Tonight, 29/04, on the BBC website: "You just can't imagine this happening here, in quiet Amstetten," one woman told the BBC.
Oh yes, I can. A lot of things happened in quiet villages in Austria only 60 years ago.
In 1938 they took my beautiful young uncle from a lovely quiet village near Vienna and imprisoned him in terrible conditions that had been created with similar, scientific precision of detail. Later they gassed him to death -- as one does.
In 1941 they blew up the synagogue where my grandparents worshipped (allegedly the same God as the Christians did). See http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%207002.pdf
Sixty years later, in 2001, when, as tourists, we strolled round the site of the synagogue, an old man -- who looked very similar to the now-revealed 'beast of Amstetten' -- rushed out of his house and told us very excitedly and urgently that that place had always been a riding school. This was in 'Templegasse' of all names! He must have been at least 10 years old when it was blown up. So why did he have to be in such denial? What is it with them?
They have very nice gardens and very nice log piles and very nice bakeries in these small towns and villages in the wine-producing region. The houses are quite immaculate.
Newspaper headlines called the case the "crime of a monster" and the "worst crime of all times" and stories questioned authorities and residents of Amstetten, 130km west of Vienna, for failing to notice "the martyrdom in the horror house" under their feet. I thought that was a bit funny. I thought there were far worser crimes of all times in Austria.
Amstetteners managed not to see the 2966 inmates of their very own concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen. Odd, isn't it?
"The community of Amstetten, including its population, should drown in shame. ... The neighbours are very thoroughly looking away," the Oesterreich newspaper wrote in an editorial.
Well, where were they looking in the 1930s and 40s? They have to be nuts to be asking those sort of questions today. Do they have no recall? To paraphrase Howard Jacobson: "Just shut the fuck up and get on with building your Holocaust memorials".
"Obviously it was more convenient to look away from the neglected house than question its fabulous inhabitant of what he was doing behind his walls," the paper added -- without a single touch of irony.
We were "at war with Germany", but we always seem to forget that Hitler was Austrian. How can we ever forget the rousing welcome the Austrians gave the Nazi adjoiners?
When, in the late twentieth century, it was revealed that Kurt Waldheim had a Nazi past, my old dad said, "Oh well then, they'll definitely vote for him now." How right he was.
Nice little insight into Amstetten's past here: http://www.germanpostalhistory.com/php/viewitem.php?itemid=28938&germany=briefe&&PHPSESSID=995afb0cc8b682447d1f56e7d4d602d9
Postscript 29/4: The Times newspaper: "The ignoble fact is that 40 per cent of the staff and three quarters of the commandants of concentration camps were of Austrian origin. It was Austrians largely who organised the deportation of the Jews: 80 per cent of the staff of Adolf Eichmann, the logistics planner of the Holocaust, were from Austria."
On a literary note: there is something so totally heinous about locking people up in cellars, taking away people's human rights, that I always thought there was something gross about that gross old John Fowles who wanted to write about it in The Collector, and I need to examine why I don't feel that, say, Nabokov or McEwan are similarly tainted when they choose iffy material.
But hey, we all need to think about ourselves. Although I've drawn attention to it, I don't think there really should be something more inherently wrong with the Austrians when we, the Belgians, and all are perfectly capable of producing our own home-grown rapists, murderers, weirdos.
I seem to have to come out with the cliche that there's good and bad in everyone; and now I want to meet the good people of Austria: the groovers, coolios, happy nutters, cultured and kind intellectuals, listeners, thoughtful people, fun people, loving people of Amstetten, happy children and grandchildren of the Antisemitenbund of Amstetten. Look, there are three family surnames signed on the bottom of the note. I actually do believe that you can have come to terms with what your grandaddies did. We are all individuated now. Please say hi to me!
A ten heller note from Amstetten's Anti-Semitic Union.
3 comments:
Yes I agree. You're going into this with more depth on the history side, but as the people haven't dealt with this yet, it remains there, under the surface, and no-one is safe. But it is healing we need to do here, to accept the past wrongs and draw a line under the suffering. I was quite impressed by the police inspector guy in charge of this case. He sounded very compassionate. Definitely there is hope in Austria. Have you been back? They would very much welcome you I suspect, if the experience of a fellow teacher is anything to go by. The locals helped him find a cousin who had survived. His only relative. Joy all round.
I agree. Jill. He sounded like the lovely intelligent young Germans who have come to terms with their past. I'm sure there have to be many Austrians like him.
Interesting take. My Grandfather lived in Amstetten during the Anschluss, and was an important figure in the town, living in Schloss Edla. It is true that almost all residents saluted Hilter as his parade came through town. My grandfather did not, but had to suffer while his children waved Nazi flags that were handed out. Most of the villagers (including my Dad) had not even seen a plane fly over their town, so to see Luftwaffe squadrons fly overhead while tanks roared through and loudspeakers blasted propaganda was the most exciting thing they had ever seen or heard. After many years of depressing decline after massive war reparations from WWI onward, their country was in the middle of great civil strife, in which many who would have resisted the Nazis (Communists, Anarchists and Royalists) were already taken care of by the Nazi-backed thugs that had infiltrated and had eventually brutally gotten rid of Chancellor Dolfuss, who was against any union with Germany. My Gradad was lucky enough not to be a Jew, but for his vocal resistance he was taken into the countryside, badly beaten and left for dead in a ditch. He made it home and the family was able to escape Austria after much struggle. If anyone who lived there at the time had an idea that they should band together and resist, those thoughts were easily buried when they saw what happened to those who did resist, no matter what their social-economic status was.
Having visited Austria, I have mixed feelings. For the most part it does seem like a conservative, depressed populace. You wave at strangers you meet in a hiking trail and they don't wave back as they do here, people lock not just their front doors but even the gates to their front yards...but I would hate for my own countrymen to be judged by someone who came to the US and only visited Alabama.
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