Archive for September, 2009

Items for the interim – Stuff I’ve seen while being too busy

It pains me that I haven’t updated GHB since last Wednesday, and I probably won’t again until the weekend.  The reason is because I got a rush job for German-to-English translation of some very, very dense and difficult German.  It concerns psychological research and it’s just simply brutal.  Here’s a single sentence to give you an idea.  Yes, this is just one sentence:

Darüber hinaus deutet Vieles darauf hin, dass in Aus- und Weiterbildungslehrgängen für Pflegepersonen (im Altenbereich) ein geringes Gewicht auf die Vermittlung von Wissen und die Förderung von Kompetenzen gelegt wird, die es Pflegepersonen ermöglichen, über explizite und implizite Momente des eigenen Wahrnehmens, Erlebens und Denkens, die ihre pflegerische Tätigkeit unmittelbar und häufig unbewusst beeinflussen, in professioneller Art und Weise zu reflektieren.

I’m not really that good of a translator.  In fact, I’m not a translator in any official capacity at all.  But I accepted the job and it’s moving forward, albeit very slowly; I’m doing it during my evenings, since I have a day job.  It should be finished by Friday.

So anyway, as I said, it kills me to leave GHB so unattended.  During little breaks in the work, I have surfed around to look at stuff as always, so I just mention a few things here now.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Last week I tweeted about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s First Person podcast series.  Since then I’ve taken the time to look around more at the rest of the USHMM’s website, and I’m very impressed with what’s available.  Just one example is their Online Exhibitions page.  Have a look at it.  If you like original source material like oral histories, interviews, documents, film footage and the like, then this is really a place for you to stop by.

Harvard Law School Library: Nuremberg Trials Project

According to the introductory page, Harvard has over a million documents related to the trials.  They don’t seem to have scanned many of them yet to make them available online, but there are some from the “Doctors’ Trials”, the trials concerning such experimentation on human subjects.  If you look at their Documents page, you get an example of how the prosecution worked with documents.  The page shows you an original German document, a typed version (still in German), another typed version (now translated to English), and a “Staff Analysis” prepared by the prosecution staff.  I found that interesting.

European Resistance Archive

This web site has several videos containing eyewitness testimony of people who resisted fascism throughout Europe.  The videos even contain English subtitles.  I’ve just watched the testimony of Ms Romana Verdel from Carinthia.  Very interesting!

That’s all for now.  GHB will be back in normal operation soon.  Bis bald!

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In the Hausarchiv: Mikrophon, September 1934

In the Hausarchiv: Mikrophon, September 1934

mikrophon_cover.jpgAmateur history nerd that I am, I’m quite pleased to have married into a family which has retained all sorts of books, newspapers and magazines dating from about 1920 onwards. The “In the Hausarchiv” series gives an occasional look at the things I’ve come across in our own “house archive”.

Today’s “In the Hausarchiv” features the September 1934 edition of the small-format magazine, Mikrophon, a “magazine for radio listeners” produced by what was, at the time, the official Austrian radio broadcaster (RAVAG).

The cover of this September 1934 edition shows a young man wearing traditional garb (Carinthian, perhaps?), a photo which hints at one of the features within the edition, namely a story about traditional Austrian costume (“Österreichische Volkstrachten“). But of real interest to me is the first story inside: “Österreichs Heldenkanzler ist tot … !” (“Austria’s heroic chancellor is dead … !”; see scanned image). This refers to the July 1934 murder of Austria’s chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss.

mikrophon_dollfuss.jpgI know that, to many people, Austrian history is rather obscure. People with “passing” knowledge of the years surrounding World War Two might know of the Anschluss of 1938, when Nazi Germany occupied and then dissolved Austria, merging it into Germany. But I think relatively few people these days know that the Nazis attempted a Putsch in Austria already in 1934. It was via this Putsch that the life of the Austrian Chancellor at the time, Engelbert Dollfuss, ended; one of the Nazis who stormed the Chancellery shot him twice.

