sb bu 1 imii t^yyi an( AJR InformuL I Ing' Volume LI No. 3 ick March 1996 £3 (to non-members) C'on't miss ... Reflections on Austria past and present Vanished world Martha Blend p4 March of history Figures leaping from a vase n Ancient Rome the Ides of March sounded the trians showed themselves capable of feats of barba­ f<ichard Grunberger death knell of the Republic and the beginning of rism that aroused envy among German Nazis. I Caesar worship. In Austrian history not one, but Viennese delight in Jew-baiting helped accelerate the two climacterics occurred in the month of March. Berlin-directed drive towards the Shoah - in the im­ Reporting Israel March 1848 was sufficient of a turning point for the plementation of which Austrians participated in 'Donald Channing pl4 entire preceding period to be known as Vor-Mdrz disproportionate numbers. (pre-March). March 1938, of course, saw Austria The Austrians' shared guilt was further com­ wiped off the map of Europe. We therefore thought pounded by their bland postwar self-exculpation (for it appropriate to give over a large part of the March which the Allies' illconceived Moscow Declaration Monstrous issue to that country. of 1943 had provided an all-purpose fig leaf). It must be borne in mind from the outset that what Denazification became a sad joke when the two assertion we call Austria existed in two incarnations - first as parties that had fought the civil war twenty years ^*|*heWaffen-SS the sizable Habsburg Empire, and then as the much- earlier competed with each other in soliciting the I was part shrunken post-1918 Republic. The polyglot votes of former Nazis. ' of the Habsburg state had been so ethnically diverse that Prosperity resulting from the country's neutral Wchrmacht and the Emperor's Declaration of War in 1914 had to be stance in the Cold War further helped muffle the therefore deserves published in a dozen different languages. voice of conscience in a country apostrophized as an the same public During the late nineteenth century upsurge of 'ishnd of the blessed'(Insel der Seeligen) ^steem as the latter. ' nationalism the Jews were the only imperial subjects But a lie cannot receive credence forever. Several .' "US spake Haider with undivided loyalty to the Habsburg crown; even things happened in the early nineties: Chancellor '" his fiefdom the Austrian staatsvolk became, via Schonerer, in­ Vranitzky admitted Austrian co-responsibility for ^^-arinthia last fected with Pan-Germanism. Nazi crimes, a fund for additional compensation to October. He had In 1918 the age-old Habsburg Empire broke up the victims was set up, and - last but not least - obviously into modern nation states. In an Austria ethnically Jorg Haider's hitherto irresistible climb to power ''ailed to notice defined as German (Deutsch-Osterreich) the jews ran into the buffers. fhat the immediate were stigmatized as an outgroup; equally deplorable This check to 'Hitler's grandson' undoubtedly postwar myth was the political intransigence which pushed the two owed more than a little to the country's admiss- «f a chivalrous main parties, the Catholics and Socialists, down the ion into the European Union. A growing number wehrmacht has slippery slope into civil war in 1934. of Austrians realised that integration into the 'T'eanwhile been Four years later, during the Anschluss, many Aus- democratic EU could not be reconciled with shattered by ••evelations of neo-Nazi participation in gov­ ernment. 'fs massive '"volvement in One could justifiably talk of •massacres. But this the country's history coming 's as nothing full circle: Austria was a fairly '-•ompared to his civilised entity (and, thanks '^^sertion that the partly to the Jewish impact, a P'-^'-petrators of power house of culture) in its ;'dice, Babi Yar, multinational incarnation; today, ^^radour, obliged to pay due regard to the j;:lar2abotto and wishes of her European partners •^^agujevac deserve she shows signs of climbing out public esteem. of the pit she dug for herself by sharing in, and then glossing I'^^h - Austria Erit Glenda Jacl^son MP, centre, ioins Gretel Lefko, Kate Donaty, Gertrude Steu^art and ?^l'' ^^e greatest crime in in Orbe Ultima D Alice Jacob, at the Paul Balint AJR Day Centre's 10th birthday celebrations. history • AJR INFORMATION MARCH 1996 i critics Fredrich Torberg and Hans Waig' Profile - remained prominent in Austrian letters till at least the 1970s. Now by the mid-1990s, with a mere Heine's QC 10,000 Jews (mainly postwar immigrants) ritz Hellendal was born in the last marooned among seven million Austrians, peacetime years of Wilhelminian one could have expected the Jewish pres­ Germany. He grew up in Diisseldorf, ence on the Austrian Parnassus to have F dwindled to nothing. where his gynaecologist father ran a nurs­ ing home. (The father, though only a And it has indeed dwindled - but not residual Jew, had passed up the chance of to nothing! At this year's Frankfurt Book an academic career