The Exiles Return (32 page)

He had been there, he had been in the room when it had happened and he, he alone, had been the sole witness. No one else was involved.

There was a profound silence, broken only, after a few seconds, by a sobbing sound. It came from Kanakis, who was bent double on his chair, his head almost between his knees. Father Jahoda went over to him and put his arms around his shoulders. Kanakis sat up, and his face was ravaged with loss. His grief was so real and so sincere, and the Father’s concern for him so full of compassion, that the emotions of these two hard men, neither of them naturally given to sentiment, impregnated the atmosphere of the room and impressed itself on all present. It impressed itself quite particularly on the two officials, the Police Inspector and the American. Father Jahoda now turned to them both, and to the constable who had been taking down his, Jahoda’s, statement. ‘I’ll initial this,’ he said, ‘and when the protocol is typed, I will sign it, and I hope both gentlemen will do the same. There will then be no need for any further formalities.’ The two officials looked at each other for an instant and then nodded in agreement. The Police Inspector held out his hand. ‘Thank you, Hochwürden.’ And the American said, ‘Thank you, Father.’ Bending over Baroness Simovic, who was weeping silently into her handkerchief and was now holding Kanakis by the hand, Father Jahoda said, ‘Please convey my profound condolences to the bereaved parents. I shall not see them. I shall go into retreat as soon as these formalities are concluded. But you can tell them that I shall pray for the repose of their child’s soul.’

Epilogue

Soon after the incident of Marie-Theres’s tragic death, which by the joint intervention of the American High Commissioner and Father Jahoda was kept out of the sensational press, the State Treaty between Austria and the four Occupying Powers was signed. Austria was restored to sovereignty and to independence, her neutrality guaranteed. Reconstruction and renovation now began in earnest.

The Opera House was completed, unchanged on the outside but on the inside entirely rebuilt and made more modern and more beautiful. It was opened with a gala performance of
Fidelio
and later was the venue of the first great post-war Opera Ball, in the course of which the engagement was announced of Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach to Jo-Ann, only daughter of the owner of the largest meat-processing and meat-packing business in Chicago. In the big rambling castle of Lauterbach in Carinthia, the four Venetian glass chandeliers in the ballroom were carefully taken out of their protective burlap bags, cleaned, polished and restored to their dazzling pristine brilliance, while plumbers installed new bathrooms with gold-plated taps. These were of more concern to Jo-Ann than the chandeliers, in which Prince Lorenzo took greater interest.

A list of prospective wedding-guests, both Austrian and American, was being drawn up, but this did not include the bridegroom’s sister, the Princess Nina, who had formed an undesirable connection. She had, in fact, herself declined to emerge from the inconspicuous private life she had been leading since the war, the only change being that she now called herself Frau Grein instead of Fräulein Grein.

If anyone had been interested in scanning the list of new graduates at the close of that University year, he would have found the name of Dr Lucas Anreither.

What happened to a certain little rococo pavilion hidden in the depths of the eighth suburban district is not reported. It was certainly sold, but whether it was acquired by the chairman of one of the big industrial organisations (who could afford it) as a home for his family, or, as is more likely, it was demolished in the course of the redevelopment being undertaken in various parts of the city, is uncertain. Anyway, as the young taxi driver stationed near the Opera said to his elderly colleague, who was still musing over the name of Kanakis, which for him evoked such nostalgic memories – who cares!

Historical Note

The Exiles Return
is set over the months from March 1954, when Kuno Adler takes the train for the final stage of his journey back to Vienna, to its culmination in spring 1955, just before Austria recovered its independence in the State Treaty of May 1955. Its background is a country still convalescing from the events of the previous seventeen years, the Anschluss, the Second World War, and the postwar hardships of Four Power Occupation and food shortages.

Austria had lost its independence in March 1938 when Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and it became part of Germany – the ‘Anschluss’, or merger. Immediately after the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and the creation of a small, unviable ‘rump’ Republic of Austria, many Austrians had felt drawn to union with the greater Germany. The politics of the country were bitterly, and often violently, divided between the Christian Social party (the Blacks) and the Social Democrats (the Reds), and unemployment was high. But support for Anschluss faded when confronted with a Germany led by Hitler.

For five years Hitler schemed to bring Austria under his influence. By January 1938 he was threatening to invade, and on 9th March the Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, announced a plebiscite on Austrian independence, and called on Austrians to ‘Say Yes to Austria’. This provoked Hitler to prepare for immediate invasion. On 11th March Schuschnigg called off the plebiscite, resigned, and at the same time ordered the Austrian army to offer no resistance.

