In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (5 page)

HITLER WAS AUSTRIAN AND HAD LIVED IN VIENNA. HE HAD LEFT
his childhood home in Braunau am Inn for the capital in 1908, at age nineteen, hoping to become an artist. Despite a reasonable talent for painting, he failed repeatedly to gain entrance to the Art Academy of Vienna. While in Vienna, he came under the influence of Karl Lueger. It was from Lueger that Hitler first learned the power of demagogic oratory and the political benefits of anti-Semitism.

Hitler had dreamed of a union of Austria and Germany since his youth. Consequently, from its very beginning in the 1920s, the agenda of the Nazi party, which was framed in part by Austrian Nazis, included the merger of all German-speaking people into a Greater Germany. In the fall of 1936 Hitler began to act on this agenda. In full control of Germany since 1933, he had reinstated conscription in 1935, and the next year he had ordered his troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, a German-speaking region that had been demilitarized and placed under French supervision by the Treaty of Versailles. He then intensified his rhetoric, threatening to move against Austria. Schuschnigg was eager to appease Hitler while ensuring Austria’s independence, and he responded to the threats by requesting a meeting with Hitler. On February 12, 1938, they met in Berchtesgaden, the private retreat Hitler had selected, for sentimental reasons, to be close to the Austrian border.

In a show of power, Hitler arrived at the meeting with two of his generals and threatened to invade Austria unless Schuschnigg lifted the restrictions on the Austrian Nazi party and appointed three Austrian Nazis to key ministerial posts in the cabinet. Schuschnigg refused. As the day wore on, however, Hitler stepped up the pressure. Finally, the exhausted chancellor gave in, agreeing to legalize the Nazi party, free Nazis held as political prisoners, and grant the Nazi party two cabinet positions. But the agreement between Schuschnigg and Hitler only whetted the Austrian Nazis’ appetite for power. Now a sizable group, they emerged into public view and challenged Schuschnigg’s government in a series of insurgencies that the police had difficulty controlling. Faced with Hitler’s threatened aggression from without and the rebellion of the Austrian Nazis from within, Schuschnigg took the offensive and boldly called for a plebiscite to be held on March 13, a mere month after his meeting with Hitler. The question for the voters was simple: Should Austria remain free and independent, yes or no?

This courageous move by Schuschnigg, much admired by my parents, unsettled Hitler, as it seemed almost certain that the vote would favor an independent Austria. Hitler responded by mobilizing troops and threatening to invade the country unless Schuschnigg postponed the plebiscite, resigned as chancellor, and formed a new government with an Austrian Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as chancellor. Schuschnigg turned for help to Britian and Italy, two countries that had formerly supported Austrian independence. To the dismay of Viennese liberals like my family, neither responded. Abandoned by potential allies and concerned about needless bloodshed, Schuschnigg resigned on the evening of March 11.

Even though the president of Austria acquiesced to all of Germany’s demands, Hitler invaded the country the next day.

Now came a surprise. Rather than being met by angry crowds of Austrians, Hitler was welcomed enthusiastically by a substantial majority of the population. As George Berkley has pointed out, this dramatic turnabout from people who screamed loyalty to Austria and supported Schuschnigg one day to people who greeted Hitler’s troops as “German brothers” the next cannot be explained simply by the emergence from the underground of tens of thousands of Nazis. Rather, what happened was one of history’s “fastest and fullest mass conversions.” Hans Ruzicka was to write, “These are the people who cheered the Emperor and then cursed him, who welcomed democracy after the Emperor was dethroned and then cheered [Dollfuss’s] fascism when the system came to power. Today he is a Nazi, tomorrow he will be something else.”

The Austrian press was no exception. On Friday, March 11, the
Reichspost
, one of the country’s major newspapers, endorsed Schuschnigg. Two days later, the same newspaper printed a front-page editorial entitled “Toward Fulfillment,” which stated: “Thanks to the genius and determination of Adolf Hitler, the hour of all-German unity has arrived.”

