Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

So that was Austria. Hadn’t my father been right to keep out of it? Again I fled to the clean mountains of Styria to ski for a couple of weeks. I had nothing to do anyway but wait for the lady I still loved. We had made an appointment to meet in Vienna on the eleventh of March. I was there a day earlier, and felt as if I had wandered into a madhouse. A sort of regimented revolution was going on under the watchful eyes of fat Viennese policemen in long bottle-green coats. On one side of the Kärntnerstrasse, people with swastikas in their buttonholes promenaded, shouted “ Heil! ” and sneered at the people on the other side. The people on the other side, young workers — many Jews among them — shook their fists at the Nazis and shouted “ Rotfront! ” I could not get hold of Minka, who was helping relatives in Mödling prepare their departure, somebody in the Café Rebhuhn told me. So I went home to my grandmother’s flat, where I found that my beloved had already arrived in Vienna and would be waiting for me next evening at ten o’clock in an apartment house on the Opernring. I did not go out all the next day but spent the day in great uneasiness waiting for the telephone to ring. The cable with that precise information could only mean that something had gone wrong. But no call came. When I left the house at a quarter to ten, the streets were strangely dark and empty. I walked the short distance from the Florianigasse to the Rathaus, and through the Rathaus arcade — one of my grandfather’s dubious architectural masterpieces. Coming out, I found myself in the middle of an uncanny procession. In blocks that in their disciplined compactness seemed made of cast iron, people marched by thousands, men only, in total silence. The morbid, rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic swinging cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna. This cord seemed to originate somewhere in the outskirts. I could detect it through the length of the Alserstrasse, then winding round toward the Rathaus and leading down the Ringstrasse. Parades of all kinds were not rare in Vienna. They were nearly always led by a detachment of streetcar conductors and were in protest against something or other — unemployment, or the rise in the price of milk, or the pollution of the city water, brought in from the clean mountains of Styria by aqueducts. But this was different. It had an uncomfortably decisive character. I tried to break through between the blocks, but I did not succeed. Two or three times I asked a bystander what was going on, and got no answer. Impatient, fearing I would be late for the appointment with my beloved, I squeezed myself into the last row of a marching block and marched with them.

“What the hell are we marching for?” I asked the man beside me.

“ Anschluss ,” he barked.

Well, that literally meant “connection,” and that was exactly what I was looking for. If I could march with them down to the Opernring and get out of the parade there, I’d be in time for my appointment. But they wouldn’t let me. I was pushed out. I had come far enough to see the full height of the tower of the Rathaus, toward which the marchers turned their heads, starry-eyed. The tower was surmounted by the statue of a knight in armor, a statue I had loved as a child, so I turned my head, too, and saw a huge flag hanging down from the tower’s peak, attached to my knight’s armored feet — a red flag with a white circle, in which there was a black swastika. “So that’s it. It’s come, finally,” I said to myself. “Austria has united with the German Reich.”

It was not unexpected. For weeks people had spoken of little else. Yet how did all these people know that it would happen this very night? And how, for heaven’s sake, did they know their place in the serried ranks? They must have been drilled for months — but where? In cellars? Austrian Nazis had been underground up to this moment, an underground everybody knew about and spoke about quite openly and — with the exception of Jews and Reds, of course — with a certain sympathy. And now here it was. The whole male population of Vienna seemed to be marching in that silent parade. I felt a sudden resentment at being left out. After all, I was an Austrian myself; I had been born under the flag of the double-headed eagle as well as they, and though I was a subject of Rumania, it seemed unjust to deny me a place in one of their marching blocks as if I were a Red, or even a Jew. Politically, too, I wasn’t much different from them. Anyway, the event in itself was something I welcomed, even if I didn’t much care for the Pieffkes (as we Austrians called Germans). These people probably didn’t care for them either. Oskar Koloman had already expressed his disillusion. In any case, the unity of the Reich was restored. The dream of a century had come true. Such a political reversal would change many things, perhaps even the decision of my beloved to get a divorce from her husband, whom, unfortunately, I liked so much. There was a promise of hope in the atmosphere. In spite of that uncanny silence all over Vienna, something was happening, something important, and not merely a protest against the diminishing size of Wiener Kipfeln —the beloved Viennese croissants — and the pollution of the city water. Again and again I inserted myself into the marching blocks, trying to keep step so it wouldn’t be too obvious that I did not belong, and was pushed out of the ranks each time. At last, I came to the Opernring and hurried up the staircase of a certain house, and there she was. We both burst into hysterical laughter. “Can you imagine!” we said. “What an effort to celebrate our union!”

It wasn’t a union, though; it was the opposite. With great emotion, and not without tears, she had to tell me that in spite of all her love for me she couldn’t divorce the man whom we both liked so much. She had been married to him for too many years. It was the old story of an engagement more or less arranged by their parents; then, suddenly, she had felt that she could not marry him, and was about to tell him so when he went on a trip, and while she was waiting for him to come back so she could tell him how she really felt, he wrote her such charming, loving letters that — well, she finally married him. And he had been sweet to her and decent, and everything I knew so well, too, and — well, that was that. I had to accept it.

Next morning, we stood at the windows and looked down at the Opernring, now empty, where all the night through there had been ecstasy — a sudden ecstasy that had its source in the silent marching blocks, and that drew people out of their houses and made them run toward the marchers, shouting, roaring, embracing one another, swinging flags with swastikas, throwing their arms to heaven, jumping and dancing in delirium. It was an icy-cold yet gloriously sunny day, quite unusual for the middle of March. It was so cold that you would not allow your dog to stay outdoors for longer than five minutes. There was nobody as far as you could see except two or three of the old hags, wrapped, onionlike, in layers of frocks and coats, who sold flowers in the New Market. They were running across the Ring and throwing their roses and carnations in the air, yelling “ Heil! ” What did they have to do with it, anyway? Over the radio we had learned that Austria was about to unite with the German Reich, and the Germans were expected to come here triumphantly, as our brethren, in a huge parade, under a rain of flowers. And that the great unifier and renewer of the German-speaking peoples, Adolf Hitler, was also about to arrive in Austria any moment and would come down the Danube, the old stream of the Nibelungen, to Vienna, the former capital of the Holy Roman Empire.

She stood at one window, I at another. I turned my head toward her and saw her face, pale and suffering. I knew it was not only because we had to part but also for that clear, icy-cold emptiness outside. Out of a sudden intuition, without even thinking about how cruel it was, I said, “I know how you feel about what happened out there last night.” She swung her head round and looked coldly at me. “You feel,” I said, “precisely the way you did on the day of your marriage.” She covered her face with both her hands. “I can’t help feeling the same,” I said. “We are at a wedding day of sad promise.”