitted the following cv:

Born on 21 October 1833, acquired his knowledge through private instruction, without attending an institute of higher education; worked mainly in the area of applied chemistry, developing explosives known as dynamite, blasting gelatin, smokeless powder, ballistite, and C89; member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1884, member of the Royal Institute in London and the Société of Ingénieurs Civils in Paris, Knight of the Order of the North Star since 1880, and officer in the [French] Legion of Honour; published only one paper in English, which was awarded a silver medal.

Hmm. This cv needs editing. Wouldn’t get him a job today. But then Alfred Nobel didn’t need a job. Nor did he want any more honours to decorate his breast, stomach, and possibly even the behind.

(Source: Fritz Vögtle, Alfred Nobel; my trans.)