Dollfuss himself was basically a dictator, more like the Mussolini of 1934 than the Hitler of 1934, but even more so like one might expect a Catholic dictator following some of the social tenets of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to be. Generally speaking, there was no broad terror associated with his dictatorship. His major concern at the time of his death in 1934 seems to have been to save Austria from Germany. With that goal in mind, he tried various ways to instill a specifically Austrian patriotism to counter the German nationalism which attached many of his subjects to the big northern neighbor and its Führer. If I sound like I’m minimizing the dictatorial aspects of Dollfuss’s regime, well it’s simply because I’m not very “impressed” with his stature amongst the 20th Century European dictators. I’m being a bit tongue-and-cheek here: by saying I’m not “impressed” I mean that Dollfuss and his followers didn’t murder and invade like the others. This isn’t to say his regime wasn’t repressive. In fact, here in the 21st Century, a good Austrian Social Democrat would probably jump down my throat for any hints of minimization of the Dollfuss dictatorship such as I’ve presented so far in this paragraph. Dollfuss did, after all, ban the Social Democrats (and the Nazis, for that matter.) He ended the parliamentary republic of Austria and instituted one party rule (the “Fatherland Front”). He was a dictator, plain and simple. He just happened to be nowhere near the meanest of the group of dictators that plagued Europe around that time. (Of course, that doesn’t mean he would not have become as bad as the others…)

Anyway…

The small set of paragraphs beneath Österreichs Heldenkanzler ist tot!, as shown in the image, provide us with a nice example of precisely the kind of patriotism which Dollfuss attempted to instill in the Austrian people. An excerpt:

“Österreich über alles, wenn es nur will.” — Dollfuss hat das Wort geprägt, und sein von glühender Vaterlandsliebe beseelter Optimismus hat es hinausgetragen bis in die fernsten Täler seiner unvergleichlich schönen Heimat, hat es tief hineingegraben in das Herz seines Volkes.”

I find it somewhat difficult to translate that first part: Österreich über alles, wenn es nur will.  Many of you may have heard or read the words “Deutschland (, Deutschland) über alles” (which, contrary to the belief of many, did not come from the Nazis).  One English analog to “über alles” might be “first”, in the sense meant by the America First Committee of the early 1940s. In other words, “Austria (or Germany) is important above all other considerations”. Then the “wenn es nur will” part means, “if it would just want it”, i.e., if it was simply willing to believe in itself and fight for itself. It’s a strong call to patriotism, which we might translate, in a much more wordy fashion, like this:

Austria First! It can prevail, if only it would believe in itself!

Then, with the rest (“Dollfuss hat das Wort…”):

“Austria First! It can prevail, if only it would believe!” — Dollfuss coined this saying, and his optimism, animated by a burning love for his Fatherland, carried it to the nethermost valleys of his incomparably beautiful homeland and buried it deep into the heart of his people.

One can imagine that RAVAG, the radio broadcaster which published this magazine to its listeners, had a special hatred for whom they describe as “feige Mörder” (cowardly murderers). For on the day of the Putsch, 25 July 1934, the Putschists raided and occupied two buildings: the Chancellery where Dollfuss was killed, and … RAVAG! The following excerpt comes from Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s excellent Dollfuss (Amazon US, UK):

The storming of the Government headquarters had been the rebels’ first success. Their second was the seizure soon afterwards of the main Austrian RAVAG studios in the Johannesgasse from where, at lunch-time, they managed to broadcast a brief message announcing the “resignation” of Dollfuss and the appointment of Dr. Rintelen as his successor.

The Putsch fizzled out on that day and the Austria of the “Fatherland Front” survived to live another four years before being gobbled up by the rather more mean dictatorship from the north.

“Denying the Holocaust”, by Deborah Lipstadt (Book of the Week)

“Denying the Holocaust”, by Deborah Lipstadt (Book of the Week)

In the dedication which begins Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [eng]), Deborah Lipstadt includes this passage from Deuteronomy 32:7:

Remember the days of yore; learn the lessons of the generation that came before you.

One of the themes of her book which struck me the most is the blatant disregard of eyewitness testimony — most especially Holocaust survivors — by those who deny or minimize the Holocaust. With that sad fact in mind, I find the rest of that passage of Deuteronomy, the part she did not include, poignant and relevant:

Remember the days of yore; learn the lessons of the generation that came before you. Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will inform you. [my emphasis]

One of Lipstadt’s examples of fathers and elders being ignored can be seen in this passage concerning evidence of the gas chambers:

Deniers, led by [Robert] Faurisson, repeatedly call for “one proof… one single proof” of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. They dismiss the reliability of all human testimony, whether it came from the SS, surviving inmates, or Sonderkommando members. They do so despite the fact that regarding the general details of the gassings, the testimony of all the parties tends to corroborate each other. [from the Appendix, p. 225 of the 1994 Plume printing.]