The attacks on Jews that had begun in mid-March 1938 reached a peak of viciousness eight months later in Kristallnacht. When I later read about Kristallnacht, I learned that it had originated in part from the events of October 28, 1938. On that day seventeen thousand German Jews who were originally from Eastern Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and dumped near the town of Zbszyn, which lies on the border between Germany and Poland. At that time, the Nazis still considered emigration—voluntary or forced—to be the solution to “the Jewish question.” On the morning of November 7, a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the deportation of his parents from their home in Germany to Zbszyn, shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary in the German embassy in Paris, mistaking him for the German ambassador. Two days later, using this one act as a pretext for acting against the Jews, organized mobs set almost every synagogue in Germany and Austria on fire.

Of all the cities under Nazi control, Vienna was the most debased on Kristallnacht. Jews were taunted and brutally beaten, expelled from their businesses, and temporarily evicted from their homes. Their businesses and homes were then looted by avaricious neighbors. Our beautiful synagogue on Schopenhauerstrasse was completely destroyed. Simon Wiesenthal, the leading Nazi hunter after World War II, was later to say that “compared to Vienna, the Kristallnacht in Berlin was a pleasant Christmas festival.”

On the day of Kristallnacht, as my father was rounded up, his store was taken away from him and turned over to a non-Jew. This was part of the so-called Aryanization
(Arisierung)
of property, a purportedly legal form of theft. From the time of my father’s release from prison in the middle of November 1938 until he and my mother left Vienna in August 1939, they were destitute. As I was to learn much later, my parents received provisions and an occasional opportunity for my father to work at jobs such as moving furniture, from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde der Stadt Wien, the Jewish Community Council of Vienna.

Aware of the anti-Jewish laws instituted in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power, my parents understood that the violence in Vienna was not likely to fade away. They knew that we had to leave—and to leave as soon as possible. My mother’s brother, Berman Zimels, had left Austria for New York a decade earlier and established himself as an accountant. My mother wrote him on March 15, 1938, just three days after Hitler’s invasion, and he quickly sent us affidavits assuring the U.S. authorities that he would support us upon our arrival in the United States. However, Congress had passed an immigration act in 1924 that set a quota on the number of people who could enter the United States from the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe. Since my parents were born in territory that was at that time Poland, it took about a year for our quota number to come up, despite our having the necessary affidavits. When the number was finally called, we had to emigrate in stages, also because of the immigration laws, which specified the sequence with which family members could enter the United States. According to this sequence, my mother’s parents could leave first, which they did in February 1939; my brother and I next, in April; and finally my parents, in late August, just days before World War II broke out.

Because my parents’ only source of income had been taken from them, they had no money to pay for our voyage to the United States. They therefore applied to the Kultusgemeinde for one and a half tickets on the Holland America Line, one ticket for my brother and a half for me. A few months later, they applied for two tickets for their own voyage. Fortunately, both requests were granted. My father was a scrupulous, honest person who always paid his bills on time. I have in my possession today all the documents supporting his request, which show that he religiously paid his membership dues to the Kultusgemeinde. This view of him as an upstanding man of integrity and character is specifically mentioned by an officer of the Kultusgemeinde in his evaluation of my father’s request for assistance.

MY LAST YEAR IN VIENNA WAS A DEFINING ONE. CERTAINLY, IT
fostered a profound, lasting gratitude for the life I found in the United States. But without a doubt, the spectacle of Vienna under the Nazis also presented me for the first time with the darker, sadistic side of human behavior. How is one to understand the sudden, vicious brutality of so many people? How could a highly educated society so quickly embrace punitive policies and actions rooted in contempt for an entire people?

Such questions are difficult to answer. Many scholars have struggled to come up with partial and inconsistent explanations. One conclusion, which is troubling to my sensibilities, is that the quality of a society’s culture is not a reliable indicator of its respect for human life. Culture is simply incapable of enlightening people’s biases and modifying their thinking. The desire to destroy people outside the group to which one belongs may be an innate response and may thus be capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group.

