Homecoming in Vienna

...There was a culture once in Egypt...

...The wine is very good, and the food is superb...

...The Viennese would rather rebuild than replace—a policy that accounts, I believe, for much of the city's livability and charm...

...We found the Viennese amiable, hospitable, and helpful...

...The woman at the fruit stand knew me, for she had waited on me before...

...He was arrested by the Gestapo after the Anschluss, but managed to make his way to Sweden...

...At the Prater, the amusement park dominated by Vienna's famous ferris wheel, a pleasant young woman handed us a Bible tract...

...My grandfather, who died peacefully in his bed in 1935, was one of "the lucky ones...

...The few with whom I talked about my Viennese past seemed concerned and sympathetic—sometimes to an embarrassing degree...

...I saw a billboard for a soft-drink called Afri-Cola—"Alles ist in Afri-Cola"—that proclaimed it to be "sexy-mini-super-flower-pop-op-cola...

...One day, after the Anschluss, she sent me there to buy some oranges...

...The state radio's Third Program, which our hotel thoughtfully piped into our room, features a steady diet of American jazz, country-and-western, and rock-and-roll...

...There are many such plaques in the city...

...My father, who left Vienna, furtively, in 1939 and has never been back, is not in love with Vienna...

...There was a culture in Greece...

...Herr Blau asked, "Would you like to see the old-age home...

...At the offices of the Jewish Community of the City of Vienna, we talked with Herr Blau, who administers the Community's modern and attractive old-age home...

...I went rummaging through my files just before we left Washington to find the old passport, and carried it with me all the time we were in Vienna, expecting, I suppose, that I might want to show it to someone—someone, perhaps, who would bellow in an Erich von Stroheim accent, "Vere are your papers...

...The old charm is still there, and the gemiltlichkeit...

...There was no reason, really, for me to feel I was settling an old score and closing a chapter of my life that had been unfinished too long...

...I said that was distressing, and Herr Blau looked puzzled...

...The term is my wife's, who observed, as we walked along the row of graves, that she couldn't help thinking those who died before 1938 were the lucky ones...

...The record-keeping is impressive...

...because we happened to be in a state of unaccustomed solvency, which we were eager to dispel as rapidly as possible...

...You can hear magnificent music, and see splendid gothic churches and baroque palaces...

...When the government makes a controversial move, the newspapers receive anti-Semitic letters, which are not printed...

...It was decided, after some deliberation, to use the money for an old-age home...

...According to Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, "Although the Austrians accounted for only eight per cent of the population of the Third Reich, about one third of all people working for the SS extermination machinery were Austrians...

...The political success of the Socialist Chancellor, Dr...

...She had been away for two years, bumming around the world...

...One time—the last time I was there—I saw a new, pretty piece of hand-needlework in a frame on the wall, the sort of sampler that says, "God Bless This Happy Home...

...I assured her we were enjoying it, and she seemed much relieved...

...There was a culture in Rome...

...I recommend it to American urban planners...

...One Austrian in ten was enrolled in the Nazi Party—a ratio higher than in Germany...

...His grave is among many bearing the same date of death—November 9, 1938...

...There was no Jewish role to speak of, he replied, and no participation...

...Kreisky suggests he is particularly well qualified to make that judgment, since twenty-one members of his own family were killed by the Nazis...

...They were called U-boats...

...The janitor at Hammer-Purgstallgasse 3 when I lived there was a gentle old man who had served, I think, in the Kaiser's army during the Great War...

...Hitler's army marched into Austria on March 11,1938...

...He speaks no English, but was patient with my rusty and hesitant German...

...One can listen for hours without being disabused of the notion that he has somehow tuned in a Top-Forty station in Tulsa...

...Austrians now refer to the Anschluss as an "occupation" of their country (when they refer to it at all), but it was treated then more as a liberation...

...Fewer than 100,000 live there now, and most of them are postwar immigrants from Eastern Europe, largely middle-aged and elderly people...

...As conscientious American tourists, we savored and heard and saw as much of all this as we could in a week, and enjoyed it immensely...

...My own attitude toward Vienna," he wrote to me from New York, "is that of a man who has been happily divorced for thirty-three years...

...Bear with me...

...Some 300 Jews survived the war in Vienna by remaining hidden...

...This one said, "Heil Hitler...

...He wonders why I would want to spend a week and a lot of money there...

...Not far from the house I found the Karmelitermarkt, a collection of outdoor stalls selling fruit, vegetables, flowers, and meat, where my mother had often shopped...

...The movie-houses play American films, the newsstands display American magazines, the teen-agers wear American styles...

...He has said that every citizen must have the right to reappraise his political views, including those held during the Hitler years, in the light of "subsequent experience and knowledge...

...Some former Nazis serve in Dr...

...The fruit stand was where I had last seen it thirty-three years ago...

...My mother and I, along with thousands of others, spent many days waiting in lines at the Rothschild Palais, and I remember it well...

...We went because of a perverse impulse to absent ourselves from the United States on Richard Milhous Nixon's second inaugural day...

...They have no graves and no gravestones...

...His mother, a brother, a sister, nephews, and nieces died later in the camps...

...When we ate the oranges back at the hotel, my wife noticed the stamp on the peel...

...The programs have such titles as "Uncle Sam's Favorites," "Western Saloon," and "The Big Band Sound...

...My Uncle Joseph was unlucky...

...This story first appeared in the April 1973 issue, when he was the magazine's Washington Editor...