The Robert Faurisson whom she mentions is one of a cast of the more prominent characters whose Holocaust denial or minimization she discusses. Lipstadt generally follows a chronological approach, beginning even before the Holocaust itself: from Chapter Two, “Antecedents”:

The deniers consider themselves heirs of a group of influential American historians who were deeply disturbed by American involvement in World War I. [31]

To Lipstadt, those earlier so-called revisionists were unlike their Holocaust-denying followers in the sense that the post-World War I group consisted largely of serious historians engaging in serious research. One of them, however, became the bridge between that first generation of revisionists and the later group that assaulted the memory of the Holocaust: Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes therefore plays a prominent role in Chapter Four, “The First Stirrings of Denial in America.” After Barnes, Lipstadt discusses several others at length, amongst them Austin J. App — who, for example, argued that the Germans clearly did not exterminate Jews since, after all, “every Jew who survived the German occupation is proof of this” [93] –, Arthur Butz, and those associated with the Institute for Historical Review.

Lipstadt also dedicates entire chapters to the “Gas Chamber Controversy” (chapter nine) and “The Battle for the Campus” (chapter ten.) The latter, as you might guess, examines efforts by various groups to promote Holocaust “revisionism” on college campuses. She then ends with an interesting Appendix, wherein she takes on three of the most common Holocaust denial arguments:

  • The Nazis would not have used Zyklon-B: it would have been far too dangerous for their own personnel to handle. Therefore traces of it found at Auschwitz can be explained only as having been used for decontamination of morgues rather than for homicidal purposes.
  • There is no documentary proof of the existence of gas chambers.
  • The Diary of Anne Frank was not written until after the war, and not by a young girl named Anne Frank.

I won’t give away the evidence that Lipstadt compiles against each of these claims; read the book! It’s almost embarrassing for me to even mention the claims. Lipstadt herself recognizes that publication of such arguments touches a nerve:

I do so with some reluctance, lest it appear that I believe that serious consideration must be given to these people’s claims. I do, however, believe that even a cursory perusal of the relevant sections of these documents will demonstrate the deceitful quality of the deniers’ claims.

The fact is, most of us studied the Holocaust not to amass an intellectual arsenal against its deniers, but rather simply to learn about it and to learn from it. We don’t study it expecting to need to prove its existence. When someone comes along with plausible-sounding arguments denying or minimizing the Holocaust, we are not prepared to answer. This means we either come away thinking, “That guy was a nutcase,” or we come away with a seed of doubt successfully planted in our heads. So while it is no doubt distasteful to grant the deniers’ arguments something resembling an intellectual debate, it is nevertheless a good thing we have people like Deborah Lipstadt to take on this depressing task and produce books such as Denying the Holocaust (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [eng]).

(Photo credit: The lead photo in this blog post shows the entry to Auschwitz and belongs to flickr user “One from RM”. http://www.flickr.com/photos/onefromrome/ / CC BY 2.0.)

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Irving ad nauseum

Irving ad nauseum

Well it’s too bad to see David Irving in the news again. What makes it worse this time is that he’s not in the newspaper because of some dastardly speech or because Austrian or German authorities got hold of him once again, but rather because he was, unbelievably, invited to be in a newspaper. The Spanish El Mundo actually and deliberately sought his opinions on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. They ran his interview as part of a series that included the likes of historian Ian Kershaw and Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev.

This is probably the most opinionated you’ll ever see me at German History Buzz, so let’s get it over with and move on. I can only assume that someone with authority at El Mundo either subscribes to Irving’s “theories” about the Holocaust (or lack of a Holocaust), or at least finds them compelling, serious and scholarly enough to present them as being on par with, say, Ian Kershaw’s biographies of Hitler. It would be interesting to know if there was much dissent in the editorial offices when some genius suggested including Irving in the series. It terrifies me to think that there might have been no dissent.