I doubt very much that any such quasi-genetic predisposition would operate in a vacuum. The Germans as a whole did not share the vicious anti-Semitism of the Austrians. How, then, did Vienna’s cultural values become so radically dissociated from its moral values? Certainly one important reason for the actions of the Viennese in 1938 was sheer opportunism. The successes of the Jewish community—economic, political, cultural, and academic—generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews, especially those in the university. Nazi party membership among university professors greatly exceeded that in the population at large. As a result, the non-Jewish Viennese were eager to advance themselves by replacing Jews in the professions: Jewish university professors, lawyers, and doctors quickly found themselves without jobs. Many Viennese simply took possession of Jewish homes and belongings. Thus, as Tina Walzer and Stephen Templ’s systematic study of the period has revealed, a “large number of lawyers, judges, and physicians improved their living standards in 1938 by plundering their Jewish neighbors. The success of many Austrians today is based on the money and property stolen sixty years ago.”

Another reason for the dissociation of cultural and moral values was the move from a cultural to a racial form of anti-Semitism. Cultural anti-Semitism is based on the idea of “Jewishness” as a religious or cultural tradition that is acquired through learning, through distinctive traditions and education. This form of anti-Semitism attributes to Jews certain unattractive psychological and social characteristics that are acquired through acculturation, such as a profound interest in making money. However, it also holds that as long as Jewish identity is acquired through upbringing in a Jewish home, these characteristics can be undone by education or religious conversion, in which case the Jew overcomes the Jew in himself or herself. A Jew who converts to Catholicism can, in principle, be as good as any other Catholic.

Racial anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is thought to have its origins in the belief that Jews as a race are genetically different from other races. This idea derives from the Doctrine of Deicide, which was long taught by the Roman Catholic Church. As Frederick Schweitzer, a Catholic historian of Jews, has argued, this doctrine gave rise to the popular belief that the Jews killed Christ, a view not renounced by the Catholic Church until recently. According to Schweitzer, this doctrine argued that the Jewish perpetrators of deicide were a race so innately lacking in humanity that they must be genetically different, subhuman. One therefore could remove them from the other human races without compunction. Racial anti-Semitism was evidenced in the Spanish Inquisition of the 1400s and was adopted in the 1870s by some of Austria’s (and Germany’s) intellectuals, including Georg von Schönerer, leader of the Pan-German nationalists in Austria, and by Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna. Although racial anti-Semitism had not been a dominant force in Vienna before 1938, it became official public policy after March of that year.

Once racial anti-Semitism replaced cultural anti-Semitism, no Jew could ever become a “true” Austrian. Conversion—that is to say, religious conversion—was no longer possible. The only solution to the Jewish question was expulsion or elimination of the Jews.

MY BROTHER AND I LEFT FOR BRUSSELS BY TRAIN IN APRIL
1939. Leaving my parents behind when I was only nine years old was deeply distressing, despite our father’s persistent optimism and our mother’s calm reassurances. As we reached the border between Germany and Belgium, the train stopped for a brief time and German customs officers came on board. They demanded to see any jewelry or other valuables we might have. Ludwig and I had been forewarned of this request by a young woman who was traveling with us. I had therefore hidden in my pocket a small gold ring with my initials on it, which I had been given as a present on my seventh birthday. My normal anxiety in the presence of Nazi officers reached almost unbearable heights as they boarded the train, and I feared that they would discover the ring. Fortunately, they paid little attention to me and allowed me to quake undisturbed.

In Brussels, we stayed with Aunt Minna and Uncle Srul. With their substantial financial resources, they had succeeded in purchasing a visa that allowed them to enter Belgium and settle in Brussels. They were to join us in New York a few months later. From Brussels, Ludwig and I went by train to Antwerp, where we boarded the S.S.
Gerolstein
of the Holland-American Line for the ten-day journey that took us to Hoboken, New Jersey—directly past the welcoming Statue of Liberty.