`MY LITTLE AUSCHWITZ'
Richard Bassett on the
crassness of Austrian attitudes towards Jews
Vienna `WHAT after all does Times spelt back- wards read anyway?' the young girl with hair 'blonde as a Nazi's dream' asked. It was an inauspicious beginning to a con- versation attempting to discover whether the Austrians are any more anti-semitic than anyone else. Those outside Austria find it difficult to understand how, as more and more capital cities point an accusing finger at Dr Kurt Waldheim for his alleged links with Nazi atrocities, more and more Austrians rally to his support.
According to Belgrade, Athens, Tel Aviv and, of course, the World Jewish Congress in New York, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations is some mechant animal. For the Austrians, he is rapidly becoming a martyr, living proof of the 'evil' influence which Jews and Freemasons wield in the world's press. How much of this is potent anti-semitism and how much is an understandable tendency to help a beleaguered old man who is being daily vilified both at home and abroad is difficult to evaluate.
Many Austrians resent the interference of outside bodies in their political affairs. What would we in Britain think if a World Congress of Sikhs launched a campaign against someone of, say, Lord Hailsham's age and stature, alleging he had been involved as a young subaltern in planning the Amritsar massacre?
However unattractive Dr Waldheim is as a politician and however crassly he has handled this affair, one of the least edifying aspects of the last few weeks has been the World Jewish Congress's handling of their case, ever promising new sinister disclo- sures, new documents, more historians; Waldheim the liar, Waldheim the war criminal. Weeks before anyone had seen the UN file, itself made up of unsubstanti- ated evidence, Waldheim was a sentenced man, guilty on all counts. Is it surprising then that many Austrians detect in the World Jewish Congress's rhetoric some- thing which smells of the witch-hunt?
`Your Times may not be owned by Jews,' the foppish young graf assures me, 'but just look at the correspondents' names on the New York Times which first published these allegations.' There are in fact very few Jews left in Austria, something some observers would say was the reason why since the war the country has possessed no good newspapers, no first-rank artists and, most remarkable of all perhaps, not a single modern composer of note.
If younger Austrians grow up unaware of the presence of many Jews in the development of European culture, older Austrians remember a time before 1938 when Jews dominated the banking and artistic circles of their country. Before the Anschluss, the Industrielle Vereinigung (Union of Industrialists) was largely con- trolled by Jewish families even though they had adopted Austrian nationality. Among the most powerful families before 1938, Mayr Melnof, Mautner Markhof, Bloch Bauer and Rothschild are still household names among Austria's trade community.
The Industrielle Vereinigung in the Thir- ties used armed police to break strikes which occurred at factories where the workers had been promised wage increases when productivity improved, but were then told no increases would be possible.
It was this which made the anti-semitic `Let's hope that if Reagan goes in again, he uses plastic bullets.' Nazi propaganda so persuasive to a dreamy anti-capitalist populace in the year before Hitler marched into Vienna. In the arts, Jews were also well represented, though this has been exaggerated in recent years as art historians have become increasingly obsessed with the so-called decadence associated with fin-de-siecle Vienna. Sir Ernst Gombrich, himself of Viennese Jewish origins and a former pupil of the once renowned Theresianum, has wisely remarked that the two greatest misconcep- tions about Vienna earlier this century current in present Anglo-Saxon thinking are a belief that 'everyone was decadent' and 'anyone who wrote well or painted well was a Jew'. Rilke was not a Jew, neither was Musil or Adolf Loos. Nonethe- less there can be no doubt that Central Europe's culture owed much to the Jews, and that envy when coupled with poverty and the intimidation that was almost a daily event in Schuschnigg's Austria was a witches' brew Hitler could easily exploit. Most young Austrians would, I think, condemn the mass extermination of the Jews that took place during the war, but they have heard enough from uncles and grandfathers who lived then to view cynic- ally the good and bad guys Picture Post reporting which so often occurs when these old Nazi stories surface. Waldheim could have been a perfect example of the 'other side of the story' philosophy if he had right from the very beginning admitted his war- time career and made it clear that he was an unwilling prisoner of fortune, too afraid to rebel against a system which could have wiped out his entire family. Nonetheless, in a riveting two-hour tele- vision 'debate' — interrogation might be a better term — Dr Waldheim emerged last week still the most popular candidate in the elections. His rival, the rather supine Dr Steyrer, despite Dr Waldheim's pre- dicament, continues to lose support. For the potential head of one of Europe's most Catholic countries, his decision, widely publicised, to stop paying his church taxes and so formally renounce Catholicism is something of a faux pas. His support of abortions is another attitude calculated to lose him the support of the Catholic establishment which wields considerable influence in the country. This sort of political ineptitude easily matches Dr, Waldheim's crass observation that he had omitted mention of his wartime record on the Balkan front because people would find it 'uninteresting'. In fact, the more I think about it, it is the crassness with which Austrians talk about Jews, rather than anything which might be labelled anti-semitic, which is the real problem. Crassness at a garden party: call this grill my little Auschwitz.' And of course crassness at the polls: 'I can't vote for Steyrer — he's a Marxist — at least Waldheim wears the right clothes.' Sur- rounded by bands and loden, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations addresses a sea of Tyrolean hats in which hundreds of shaving brushes seem to be bobbing up and down. The words are the same, the allegations briskly dispatched, the foreign agents denounced and the applause, inevitably, nothing short of shat- tering.
`Is Herr Murdoch a Jew?' the girl in a dirndl asks. I cannot say, but then she cannot find a German word for crassness
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