The Love-Charm of Bombs (47 page)

Luckily, Hilde was able both to return to Vienna and to retain her Englishness. In fact, during her stay in Vienna she felt the most contentedly English she had ever been. She later wrote that

 

Kingsley Martin's automatic assumption that we would slip off our newly won identity like a pair of worn-out slippers at first seemed devastating. But what happened was unexpected and astonishing: never before or afterward would we feel such close attachment to the British as during the three years that followed, never feel so accepted by them as on that mainland, but in the shelter and protection of their army.

 

Hilde was sent to Vienna in January 1946 as a correspondent for the
New Statesman
at the behest of Kingsley Martin. She left Peter to look after the children in Wimbledon and set off from the house at four in the morning on 30 January, wrapped in a coarse military coat, fur gloves and a khaki scarf and feeling drunk from the effects of flu and a high temperature. The departure from Wimbledon seemed like a flight not merely from the gloom of post-war London but from the dreariness of Hilde's own narrowing sense of herself.

 

I was flying, no, leaping, into the centre of the mainland; five years of winter were now, with this flight, this leap, finally over.

 

She recorded in her diary that she longed to shake off the last vestiges of a dreary war spent in fire watches, queues and maternity homes; she wanted to test the present against the past, new loyalties against old, and escape the stultifying calm that had gradually come to envelop her.

Initially, Hilde was driven from St James's to Croydon where she boarded a Dakota bound for Frankfurt. Through the cloudless sky she saw the coastline of England and then the metallic morning sea. The muddy green of the winter meadows of Belgium reminded Hilde of her own continental childhood; she was grateful that her children were growing up on lush English lawns. After a bumpy landing, they arrived at Frankfurt, where she had her first, unenticing glimpse of ruined Germany. ‘Humid ghostly atmosphere,' she complained in her diary. ‘Rain. Ruins. Hatred everywhere. Have bad cold and cough. 8.10 to bed.' She was struck by the physical destruction but also by the bitterness of the people, whom she felt staring at her in her British army uniform with open hostility and a ‘furious spirit of revenge and unforgivingness'. She later claimed that she had not seen a single smile during the twenty-four hours she was there. Gazing at the ashen faces of starving people, many of whom were disfigured by injuries, she found herself lacking in pity because she could see only murder and hell in their looks. The next day, after an afternoon of wandering around ruins she spent the evening in the jollity of the transit mess, where rotund waitresses with blonde plaits swung earthenware beer mugs over their shoulders, presenting Hilde with dishes piled high with steak and vegetables. This was her first experience of the contrast between the life of the British occupiers and of the starving natives who surrounded them.

The next day Hilde flew to Vienna. When her plane swept down over the Vienna woods she looked down at the tracks drawn on the hillsides where she once learnt to ski and realised that from now on her steps would be haunted. But she decided at once that she had not come to grieve for her earlier life; she had merely returned to its source, ‘with an eye sharpened by absence and a heart disciplined by loss'. Arriving at 2 p.m., she was driven into the city. The approach to Vienna, she wrote in a diary-style account of her trip later that year, had always been one of ‘barbaric ugliness'. Now that it was ruined its ugliness had become starker, and she watched uneasily as they passed through an archway hung with pictures of Lenin and Stalin and then through the three great cemeteries of Vienna, one of which Greene would immortalise in
The Third Man
. As in Frankfurt, she was struck by her own lack of compassion for the ruins that surrounded her. Wondering what had caused this, she decided that she no longer belonged.

 

These bombs are not my own. Mine painted the sky red over the City on September 8
th
. Mine extinguished one lovely Wren church after another, sailed over the London nursing home while my son was born, rained down on us during five years, the incidental music to our lives.

 

Hilde Spiel, unlike Elizabeth Bowen, was not ready to give up her wartime identity as a Londoner; she was in Vienna as a victor occupying the city.

Like Berlin, Vienna was divided up into four zones, controlled by the Russians, the British, the Americans and the French. Greene describes the division of the city in
The Third Man
,
where he notes that the boundaries are marked only by notice boards and that the centre of the city is under the rotating control of all four powers. Although it was under military occupation, Austria was given more autonomy than Germany and was treated as a victim rather than an ally of the Third Reich. In their Moscow Declaration of 1943 the Allies had described the 1938
Anschluss
as an ‘occupation', naming Austria as Hitler's ‘first victim'. As a result, in October 1945 the Western Allies recognised the provisional Austrian government, which had been set up in April 1945 under the Chancellorship of the Social Democrat Karl Renner and which comprised a coalition of Social Democrats, Conservatives and Communists. This government was known as the Second Republic and retained authority over the entire country, although ultimately its laws could be vetoed by the Allies in the rare event that all four powers unanimously agreed. Meanwhile the occupying powers each attempted to influence public opinion through a mixture of propaganda and censorship.

At the start of 1946, Vienna was a city of ruins. ‘Nine months after the war, the city is still in chaos,' Hilde wrote in her diary account. ‘Gigantic piles of rubble obstruct doors and thoroughfares, bomb-damaged buildings remain dangerous.' In every district she saw shuttered shops, empty cafés and closed restaurants. Life had retreated from the streets, though here and there a window display included a finely cut decanter or a single elegant shoe on well-draped cloth. And, though devastated, toothless and singed, the face of the city still had its old features. Its Baroque churches and palaces were untouched.

