Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Lancashire, on the edge of Southport, close by the Birkdale golf-links. I went there after the end of the 1928–9 school year. It was my first visit to Britain, and indeed my first journey alone. (Mimi’s first action when I arrived was to take the money I carried on me, for, as so often, her cash-flow was in one of its periods of pause.) For a while my mother hoped I might be able to stay there permanently, asking me to find out when school started, and ‘whether you will have to learn a lot in order to catch up with the boys of your age’. ‘I am anxious to hear about your plans for the autumn – or rather Auntie Mimi’s plans for you,’ she wrote in another letter. ‘I hope for your sake you can stay there, and I’m sure you hope so too.’ It is impossible to know how seriously she took the possibility, and clearly there was no concrete planning. In any case there was never more than the ghost of a chance that the footloose and always cash-strapped Mimi, with or without her handsome but economically useless husband, could provide a permanent base for me. I returned to Vienna at the end of the school vacation.

Whether I wanted to stay in Britain, or what I thought of the idea, I can no longer remember. Visiting England, being shown round London and getting to know Uncle Harry and Aunt Bella, but especially my cousin Ronnie – my senior by five years – was exciting, although I found Southport a dead loss, and life among the paying guests at Wintersgarth uninspiring. Apart from the memory of endless streets of small yellowy-grey brick houses on the way into London, and the surprising discovery that Lancashire people pronounced English vowels quite differently from us, I brought back two main discoveries from England. The first was the weeklies read avidly by British working- class boys – The Wizard , Adventure and other such titles, very different from the bien-pensant material English relatives had sent us in Vienna from time to time. I read them hungrily and with unalloyed enjoyment, spent all my pocket money on them, and took a collection back to Vienna. (They did not cost much – 2d an issue, if I remember correctly.) I did not realize it then, but reading these dense grey columns of fantasy adventure and dreams made me, for the first time, a genuine Briton since, at least for a moment, they put me on the same wavelength as most British boys of my age group.

The second was the Boy Scouts. I was taken to a world jamboree of the movement, which took place at the time not far from Southport, and returned an enthusiastic convert, with a copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys , determined to join them. I did so the next year in Vienna, where the ‘Pfadfinder’ (Scouts) competed with the blue-shirted Social-Democratic ‘Red Falcons’, which my mother dissuaded me from joining on the grounds that their campfires were admirable, but I was still too young to commit myself to the Marxism that went with them. I was thus to make my entry into public life at the age of fourteen not under revolutionary auspices, but at a Boy Scout parade, composed mainly of middle-class Viennese Jewish boys, formally inspected by the then President of Austria, an undistinguished and doubtless anti-Semitic Catholic politician by the name of Miklas.

I was a passionately enthusiastic Scout, even recruiting some of my classmates, though not much gifted either for fieldcraft or group life. It was among the Scouts that I found my best friend in the days between the deaths of my father and my mother. We maintained contact until his death, for he escaped to England after Hitler occupied Austria, found a job as a doorkeeper to the Afghan legation in London and remained to become a medical technician. (My troop leader ended up in Australia.) Had there been any Baden-Powell Scouts in Germany, I might well have joined them there too, after my mother’s death, but there were none, any more than at that time – difficult though this may be to credit now – there were any German football teams that counted internationally. If there were the equivalent of the Austrian ‘Red Falcons’, they belonged to a very much less exciting and not at all revolutionary Social-Democratic Party. Marxism thus had no competitors.

For the two years after my return from England I lived a curiously provisional semi-independent life. To stay with a neurotic and semi-invalid grandmother after my mother went into hospital was clearly out of the question. For a few months I was taken over by Great-uncle Viktor Friedmann and Aunt Elsa, who had at least one child still in the house, my cousin Herta, several years my senior. (Her brother Otto had been boarding with Sidney and Gretl in Berlin, so there was some obligation of reciprocity.) For the rest of the school year I commuted daily from their flat in the Seventh District, the other side of the Old Town, to my Gymnasium in the Third District, opposite – though I did not then know it – the house built for himself by the philosopher Wittgenstein. In the summer of 1930 I joined Gretl, Nancy and Peter in an Upper Austrian alpine village, Weyer-an-der-Enns, to be near my mother, who had been sent to a hospital/sanatorium there. As all readers of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain know, mountain air was prescribed for TB sufferers. But it did her no good.

I spent my last school year in Vienna alone, or rather as a sort of male au pair. Someone discovered a Mrs Effenberger, widow of a colonel and, like so many good Viennese, from southern Bohemia – she came from Pisek – whose son Bertl, two or three years younger than me, wanted English lessons. In return for these, and possibly a very modest subsidy, she was prepared to look after me. Since she lived in the outer suburb of Wahring, I had to move school yet again and joined the Federal Gymnasium XVIII in the Klostergasse, my third secondary school in three years. By this time my mother had left Weyer and been transferred to a hospital not too far from Wahring. I visited her there every week. Sidney and Gretl invited me to join them and my sister in Berlin over Christmas, but sitting by my mother’s bed was my only regular physical contact with family. I, in turn, was all that was left of her life’s work and hopes, within regular reach of her hand.

Sometime in the early summer of 1931 it became clear to the adults that the end was close. Gretl must have come to Vienna and stayed there. My mother was transferred to a garden sanatorium in Purkersdorf, just west of Vienna, where I saw her for the last time shortly before going to camp with the Scouts. I can remember nothing of the occasion except how emaciated she looked and that, not knowing what to say or do – there were others present – I glanced out of the window and saw a hawfinch, a small bird with a beak strong enough to crack cherry stones, that I had never seen before and for which I had long been on the lookout. So my last memory of her is not one of grief but of ornithological pleasure.

She died on 12 July 1931. I was fetched from camp. Shortly after the funeral she was buried in the summer heat in the same grave as my father. I left Vienna for good and went to Berlin. From then on Nancy and I were together again, and Sidney, Gretl and their son Peter (then just six) were our family. It was not to be the last death in the family in that decade.

Perhaps this is the moment for some reflections on my mother.

She was the smallest of the three Grun girls, the most intelligent, clearly the most gifted except in joie de vivre. Less pretty and spontaneous than her younger sister, the family beauty Gretl, less rebellious and adventurous than the older Mimi, she was in many ways perhaps the most conventional of the three. Engaged to Percy at the age of eighteen, married earlier than the other two – and according to her letters as a virgin – she returned to Vienna after the war a married woman with one child, and on the verge of expecting another. Her sisters and many of her friends had meanwhile passed through that pressure-cooker of change and emancipation, the war and the era of breakdown and revolution at the end of it, unmarried and unattached. Not that she missed all the war. For a few months, while waiting to go to Switzerland to marry at the British Consulate in Zurich, she worked as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital. There she learned that wounded men could not bear lying on any but the most smoothly laid bedsheets – she later taught me the trick of making such beds – and tried to communicate with a dying Ruthenian soldier by selecting phrases from a volume of what she discovered to be translations of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, the German text of which she could easily refer to. Still, life in the colonial society of Alexandria was an exotic, but recognizable version of life in Europe before 1914. Not so life in the Vienna to which she returned after four years’ absence.

In some ways she remained conventional in the pre-1914 Viennese middle-class sense. As I have already said, she found it almost inconceivable to live without servants, and was amazed to discover that in England ladies could