My first reaction when I saw Kershaw’s name was, “Why did he agree to take part given that Irving was involved?” But I see in a later report that Kershaw was not told about Irving and would not have participated had he been told.

I tweeted about this topic on Wednesday and referred people to the transcript of the judge’s opinion in the case of Irving v. Lipstadt. In my own head I tend to refer to that opinion rather colloquially as “The Great Smackdown”. Now I’m a bit of a historical nerd so I anyway like reading this kind of stuff, but really I find the opinion simply breathtaking. Having read Lipstadt’s book about the trial, I found it interesting that she and others, throughout the proceedings, were really unsure and occasionally quite worried about Mr. Justice Gray. In the end, as you’ll see if you read the opinion, they had little to worry about.

It’s a huge, comprehensive, and thorough opinion, so I know that few will actually read it. If you want to get to the meat of the judge’s views on Irving’s merit as a historian, you can jump to section XIII, Findings on Justification, though you’ll be lacking some context when you land there. In those Findings, Mr. Justice Gray throws one bone out to Irving (“My assessment is that, as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him” [13.7, my emphasis]), before spending the next umpteen paragraphs grabbing it back and more.

If you are not planning to read the whole judgement, let me help out by ending this rather lengthy blog post with a close inspection of one of the defense’s (Lipstadt’s) historiographical criticisms of Irving. I’ll show the pattern followed by Mr. Justice Gray throughout the judgement: lay out the issue rather dispassionately, present each side’s arguments and, later, announce his own findings.

The Issue: Three speeches by Heinrich Himmler in 1943 and 1944 and how Irving treats them as a historian.
Mr. Justice Gray starts by presenting parts of the three Himmler speeches. I’ll just quote one of them here, Himmler’s speech to generals on 5 May 1944, presented in paragraph 5.223 of the judgement:

“The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself and in general within the countries occupied by Germany. It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation in which the existence of our blood is at stake. You can understand how difficult it was for me to carry out this soldierly order (soldatische Befehl) and which I carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction”.

Defense’s allegations.
Mr. Justice Gray then presents the defense’s allegations of Irving’s faulty treatment of this issue in his books. For brevity’s sake, I’ll put just one of the defense arguments here, that of paragraph 5.227:

The Defendants direct particular criticism at Irving for the way in which he deals at p630 of Hitler’s War (1977 edition) with the speech of 5 May. He there paraphrases what Himmler in such a way as to conceal the uncompromisingly brutal language used by Himmler. After the reference to Himmler’s speech, Irving adds:

“Never before, and never after, did Himmler hint at a Fuhrer order, but there is reason to doubt that he showed this passage to his Fuhrer”.

The Defendants reply that it is pure surmise on Irving’s part that the relevant passage was not shown to Hitler but it is presented by him to the reader as established fact. They point out that in the 1991 edition the reference to Himmler’s speech of 5 May has been omitted altogether. The Defendants maintain that it is an important part of the narrative because it casts light on Hitler’s role in the extermination of the Jews. The inescapable inference is that Irving was determined to avoid compromising Hitler.

Irving’s response.
Mr. Justice Gray then summarizes Irving’s response to the defense’s allegations. I’ll quote here part of 5.229 because it’s relevant to the allegation I quoted above:

He [Irving] disputed the contention that the speech of 5 May points towards the existence of a Hitler order. From the facts the transcript of the relevant page of the speech has evidently been typed on a different typewriter and the pagination has been altered, Irving deduced that the document has been tampered with and is accordingly unreliable. He rejected the mundane explanation that Himmler was simply revising what he proposed to say in his speech. Irving further argued that it is to be inferred that the transcript was sanitised before it was submitted to Hitler because Himmler did not want Hitler to know that he (Himmler) was claiming falsely to have been acting on the order of Hitler.