 

Whenever the uncertain weather permits, a shy early spring sun glistens on the patina of their roofs and domes. The tower of St Stephen's Cathedral, shrouded in wavering blue-grey mist, rises above the delicate lines of the Vienna woods; at its feet lie empty shells; everything in its immediate surroundings is destroyed.

 

Vienna in 1946

 

Hilde was initially installed in the Hotel Astoria on the Führichgasse near the opera house. Looking out onto the once fashionable street she saw that the joke shops of her childhood were still there, selling boxes of magic tricks – ‘the spiders which you can slip into people's drinks, the wax apples inviting the guileless bite' – tokens of a whimsicality the Viennese had little interest in at present. On her first afternoon she went to a British press conference and was invited by fellow journalists to live with the other war correspondents in the British Press camp in a dilapidated palace called the Salmschlössl. This was once the home of the aristocratic Salm family and the house was still heavy with the past, its rooms lined with mirrored cupboards and decorated with stags' antlers and stuffed grouse.

From this point, Hilde was immersed in a new and heady world. In leaving war-torn London she had come to a city where the war was even harder to forget, but the result was exhilarating. ‘Darling, this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me and I'm really quite unable to say what I feel,' she wrote to Peter in Wimbledon. ‘I walk about, not in a daze, but aware that every minute is of the utmost importance to me.' ‘This is still the most exciting, heartbreaking, enthralling thing that could have happened to me,' she wrote again two days later. ‘It's almost worth having gone away into a new life to have this incredible return, an emotional experience unlike anything that might have happened otherwise.' She had spent her time attending press conferences, socialising with the British, meeting the Viennese, and revisiting the haunting landscape of her past.

Hilde cried on her first day while visiting the rather ugly home she had left behind in 1936, at Stanislaugasse 2. It was here that she had spent her teenage years after the First World War, sitting beside her father in his laboratory as he carried out incomplete experiments, or typing in her bedroom. She discovered on the way there that the park and playground of her youth had been bombed out of existence. The next day she visited her old family servant Marie, whom she found surrounded by her parents'
Jugendstil
bedroom furniture, bitter but triumphant, her own socialist convictions vindicated by the defeat of the Nazis. Hilde then returned to her earlier childhood district of Heiligenstadt where, in melting snow in the late afternoon, she encountered a scene ‘a hundred times more heartbreaking' than she had expected. Entering the leafy village of Döbling, where generations of her mother's family had grown up, she found that every alley and corner was familiar. She passed the house of her grandmother Melanie, who had been deported and had then died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. She saw the houses of old friends, now dead, and found the narrow street where she had spent the first ten years of her life. Their apartment was now hidden but she could sense the cold hallway, the staircase on the left, the passage leading to the garden where, on the branches of a forked apple tree, she had read her first fairy tales.

In the failing light she entered the church of St Jakob which she had dreamed of during all those lonely nights spent listening to Beethoven and Schubert in wartime Wimbledon. Now, she was returning as an intruder: ‘where my roots reach deep into the earth as nowhere else, I am a complete stranger, as disconnected in time and space as a ghostly visitor'. But bowing her head over her hands as she listened to a children's service in progress at the front of the church, Hilde still found herself overwhelmed by ‘all the bottled-up emotion, repressed for years, when courage had to be bought at the price of dulled sensation – all the misery over the degradation of my home, all the anxiety over my children in the war, all the grief over my father's death'. Boys in the front pews turned and stared at the foreign woman in military uniform kneeling near the door and weeping openly. Quietly, the priest continued to read the mass. ‘Heiligenstadt unchanged,' Hilde noted in her diary that night. ‘Walked in sinking light. Heartbreak beyond words.'

Returning from these wrenching trips around the city of her childhood, Hilde spent her evenings drinking in bars and going to parties. On 1 February there was a big party given by Peter Smollett, who in his former incarnation had been Peter Smolka, Peter de Mendelssohn's boss at the Exchange Telegraph in London. He was working as a correspondent for the
Daily Express
and encouraged Hilde to meet the leading Viennese Communists. In 1987 Hilde would discover that throughout the 1940s Smollett worked as a Russian spy. She nonetheless looked back on him as ‘one of the most remarkable persons of this century that I ever met', despite his inconsistencies. Now his party provided her with a chance to meet the Viennese intelligentsia alongside the usual Allied officers and correspondents. There was a mixture of Catholic Communists and returned intellectuals, all of whom had offered active resistance to the National Socialists and were now imbued with faith in the Second Republic.

These were people who were involved in the renewed cultural scene. Already, walking through the ruins, Hilde could see exhibitions of crafts whose beauty overwhelmed her. And the opera had been revived, playing each night to packed audiences. Indeed, the opera house and theatres had been reopened immediately after the liberation of the city, with the Red Army allocating special rations to the company members and allowing the black sheep to return where possible. Hilde went to the opera, now held in the Theater an der Wien, and heard a finer performance of Verdi's
Otello
than she could imagine hearing anywhere else. In Vienna, as in London, Shakespeare was providing catharsis amid the ruins; here was tragedy with rhythm, structure and meaning after the sprawling, apparently meaningless tragedy of the war. ‘The opera still seems to be the most perfect in Europe outside Italy,' Hilde wrote in a report on Vienna which was published in the
New Statesman
in April. ‘The miracle of Austria's cultural rejuvenation is about to repeat itself once more.'