André Heller’s Memorial Address in Memory of March 12, 1938

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André Heller is an Austrian artist, poet, author and singer.

 

Andre Heller (71) and his mother (104)

On the evening of March 11, 1938, my father – this was probably the last day of optimism in his life – a big confectionery manufacturer and dedicated Austrofascist, said reassuringly to his friend Emil Fey, Dollfuss’ former Vice-Chancellor and leader of the Home Guard: “You know, things will not be as bad as they seem”.

A hundred hours later, after being brutally questioned by the Gestapo, Fey shot his wife, his son and then himself, and in the morning of March 12, after the wholly unhindered invasion of the First Republic by the German Wehrmacht – the so-called “Anschluss” – the doorbell of my parents’ apartment on Brahmsplatz 1 in Vienna kept ringing. The housekeeper opened the door and saw three youngish men in police uniforms and swastika armbands.

As if normal speech were prohibited, one of the three men blared [speaking the local vernacular]: “Where is the Jew Stephan Heller?”. With remarkable courage Miss Kralicek answered: “Please, the masters only receive people by appointment”. Another roar: “As a matter of principle we always come without prior appointment”. They then pushed the girl brutally aside, so that she fell to the floor. That is when my father appeared in his dressing gown, followed by my fearful 24-years-old mama holding the hand of my brother, who was 3.5 years old. “How dare you?” said my father.

The answer was: “We can do what we want. Now it is finally the decent people’s turn. You are to come with us immediately “. This is at least what my mother remembers – she is now 104 and is at home watching the broadcast of this event on ORF.

Then my father asked: “Is this an arrest?” “Yes, for your protection” “Protection against whom?” “Against the public’s justified displeasure”.

“Will you allow me to change and pack a bag with the utmost necessities?” “Yes but hurry up. We have many other interesting protection measures to perform today”.

My father went into his dressing-room. While waiting for him, the three men made my mother – who was absolutely intimidated – hand over all her jewelry.

When my father returned, over his 3-piece suit he was wearing a camel hair coat which he had decorated with all the medals he had got as an officer during World War One.

“What does this insolence mean!”, shouted one of the henchmen, and another slapped Stephan Heller’s face with self-satisfied cockiness. “What you are calling insolence, gentlemen, is my proof of the services rendered in the Kaiser’s army and of my passionate love of Austria”.

“As of today, there is no Austria any more”, said one of the men in a dangerously quiet voice. And then, looking at my father’s travel bag: “I hope you have a toothbrush in there! You are going to need one soon”.

Then they escorted my father to a place in front of the Theresianum, and for a full hour, encouraged by laughing and swearing Viennese people, they made him kneel down and, with the help of his toothbrush, clean Schuschnigg slogans, appeals for a free Austria, written on the pavement – without much success. He was then incarcerated in the so-called “Liesl”, the police prison on Rossauer Lande. This was my parents’ experience of the first hours of the Anschluss.

It was probably in October 1970 that my friend and mentor Helmut Qualtinger phoned me and asked: “Do you feel like meeting Carl Zuckmayer tonight at 8 pm at the Falstaff Restaurant near the National Opera?” I was of course interested in meeting the author of theater events such as “Der Hauptmann von Köpenick” or “Des Teufels General”. Incidentally, he had also co-written the scenario for the classic film “Der blaue Engel” together with Heinrich Mann. This means that I came promptly and saw Helmut excitedly speaking with Zuckmayer, who was smoking his pipe and looking like a beautiful Tirolean wood carving.

“Sit down and pay attention, because Zuck experienced more than others experience in 5 lifetimes”, Helmut said. “You exaggerate, but it is true that it is quite a lot for a life that has not yet ended”, the poet replied and taking up the conversation that had been interrupted by my appearance: “Listen, your Mister Karl’s wording, that the exultant masses’ mood during Hitler’s Heldenplatz speech and the following days conveyed the feeling as if at an enormous wine tavern, only more solemn, may have been true as far as those inebriated by the Nazis are concerned. But for people like us it was different”, and now Zuckmayer started to passionately describe what remained in his memory “as if part of myself”.

I am quoting word for word: “All hell was let loose. The underworld had opened its doors and freed its lowest, most evil and impure spirits. The city became a nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch: lemures and half daemons seemed to have crawled out of dirt eggs and climbed out of sinkholes. What was unleashed here was an upwelling of jealousy, resentment, bitterness, blind and malevolent thirst for revenge, and all other voices were sentenced to remain silent. Nothing was unleashed but the dim masses. The blind destructive frenzy and their hate were turned against everything that had been refined by nature or the human spirit. It was the mob’s Witches’ Sabbath and the burial of human dignity”.

So far, the perception of a blessed observer and literary analyst I have never forgotten and will never forget.

This Viennese Witches’ Sabbath of the deluded became the model for the big pogrom of November 1938 in the whole of the Reich territory. Based on that, two months later, in January 1939, Hitler announced at the Reichstag, i.e. for the ears of the entire world, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe in case of a coming war.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is an unquestionable connection between the elation at that time, outside, in front of these windows at Heldenplatz and all the horrors that followed.

But what had preceded this madness?

What remained of Austria in the First Republic was suffering from a first-class loss complex.

Radical loss of territorial size, radical loss of importance on the political world scene, loss of many industries, loss of agriculture and jobs, loss of something particularly boundless, nostalgic and beautiful: the sea and the Mediterranean landscapes. The loss of the nobility’s role, the loss of a collective feeling of self-esteem, the subtle body of the Austro–Hungarian monarchy, of hundreds of years of nourishing and inspiring a unique mixture of languages, religions, cultures and nations. In November 1918 nobody knew what would happen to the German Austria left over from the Habsburg map.

Representative democracy. Bolshevism, revolutionary fermentations of all horrible and beneficial shades were a realistic option, and practically nobody in the whole country knew what the purpose of this Austrian State could be. Governments changed rapidly: at one time a lawyer was Chancellor, then a clergyman, then a police president, then an agriculture expert, who in cooperation with his movement cancelled Parliament and established a catholic dictatorship.

And in such insecurity, such chaos, this tragic nonsense depending on improvisation, luck and political skill, to which the fate of the early 1920s added hyperinflation with total devaluation of the currency – a further blow for wage earners and the middle class – it was extremely difficult to remain optimistic when you were not one of the racketeers, the profiteers, the amoral gamblers.

My worshipped, beautiful and open-minded grand-mother once told me: “You know, my boy, my main solace during the reeling period between the wars, what I perceived as my inalienable homeland, were the music of Mozart and Schubert. And when I listened to Lotte Lehmann at the Opera or read aloud from Rilke or Hofmannsthal at the Trade Association, I was saved – at least for some time – and my eyes and ears found refuge from coarseness and unkindness. You see, we felt that something horrible, an unspeakable catastrophe was looming.

“By the time they were shooting workers and then when Socialists, Communists and illegal Nazis were incarcerated together in Austrofascist camps, it was no longer a feeling, we knew. From 1936 on, Nazis were no longer illegal and were visibly back on the streets, and by March 12, 1938, they had totally defeated all those who desired the continuation of an independent Austria. That is how it was, my boy” said my grandmother.

Ladies and Gentlemen, one of the cruelest pillars of murdering dictatorships has always been the creation of scapegoats who must continually be at fault for everything, and on whom the most abominable penances are often imposed. They are the blood-stained screen behind which extreme cynicism, amorality and criminal acts are raging. Among the Nazis’ gang of political offenders an overproportionate number of Austrians stood out. I shall name only a few representatives like Hitler, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Seyß-Inquart and several particularly brutish concentration camp and extermination camp commanders. Arsenals of homicidal fury, surreal sadism and infamy were disseminated to the remotest corners: for the extermination of Jews planned with military precision, but also of Roma and Sinti. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and believers of several other religious communities, as well as political offenders were sent to concentration camps, while hospitals and homes were practicing the extermination of sick children and adults, worthless lives in the Nazi view. Our minds are unable to grasp the extent and depth of the horror of that time, but there are small insights into daily banalities which suddenly tear open the curtain of distance and hit us through the heart:

The son of Auschwitz commander Höß who, when he was a child, was living with his parents in a villa bordering on the camp, related that his mother often warned him not to eat strawberries from the garden, because they were too grey. One day he understood that the grey color originated in the ashes of the crematoriums, incessantly fluttering down from the chimneys when it was windy, and was also inhaled by everyone, so that commanders, SS-guards and prisoners, the perpetrators as well as the victims, were most of the time inhaling ash particles of those who had been murdered.

