From Neither Here Nor There (Bill Bryson, 1991) pp262-5
Late one afternoon I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, in his old apartment on Berggasse, a mile or so to the north of the city centre. Berggasse is now a plain and rather dreary street, though the Freuds lived in some style. Their apartment had sixteen rooms, but of these only four are open to the public and they contain almost no furniture, original or otherwise, and only a few trifling personal effects of Freud’s: a hat and walking stick, his medical bag and a steamer trunk. Still, this doesn’t stop the trust that runs the museum from charging you thirty schillings to come in and look around.
The four rooms are almost entirely bare but for the walls, which are lined with 400 photographs and photocopies of letters and other documents relating to Freud’s life — though some of these, it must be said, are almost ludicrously peripheral: a picture of Michelangelo’s Moses, which Freud had admired on a trip to Italy, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, included not because Freud treated her or slept with her or even met her, but because he once saw her perform. Almost all of the personal effects Freud collected during half a century of living in this apartment — his library, his 2,500 pieces of classical statuary, his furniture, his famous consulting couch — are now in a far superior museum in Hampstead because, of course, Freud was driven from Vienna by the Nazis two years before he died.
The wonder to me is that it took him so long to go. By well before the turn of the century Freud was one of the most celebrated figures in world medicine, and yet he wasn’t made a professor at the University of Vienna until 1902, when he was nearly fifty, simply because he was a Jew.
Before the war there were 200,000 Jews in Vienna. Now there are hardly any. As Jane Kramer notes in her book Europeans, most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are ‘physically revolted in a Jew’s presence’. I’d have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the Observer revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country’s 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population — still enjoy too much – economic power and political influence.
The Germans, however unseemly their past, have made some moving attempts at atonement — viz., Willy Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizsacker apologizing to the world for the sins of his country on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. What do the Austrians do? They elect a former Wehrmacht officer as President.
I thought about this as I was walking from the Freud museum to my hotel along the Karl-Lueger-Strasse. At a set of traffic lights, a black limousine led by a single motor-cycle policeman pulled up. In the back seat, reading some papers, was – I swear to God – the famous Dr Kurt Waldheim, the aforementioned Wehrmacht officer and now President of Austria.
A lot of people aren’t sure of the difference between the Chancellor and the President in Austria, but it’s quite simple. The Chancellor decides national policy and runs the country, while the President rounds up the Jews. I’m only joking, of course! I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that President Waldheim would have anything to do with the brutal treatment of innocent people – not these days, certainly. Moreover, I fully accept Dr Waldheim’s explanation that when he saw 40,000 Jews being loaded onto cattle trucks at Salonica, he genuinely believed they were being sent to the sea-side for a holiday.
For the sake of fairness, I should point out that Waldheim insists he never even knew that the Jews of Salonica were being shipped off to Auschwitz. And let’s be fair — they accounted for no more than one-third of the city’s entire population (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking Nazi officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command.
Let’s give the man a break. I mean to say, when the Storm Troopers burned down forty-two of Vienna’s forty-three synagogues during Kristallnacht, Waldheim did wait a whole week before joining the unit. And after the Anschluss, he waited two whole weeks before joining the Nazi Student Union. Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.
Austria should be proud of him and proud of itself for having the courage to stand up to world opinion and elect a man of his calibre, pugnaciously overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar, that he has been officially accused of war crimes, that he has a past so murky and mired in mistruths that no one but he knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.
What a wonderful country.
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