In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (4 page)

I was born eleven years after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in World War I. Before the war, it was the second largest country in Europe, surpassed in area only by Russia. The empire extended in the northeast to what is now Ukraine, its eastern provinces included what are now the Czech and Slovak republics, and its southern provinces contained Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia. After the war, Austria was drastically reduced in size, having lost all of its foreign-speaking provinces and retaining only the German-speaking core. Consequently, it was greatly reduced in population (from 54 million inhabitants to 7 million) and in political significance.

Still, the Vienna of my youth, a city of almost 2 million people, remained intellectually vibrant. My parents and their friends were pleased when the municipal government, under the leadership of the Social Democrats, initiated a highly successful and widely admired program of social, economic, and health care reforms. Vienna was a thriving cultural center. The music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, as well as that of Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, resonated throughout the city, as did the bold expressionist images of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele.

Even as it thrived culturally, however, Vienna in the 1930s was the capital city of an oppressive, authoritarian political system. As a child, I was too young to understand this. It was only later, from the perspective of a more carefree adolescence in the United States, that I understood just how oppressive the conditions that formed my first impressions of the world actually were.

Although Jews had lived in Vienna for over a thousand years and had been instrumental in developing the city’s culture, anti-Semitism was chronic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vienna was the only major city in Europe where anti-Semitism formed the basis of the political platform of the party in power. Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic populist mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, focused his spellbinding orations specifically on “the wealthy Jews” of the middle class. That middle class had emerged following the adoption of a new constitution in 1867, which extended equal civil rights to Jews and other minority groups and gave them the freedom to practice their religion openly.

Despite the provisions of the new constitution, the Jews, who made up about 10 percent of the city’s overall population and almost 20 percent of its vital core (the nine inner districts), were discriminated against everywhere: in the civil service, in the army, in the diplomatic corps, and in many aspects of social life. Most social clubs and athletic organizations had an Aryan clause that prevented Jews from joining. From 1924 until 1934, when it was outlawed, there existed in Austria a Nazi party with a strongly anti-Semitic platform. The party protested, for example, the performance of an opera by Ernst Krenek, a Jewish composer, at the Vienna Opera House in 1928 (figure 2–6).

Nonetheless, the Jews of Vienna, my parents included, were entranced by the city. Berkley, the historian of Jewish life in Vienna, has commented aptly: “The fierce attachment of so many Jews to a city that throughout the years demonstrated its deep-rooted hate for them remains the greatest grim irony of all.” In later years, I learned from my parents why the city exerted such a powerful hold. To begin with, Vienna is beautiful: the museums, the opera house, the university the Ringstrasse (Vienna’s main boulevard), the parks, and the Habsburg Palace in the city center are all architecturally interesting. The renowned Vienna Woods outside the city are easily accessible, as is the Prater, the almost magical amusement park with its giant Ferris wheel later made famous in the movie
The Third Man
. “After an evening at the theater or a May Day in the Prater, a Viennese might with equanimity regard his city as the pivot of the universe. Where else did appearance so beguilingly sweeten reality?” wrote the historian William Johnston. Although my parents were not deeply cultivated people, they felt themselves to be connected to the intellectual values of Vienna, especially to the theatre, the opera, and the city’s melodic dialect, a dialect I still speak.

2–6
An Austrian Nazi party poster from 1928, a decade before Hitler entered Vienna, protests the performance at the Vienna Opera House of an opera by the Jewish composer Ernst Krenek: “Our opera house, the foremost arts and educational institution in the world, the pride of all Viennese, has fallen victim to an insolent Jewish-Negro defilement…protest with us against this unheard-of shame in Austria.” (Courtesy of Wiener Stadt-und Landesbibliothek.)

My parents shared the values of most other Viennese parents: they wanted their children to achieve something professionally—ideally, something intellectual. Their aspirations reflected typical Jewish values. Ever since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., when Yohanan ben Zakkai left for the coastal town of Yabneh and established there the first academy for the study of the Torah, Jews have been a people of the book. Every man, irrespective of financial position or social class, was expected to be literate in order to read the prayer book and the Torah. By the end of the nineteenth century, upwardly mobile Jewish parents were encouraging their daughters as well as their sons to become well educated. Beyond that, the goal of life was not simply to achieve economic security, but rather to use economic security to rise to a higher cultural plane. What was most important was
Bildung
—the pursuit of education and culture. It meant a great deal, even to a poor Jewish family in Vienna, that at least one son succeed in becoming a musician, a lawyer, a doctor, or, better still, a university professor.

Vienna was one of the few cities in Europe where the cultural aspirations of the Jewish community coincided fully with the aspirations of most non-Jewish citizens. After the repeated defeat of Austria’s armies by Prussia, first in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748, and then in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Habsburgs—Austria’s ruling family—lost all hope of military predominance among the German-speaking states. As their political and military power waned, they replaced their desire for territorial preeminence with a desire for cultural preeminence. The lifting of restrictions under the new constitution led to a major emigration of Jews and other minority groups from all over the empire to Vienna in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Vienna became home to people from Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, northern Italy, the Balkans, and Turkey. Between 1860 and 1880, its population increased from 500,000 to 700,000. The middle-class citizens of Vienna began to see themselves as citizens of the world, and they exposed their children to culture early in life. Being reared “in museums, theaters, and concert halls of the new Ringstrasse, the middle-class Viennese acquired culture not as an ornament of life, or a badge of status, but as the air they breathed,” wrote Carl Schorske, the cultural historian of Vienna. Karl Kraus, the great satirical social and literary critic, said of Vienna that “its streets are not paved with asphalt but with culture.”

In addition to being culturally vibrant, Vienna was also alive sensually. My fondest early memories are typically Viennese: one, a modest but sustained bourgeois contentment that came from being raised within a close-knit and supportive family that shared holidays in a regular, prescribed manner, and the other, a moment of erotic happiness that came naturally from our seductive housekeeper, Mitzi.

That erotic experience was right out of one of Arthur Schnitzler’s short stories, wherein a young, middle-class Viennese adolescent is introduced to sexuality by
ein süsses Mädchen
, a sweet young maiden, either a servant in the house or a working girl outside the house. Andrea Lee, writing in
The New Yorker
, has said that one of the criteria bourgeois families in Austria-Hungary used in selecting girls for housework was that they be suitable to relieve the family’s adolescent boys of their virginity, in part to entice them away from any possible attraction to homosexuality. I find it interesting to look back and realize that an encounter that easily could have become, or could have been perceived by others as being exploitative, never had that connotation for me.

My encounter with Mitzi, an attractive, sensual young woman of about twenty-five, began one afternoon as I was recovering from a cold at age eight. She sat down at the edge of my bed and touched my face. When I responded with pleasure, she opened her blouse, exposing her ample bosom, and asked me whether I would like to touch her. I barely grasped what she was talking about, but her attempt at seduction had its effect on me, and I suddenly felt different than I ever had before.

As I began with some guidance to explore her body, she suddenly became uncomfortable and said we had better stop or I’d become pregnant. How could I become pregnant? I knew full well that only women have babies. Where can a baby come from in boys?

“From the belly button,” she answered. “The doctor puts some powder on it, and the belly button opens up to allow the baby to come out.”

Part of me knew this was impossible. But part of me was not certain—and even if it seemed improbable, I became slightly anxious at the potential consequences of that event. My worry was, What would my mother think if ever I were to become pregnant? That worry and Mitzi’s change of mood ended my first sexual encounter. But Mitzi continued thereafter to speak freely to me about her sexual yearnings and said that she might have realized them with me were I older.

Mitzi did not, as it turned out, remain celibate until I reached her age qualifications. Several weeks after our brief rendezvous in my bed, she took up with a gas repairman who came by to fix our stove. A month or two later, she ran off with him to Czechoslovakia. For many years thereafter, I thought that running off to Czechoslovakia was the equivalent of devoting one’s life to the happy pursuit of sensuality.

Our bourgeois familial happiness was typified by the weekly card game at my parents’ house, family gatherings on the occasion of Jewish holidays, and our summer vacations. On Sunday afternoons my Aunt Minna, my mother’s younger sister, and her husband, Uncle Srul, would come for tea. My father and Srul would spend most of the time playing pinochle, a card game at which my father excelled and which he played with great animation and humor.

Passover was a festive occasion that brought our family together at the home of my grandparents, Hersch and Dora Zimels; we read the Haggadah, an account of the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and then enjoyed one of my grandmother’s carefully prepared seder meals, the high point of which was her gefilte fish, which to my mind still has no equal. I particularly remember the Passover of 1936. A few months earlier, Aunt Minna had married Uncle Srul, and I was an attendant at her wedding—I helped manage the train of her beautiful gown. Srul was quite wealthy. He had developed a successful leather business, and his wedding to Minna was elaborate in a way I had not previously experienced. I was therefore very pleased with my role in it.

On the first night of Passover, I recalled fondly for Minna how much I had enjoyed their wedding with everyone dressed so nicely and food served in an elegant way. The wedding was so beautiful, I said, that I hoped she would have another soon so I could experience a special moment like that again. Minna, as I learned later, felt somewhat ambivalent about Srul. She considered him her intellectual and social inferior and therefore immediately assumed that I was referring not to the event but to her choice of partner. She inferred that I would like to see her remarried to someone else—someone perhaps more appropriately matched to her intellect and breeding. Minna became enraged and lectured me at length on the sanctity of marriage. How dare I suggest that she would want another wedding so soon, to marry someone else? As I was to learn later, in reading Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, a fundamental principle of dynamic psychology is that the unconscious never lies.

Every August my parents, Ludwig, and I spent our summer holidays in Mönichkirchen, a small farming village fifty miles south of Vienna. Just as we were about to depart for Mönichkirchen in July 1934, the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated by a band of Austrian Nazis disguised as policemen—the first storm to register on my emerging political consciousness.

Modeling himself on Mussolini, Dollfuss, who had been elected chancellor in 1932, had absorbed the Christian Socialists into the Fatherland Front and established an authoritarian regime, choosing as an emblem a traditional form of a cross rather than the swastika, to express Christian rather than Nazi values. To ensure his control of the government, he had abolished Austria’s constitution and outlawed all opposition parties, including the Nazis. Although Dollfuss opposed the efforts of the Austrian National Socialist movement to form a state consisting of all German-speaking people—a pan-German state—his abolition of the old constitution and competing political parties helped open the door for Hitler. Following Dollfuss’s assassination and during the early years of the chancellorship of his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Nazi party was driven further underground. It nonetheless continued to gain new adherents, especially among teachers and other civil servants.