...it took only moments to locate my grandfather's gravesite and my uncle's...

...I burst into tears and ran home...

...She turned out to be an American, and we chatted for a few minutes about the Old Country...

...There was no reason, really, for me to feel I was settling an old score and closing a chapter of my life that had been unfinished too long...

...Bruno Kreisky, is offered as evidence that the bad old days are over...

...After the war, he explained, the city turned over to the Jewish Community a substantial amount of unclaimed Jewish assets...

...At Gate Four, through which one enters the Jewish section, there is an office and a new chapel dedicated to the victims of the Third Reich...

...And there was a culture once here...

...The yellow stucco apartment house at Ham-mer-Purgstallgasse 3 looked exactly the way I remembered it, though a plaque on the wall announced that it had been damaged during the war and restored...

...It isn't hard to find the United States in Vienna...

...I can understand why people have fallen in love with Vienna for centuries, and why they still do...

...The woman—she couldn't have been the same one—put my two oranges in a paper bag and gossiped with another customer while I fumbled with the unfamiliar coins...

...A large, red "J" is stamped on the first page, and my name is entered as Erwin Israel Knoll...

...He had a white, tobacco-stained mustache, and taught me how to whistle through my teeth...

...We did not go to Vienna, my wife and I, to buy oranges, which are in plentiful supply in Washington and only slightly more expensive...

...It was time, we felt, to heed the advice of people who have kindly suggested from time to time that I ought to go back to where I came from...

...Kreisky—doctorates are as ubiquitous in Vienna as apfelstrudel—is of Jewish descent, though he does not consider himself to be a Jew...

...And it is gone...

...One young woman pressed back tears and said she hoped I would find it possible to enjoy the city...

...But I showed it to no one and it is back in my files...

...I found Jesus in Afghanistan," she said...

...Almost 200,000 Jews lived in Vienna before the war...

...I ought to state, right at the outset, that what they say about Vienna—what they have always said about Vienna—is true...

...More than 400,000 Viennese—the largest crowd ever assembled in the city—cheered the Fiihrer for leading them "home into the Reich...

...It is a brown passport with a swastika on the cover (and five more inside...

...Almost half of the six million Jewish victims of the Hitler regime were killed by Austrians...

...They were Jaffa oranges, imported from Israel* Erwin Knoll, Editor of The Progressive, died on November 2, 1994...

...Reversing the usual procedure, I took a souvenir with me to Vienna...

...Kreisky's ancestry is mentioned infrequently in public, often in private conversation...

...I can understand that, too...

...This is not our experience in the week we spent in Vienna...

...The Simmeringer Hauptstrasse has been called Vienna's saddest street...

...When I visited his apartment, his wife, a grandmotherly sort, would give me candy...

...Kreisky's government...

...because a set of grandparents was fortuitously on hand to keep an eye on our children...

...I had no trouble finding my old neighborhood in the Second District, across the Danube Canal from the Inner City...

...Overt manifestations of anti-Semitism are a rarity in today's Austria, and are sternly dealt with by the government...

...We chose Vienna because I was born there forty-one years ago, and left the city, unceremoniously, at the age of eight, and had not seen it since...

...You'd have a hard time finding him in the United States," said my wife...

...Herr Blau, a man in his mid-fifties, was born in Vienna and spent the war years in a German forced-labor camp...

...The oranges were important, of course, only to me, for reasons that I may or may not be able to explain on the next couple of pages...

...Given the nature of our population," he said, "it made no sense to build a kindergarten or a school...

...The Zentralfriedhof, the main cemetery, is where the remains of Beethoven, Brahms, Gluck, Mozart, and Schubert are buried...

...Joseph Knoll's luck could have been even worse...

...The passport was issued to me on April 19, 1939, at the Rothschild Palais, which had been converted into Nazi offices and later was to serve as Adolf Eichmann's headquarters...

...His politics, like those of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, have been heavily influenced by his contacts with Scandinavian socialism during the war years...

...Because, I said, the Jews were once such a vital force in this city's cultural life...

...Wow—it sure doesn't taste like Kaffe mit Schlag...

...My line of questioning, however, did not interest him very much...

...It was called Kristallnacht because of all the broken glass in the streets...

...And they are gone...

...it has a hospital and barracks at one end, and a cemetery at the other...

...Warum...

...The researchers concluded that Austrians were "the most prejudiced people in Europe," and Die Presse, Vienna's leading newspaper, editorialized that Austrians are "a people of xeno-phobes who see foreigners as intruders and often reject what is strange or unaccustomed...

...A public opinion survey conducted in Austria a few years ago found strong and persistent bias against foreign migrant workers, long-haired youths, blacks, Arabs, and Jews...

...Not even the Professor of Jewish Studies at the University is a Jew," he said...

...But on this morning she looked down and said, "We have no oranges for Jews...

...Freud, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus...

...I wanted to know about the role of Jews in today's Vienna, and particularly about their participation in music, art, the theater, literature, journalism, education...

...he asked...

...It had marble staircases, which were hard on the feet...

...I can't weep over something that will never exist here again," Herr Blau interrupted...

...It was a Nazi nicety to bestow the middle name "Israel" on all male Jews, and "Sarah" on all females...

...That was Kristallnacht, the night when every synagogue in Germany and Austria was put to the torch, when Jewish shops were plundered, when Jews caught on the streets were hauled off to prisons from which many never returned, or were beaten to death on the spot...