In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (48 page)

Yet despite their active participation in the Holocaust, the Austrians claimed to be victims of Hitler’s aggression—Otto von Habsburg, the pretender to the Austrian throne, managed to convince the Allies that Austria was the first free nation to fall victim to Hitler’s war. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were willing to accept this argument in 1943, before the war ended, because von Habsburg thought it would stimulate Austria’s public resistance to the Nazis as the war ground to a halt. In later years both allies maintained this myth to ensure that Austria would remain neutral in the Cold War. Because it was not held accountable for its actions between 1938 and 1945, Austria never underwent the soul-searching and cleansing that Germany did after the war.

Austria readily accepted the mantle of injured innocence, and this attitude characterized many of Austria’s actions after the war, including its treatment of Jewish financial claims. The country’s initial uncompromising stand against paying reparations to the Jews was based on the premise that Austria had itself been a victim of aggression. In this way, the survivors of one of Europe’s oldest, largest, and most distinguished Jewish communities were essentially disenfranchised, both financially and morally, for a second time after the war.

The Allies initially validated this alleged innocence by exempting Austria from the payment of reparations. The Allied occupation forces pressured the Austrian parliament to enact a war criminals law in 1945, but it was not until 1963 that a prosecuting agency was established to put the measures into effect. In the end, few people were tried, and most of those were acquitted.

Austria’s intellectual loss is equally clear and dramatic. Within days of Hitler’s arrival, the intellectual life of Vienna was in shambles. About 50 percent of the university’s medical faculty—one of the largest and most distinguished in Europe—was dismissed for being Jewish. Viennese medicine has never recovered from this “cleansing.” Particularly distressing is how little was done after the collapse of the Third Reich to redress the injustices committed against Jewish academics or to rebuild the academic faculty. Few Jewish academics were invited back to Vienna, and even fewer were given restitution for the property or income they had lost. Of those who did return, some were not reinstated in their university positions, and almost all had great difficulty regaining their homes or even their citizenship, of which they had been stripped.

29–4
Eduard Pernkopf, the dean of the medical school of the University of Vienna, meets his faculty in April 1938, several weeks after Hitler’s entry into Vienna. The dean and the organized faculty greet one another with “Heil Hitler!” (Courtesy of Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte, Wien.)

Equally disturbing was the fact that many of the non-Jewish members of the faculty of medicine who remained in Vienna during the war were Nazis, yet they retained their academic appointments afterward. Furthermore, some who were initially forced to leave the faculty because they had committed crimes against humanity were later reinstated.

To give but one example, Eduard Pernkopf, dean of the faculty of medicine from 1938 to 1943 and rector of the University of Vienna from 1943 to 1945, was a Nazi even before Hitler entered Austria. Pernkopf had been a “supporting” member of the National Socialist party since 1932 and an official member since 1933. Three weeks after Austria joined with Germany, he was appointed dean; he appeared in Nazi uniform before the medical faculty, from which he had dismissed all Jewish physicians, and gave the “Heil Hitler” salute (figure 29–4). After the war, Pernkopf was imprisoned in Salzburg by Allied forces, but he was released a few years later, his status having been changed from that of war criminal to a lesser category. Perhaps most shocking, he was allowed to finish his book
Atlas of Anatomy
, a work thought to be based on dissection of the bodies of people who had been killed in Austrian concentration camps.

Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were “rehabilitated” in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period. Austrian history books gloss over the country’s involvement in crimes against humanity, and blatant Nazis continued to teach a new generation of Austrians after the war ended. Anton Pelinka, one of Austria’s leading political historians, has called this phenomenon the “great Austrian taboo.” It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not in Germany.

IN SOME WAYS, THE TIMIDITY OF AUSTRIAN JEWS—MYSELF
included—contributed to the taboo. On my first return visit to Vienna, in 1960, when a man came up to me and recognized me as Hermann Kandel’s son, neither of us even mentioned the intervening years. Twenty years later, when Stephen Kuffler and I were inducted as honorary members of the Austrian Physiological Society, neither of us protested when the academic dignitary introducing us glossed over our escape from Vienna as if it had not happened.

But by 1989 I had reached the limit of my silence. That spring, Max Birnstiel, a wonderful Swiss molecular biologist, invited me to Vienna to participate in an inaugural symposium for the Institute of Molecular Pathology. It was clear that Max was going to energize science in Vienna. The symposium took place in April, almost fifty years to the day after I had left, and I was enthusiastic about the timing.

I began my lecture with some comments about why I had left Vienna and how ambivalent I felt about the city upon my return. I described the fondness I felt for Vienna, where I first learned about the music and art that I enjoy, as well as the enormous anger, disappointment, and pain caused by the humiliation I suffered there. I added how fortunate I was to have been able to go to the United States.

After I finished my comments there was no applause, no recognition. No one said a word. Later, a little old lady walked up to me and said in typical Viennese fashion, “You know, not all Viennese were bad!”

