The Vienna Melody (72 page)

Over and over again the voice spoke of Austria. That she must be free, and would be free. It did not depreciate the Germans. But, it said, the great qualities of the Germans had never been those of the Austrians. Nor would the innate, rooted aversion disappear between these two people, who had a common language only to understand the more how different they were. Austria the middle, Germany the extreme. Austria the compromise, Germany the challenge. For, said the voice, Austria is more than a land. It is an idea. The idea of a super-nationalism where once twelve different nations lived together under one roof, the United Nations of Europe, united neither through language nor geography, policy nor constitution, only by the will to live together. The speaker himself had never been a politician, had never belonged to any party. Nevertheless, his own life was a proof that the Austrian idea brought classes nearer together, let races develop, and respected minds. When he was a boy and young man imperialism, compulsion, and narrow-minded rigidity had done much to compromise that Austrian idea to a dangerous degree. But in the years of his manhood, when everything was being done to destroy it, it had been restored for all time.

Of all the monuments he had ever seen, the speaker told the Austrians, the American Statue of Liberty had seemed to him the most significant. Yet for centuries it could have and should have served as the symbol of Austria, because the Austrian idea, without ever using or even understanding the word democracy, had anticipated its underlying elements. For the Austrian idea is the recognition of the fact that the only nationality which man unrelentingly may defend is humanity.

Therefore, and in the inevitable nature of things, the voice went on, the Austrian idea was first made manifest in music. In that form it had conquered the world. But for the new, free, future Austria, whose part is to make Europe European again, a universality of spirit must be the goal and the word. Hofmannsthal coined it. Where universality of spirit will prevail, the anti-European spirit of Prussia—to wit, of the Nazis—is doomed to lasting impotence, and out of the destructive one a creative Europe will arise again.

“If she but wills, our Austria is always the land of the deepest respect for man. ‘She wills! She wills!' was what German Beethoven wrote and composed. It was more than an accident, it was an omen, that those words were discovered in Austrian, archives and published in the year 1933, coincident with the rise of the Austrian Hitler, who longed to become a German and destroy respect for man.

When the voice had expressed these or similar thoughts it changed. In it enthusiasm and emotionalism were replaced by tremendous determination. One might, almost think it was another person speaking with such precision and persistence, giving dates and technical information, offering methods of resistance, calling for courage and sacrifice. It was only the light, soft music accompanying also this part of the broadcast that supplied the continuity.

The broadcast ended as it began. A woman's voice spoke, permeated with a deep and penetrating faith. For several seconds, perhaps longer, those who had been listening had not a vestige of doubt about the future.

The woman's voice said, “I will deliver you from fear …”

I
used to buy the exercise books prescribed by the curriculum of the Vienna Francis Joseph Gymnasium at the stationer's in Seilerstätte. My daily way took me past the corner house of Number 10, where one of my classmates lived, the son of the best-known piano-maker in Vienna. In this book that schoolmate is called Hans Alt.

I recall how he came into class with bare legs on the first day of school and was admonished by Professor Rusetter, later to become our tormentor, for being “improperly clad.” His pained blushes at that time stuck in my memory. Not long afterwards another schoolmate, von Blaas, told me about an extraordinary early-morning expedition to the Prater, the exciting circumstances of which offered food for conversation among us schoolboys for weeks. Only young Alt, who knew most about it, did not take part in them. More than that, he cut himself off from the rest of us in a way which we considered arrogant. Consequently, on our side we paid little or no attention to him, and when our chief tormentor, Professor Miklau, held him up to scorn we enjoyed his discomfiture. His exclusiveness and sensitiveness were too much for us.

In the seventh of our eight years in the Gymnasium Hans made friends with kindly, tall Ebeseder, and that we liked even less. A spoiled little patrician and a proletarian? Meanwhile fantastic rumors about this patrician boy's mother, which were confirmed by our parents, had reached our ears. Our interest in them was boundless. Frau Henriette Alt, so we learned, was a historic personage of sorts.

I saw her first in Hans's small study, with its single window, on the fourth floor of the old house. He had invited a group of us—Einried, Ebeseder, von Blaas, and me—to some kind of party, for the first time in eight years and presumably because it was also the last time. For all of us—except Ebeseder, who had become a painter—had graduated, and our years of forced labour were at an end.

The old house, which from the outside made an impression of such stateliness, and which to me had always been the embodiment of a wealthy, comfortable town house, on the inside was surprisingly severe and sombre. I was as surprised that the gorgeous facade could be so deceptive as that the lady who greeted us could be the mother of our classmate. Instead of the middle-aged motherly woman whom I had expected to see, I met a fascinating young woman. Hans, who obviously was devoted to her, noticed my admiration. Perhaps the relationship which later on developed between us had its starting-point there.

It was not a close relationship-—at least, not in the beginning. At the University, where I started out to become a jurist, while Hans studied philosophy, our courses and our ways led us apart. It was only during the war that we came nearer to each other. It was then that I began to realize I had been as mistaken in what I thought of Hans as I had been in the facade of the house in which he lived. Except that with him it was the other way round. Behind his shyness and reticence, his sensitiveness and quiet, there appeared a likeable human being with the typically Austrian qualities of inner tenderness and the typically un-Austrian gift of an almost fanatical power of being convinced and of convincing others.

