H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by Habsburg@vm.cc.purdue.edu (February, 1996)

Gertrude Schneider. _Exile and Destruction: The Fate of
Austrian Jews, 1938-1945_.  Praeger Publishers, 1995. 256 pp.
Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth).
ISBN 0-275-95139-1.

Reviewed by Sidney Bolkosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn,
for Habsburg <sbolkosk@umich.edu>


        The final page of Gertrude Schneider's acknowledgments
is a wedding photograph of her family in 1909.  It represents
at least three generations: men in tuxedos and Habsburg
military uniforms, women in white dresses, children sitting in
the front row.  In this pre-introduction, then, we meet some
of the people Schneider will mention in the book -- her
parents, aunts, uncles, cousins.  It is a moving, effectively
candid and sad way to begin such a book. In her effort to
personalize the destruction of Austrian Jewry, Gertrude
Schneider has created an amalgam of personal life histories
and a public history of the Holocaust.

          The book demonstrates both the value and pitfalls of
attempting to meld private accounts with the larger history,
to conflate History (upper case) with history (lower case).
As a consequence, _Exile and Destruction_ is not exactly what
the title implies, i.e. a history of Austrian Jews after the
Anschluss, when Austria was brought into the Third Reich as
part of Germany.  Rather, Schneider, a child survivor, has
tried to relate the story of her own family to the fate of
Austria's 300,000 Jews by interweaving her and their private
histories with the public history, using "the fate of the
members of my family and friends as examples of what happened
to the Jews of Austria"(166).  Her family serves as a sort of
case study, an emblem not only for Vienna's but for the whole
country's Jewish population.  She traces the deportations of
Jews to a wide variety of destinations, Lodz (which she calls
Litzmannstadt, the German name, even using both names in the
same sentence), Riga, Lvov (Lemberg), Theresienstadt, Minsk,
and Auschwitz, for example, by noting who among her family or
acquaintances went to each of those lamentable places.  With
excruciating attention to detail, Schneider follows personal
stories with condensed histories of German policy.  She
recounts statistics of how many Jews left Austria on each
transport, train by train with destinations, numbers, and
names of victims and survivors.  A fusion of memoir and public
history, the book both benefits and suffers from the
combination.

          At the center of Schneider's work is her own and her
immediate family's story.  By focusing on the individual and
personal narrative, the Holocaust becomes concrete and
specific, a phenomenon which demands confrontation not with
statistics, but with individuals, one by one.  It is a
survivor's tale that we hear, a retelling of the tragic fates
of specific people, the overwhelming majority of whom
perished.  But from such a first-person perspective the larger
or public history, told in third person narrative, becomes
somewhat skewed; and historians may raise questions about the
scarcity of footnotes combined with the detailed numbers,
dates, and other specifics of the deportation process.  Do we
know, for example, what Eichmann thought and hoped about the
procedures to remove the Jews of Vienna, information which
Schneider offers without textual citations? Although she gives
thanks to some archivists -- at Stutthof, for example -- and
to those Poles with whom she talked as she traced the
footsteps of the Austrian Jews through Polish villages,
hamlets and camps, there are few references to the Reichsbahn
records or the records kept at places like Auschwitz,
Stutthof, or Dachau.

          The book unfolds chronologically beginning with spring
and summer, 1938, and moving by seasons or years, recording
events like the Wannsee Conference and turning points of the
war.  Chapters on specific deportations to Litzmannstadt,
Riga, or Minsk follow.  Swept away by this whirlwind of
events, her family, like most of Vienna's 120,000 Jews, was
"steeped in that charming mixture of Jewish and Viennese
cultures" (11). Like those Marsha Rozenblit described in _The
Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity_, they
endured as Austrian patriots who nevertheless maintained a
distinct Jewish identity: assimilated, yet apart; cosmopolitan
and middle class, yet with distinct Jewish consciousness.

          Stefan Zweig, in _The World of Yesterday_, his
autobiographical rumination on the descent of European culture
into barbarism, wrote of his own family as Viennese patriots.
His description of the typical Viennese -- cosmopolitan,
multilingual, immersed in proper etiquette, charming,
supportive of the arts (especially music and theater) -- is,
in clear relief, a description of the Jews of Vienna.  Zweig
believed nationalism was the root of all evil.  To him, the
"true cosmopolitan," the Viennese, embodied peace and
civilization.  Consequently, no one was more Viennese than
Viennese Jews, children of the Enlightenment, who brought
their centuries-old cosmopolitanism to that golden city.
Zweig believed they found ultimate security there: a
beneficent father (Franz Joseph), the descendant of the
Enlightenment and of reform emperor Joseph II; an appreciative
population; a slightly anti-Semitic but ultimately Viennese
and therefore good mayor (Karl Lueger); economic security.
His opening chapter, "The Golden Age of Security,"
reverberates with tangible and symbolic meanings.  Zweig
claimed he had never experienced anti-Semitism in his Vienna,
a claim that Sigmund Freud, among others, would have found
difficult to support; and one which, perhaps, Schneider's
consistently optimistic father may have shared.

