The Little Book (45 page)

“Right,” Wheeler said. “From the time I got to St. Greg’s people were always telling me what a hero you had been and how you have saved this game or that game or had done this or that with a hockey puck. At first I couldn’t figure why it made so much difference to all these highly educated and stuffy people. When I got to Harvard, they all wanted to talk about what you had done there, especially in sports. And most of all it was the catch you made against Yale: ‘the Catch’ everyone called it. So, I wrote the essay explaining why the great catch in general is the highest point of civilization. I used Willie Mays’s catch of Vic Wertz’s fly ball in the 1954 World Series as my model.” He paused. “You’ve heard of neither of them,” he added quickly, then continued. “That essay went on to become ‘The Preconditions of Cultural Apex,’ the essay whose ideas I gave Egon the other day at the Café Central, and the essay that caused an assistant professor named Fielding Shomsky to go apoplectic and nearly get me thrown out of Harvard for plagiarism.”

“What saved you?” Dilly said, beginning to see it all.

“Your friend Professor Walker just sort of buried the whole thing. Lord knows what he thought.”

Dilly shook his head. He was struggling, trying to take it all in. “Whatever happened to Wickstein? In 1943, when Brod published his book, he was reported incarcerated somewhere in Germany.”

“It’s not a good story,” Wheeler said grimly.

47

A Magnificent Example

Egon Wickstein spent his twenties in Vienna, studying philosophy and then teaching at the university, developing something of a reputation for his sharp wit and his outspoken—some would say abrasive—flair, publishing his
feuilletons
often in the
Neue Freie Presse
, and proving incapable of keeping his opinions to himself. In 1914, at age thirty-four, with some fanfare, he moved to Cambridge University to share thoughts with Bertrand Russell. It was then that he began to distinguish himself and attract attention for his ideas, and in the early 1930s, he published his
Critique of Pure Reason,
now considered one of the finest works of twentieth-century philosophy. Almost before the ink was dry on the first edition in German, the book was put on the objectionable list in Nazi Germany and cast into the bonfires. The following year, his autobiography,
Before Yesterday,
was published and to this day it is considered one of the best descriptions of early-century intellectual and cultural life in Vienna, but still, like its predecessor, a Jewish book, it went into the bonfires. “I must have said something right,” Egon was said to have exclaimed upon hearing of the second distinction. But like Freud’s early works, neither book sold very well at the outset, or was particularly well-known.

The child Hitler from Lambach left home in 1908 at age nineteen and moved to Vienna hoping to become an artist, sharing the city for five years with Egon Wickstein. Despite a reasonable talent, he failed repeatedly to gain entrance to the Art Academy of Vienna. For five years, he eked out an existence by selling his watercolors and developed a sense of politics and hatred for Jews by watching the master, mayor Karl Lueger. It was then that he learned the power of demagogic oratory and the political uses of anti-Semitism. During this time, it is speculated that he came in contact with Egon Wickstein and developed an intense reaction against him, as he represented all that the young man hated about Jews.

In 1914 Hitler moved to Munich and after humble service as a corporal in the great war helped form the National Socialist Party. It is likely that neither Wickstein nor Sigmund Freud noticed him when he was arrested during the
putsch
and sentenced to four years in prison, only nine months of which he actually served. It was during that incarceration that he dictated his
Mein Kampf
to Rudolph Hess.

In 1938, when tension was rising from Germany, much to the disapproval of his friends and colleagues, Egon returned to Vienna to help. But the surging time of pro-Germanism and anti-Semitism was far greater than any one brilliant philosopher could match. Early in 1938, Hitler invaded Austria and Vienna. His Anschluss, the takeover of Austria, was greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering Austrians. The Catholic cardinal greeted Hitler in person and pledged the support of Austria’s majority Catholic population. The effect on Vienna’s Jews was immediate and devastating. They were taunted and beaten, expelled from their homes, their businesses and their properties looted by avaricious neighbors. A large number of lawyers, judges, physicians, and businessmen improved their living standards and their family futures by plundering their Jewish neighbors. At the university, nearly all Jews—forty percent of the student body and fifty percent of the faculty—were dismissed. “Of all the cities under Nazi control,” the Haze told his boys, “Vienna was the most debased on Kristallnacht a few months after the 1938 takeover. Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter after World War II, has said that compared to Vienna, the Kristallnacht in Berlin was a pleasant Christmas festival.”