because it would have Fair the focus theme was Austria, and to involved conversion.) maximise their sales opportunities Aus­ trian publishers displayed the work - andj Fritz showed not dissimilar strength of frequently the person - of 120 writers. character when, aged sixteen, he contra­ dicted his Gymnasium director over a Of that grand total exactly ten were most contentious issue: whether Diissel­ Jewish - albeit of widely different back­ dorf should erect a statue to its most ground and age. Exactly half were quite famous son, Heinrich Heine. When the elderly and had begun their career in pre- Anschluss days. This group comprised the headmaster asserted that Heine had Fritz Hellendal lacked patriotism the youthful counsel for internationally renowned art historian the defence riposted with a quote from the German pantheon met with opposi­ Ernst Gombrich, topflight film directof the poet's Wintermdrchen 'I am ready to tion yet again. The chief nay-sayer was Billy Wilder, playwright-cum-theatre- shed my blood for a Germany that has University Rektor Diemer, a Heidegger director Georg Tabori, and the cabaret hoisted the black-red-gold (i.e. liberal) disciple who speciously objected to a artists Georg Kreisler and Gerhard Bronner. flag'. 'cult of personality'. However, by this A second, considerably younger, group time Fritz Hellendal had got the bit be­ Sad to relate this irrefutable riposte - Erica Fischer, Elizabeth Spira, Petef tween his teeth. He alerted Western failed to dent the headmaster's - and Sichrovsky - was made up of children journals - not least AJR Information - the City Council's - rightwing convic­ whose parents had returned to Austria and politicians like Michael Foot to the tions. Five years later the majority of from wartime exile in Great Britain. shenanigans in German academe. Germans were similarly convinced. Man This left two writers whose early sur­ zdhlte 1933 and Fritz was hard pushed to Finally, an incredible 60 years after he vival had itself constituted a miracle! finish his law studies before being kicked had first crossed swords with his head­ Elfriede Gerstl, a child U-Boat, and Rob­ out of university. He somehow got his de­ master, Fritz Hellendal had the ert Schindel, a wartime baby born to gree - but England, to which an uncle satisfaction of seeing Diisseldorf name its Jewish underground fighters disguised aS| helped him emigrate in 1934, did not rec­ university after his lifelong idol. Fremdarbeiter. ' ognise German legal qualifications, so This long-delayed triumph - and the All this may not add up to very mucb» Fritz had to set to and go through the en­ more personal satisfaction of being a step- however. Even if it no longer holds true tire study course for the second time. grandfather - buoy him up now that age that - pace Burgomaster Lueger's When he finished war broke out. From and uncertain health have forced him to henchman Bielohawlek's dictum 'Kultut, 1940 on he served in the Pioneer Corps, withdraw more and more from legal affairs. is ivos a Jud vom andern abschreibt' (cull an experience on which he looks back DRG ture is what one Jew cribs from the next) with very mixed feelings. - we still have some claim to being the People of the BOOK. On the other hand wartime was also n Richard Grunbergel when he met and married his wife, a Montessori-trained teacher. After the war Austro-Jewish he went back to the law and by the sixties he had an office in Holborn from which Parnassus AJR SEDER NIGHT he eventually transferred to North-West efore the Anschluss Jews formed We are pleased to announce that a London. three per cent of the Austrian popu­ SECOND NIGHT SEDER His work, which in part had to do with Blation, but - pace Hugo von will be held on Thursday 4 April at the restitution, occasionally took him back to Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Paul Balint AJR Day Centre DiJsseldorf. There he learnt in 1968 that Zweig, Franz Werfel, Karl Kraus and 15 Cleve Road, NW6 the local medical academy had been ele­ Hermann Broch - supplied over half of led by Hans Freund vated to university status. He also met the country's leading writers. one or two local Heine enthusiasts with The Nazi murder of every third Aus­ Please phone: 0171 328 0208 whom he launched a citizens' initiative to trian Jew and the flight of the rest for reservations have the new university named in drastically altered the postwar literary As there is limited space, regretfully Heine's honour. constellation. Even so a handful of Jews wheelchairs cannot be accommodated - novelists Robert Neumann and Hilde Astonishingly this long overdue homage 6pm for 6.30pm - £18 per person to a poet who ranks alongside Goethe in Spiel, poets Paul Celan and Erich Fried, AJR INFORMATION MARCH 1996 ligl The reviews were ecstatic, with the Vi­ ^ole-less Royce enna correspondent of the Volkische PARTNER only I was called Huber' was Sig- Beobachter lauding the Galician Jew as a mund Freud's constant refrain.