Mr. Justice Gray’s conclusions regarding this issue.
Only near the end of the entire opinion do we get to read Mr Justice Gray’s own conclusions (findings) concerning the various issues in contention. And so at paragraph 13.46 we learn of his assessment of Irving’s handling of the three Himmler speeches:

It is a common ground that in these three speeches Himmler was speaking, with remarkable frankness, about the murder of the Jews. The question is whether Irving dealt in an objective and fair manner with the evidence which those speeches afford as to Hitler’s knowledge of and complicity in the murder of the Jews. I am satisfied that he did not. Two of the speeches provide powerful evidence that Hitler ordered that the extermination of the Jews should take place. Yet in the 1977 edition of “Hitler’s War” Irving suggests that the existence of a Hitler order was an invention on the part of Himmler. It does not appear to me that the evidence supports that suggestion. I consider that Irving’s deduction that the transcript of the speech of 5 May was either altered after Himmler delivered the speech or sanitised before it was shown to Hitler is fanciful. The absence of any mention of that speech in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War was in my judgment another culpable omission.

Recommended reading:
I recognize that Mr. Justice Gray’s judgement, being as dispassionate as it is, doesn’t make for particularly exciting reading (though I enjoy reading it!) Therefore if you are interested in reading more about the trial, I can recommend the books which I’ve read. They are as follows:

  • Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, by Deborah Lipstadt (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [english]). This is the book that caused Irving to sue for libel.
  • History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, also by Deborah Lipstadt (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [english]). This book covers the trial itself.
  • The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case, by D.D. Guttenplan (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [english]). If reading an account from the defendant herself, Ms Lipstadt, doesn’t feel objective enough for you, you can read this book by a third party.

And then there is this book, which I haven’t read but which I very much want to read:

  • Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, by Richard J. Evans (Amazon US, UK, CA). Professor Evans was a witness for the defense and is a prominent historian of Modern Germany.

Image credit:
The lead image to this blog post shows part of an actual deportation list. Willie Glaser is credited as the source and author of the image and has licensed it for “anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification.” I didn’t want a photo of Irving on my blog, so I chose instead to show part of a document that represents a small part of the great tragedy which Irving and others like him choose to either disbelieve outright or minimize.

In the Hausarchiv: Wiener Zeitung, 13 November 1945

In the Hausarchiv: Wiener Zeitung, 13 November 1945

Amateur history nerd that I am, I’m quite pleased to have married into a family which has retained all sorts of books, newspapers and magazines dating from about 1920 onwards. The “In the Hausarchiv” series gives an occasional look at the things I’ve come across in our own “house archive”.

Today’s “In the Hausarchiv” features the Tuesday, 13 November 1945, edition of the Viennese newspaper the Wiener Zeitung. We have a bunch of issues of this newspaper in the Hausarchiv; the earliest I’ve found so far is from 4 November 1945.

Today I set out on a special mission in my quest to find a topic for the Hausarchiv series: find the earliest mention — amongst the stack ofWiener Zeitung editions that we have — of the scope of the killing of Jews under National Socialism. It didn’t take long. As I mentioned, the oldest edition we have is from 4 November 1945, and I found within the 13 November 1945 edition the following quote:

3 Millionen jüdische Frauen und Kinder wurden von deutscher Hand erschossen oder starben den Tod in den Gaskammern.

3 million jewish woman and children were shot by German hands or perished in the gas chambers. [my translation]

An article titled “Die unverschämste Propagandalüge” (“The most shameless propaganda lie”) contains the quote. The shameless lie it speaks of is: “Wenn der Führer das wüßte” (“If only the Führerknew”). The idea here is that apologists for Hitler were (and are!) fond of saying that the likes of Goebbels and Himmler tricked Hitler or hid the truth from him. “If only the Führer knew”, then he would have put a stop to the barbarity! The article scorns this view and tells of one Eugen Kumming, a former head translator within the Wehrmacht, who had just written an article for the Sudetendeutschen Zeitung in which he mentions the 3 million “jewish women and children” referenced above. He also tells the following stories:

Im April 1941 teilte ihm [Kumming] ein Oberstleutnant von Bodecker mit, daß SS-Verbände jüdische Frauen und Mädchen in Warschau zusammentrieben und sie nackt im 4. Stock eines Hotels eingesperrt hatten. Tagelang waren sie Opfer wiederholter Schändungen und wurden schließlich durch das Fenster auf die Straße geworfen. Ein Oberstleutnant Mauck berichtet, daß er gesehen habe, wie SS und SD-Angehörige über 1500 Juden bis zum Halse in einen Sumpf in der Nähe von Solotschew getrieben und sie dort als lebendige Zielscheibe benutzt hätten.