On the morning of 12th March 1938 German troops marched into Austria, and Hitler followed them into the country of his birth that afternoon. That evening in Linz almost all the population turned out to greet him, ‘the ecstatic crowds assembled in one provincial capital literally cheered their country into extinction’ (Gordon Brook-Shepherd
The Austrians
1997 paperback p. 327). The same evening in Vienna the
Daily Telegraph
journalist, G.E.R Gedye, saw ‘a Brown flood … sweeping through the streets. It was an indescribable witches’ sabbath – storm-troopers barely out of the school-room with cartridge-belts and carbines … men and women shrieking or crying hysterically the name of their leader … leaping, shouting and dancing in the light of the smoking torches, the air filled with a pandemonium of sound … until long after 3 a.m. the streets of Vienna were an inferno’ (
Fallen Bastions
1939 pp. 295–96). The Anschluss triggered a horrific period of indiscriminate and popular violence against Jews and Jewish property (cf. Edmund de Waal’s
The Hare with Amber Eyes
Chapters 24–6). But as George Clare explained in
Last Waltz in Vienna
1981 p. 191 ‘the paradox of Vienna’s volcanic outburst of popular anti-Semitism was that it saved thousands of Jewish lives … (It) left no Jew in any doubt that he had to get out of the country as quickly as possible.’ Well over half Austria’s 185,000 Jews had left by the autumn of 1939. By the end of 1942 only 8,000 Jews remained at liberty in Austria, mostly in mixed marriages.

When Hitler first spoke in Vienna, in the Heldenplatz (the Square of the Heroes), 250,000 Viennese turned out to applaud him. A month later, in April 1938, a plebiscite on the Anschluss was held, and endorsed by 99.73% of those voting. Why was this? There was a mixture of helplessness after five years of harassment and international isolation, but also hope for a better economic future. And ‘no other point of the Nazi programme found a more resounding echo in Austria than its anti-Semitism’ (Clare ibid p.187). The Anschluss received the support both of the country’s Catholic bishops and of at least one socialist leader.

Austrians fought in the Second World War, with a large number playing a prominent role in military and administrative positions in the Third Reich. But it suited the Allies to agree in 1943 that Austria was ‘the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression’ so that it should be reestablished as a ‘free and independent state’. After Hitler’s defeat it was occupied by the Four Powers, the US, UK, the Soviet Union and France, each with its Occupation zone, and with Vienna shared between them. The government was a coalition between the People’s Party (the Right) and the Social Democrats. The immediate post-war years were grim, with severe shortages of food and a flourishing black market – the Vienna of Carol Reed’s
The Third Man
with Orson Welles.

A process of denazification took place, initially carried out by the Four Powers, but then delegated to the Austrian government. However, denazification petered out and attitudes to the Nazi era remained ambivalent: in August 1947 ‘those who thought Nazism was a good idea which had merely been badly executed actually exceeded (at 38.7 per cent) the 31.6 per cent who still thought it had been bad all along. By the spring of 1948 … opinion was equally divided…’ (Gordon Shepherd ibid p.392).

At this time Austria was an unresolved frontier in the Cold War. The Soviet Eastern zone and the Western zone were divided by barriers. Many feared that Austria might suffer the fate of the rest of central Europe, in which Communist governments took control, most dramatically through the 1948 anti-Masaryk coup in Czechoslovakia. The Marshall Plan provided American food aid and financed investment in heavy industry. In 1950 the small Communist party unsuccessfully attempted to destabilise the country through the occupation of factories, offices and post offices.

But the situation changed rather suddenly in 1953, with the death of Stalin and the election of a new Austrian Chancellor, Julius Raab, committed to achieving independence. The new Soviet leadership, under Khruschev, decided that a neutral Austria on the Swiss model would suit Soviet interests, and in April 1955 this was negotiated and agreed. The State Treaty giving Austria independence was signed in Vienna in May 1955; the last Occupation troops left Austria in October; and the historic Vienna Opera reopened with a gala performance of
Fidelio
on 5th November 1955.

About the Author

E
LISABETH DE
W
AAL
was born in Vienna in 1899. She studied philosophy, law, and economics at the University of Vienna, and completed her doctorate in 1923. She also wrote poems (often corresponding with Rilke), and was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Columbia University. She lived first in Paris, then Switzerland, and settled in England with her husband, Hendrik de Waal, and her two sons. She wrote five unpublished novels, two in German and three in English, including
The Exiles Return
in the late 1950s. She died in 1991.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE EXILES RETURN.
Copyright © 2013 by The Estate of Elisabeth de Waal. Foreword copyright © 2012, 2013 by Edmund de Waal. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-045782 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-04579-9 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781250045799

Originally published in Great Britain by Persephone Books

First U.S. Edition: January 2014