The world of the Viennese middle class, and certainly of the Jews who formed so large a proportion of it, was still that of the vast polyglot region whose migrants had, in the past 80 years, turned its capital into a city of two million – except for Berlin by far the largest city on the European continent between Paris and Leningrad. Our relatives had come from, or were still living in, places like Bielitz (now in Poland), Kaschau (now in Czechoslovakia) or Grosswardein (now in Romania).1 Our grocers and the porters of our apartment buildings were almost certainly Czech, our servant-girls or child-minders not native Viennese: I still remember the tales of werewolves told me by one from Slovenia. None of them was or felt uprooted or cut adrift from ‘the old country’ unlike European emigrants to the United States, since for continental Europeans the sea was the great divider, whereas travel on rails, even over large distances, was something everyone was used to. Even my nervous grandmother thought nothing of taking short trips to visit her daughter in Berlin.
It was a multinational, but not a multicultural society. German (with a local intonation) was its language, German (with a local touch) its culture, and its access to world culture, ancient and modern. My relatives would have shared the passionate indignation of the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, when, to fit in with late twentieth-century fashions, he was asked to describe his native Viennese culture as Jewish. It was plain Viennese middle-class culture, unaffected by the fact that so many of its eminent practitioners were Jews and (faced with the endemic anti-Semitism of the region) knew themselves to be Jews, any more than by the fact that some of them came from Moravia (Freud and Mahler), some from Galicia or the Bukovina (Joseph Roth) or even from Russe on the Bulgarian Danube (Elias Canetti). It would be just as pointless to look for consciously Jewish elements in the songs of Irving Berlin or the Hollywood movies of the era of the great studios, all of which were run by immigrant Jews: their object, in which they succeeded, was precisely to make songs or films which found a specific expression for 100 per cent Americanness.
As speakers of the Kultursprache in a former imperial capital children instinctively shared the sense of cultural, if no longer political, superiority. The way Czechs spoke German (böhmakeln) struck us as inferior and therefore funny, and so did the incomprehensible Czech language with its apparent accumulation of consonants. Without knowing, or having any opinion about, Italians we referred to them with a touch of contempt as Katzelmacher . Emancipated and assimilated Viennese Jews talked about Eastern Jews as of some other species. (I distinctly remember asking an embarrassed older member of the family whether those Eastern Jews had surnames like ours, and if so what names, since they were obviously so different from us.) It seems to me that this explains much of the enthusiasm with which Austrians greeted their annexation by Hitler’s Germany: it restored their sense of political superiority. At the time I only noticed that one or two of my classmates in secondary school were Hakenkreuzler (swastikers). Since I was an English boy, however culturally indistinguishable from the Austrians, this clearly did not concern me directly. But it brings me to the question of politics.
Because I was to be seized so young and so long by that typical twentieth-century passion, political commitment, it seems reasonable to ask how much of its roots can be found in a childhood in 1920s Vienna. That is difficult to reconstruct. We lived in an era steeped in politics, although the affairs of the wider world came to us, as I have said, mainly through overheard adult conversations, whose purport children did not fully grasp. I remember two of these, both probably around 1925 or so. One occurred in an alpine sanatorium where I had been sent to recover from some illness (we children appeared constantly to have some sickness or other) under the supervision of my aunt Gretl who was also convalescing there. ‘Who is this Trotsky?’ asked a woman, whom I vaguely recall or imagine as maternal and middle-aged, but not without a touch of satisfaction. ‘Just a Jewish boy called Bronstein.’ We knew about the Russian Revolution, but what exactly was it? Another happened at an athletics meeting to which my uncle (and presumably my father) had taken me, made memorable by my first experience of a black sprinter by the name of Cator. ‘You say there’s no war anywhere at the moment,’ said someone, ‘but surely, there’s a revolt in Syria?’ What did or could this mean to us? We knew there had been a world war, as any British boy born in 1944 would grow up knowing that there had been one. Two of my British uncles had been in it, our neighbour Mr Gold would show me his tall officer’s cap, and my best friend was a war orphan – his mother kept her husband’s sword on the wall. However, nobody I knew, English or Austrian, regarded the Great War as a heroic episode, and Austrian schools kept quiet about it, partly because it concerned another country at another time – the old Habsburg Empire – partly perhaps also because the Austrian armies had not covered themselves with much glory. It was not until I went to Berlin that I experienced the ex-officer schoolmaster proud of his front-line service. Before that, my most powerful image of the Great War came from Karl Kraus’s wonderful documentary super-drama The Last Days of Humanity, which both my mother and my aunt Gretl had bought as soon as it came out in 1922. I still have my mother’s copy, and still re-read it from time to time.
What else did we know about the times we lived in? Vienna schoolchildren took it for granted that people had the choice between two parties – the Christian socials and the social democrats or Reds. Our simple materialist assumption was that if you were a landlord you voted for the first, if you were a tenant for the second. Since most Viennese were tenants, this naturally made Vienna a Red city. Until after the civil war of 1934 communists were so unimportant that a number of the most enthusiastic ones chose to be active in other countries where there was more scope for them – mainly Germany, such as the famous Eislers: the composer Hanns, the Comintern agent Gerhart, and their sister, the formidable Elfriede, better known as Ruth Fischer, who briefly became leader of the German Communist Party – but also in Czechoslovakia, such as Egon Erwin Kisch. (Many years later the painter Georg Eisler, Hanns’s son, became my best friend.) I cannot recall paying attention to the only communist in the circle of the former Grün sisters, who wrote under the pen-name Leo Lania, then a young man who declared Zola’s L’Oeuvre to be his favourite book and Eugene Onegin and Spartacus his favourite heroes in literature and history. Our family was, of course, neither Black nor Red, since the Blacks were anti-Semites and the Reds were for workers and not people of our class. Besides, we were English, so the matter did not concern us.
And yet, moving from primary to secondary school, and from infancy towards puberty in the Vienna of the late 1920s, one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness. In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. (By the tradition of bureaucratic states, when names were called for, surnames came before given names.) We fished and went robbing orchards together, an exercise I thought my sister would also enjoy, but which, as she admitted to me many years later, had terrified her. Since his father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also concluded that I wanted to be one.