During this awful time, when most Jews and political opponents of Nazism were trying to flee Vienna, Egon Wickstein thought it his duty to return, much to the dismay of his Cambridge colleagues and friends. He was one of the major forces in persuading his eighty-two-year-old friend Sigmund Freud to leave and working with forces outside Austria to pressure the Nazis to release him. After much negotiation and the gift of $400,000 to the Nazi Party, Freud and his immediate family were allowed to leave for London, where young psychiatry student Flora Zimmerman, among others, was waiting to prepare a welcome. After Freud’s departure, Wickstein and a number of friends meticulously photographed the Berggasse 19 apartment and then boxed up all remaining items that the great doctor did not take himself. They labeled the box “toilet articles” and sneaked it out past the invading Nazi guards, who in a few days had emptied the apartment of all valuables, appropriating them, and erasing all memories of the Jews who had lived there, regardless of any contributions to the advancement of civilization that might have been generated there.

It was clear to all his Viennese friends that Egon was high on the list of undesirables, and many friends interceded and offered him plans of emigration, but Egon refused, saying that Vienna was his home and it belonged to his people, whom he defined as all intelligent book-reading denizens of the café world. Shortly after Freud’s departure, Egon was detained for questioning and held for a while at the football stadium, then not heard from again. Over the years, intellectuals from neutral countries around the world tried to pressure the German government to release him, and the answer always came back that Egon Wickstein had engaged in subversive activity and he was safely incarcerated in a concentration camp, being well cared for.

His great fame was not really established until after 1944, when his fate was unknown and Broderick Walker of Harvard University published his collected works, the first of which was a
feuilleton
from the
Neue Freie Presse
entitled “The Preconditions of a Cultural Apex.” Then in 1950, the Harvard professor published his monumental biography of Wickstein, a work that characterized Vienna at the turn of the century and put both men on the map.

After scrupulous research into the details of the young philosopher’s life, Brod Walker discovered from eyewitnesses exactly how Egon Wickstein met his end. In 1938 he was questioned and detained by the SS and shipped to a prison in Germany where the high command considered what to do with their high-profile prisoner. After a few months of holding this offensive Jew who did not know how to keep his mouth shut, one day an SS officer took him out into the prison courtyard and with his service-issue Luger put a bullet into the brain of one of the century’s great thinkers. It was a case, Brod Walker lamented, of a very limited example of human intelligence having ultimate power over a magnificent example. It was said that when Hitler was told of the end of “the offensive Jew,” he was greatly pleased.

It was not until the end of the war that Egon Wickstein was declared an official casualty, his martyrdom firmly established. At the time of Wheeler’s visit to Vienna in 1897, there were nearly 400,000 Jews in the imperial city. By the time the Russians rolled into Vienna in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, there were 127.

In the summer of 1956, Arnauld Esterhazy, then seventy years old, returned to Vienna for the first time since the end of World War I, and for the last time. The opera house, destroyed by a single direct hit from an Allied bomb in 1945, was reopened. Arnauld visited the Dilly Burden memorial in Paris, then went to Vienna for a performance of Wagner’s
Tannehausen.
At the end of the performance, he discovered something very wrong in the reconstructed and refurbished space. He wept for all that had been lost, for his beloved Dilly and for his old friend Egon Wickstein, but it was also for something deeper. The whole performance seemed flat and lacking the vibrancy and vitality he had remembered when Gustav Mahler was conducting and the audience was electric with cultured appreciation. “Something was dreadfully wrong,” Arnauld wrote in his notes from the occasion. “One awful and devastating reason: there are no Jews.”

