----------------------------Original message----------------------------
HABSBURG Reviews 1996/5                        February 21, 1996

   The Survivor as Historian: Austrian Jewry in the Holocaust

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

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

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.

Sidney Bolkosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn <sbolkosk@umich.edu>

      Copyright (c) 1996 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work may be
      copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to
      the reviewer and to HABSBURG. For other permission, please contact
      <reviews@h-net.msu.edu> and <lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu>.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS