books on birdlife and animals which I received as presents, and after primary school, plunged into the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, a society for the popularization of the – mainly biological and evolutionary – natural sciences, to which they subscribed for me. We were taken to the theatre from an early age to plays we might enjoy, but which adults also admired – say, to Schiller’s William Tell (but not to Goethe’s Faust), and the works of the early nineteenth-century Viennese popular playwrights – the charming sentimental magic plays of Raimund, the savagely funny comedies of the great Johann Nestroy, whose bitter wit we did not yet understand. But we would be sent with other primary schoolchildren to the morning sessions of films at the local cinema, the long-gone Maxim-Bio, to see shorts of Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, and, more surprisingly, Fritz Lang’s rather longer Nibelungen epic. In my Viennese experience adults and children did not go to the movies together. Again, intellectual children would naturally make their choice among the books on their parents’ and relatives’ shelves, perhaps influenced by what they heard at home, perhaps not. To this extent the generations shared some tastes. On the other hand, the reading material selected for children by our elders was not, in general, supposed to be of serious interest to adults. Conversely, of all adults with whom we had any dealings, only teachers (who disapproved) were even aware of the passionate interest of thirteen-year-olds in the pocket-sized adventures of detectives with invariably English names which circulated in our classes under such titles as Sherlock Holmes the World Detective – no connection with the original – Sexton Blake, Frank Allen, the Avenger of the Disinherited and the most popular of all, the Berlin detective Tom Shark, with his buddy Pitt Strong, who operated out of the Motzstrasse, familiar to readers of Christopher Isherwood, but as remote to Viennese boys as Holmes’s Baker Street.
Children in the Vienna of the mid-twenties still learned to write the old Gothic script by scratching letters on slates framed in wood, and wiping them with small sponges. Since most post-1918 school texts were in the new roman print, we obviously also learned to read and later write that way, but I cannot remember how. By the time one entered secondary education at the age of eleven one was obviously expected to have acquired the three Rs, but what else we learned in primary school is less clear. Plainly, I found it interesting, since I look back on my elementary schooldays with pleasure, recalling all manner of stories about Vienna and trips into the semi-rural neighbourhood to search for trees, plants and animals. I suppose all this came under the pedagogic heading ‘Heimatkunde’, which, since the German word Heimat notoriously has no exact English equivalent, can best be translated as ‘knowledge of where we come from’. I can see now that it was not a bad preparation for a historian, since the great events of conventional history in and around Vienna were only an incidental part of what Viennese children learned about their habitat. Aspern was not only the name of the battle the Austrians won against Napoleon (neighbouring Wagram, which they decisively lost, was not in the collective memory), but a place in the remote zone beyond the Danube, not yet part of the city, where people went to swim in the lagoons left by the old course of the river, and explored wildernesses of martens and waterfowl. The Turkish sieges of Vienna were important because they had brought coffee into the city as part of the Turkish booty, and therefore our Kaffeehauser. Of course we had the enormous advantage that the official history of the old imperial Austria had disappeared from sight, except as buildings and monuments, and the new Austria of 1918 had no history yet. It is political continuity that tends to reduce school history to the canonical succession of dates, monarchs and wars. The only historical event I recall celebrating at school in the Vienna of my childhood was the centenary of Beethoven’s death. The teachers themselves knew that in the new era school also had to be different, but they were not yet clear just how. (As my school songbook put it at the time – 1925 – ‘the new methods of teaching having not yet been entirely clarified’.) I was to discover the ‘1066 and all that’ type of history in the secondary Gymnasium, not yet emancipated from traditional pedagogy. Naturally this was unexciting. German, geography, Latin and eventually Greek (which I had to give up on coming to England) seemed much more to my taste, but not, alas, mathematics and the physical sciences.
And certainly not religious instruction. I do not think this arose at all in primary school, but in secondary school I seem to recall that the non-Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelicals, the odd Greek Orthodox, but mainly the Jews, were excused the periods presumably devoted to this subject in class. The minority alternative, an afternoon class for Jews conducted in another part of town by a Miss Miriam Morgenstern and her various successors, was uninspiring. We were repeatedly told and interrogated on the Bible stories in the Pentateuch. I recall the shock I caused when I answered yet another question on who was the most important of the sons of Jacob, unable to believe that they were, once again, going on about Joseph, ‘Judah’. After all, I reasoned, had not all the Jews (Juden) been called after him? It was the wrong answer. I also acquired a knowledge of printed Hebrew characters which I have since lost, plus the essential invocation to the Jews, the ‘Shema Yisroel’ (the language was always pronounced in the Ashkenazi manner and not in the Sephardic pronunciation imposed by Zionism), and a fragment of the ‘Manishtana’, the ritual questions and answers supposed to be recited during Passover by the youngest male. Since nobody in the family celebrated Passover, took notice of the Sabbath or any of the other Jewish holidays, or kept any Jewish dietary rules, I had no occasion to use my knowledge. I knew that one was supposed to cover one’s head in the Temple, but the only times I ever found myself in one were at weddings and funerals. I watched the one school friend who practised the full ritual when addressing the Lord – prayer-shawl, phylacteries and the rest – with an uninvolved curiosity. Moreover, if our family had practised these things, an hour a week at school would have been neither necessary nor sufficient to acquire them.
Though entirely unobservant, we nevertheless knew that we were, and could not get away from being, Jews. After all there were 200,000 of us in Vienna, 10 per cent of the city’s population. Most Viennese Jews bore assimilated first names, but – unlike those in the Anglo-Saxon world – rarely changed their surnames, however recognizably Jewish. Certainly in my childhood nobody I knew had been converted. In principle, under the Habsburgs as under the Hohenzollerns, the abandonment of one form of religious service for another had been a price willingly paid by very successful Jewish families for social or official standing, but after the collapse of society, the advantages of conversion disappeared even for such families, and the Gruns had never aimed so high. Nor could Viennese Jews think of themselves simply as Germans worshipping (or not worshipping) in a particular way. They could not even dream of escaping their fate of being one ethnicity among many. Nobody gave them the option of belonging to ‘the nation’, because there was none. In the Austrian half of the Emperor Franz Josef’s dominions, unlike in the Hungarian half, there was no single ‘country’ with a single ‘people’ theoretically identified with it. Under such circumstances for Jews to be ‘German’ was not a political or national but a cultural project. It meant leaving behind the backwardness and isolation of shtetls and shuls to join the modern world. The city fathers of the town of Brody in Galicia, 80 per cent of whose population was Jewish, had petitioned the emperor long ago to make German the language of school education, not because the emancipated citizens of Brody wanted to be like beer-drinking Teutons, but because they did not want to be like the Hasidim with their miracle-working hereditary wunderrabbis or the yeshiva- bokhers explicating the Talmud in Yiddish. And that is why middle-class Viennese Jews, whose parents or grandparents had migrated from the Polish, Czech and Hungarian hinterlands, demarcated themselves so decisively from the Eastern Jews.
It is no accident that modern Zionism was invented by a Viennese journalist. All Viennese Jews knew, at least since the 1890s, that they lived in a world of anti-Semites and even of potentially dangerous street anti-Semitism. ‘Gottlob kein Jud’ (Thank God it wasn’t a Jew) is the immediate reaction of a (Jewish) passer-by to the cries of newspaper vendors on the Vienna Ring, announcing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the opening scene of Karl Kraus’s wonderful The Last Days of Humanity. There was even less reason for optimism in the 1920s. There was no doubt in most people’s minds that the governing Christian-Social Party remained as anti-Semitic as its founder, Vienna’s celebrated mayor Karl Lueger. And I still recall the moment of shock when my elders – I was barely thirteen – received the news of the 1930 German Reichstag election, which made Hitler’s National Socialists the second-largest party. They knew what it meant. In short, there was simply no way of forgetting that one was Jewish, even though I cannot recall any personal anti-Semitism, because my Englishness gave me, in school at least, an identity which drew attention away from my Jewishness. Britishness probably also immunized me, fortunately, against the temptations of a Jewish nationalism, even though Zionism among the central European young generally went together with moderate or