A certain lieutenant-colonel von Bodecker told him [Kumming] in April 1941 that SS troops had rounded up some Jewish women and girls and locked them up, naked, on the fourth floor of a hotel in Warsaw. These women and girls were raped for days and then thrown out of windows on to the street. Another lieutenant-colonel, a certain Mauck, reported that he’d seen how SS and SD members in Solotschew had placed 1500 Jews up to their necks in a swamp and used them as live targets for practice.

So why was I searching for the earliest mention of the Holocaust that I could find within our stack of Wiener Zeitung editions? Because David Irving has come out again from under his rock — this time actually invited, I’m sorry to report — and had the following to say about the alleged jewish manufacturing of “Holocaust”:

Until the 1970s [the Holocaust] was just a speck of dust on the horizon … The proof is that it doesn’t appear in any of the biographies of the great leaders of the Second World War. But from then on it became fashionable. The Jews turned it into a brand, using the same technique as Goebbels. They invented a slogan… and repeated it ad nauseam.

Now I realize he’s not exactly saying that nobody reported on mass extermination of Jews prior to the 1970s, but his suggestion that it wasn’t on the radar prior to then made me want to find the earliest mention of it that I could. And so I found it, printed in an Austrian newspaper just seven months after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Someone was apparently paying attention long before the 1970s.

I’ll have a larger post about David Irving on Thursday. In the meantime, I’ll just say that it’s kind of an interesting coincidence that I found this particular article which, as I explained above, is centered around the lie of “If only the Führer knew”: a coincidence because David Irving, as you’ll see in my Thursday post, is guilty of precisely that lie.

Hooliganism I can live with: football in Nazi Vienna.

Hooliganism I can live with: football in Nazi Vienna.

I have to be honest with you: I really look down upon soccer (football) hooliganism and I don’t understand the level of hysteria that often occurs at (and, especially, after) soccer matches in parts of Europe and the UK. But I have enjoyed reading about this kind of hooliganism in Vienna during the Nazi era:

On November 18, 1940, some 52,000 fans jammed into Vienna’s soccer stadium in the Prater for a game between Vienna’s Admira and the German champion Schalke 04. The stadium crowd was unruly and ready for trouble. And trouble, political trouble, there was aplenty, despite a massive display of uniformed and plainclothes police and the presence of an impressive array of Nazi brass led by [Baldur von] Schirach and his wife. Let a German player commit a foul, or worse, get away with it, and fans’ anger exploded into anti-German, even anti-Nazi, expletives. As the [Neues Wiener Tagblatt] noted, the crowd ignored Austrian infractions, or worse, cheered them. It didn’t help that Schalke played a tough, even brutal, brand of football. And when the referee disallowed Admira’s go-ahead goal after the teams were tied 1 to 1, the crowd exploded with soccer war style fury. Fans grew totally out of hand when an Admira forward headed the ball into the net, and the referee called that goal back too and the game ended in a tie.

Just how serious was the riot? The Gestapo cabled uncertain reports back and forth from Berlin, suggesting that they would need 10,000 police to pick out ringleaders of so large a mob. What’s more, even with the sizable contingent of police on hand that day, nobody was around when so-called hooligans smashed the window of Schirach’s limousine and slashed its tired. Soccer would remain a Gestapo problem for the rest of the war; especially when, seven months later, the Viennese got revenge of a different sort. Before 90,000 fans in Berlin’s stadium Rapid cannonaded Schalke 04 into submission. [p. 182-3]

That’s from Thomas Weyr’s excellent book, The Setting of the Pearl: Vienna Under Hitler (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [english]). Weyr later quotes a witness, Kurt Neubauer:

I was at the Stadium when Admira played Schalke 04 and yelled my head off at the Piefkes. Soccer gave you a chance to protest. [p. 226]

(Piefke is an Austrian derogatory term used against Germans … to this day!)

I’m interested in the topic of sport as one of the very, very few forms of public protest available to Germans and Austrians under Nazism. The Austrian expert in this arena, according to the results of my web searches, appears to be the historian Dr. Matthias Marschik. He has an article, Between Manipulation and Resistance: Viennese Football in the Nazi Era, which I’d love to read but appears to be available only after payment.

The Viennese family into which I married supports the FK Austria Wien football side, as opposed to their bitter rivals, SK Rapid Wien, so I naturally find FK Austria Wien’s history particularly interesting. This is especially so since they were the Vienna side that seems to have suffered the most after the Anschluss by virtue of the fact that they were the team most associated with Jewish people. I found a very interesting article, unfortunately only in German, titled Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz (“Football under the Swastika”). The article’s authorsinterviewed the son of FK Austria Wien’s pre-Anschluss club president, Dr Emanuel Schwarz, himself Jewish. After the Anschluss, Dr Schwarz was, of course, unceremoniously relieved of his duties and he wisely began seeking an exit visa. His replacement as the head of the club, an SA Sturmbannführer, began his new duties by taking away one of Dr Schwarz’s trophies. The Schwarz family managed to get it back after the war.

According to the article (my translation),

A large portion of the club’s management had to escape Austria after the Anschluss. Robert Lang, the club manager, escaped to Yugoslavia, but was later captured there by the Nazis and murdered. President Schwarz was able to stay for a short while because he was, for a time, protected by the fact that he married a non-Jew; he stayed in Vienna only to await permission to travel to the USA. As this was not forthcoming, he eventually fled to Bologna, thanks in large part to his contacts within Italian football. With help from the FIFA president Jules Rimet, he received permission to emigrate to France in 1939. He went underground when the Germans invaded France. … The later national team manager Walter Nausch and Karl Geyer left Vienna with their jewish wives.

Amazingly, the team survived during the Nazi years, but wasn’t very successful, never finishing higher than fourth in the Gauliga Ostmark, as the Austrian league was called during the Nazi era. More amazingly, “FK Austria Wien” appears to be the only institution in the “Ostmark” to have retained the word “Austria” in their name.

Photo credit: the lead photo in this article shows the inside of Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license. Attribution:

Stefan Zweig, “The World of Yesterday” (Book of the Week)

Stefan Zweig, “The World of Yesterday” (Book of the Week)

Some autobiographies manage to go beyond the subject’s own life and capture the very essence of an entire epoch. I consider The World of Yesterday (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [eng], DE [deu]) at the top of any list of such autobiographies. I have certainly never read another that made me feel so connected to the times in which the author lived.

Given the turmoil which the world saw during the span of Stefan Zweig’s life (1881-1942), we can say that he witnessed not just one but a handful of epochs. His generation “was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history,” enduring as it did both World Wars. Zweig and his wife chose to no longer endure their fate as stateless, homeless refugees after he finished this book; they ended their lives together in Brazil in 1942 after sending off the manuscript to the publishers in New York.

Zweig was born into what he calls the “World of Security”, the late Habsburg era during which one could theoretically plan out one’s life in the finest of detail. Each knew his position in that society. Families had budgets, incomes were pre-determined, everything was insured, risks were frowned upon. School — a topic to which he devotes an entire chapter — consisted of curricula so finely tuned that instructors could get through a year without learning the names of their students; they merely needed to repeat what they had done the previous year, and the year before that … with such consistency that they could do it with their heads down, practically avoiding the faces of individual pupils.

Events would later prove just how fragile the security and confidence of that era were. The trauma of the First World War, followed by massive inflation and the unsteady inter-war years, and then the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of war in 1939 … Zweig experienced all of this, and, at the risk of sounding elitist, he did so not just as any ordinary person, but as an “international” intellectual with close friends in many of those countries which, ostensibly, would become “enemies”. His pan-European outlook, which permeates the book, provides a perspective on the events of that time which is quite different than, say, the perspective of a statesman or a general.

Most importantly, Zweig pens his memoir as the same able storyteller who told so many other excellent stories, such as Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Invisible Collection, to name just the few that I have read.

Given that I present a “Book of the Week” each week, I’ve got to be careful to not get into the habit of saying the following: You really must read this book. Please indulge me as I say it this week, because if there is any one book that I would recommend which covers the period from a personal perspective, it would be this one. I’ll let The New Republic have the last word:

It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture. The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative. [From the back cover of the University of Nebraska Press edition of the book.]

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