48

A Historic Gift

That afternoon in the Prater, they walked out to an expan-sive spot of flat ground. Wheeler wanted to show Dilly what the Frisbee could do in the open spaces. Dilly was delighted.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” Wheeler said, as his partner launched a tilting throw that hit the ground about halfway between them.

“Now this time you are going to have to show me exactly how to throw it. We must not leave until I have mastered it.” Mastering for Dilly meant the most thorough analysis of how it worked: exactly how the disk was to be held and released, the aerodynamic sciences that applied, and then some serious study of how to maximize the effects of throwing and catching. Wheeler had never seen anyone as analytical about something that he had always taken for an instinctive act.

After a while Wheeler said, “Let’s stop talking about it and throw it.”

He stood thirty yards from Dilly and released a throw that soared high and then dropped gracefully to where his father was standing. Dilly nearly failed to catch it, he was so enthralled by the graceful flight. Dilly would have to step forward to make his throws, but Wheeler could see him working with his form, doing practice throws in his mind until he removed from his delivery the quirks that were making the disk roll over shortly after it left his hand. He listened to Wheeler’s long-distance coaching, and added intuitions of his own. Soon he was making long, graceful, accurate throws.

“Ready for the real distance?” Wheeler yelled to him across the green expanse of the Prater. He brought his arm back and then swept it forward past his chest with a violent suddenness, putting his full body weight behind it. The disk left his hand from a position below his waist and rocketed out toward where Dilly was standing, sailing far over his head before slowing and beginning to hover. Dilly, failing health or no, caught by surprise, at first watched in awe, then with an unbelievable burst of coordinated energy, he spun, and, without looking up, raced across the grass to a position a good distance away where the disk might fall. At the last possible moment, he looked up, saw the Frisbee over his shoulder, reached out, and grabbed it with one sure hand, tumbling as he did and rolling to the earth.

It was an exquisitely coordinated move.

Wheeler ran over to where Dilly was picking himself off the ground. “That was fantastic,” he said.

Dilly was standing, brushing grass from his suit pants. “I wanted to see if I could catch it.”

“I guess so,” said Wheeler, in awe, his heart soaring with love and pride.

Neither of them noticed the carriage drive up and stop. It was driven by two white horses, which, after the incident, both men realized were of superior breeding. But neither the coach itself nor the coachman looked special enough to attract attention. The glass on the windows was frosted and difficult to see through. The carriage might have been parked beside the field where they were throwing for ten or twenty minutes.

Dilly was concentrating on his style, and Wheeler was watching with fascination the concentration and attention to detail of this remarkable athlete he had heard about all his life.

They were now standing nearly fifty yards apart, their throws sending the wooden disk soaring gracefully over the great distance, Wheeler’s throws dropping gently within Dilly’s reach, Dilly’s coming closer and closer to his distant target.

Neither did they see the coachman descend from his seat and walk across the grass to where Wheeler stood. “Please,” said the man, pointing across the field toward the coach, whose door was now open. He began to walk back, ushering Wheeler. Dilly stayed at his position, watching in fascination.

As Wheeler approached he had trouble seeing into the coach, and it was not until he was only a few feet away that he saw the woman in black, sitting in the coach, waiting for him. And it was not until he was nearly upon it that he realized that this was no ordinary two-horse carriage.

The woman’s eyes followed him as he approached. Now, Wheeler realized that she had probably been watching them throw the Frisbee for some time. She had a look of affection on her pale face, and her eyes were filled with tears. She did not speak, but made it clear that she wished Wheeler to approach. Wheeler had no idea why he did it, but as he approached he knelt on the footrest with one knee.

“I am honored—” he began, but she silenced him with an index finger to her lips. She stared at him in silence.

“You have shown me much beauty,” she said, in barely more than a whisper. With a rustle of silk she leaned forward in her black leather seat and extended a hand. Wheeler held out both of his. She placed in his hand a cloth-wrapped bundle about the size of a walnut, and with her other hand pulled his fingers closed on it, holding him there for a long moment, as if hoping to give or receive from him some vital life force. “Take this,” she said solemnly. “And live.” She looked deep into his eyes.