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

significance.
    Still, the Vienna of my youth, a city of almost 2 million people, remained intellectually vibrant. My parents and their friends were pleased when the municipal government, under the leadership of the Social Democrats, initiated a highly successful and widely admired program of social, economic, and health care reforms. Vienna was a thriving cultural center. The music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, as well as that of Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, resonated throughout the city, as did the bold expressionist images of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele.
    Even as it thrived culturally, however, Vienna in the 1930s was the capital city of an oppressive, authoritarian political system. As a child, I was too young to understand this. It was only later, from the perspective of a more carefree adolescence in the United States, that I understood just how oppressive the conditions that formed my first impressions of the world actually were.
    Although Jews had lived in Vienna for over a thousand years and had been instrumental in developing the city’s culture, anti-Semitism was chronic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vienna was the only major city in Europe where anti-Semitism formed the basis of the political platform of the party in power. Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic populist mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, focused his spellbinding orations specifically on “the wealthy Jews” of the middle class. That middle class had emerged following the adoption of a new constitution in 1867, which extended equal civil rights to Jews and other minority groups and gave them the freedom to practice their religion openly.
    Despite the provisions of the new constitution, the Jews, who made up about 10 percent of the city’s overall population and almost 20 percent of its vital core (the nine inner districts), were discriminated against everywhere: in the civil service, in the army, in the diplomatic corps, and in many aspects of social life. Most social clubs and athletic organizations had an Aryan clause that prevented Jews from joining. From 1924 until 1934, when it was outlawed, there existed in Austria a Nazi party with a strongly anti-Semitic platform. The party protested, for example, the performance of an opera by Ernst Krenek, a Jewish composer, at the Vienna Opera House in 1928 (figure 2–6).
    Nonetheless, the Jews of Vienna, my parents included, were entranced by the city. Berkley, the historian of Jewish life in Vienna, has commented aptly: “The fierce attachment of so many Jews to a city that throughout the years demonstrated its deep-rooted hate for them remains the greatest grim irony of all.” In later years, I learned from my parents why the city exerted such a powerful hold. To begin with, Vienna is beautiful: the museums, the opera house, the university the Ringstrasse (Vienna’s main boulevard), the parks, and the Habsburg Palace in the city center are all architecturally interesting. The renowned Vienna Woods outside the city are easily accessible, as is the Prater, the almost magical amusement park with its giant Ferris wheel later made famous in the movie The Third Man . “After an evening at the theater or a May Day in the Prater, a Viennese might with equanimity regard his city as the pivot of the universe. Where else did appearance so beguilingly sweeten reality?” wrote the historian William Johnston. Although my parents were not deeply cultivated people, they felt themselves to be connected to the intellectual values of Vienna, especially to the theatre, the opera, and the city’s melodic dialect, a dialect I still speak.

     
    2–6 An Austrian Nazi party poster from 1928, a decade before Hitler entered Vienna, protests the performance at the Vienna Opera House of an opera by the Jewish composer Ernst Krenek: “Our opera house, the foremost arts and educational institution in the world, the pride of all Viennese, has fallen victim to an insolent Jewish-Negro