After a world war without any measure – for the outbreak and duration of which the Nazis bore exclusive responsibility – they drove the deluded “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” to an unprecedented, unheroic collapse and to terrible auto destruction.

The main culprits, such as Hitler, Göbbels, Göring and Himmler, committed suicide, thereby avoiding the assumption of responsibility. If pride and insanity ever came before the fall, then it was the Nazis in 1945 with their idea of National Socialism.

Now it was zero hour for an Austrian rebirth, which was naturally impossible for wide sectors of the population, since the spiritual and factual brutality, the depressing betrayal of everything one was still cheering only days before, the contempt for human rights, which were the deforming result of Nazi rule for millions of subjects all over the country, could of course not be erased by pushing a delete key when the Second Republic was founded,, and continued fermenting in the heads, thoughts and behavior of many of them, and as we know, tragically exist in motes and beams to this day.

We owe our freedom to the Allied forces. People in Austria would not have been able, nor for a long time even willing to free themselves by their own efforts. The majority thankfully welcomed democracy as salvation, for those however who remained stranded on the wreckage of their fanaticism and their delusion, democracy was a symbol of their humiliation. Strangely, in this situation defined by diametrical attitudes, all political groups mostly agreed not to invite those Jews who had been expelled, robbed and outlawed – those who had not been murdered in concentration camps or elsewhere – to come back to Austria and take part in the country’s moral, cultural and economic reconstruction. There were hardly any feelings of guilt towards them. In 1991, 46 years after the end of the Nazi rule, Chancellor Vranitzky was the first to admit Austrian guilt and to invite Jews to come back to the country.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, during the terror of the Nazi era one needed enormous heroism and principles to join the resistance or even to only behave decently and characterfully in certain difficult situations. I admire and am thankful to all those righteous people. Their acts should not be underestimated, but nowadays there is no acceptable excuse not to oppose racism and xenophobia in politics, at the workplace, at the pub, on the football ground, in social media or in social clubs. There is no risk of torture and death. I admit that there might be some professional disadvantages, but in exchange we will get a better Austria.

Let us not forget that National Socialist rule did not start with Auschwitz, but with the exclusion of people considered to be objectionable, harmful.

And because many agreed, the Nazis got the green light, and the humanitarian catastrophe steadily grew.

I would like to pass on to my younger listeners what Bruno Kreisky emphatically told me on the occasion of our first talk in 1970: “For you and all those of your generation in Austria who were blessed to grow up in peace, freedom and prosperity, if only out of thankfulness for your luck, cowardice cannot be an option. All your life you must show solidarity with the weak and those exposed to injustice”.

Dear listeners, democracy must be the very opposite of whatever National Socialism stood for. The highest obligation of every legitimate democratic government is to respect and defend the principles of its existence, i.e. democracy and its constitution in all aspects. This means to protect them from being weakened and undermined. For example, the precious treasure of free reporting by independent media. This does not only concern the ORF, but them in particular.

Democracy should always be a showplace of honesty.

Honesty when informing citizens about all relevant subjects, in political discourse, truth when analyzing historical causes, national developments and the reasons for global dislocations.

(…)

Allow me to relate to you something memorable from my life. For decades I thought I was better than others. More intelligent, more gifted, more amusing, justified in my pride. I was arrogant, in love with myself, always evaluating others. This was not good for me. Until one day, in a carriage of the London underground, I looked around: a variety of people were sitting and standing there, of various skin colors and they spoke many different languages. In a kind of lighting stroke to my consciousness, I understood that each of those women and men, the old and the young, the hopeful and the desperate, is also myself, and that neither German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or Swahili is our real mother tongue, but that the global mother tongue is and should be compassion. Compassion makes it possible for us to recognize ourselves in any other person, to be intimately and fondly bound to them, and to take this insight into consideration in all our thoughts and acts.

Compassion!

Originally published in:

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© translated by: Translations International, Herzliya,

emjay@inter.net.il