It was when he had the tragic misfortune to lose his wife, who in these pages is called Selma Rosner, that our friendship began. At that time I was dramatic critic on a Vienna paper and wrote an obituary attempting to do justice to the extraordinary gifts of the dead; it seemed to be of some solace to the widower. From then on we became attached to one another. Our common work on the Salzburg festivals, in which we both had faith, a feeling and a love for Austria, which we both shared, strengthened our friendship. When Hans came back from his trip to America, made on behalf of the Salzburg festival, he was changed. His timidity had abated somewhat, and he seemed to have overcome the shock of Selma's death. In other ways, too, this journey had a surprising result. It had given him a belief at one and the same time in America and in Europe. The revival of Austria in the years before Hitler had proved him to be right and me wrong. I had always believed in Austria, but never put my faith in her being understood by the rest of the world.

When, under Hitler, Austria vanished from the world and flight was all that remained to us, we lost track of each other. I had been in Paris for some time. In an hour of darkest despair, I, without hope, renewed my daily attempts to get short-wave broadcasts on the wireless which some Paris friends allowed me to use. Out of the babel of voices screaming into the ether about Hitler's thousand years of power, one day after Munich, there came a voice I knew. It said, “I will deliver you from fear.” And the voice that followed I also recognized. I heard its message, and it moved me as nothing else had done. To me, bereft of everything which was my existence, painfully torn from all attachments which were my very life's blood, this familiar voice sounded the first note of hope.

Since then I, and others who felt as I did, have heard it countless times. Those were the good moments in the inferno of the first months of exile. It was the voice of a submerged world, the resurrection of which it presaged. I had to be very grateful to that voice. More grateful than to any other.

One day it was silent, replaced by a woman's voice. It too spoke courage and truth, but it was no longer the familiar voice. I tried in every way to discover what had happened to that voice, although its fate was all too easy to surmise. Had it been stifled like thousands before it.

After I had been in the United States for some time, and was happy here, I received a letter from my classmate Hans Alt. It was written in Vienna and sent abroad through a friend in a neutral country. It said that Hans was well. And did I still remember the arithmetical progression of our mathematics teacher? In the same ratio as things grew worse for others, they were growing better for him, and one day things would be going extraordinarily well for all of us. “Everything is as it was,” said the letter, “even Number 10. I myself arranged a change of air, but in general it is the same air. Don't you find that Mitzi speaks better than I do? She is more convincing and avoids my old mistake of being theoretical. And don't you think also that the two women's voices supplement each other?” So it was that I learned that he was well and who was speaking in his stead. That is the last I have heard from him.

Then came a statement in the New York papers. It told of an announcement in the
Volkischer Beobachter
to the effect that the Austrian Freedom Station had been discovered in a house in the First District in Vienna. I had long before learned which house that was. The news was included with other items printed in much larger type and undoubtedly of much greater importance. Yet, in my eyes, this one was the most important one in the world. Constantly my thoughts returned to that house with the misleading exterior. Was it still standing? What had become of those discovered there? Had they paid with their lives for not having been willing to become fugitives and deserters from the cause in which we believed but which they defended more heroically than Spartans at Thermopylae? Or had an immanent justice, in which we also believed, saved and preserved them for that time when they would reap the fruits of their unutterable torture?

To the feeling of deep concern aroused in me by these thoughts there was now added one of unsurmountable shame. People of the caliber of my classmate Hans Alt were the nameless heroes beside whose heroism military exploits pale. They had stuck it out and raised their voices, preachers in Hitler's wilderness.

I do not know what has become of Hans Alt. A feeling I cannot buttress with logic tells me that he is alive. Meanwhile, until the truth concerning his fate can be learned, I have attempted to fulfil a duty and to render his story up to the point it is known to me. There should at least be a memorial in words. When Hans some day sees it, as I hope he may, he will approve the fact that he does not appear in it as a ‘hero.' Nevertheless, I am convinced that some day a real monument will be erected to him. It should stand in the Heldenplatz in Vienna, between the equestrian statues of Prince Eugene and Archduke Charles, the most warlike, aristocratic fighters of the House of Austria, and be the figure of a completely unwarlike, simple, democratic pedestrian. If it bears the features of Hans Alt it will bear the features of all true Austrians, whatever house they were born in.

And so the words of this picture paper of a century apply as much to him as to the almost symbolic house with the misleading facade. We have looked too long on their kind with eyes perceiving only an exterior which we took for granted. Hence the facade of Vienna was the violin of Johann Strauss, a light blue sky above vineyards, the legend of princes and sweet girls, a dance continuing into eternity. And accordingly the façade of the Viennese themselves was the lighthearted philanderer Anatol.

That is why I have tried to see beyond this facade. Behind it things have a dual aspect, are more sombre, austere, perhaps even greater than we are wont to see. Yet, despite all, that is the true, the imperishable, the indispensable Vienna. Despite all, that is the immortal Austria for whose sake a disillusioned Grillparzer passionately lived and a deaf Beethoven, adoring, died.

 

ERNST LOTHAR

C
OLORADO
S
PRINGS

Ernst Lothar was born in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic) in 1890 and died in Vienna in 1974. He was a writer, theatre director, and producer. In addition to
The Vienna Melody
, first published in the US in 1944 as
The Angel with the Trumpet
, his best-known works are
The Prisoner
and
Beneath Another Sun
. He was married to the Austrian actress Adrienne Gessner.