In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind Read Online Free PDF

Widerstands and Hoover Institute Archives.)
     

     
    2–5 Jews forced to scrub the streets of Vienna to remove political graffiti advocating a free Austria. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives.)
     
    In his autobiography, German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, who had moved to Austria in 1933 to escape Hitler, described Vienna during the days following the annexation as a city transformed “into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch.” It was as if:
    Hades had opened its gates and vomited forth the basest, most despicable, most horrible demons. In the course of my life I had seen something of untrammeled human insights of horror or panic. I had taken part in a dozen battles in the First World War, had experienced barrages, gassings, going over the top. I had witnessed the turmoil of the postwar era, the crushing uprisings, street battles, meeting hall brawls. I was present among the bystanders during the Hitler Putsch in 1923 in Munich. I saw the early period of Nazi rule in Berlin. But none of this was comparable to those days in Vienna. What was unleashed upon Vienna had nothing to do with [the] seizure of power in Germany…. What was unleashed upon Vienna was a torrent of envy, jealousy, bitterness, blind, malignant craving for revenge. All better instincts were silenced…only the torpid masses had been unchained…. It was the witch’s Sabbath of the mob. All that makes for human dignity was buried.
     
    The day after Hitler marched into Vienna, I was shunned by all of my classmates except one—a girl, the only other Jew in the class. In the park where I played, I was taunted, humiliated, and roughed up. At the end of April 1938, all the Jewish children in my elementary school were expelled and transferred to a special school run by Jewish teachers on Pantzergasse in the Nineteenth District, quite far from where we lived. At the University of Vienna, almost all Jews—more than 40 percent of the student body and 50 percent of the faculty—were dismissed. This malevolence toward Jews, of which my treatment was but a mild example, culminated in the horrors of Kristallnacht.
     
     
    MY FATHER AND MOTHER HAD EACH COME TO VIENNA BEFORE World War I, when they were very young and the city was a very different, more tolerant place. My mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, a town of about 43,000 inhabitants on the Prut River in Galicia. This region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Romania was then part of Poland and is now part of Ukraine. Almost half the population of Kolomyya was Jewish, and the Jewish community had a lively culture. My mother came from a well-educated middle-class family. Although she spent only one year at the University of Vienna, she spoke and wrote English in addition to German and Polish. My father, Hermann Kandel—to whom my mother was immediately attracted because she found him handsome, energetic, and filled with humor—was born in 1898 into a poor family in Olesko, a town of about 25,000 near Lvov (Lemberg), also now part of Ukraine. He moved to Vienna with his family in 1903, when he was five. He was drafted directly from high school into the Austro-Hungarian army, fought in the First World War, and sustained a shrapnel wound in battle. After the war, he worked to support himself and never finished high school.
    I was born eleven years after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in World War I. Before the war, it was the second largest country in Europe, surpassed in area only by Russia. The empire extended in the northeast to what is now Ukraine, its eastern provinces included what are now the Czech and Slovak republics, and its southern provinces contained Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia. After the war, Austria was drastically reduced in size, having lost all of its foreign-speaking provinces and retaining only the German-speaking core. Consequently, it was greatly reduced in population (from 54 million inhabitants to 7 million) and in political