My family history never
ceases to surprise me.
I, recently,
watched (a very rare occurrence) a highly enjoyable and intelligible series on
television, hosted by Simon Sebag-Montefiore, on the history of Vienna. And I
remembered that, many years ago, I had bought and read, with curiosity, a
semi-scholarly book entitled Vienna:
Legend and Reality by one Ilsa Barea. I decided I would dig it out and take
it, as an alternative to struggling with a recalcitrant video screen, on my
plane trip to Australia. Reading it again, 20 or 30 years on, in the light of
the TV show, and my own subsequent delvings into things Viennese, I was
reminded of an essay I wrote in University days: What really happened at the Battle of Marathon? Well, what did? No
one knows. You either believe the Greek version, or the Persian version. And
they are well and truly different! Mrs Barea was clearly a confirmed socialist.
So here we get the Persian version.
Her book’s biggest
hero seems to me to be Dr Viktor Adler, the effective developer of the poorly-organised
Viennese left-wing movement into the Austrian ‘Social Democrat Party’. His son,
Friedrich Adler, was the politically-motivated murderer of the Austrian Prime
Minister in 1916.
Adler? Adler?
Politics didn’t
get a mention in our house when we grew up, and I remain, today, what some have
called ‘politically naïve’ and what I call, simply, ‘utterly uninterested’.
However, in an earlier generation of my family, it was quite different. My Viennese
great-grandfather, Eduard Stojetz (1860-1942), was a keen and active
participant in the new party’s affairs, and there are records of his daughter,
my grandmother, reciting political poetry to the ‘brothers’ at the meetings of
the Floridsdorf chapter.
Nana (widow of a
Jew) stayed in Vienna, through the war, and when I asked what she did, I was
told that she was ‘a secretary at the Social Democratic Party’. Well, that
sounded middle-of-the-road enough. How was I to know? I didn’t ask any more.
Father clearly thought I had understood, and he told me one day, slightly
apologetically, that his grandfather had seen the famous charge of the mounted
imperial cavalry against the ‘workers’ and never forgot it. The trouble is,
that happened in 1848. Unless they did it twice. So maybe it was his
great-grandfather. I didn’t ask any more. I was only interested in stories
about music and opera and theatre and literature and sport. Politics
schmolotics.
And then, this
year, I opened nana’s boxes of photos and therein (amongst other things) was my
father’s ‘baby book’. Written in wretched German Sütterlin. But I could make
out some of it. After baby Fritz was born, mother and child went to the healthy
countryside for his earliest days. To Hinterholz bei Kirchstetten, to the home
of ‘Professor Adler’. Well! Is it the
hero Adler or the murderer Adler? I am sure it must be one or the other …
So my father, it
seems, spent his first days … hmmmm … Dad was five when the murder took place.
Maybe that’s got something to do with the reason why politics wasn’t talked in
our house… even by the indomitable Nana.
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