          Despite the city's long and deep history of
anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, Vienna's Jews, especially
after the reign of Emperor Joseph II, felt they held a special
place in the hearts of their non-Jewish countrymen.  In his
1922 satirical novel _Stadt ohne Juden_, _City Without Jews_,
Hugo Bettauer created the scenario of a city, Vienna,
convinced by its anti-Semites to expel the Jews.  Shocked, the
Jews are driven out and quickly become successful in other
countries, welcomed by their new countrymen.  Vienna, of
course, languishes, loses its economic prosperity, artistic
creativity, cultural supporters, and its stature as the most
civilized of European cities.  Through the offices of a young
Viennese couple, one Jewish and the other not, the Jews are
entreated to return. Good Viennese, full of Gemuetlichkeit,
they naturally agree, the wedding of the romantic couple takes
place, Kaiser-beards (symbols of anti-Semitism) are shaved,
prosperity blossoms with them, and all live happily ever
after. Bettauer, as Schneider notes, died at the hands of a
fanatical Austrian Nazi in 1925.

          Austrian Jews, especially Viennese Jews, perceived
themselves as diehard Austrian citizens, indelibly rooted to
that place and enfolded in its mystique.  Like Zweig and his
multilingual family -- speaking Italian, Spanish, and German
regularly in their home -- their identities were
quintessentially Viennese or cosmopolitan.  They distinguished
themselves from Eastern European Jews, especially those from
Poland.  It seemed difficult to imagine that Nazism would
triumph in that place -- at least from the Austrian-Jewish
perspective.  Only years after it happened did Zweig admit
that the security he had vaunted was "only an illusion."
Echoing those sentiments, Schneider concludes her
acknowledgments with a dedication to her children, writing of
her hope that "they may know how the Enlightenment in Austria
fooled us, the Jews, into being complacent when we should have
been agitated, into feeling secure when we should have been
wary, and into loving our country which did not love us at
all" (ix).

          Except for the repeated references to her father's
optimism, there is little of this Austrian Jewish cultural
patriotism in Schneider's account of her own family. March 11,
1938, the day of the Anschluss, "signaled the end of an
enlightened Jewish presence in Austria, incomparable to any
other in the world" (12).  That sentiment creates a tragic
picture of maledictive betrayal which permeates the work,
sometimes enhancing her focus on individuals and details.
From this locus of attention emerge several important points:
Austrian Jews were murdered all over Europe -- at camps like
Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Theresienstadt; in ghettos
in Riga, Minsk, Kielce, Nisko, Litzmannstadt, and Lemberg; and
on killing fields like Maly Trostinec.  Four hundred died in
"insane asylums;" the lists of names which Schneider seems
determined to incorporate into the story create a kind of
memorial book, striking harder than the statistics, each name
carrying a specific history.

          The strategy of mingling personal and public histories
engages, arrests us, yet appears somehow formulaic.  What
seems even more striking about the book surfaces almost
immediately.  Despite her commitment to the specific and the
personal, Schneider seems almost obsessed with the numbers.
"We do not want to see the victims as numbers, but as people,"
she writes, yet the book abounds in such statistics.
Insisting that she wants to examine the expulsion and
destruction of Austrian Jews "from a personal side rather than
just relegating the Holocaust to numbers," she follows the
private stories with statistics for each train, camp, month,
day.  In an emblematic, remarkable thirty-page appendix, she
not only lists numbers of dead for each place of destruction;
she also includes survivors by name and (where available) by
birth date.

          From the Kristallnacht on, a macabre travelogue of
death and survival takes shape, a genealogy and an odyssey of
Austrian Jews, related singly or in numbers.  The personal
itineraries seem too brief, similar to Martin Gilbert's use of
testimonies in both _The MacMillan Atlas of the Holocaust_ and
his _History of the Holocaust_. Schneider's personal
recollections open into historical information, alternating
from private to public.  From the wedding picture to the
appendix, she loads the text with names, emphasizing the
human, familial context of the deaths of more than 50,000
Austrian Jews as they occurred one by one by one.  Her final
chapter, epitomizing a memorial, mourns the loss of the Jews
but also the failure of Austria to invite the survivors to
return.  She offers another list, one composed in 1992 for
Vienna's Museum of History exhibition on Jews forced from
their country in 1938.  It appears like a who's who of popular
and high culture, teeming with notables in literature,
operetta, opera, stage, film, cabaret.  Schneider again
depicts them as ineffably Viennese, Vienna's lost heart.
They, the "effervescent, enlightened and creative Jewish
presence in Austria," disappeared forever (158).

          The Viennese Jewish survivor speaks most clearly here
from the nostalgic memories of the golden city that Jews never
perceived as lethal -- despite its hatred of them and their
ancestors from the earliest moments of its origins, shrouded
in the mist of fantasy, myth, and legend.  Austrian Jews,
disenfranchised, stateless, some bewildered, were murdered in
virtually every country in Europe.  Those who survived carry a
mixed and conflicted legacy which occasionally surfaces in
this book.

          The bibliography includes many standard works on the
history of the Holocaust, on Jews in Austria, and on Austrian
anti-Semitism.  The footnotes usually expand on the text, and
the lack of primary source references weakens it.  There
remains the sense that we are "listening" to a survivor give
her testimony, offering statistical excursions into the
background and historical context of her own and her family's
experience.

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