THE SYMPOSIUM THAT I HAD PROPOSED TO PRESIDENT KLESTIL
took place in June 2003. Fritz Stern, a colleague at Columbia and my good friend, helped me organize it, and he and many other outstanding historians with special knowledge of the areas covered by the symposium participated. The talks described the differences between Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in dealing with their past and the devastating consequences for Vienna’s intellectual life of losing so many great scholars. That list includes Popper, Wittgenstein, and the key philosophers of the Vienna Circle; Freud, the world leader of psychoanalysis; and leaders of the great Vienna schools of medicine and mathematics. On the final day, three Viennese émigrés talked about the liberating influence of American academic life, and Walter Kohn, himself a Viennese émigré and a Nobel laureate in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I spoke about our experiences in Vienna.

The symposium also gave me the opportunity to establish contact with the Jewish community and to think about what made the Jewish experience there so special. I gave a lecture at the Jewish Museum and then invited several members of the audience for dinner at a nearby restaurant, where we talked about the past and the future.

The members of the Jewish community in Vienna with whom I had dinner reminded me of what had been lost. The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry. Only in fifteenth-century Spain had the European Jewish community achieved a more productive period of creativity than it had in Vienna during the late Habsburg period, from 1860 to 1916, and the decade thereafter. Writing in 1937 Hans Tietze stated, “Without the Jews, Vienna would not be what it is, and the Jews without Vienna would lose the brightest era of their existence during recent centuries.”

In speaking of the importance of Jews for Viennese culture, Robert Wistrich wrote:

After the symposium, I met again some of the Viennese Jews with whom I had dined earlier and discussed with them what they thought the symposium had accomplished. They agreed that it had helped young academics in Vienna to recognize that Austria had collaborated enthusiastically with the German Nazis in the Holocaust. It had also called attention—through the newspapers, television, radio, and magazines—to the fact that a segment of the international community had begun focusing its attention on Austria’s role in the Hitler era. This made me hopeful that gradually change might come.

But one incident points up Austria’s continued difficulty in dealing with its heavy debt to and responsibility for the Jewish community. While we were in Vienna in June 2003, Walter Kohn and I learned that the Viennese Kultusgemeinde, the Jewish social service agency that is responsible for the synagogues, the Jewish schools and hospitals, and the Jewish cemetery in Vienna, was going bankrupt trying to protect those entities against continuing vandalism. European governments typically compensate Jewish agencies for such expenses, but the Austrian government’s compensation was not adequate. As a result, the Kultusgemeinde had to empty its own coffers and spend its entire endowment. The government refused requests from Ariel Muzicant, the president of the agency, to increase its subsidy.

Back in the United States, Walter Kohn and I joined forces to see whether we could help ameliorate the situation. Walter had gotten to know Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, the consul general of Austria to Los Angeles, and Launsky-Tieffenthal arranged for a conference call that would include himself, Muzicant, Wolfgang Schüssel (the chancellor of Austria), Walter, and me.

We thought the conference call was all set, but at the last moment Schüssel canceled. He did so for two reasons. First, he was concerned that his participation might be taken as an indication that the Austrian government was not doing enough for the Jewish community, which he denied. Second, he was willing to speak to Walter Kohn but not to me, because I had been critical of Austria.

Fortunately, when Walter and I were in Vienna for the symposium, we had also met Michael Häupl, the mayor of the city of Vienna and governor of the state of Vienna. We were very impressed with Häupl, a former biologist, and greatly enjoyed our evening with him. He acknowledged that the Jewish agency was being shortchanged. After Schüssel refused to talk to us, Walter wrote Häupl, who swung into action below the federal level. To Walter’s and my delight, he succeeded in persuading the governors of the Austrian states to help out financially. In June 2004 the states rescued the Kultusgemeinde from insolvency, at least for the time being.

In these negotiations, I felt that the Kultusgemeinde needed our support in principle—on moral grounds. As far as I knew, I had no personal involvement with the agency. A few weeks later I learned that I was wrong. In addition to principle, I had a personal obligation to support the Kultusgemeinde.

In July 2004 I received through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., my father’s file from the Kultusgemeinde. In it were requests from my father for funds to pay first for my transportation and that of my brother to the United States and then to pay for the transportation of my parents. Simply stated: I owe my existence in the United States to the generosity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde.

Despite Mayor Häupl’s success, some Viennese Jews see no future for themselves or their children in Austria. The number of Jews in Vienna is small. At present, only about 9,000 Viennese have officially registered themselves as Jews with the Kultusgemeinde, and another 8,000 may be unregistered. This small number is a function of the tiny fraction of the original community who survived the war and the few who returned after the war or who immigrated to Vienna from Eastern Europe. It also speaks to the government’s failure to reverse the emigration of Jews and to encourage, as Germany has done, the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Austria.

The situation in Vienna today reminds me of Hugo Bettauer’s satirical novel
The City Without Jews: A Novel About the Day After Tomorrow
, written in 1922. Bettauer described the Vienna of tomorrow as a city in which the anti-Semitic government has expelled all of its Jewish citizens, including Jews who had converted to Christianity, because even they could not be trusted. Without the Jews, the intellectual and social life of Vienna deteriorated, as did its economy. A character commenting about the city, now without Jews, says: