Vienna, Nazis, Jews, and Women Part 2
A feminist in 1986 thinks about “the masculine principle.”
To bring us back to where we left off.
In 1986, I visited Vienna during the campaign of Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, who was running for President of Austria and would win. While I was in the city, I spoke to Jews and feminists. In the piece I wrote in the Village Voice, I described a visit to Freud’s house as well as an expansive museum exhibition called Vienne, 1880-1938 I saw in Paris and that later came to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In the previous post, I published the first half of this piece, concerning the marriage of Jew-hate and woman-hate in Nazi ideology. It was a line of thought in which “the female principle” was equated with irrationality (or sex, or fantasy, or debased animality) that extended from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to the widely influential Viennese theoretician Otto Weininger and the writer Karl Kraus and that influenced Freud as well as Hitler—both were in Vienna at the same time.
When Hitler planned to eradicate Jews from existence, he also thought he was wiping out "the feminine principle." He thought Jews embodied “the feminine principle” and that “the feminine principle” was a really bad thing you’d be justified in destroying to protect “the masculine principle” from contamination.
One of the reasons I wanted to revisit this history now is I think it sheds light on the reactive, hyper macho, militarist stance Israel has assumed since its establishment in 1948. It sheds light on what can happen in the minds of male humans and in the policies of the countries they come to rule—including in the minds of Putin and Trump—when they have been taught to believe “real men” prove they are “real men” with a show of destructive power. It seems to me we are all being held hostage by a group of six-year-old, schoolyard bullies, anxious about whether they are “real men.”
In the second part of the piece—the part I’m publishing today—I report on Austrian culture and history from the perspectives of the women I meet. I wasn’t sure whether I’d post this section before reading it again. When I did, I thought, Damn, I could have written this now, instead of nearly 40 years ago. Woman-hate laughs at time. “Time, what is time?” woman-hate asks, “you really think you have a chance of budging me?”
What Women Want
In Paris, I’d seen Centre Pompidou’s exhibit, Vienne, 1880-1938: Naissance d’un siècle. The show swirled through 21 galleries, chronicling the period’s art, science, literature, philosophy, music, theater, and social history. The gigantic assemblage of artifacts and the range of subjects covered said this is the entire period—from working-class housing conditions (overcrowding was a huge problem, hence life in cafés) to the era’s enduring impact on world history. Except there were no women in the show as creators of anything.
In fact, women did design clothes and other items for Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s art nouveau version of William Morris’s arts and crafts movement, but their contributions weren’t there. When women were included, it was as artists’ models and in the lore surrounding the achievements of men, the most famous example probably being Alma Mahler: wife of Gustav and later of the writer Franz Werfel; patient of Freud; and lover of Walter Gropius, who fathered her daughter, Manon, and of Kokoschka, who, after she left him, built a life-size doll of her, escorted it to cafés, and ultimately “murdered” it.
The curators of the Pompidou show (15 men and three women) weren’t, of course, responsible for the way women were restricted in the past. The problem was the curators didn’t seem to notice women were restricted in the past. The condition of Jews inside anti-Semitism and of workers inside capitalism were of world historical importance in the galleries. Nazi boots goose-stepped on video screens, and the faces of exiles flashed in a slide show. Never for one moment did the show lose sight of the fragility of social justice—when it was applied to men. Never did it lose sight of the fact that in Vienna, studying the theories of Weininger, Karl Lueger, and the ideologue Georg von Schönerer, Hitler had learned a particularly vicious form of Jew-hate.
But there was no exhibit on the condition of women in Vienna. Nor was there a slide show on the role of misogyny in history, its place, for example, in Nazi ideology: Hitler’s iron-fisted promotion of the male-dominated family and the depiction of the Aryan triumph as a victory of the masculine principle over “the feminine race of Jews.” At Pompidou, women were no more real to the curators than they’d been to turn-of-the-century Viennese.
Feminists in Vienna, 1986
I wanted to meet today’s counterparts to the women left out of history. I struck up conversations on theater lines, in bookstores, at art galleries, and some meetings led to shared meals.
I received the phone number of Erica Fischer at Frauenzimmer, the women’s bookstore on Langergasse. We met at a café (where else?). She was 43, with short red hair and a girlish body. She was the German translator of Kate Millett’s books and the author of two books, one about violence and the other about turning 40. She’d been part of the women’s movement in Austria since its beginnings in 1973. She said it was easy for her to be a feminist. As a Jew born in England, she’d always felt outside.
She said, “The problem that exists now was here from the start. Socialists say they will transform the world and everyone will benefit, including women, but of course this doesn’t happen. Here, the Socialist Party, which has the majority, supports feminist issues, like abortion. They take credit for social change, and, as a result, they’ve drained the women’s movement of support—they say it’s not necessary, and theirs is the only voice people need to hear on the subject. There’s no public debate about feminism, and therefore no general consciousness about the issues. The press, too, is very conservative. Young women aren’t interested in the women’s movement, and I don’t know how they’ll become involved. We were always looked upon as misfits—lesbians and man-haters, and this hasn’t changed. Austrians, you must remember, are used to listening to one leader. This country is even more authoritarian and patriarchal than Germany.”
I’d seen what Erica was talking about in my conversations with women in Vienna. Barbara, a 21-year-old student, told me, “My mother was in the women’s movement, but what’s going on now—rape counseling and battered women’s shelters—doesn’t interest me to join.” Instead, she was active in a Socialist Party youth group.
Like the word “Jew,” in Vienna, when I said the word “feminist,” people’s eyes shifted uncomfortably and they flashed scornful smiles—unless they were feminists. Ingrid, 35, a teacher of French and Italian at a secondary school, was very beautiful with flowing dark curls. She was proud of the way she’d lived on her own before marrying. She told me, “In Austria, feminists are women who don’t like to look nice and are not interested in men.”
Every day, I spoke with Lotte, 55, who ran Pension Aclon, where I was staying. She said, “My father would turn over in his grave if he could see me working.” She’d stayed home for 17 years, raising her four children. She told me she vastly preferred running the hotel. “This place, ach, you should have seen it when I took over—paint peeling off the walls, a wreck.”
One morning, she was jittery awaiting a phone call. Her daughter was in the hospital, about to give birth, and in a few minutes Lotte would learn the sex of the baby. “If it’s a boy, the family will be very happy, if a girl, not so happy,” she said.
I said, even a little more nuts and out of control than usual, “A girl is as valuable as a boy. You are female.” Lotte said, “Madame (although we’d previously advanced to first names), “you do not understand my country. Here, the ugliest, stupidest man is worth more than the most intelligent woman. Men are pashas. Do you know what that is? My father was like that, my husband the same. I raised my son to be one, too. Why would I want my daughter to have a girl, when she would mean nothing?”
I said, “Things don’t always have to be this way.”
She said, “I am happy, very happy with my family, my country.” The next moment the phone rang, and she learned a girl had been born, and she nearly smiled, hearing the baby was okay. That night, though, the baby, Hilde, had a breathing problem, and for several days Lotte worried in her stern manner. We still chatted, but she was cool with me, and I wished, as I always wish, I knew better how to give people what they want. (Do I ever really want that?) Each night I would ask about Hilde and Lotte would grudgingly say, “She’s better,” or “Fine, fine,” although it was obviously not the case. My interest in the baby irritated her.
She changed again on my last night, though, freely saying the doctors had declared Hilde healthy. “Ya, ya,” she said, bobbing her head, her face glowing with relief. When I kissed her goodbye, she returned the hug a little stiffly. I said, “I hope Hilde inherits your energy and brains.” She said, “Ya, I hope so, too.”
All the women I met said that Austrian men still expected women to cook, clean, and take care of children. In terms of the sexual politics I could see—the way waiters, hotel workers, and ushers treated women and men, the way couples related on the streets—the citizens of Vienna seemed no more or less influenced by feminism than the citizens of any other city in Europe. On this score, compared to New York City and to cities in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, men and women seemed stuck in a time warp.
You hardly ever see men taking care of kids. They do, however, pull out chairs and open doors for you with so much focused attention that saying no-thanks makes you appear rude. If you are an idiot like me and show your cards, they say, “Please, don’t be so unromantic, so unfriendly.” Oy.
Erica and Erwin (the young man I wrote about in the previous post) said Austrians were oblivious of their emotions. Erica said this was generally true of feminists as well—they were only just beginning to think about sex and power in terms of their own experiences. Erica linked the lack of consciousness of an inner life to the unexamined anti-Semitism and misogyny that persisted in the culture. Hello, yes, but these conditions were hardly special about Austria. What circled this so clearly in Austria to me at this time was the bullish, edgy, half-prepressed/half expressed anti-Semitism, a gripping fantasy peculiar to this place at this time that also starkly dramatizing the effects of repression everywhere.
Freud’s most brilliant insight into history was seeing that human beings endlessly try to rewrite history—both events in the world and things that happened to them. He grasped that people fight, often to the death, to resist knowledge they don’t want. He understood that reality was a series of co-existing realities, that human knowledge was ineluctably partial—at best an acknowledgement of one’s own experience and even there severely limited. The danger for people was in mistaking one’s own view of reality for stable, generalizable truth.
I did this all the time. As a feminist, I hated Jewish religious rituals. Pissed at Freud’s misogyny, I had to remind myself that insight into our unconscious lives doesn’t live or die on Freud’s statements but rather slinks along, imperfect and illusionless, on the wit of frayed analysts and the people on their couches.
In Vienna, during the Waldheim campaign, you couldn’t forget Jews were hated for being Jews. At the same time, there was much in the culture I admired. The Austrian government provides excellent health care and actually supports abortion (the law isn’t ideal; abortions are still expensive). There is poverty in Austria, but unemployment statistics don’t approach those in the US, nor do the slums there at all resemble the bombed-out wastelands of New York and L.A.—homeless people don’t sleep on the streets of Vienna.
The city is a great, sensual beauty. Architectural styles have conversations with each other the walker overhears, moving past the Belvedeer Palace, to the art nouveau Secession building with its gold-leaf cabbage crown, to the Ringstrasse’s smorgasbord of styles—the gothic Rathaus, the baroque Burgtheater, the Renaissance-style university, the classical Reichsrat. In the old, imperial city’s heart, churches, antique shops, art galleries, and chic boutiques throng a web of small streets and alleys. Suddenly, in the Graben, rises the bizarre monument built for the survivors of the plague, a convulsing tower of stone, studded with gargoyles. And finally, at the hub of all their ancientness, stands St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the incomparable gothic giant.
The smell of coffee and sweet, spiced tea perfumes the air. Every few paces, you are tripped up by apple strudel and sacher torts. Street stands offer little sandwiches of caviar and lox, and in Drei Hacken (Three Hatchets), an unpretentious restaurant serving traditional Austrian food, the head-waiter, who looks like a tall, half skeletal Ichabod Crane, treats everyone with the same saturnine irony as he sets down coal-black blütwurst. It looks like death and tastes like the future.
And the people—a more openhearted population it would be difficult to imagine (as long as you don’t say “Jew” or “feminism”). In almost every exchange, my curiosity was matched by an equal interest in America, New York, me. I visited a small art gallery, and within three minutes the woman who owned it insisted I share a glass of schnapps with her. When a restaurant I arrived at turned out to be closed, a group of other people who had shown up whisked me off to another place they knew and invited me to join them. Did I ever forget that some of the people who were charming or most of them would vote for Waldheim? I did not.
I left Vienna on Saturday evening, April 26, unaware that during my stay nuclear reactors at Chernobyl had exploded. During the weeks before the election, new evidence of Waldheim’s Nazi past was exposed. In his doctoral dissertation—freshly unearthed—he wrote glowingly of Hitler’s ideology. The press also revealed that the UN War Crimes Commission had had enough evidence to prosecute him in 1948. A small Vienna group called New Austria protested the candidacy with hostile posters and a piece of agitprop theater. None of this affected voters. Waldheim won a rousing victory on June 8.
Following the election, Le Monde ran a clever cartoon showing Freud beside his empty couch with the caption, “So many millions of amnesiacs and not a single patient.” The barb was suitable to lots of other countries, including France. In an article in The New Yorker (June 30, 1986), Jane Kramer reported evidence that most countries in Western Europe, as well as the Russians, Americans, and even the Yugoslavs, knew about Waldheim’s war record all the time he headed the UN but, rather than publicize the information, preferred to use it to make him jump.
The Soviet Union congratulated Austria for electing Waldheim, calling the charges against him a conspiracy trumped up by Zionists and the US government to discredit the UN—proving that anti-American feeling and anti-Semitism are stronger than Russia’s vaunted anti-Nazism. Out of one side of its mouth, the US Justice Department considers banning Waldheim from the country as a suspected war criminal, while remaining tight-lipped about America’s 40-year policy of harboring ex-Nazis—proving that anti-Communist feeling here is stronger that regard for justice or Jews.
Ronald Reagan, who applauds a Rambo-style approach to diplomacy, treats Qaddafi like the Jack Palance villain in a Western and bombs Tripoli (on April 15, 1986)—the revenge of an old man on what he sees as demonic arrogance. The Soviet government cynically deceives its people and the world about the radiation levels at Chernobyl; and to the White House, the disaster isn’t about the dangers of nuclear energy but rather a media opportunity to beat up unscrupulous Russia. Austrian denial, Soviet hypocrisy, the American confusion between movie illusion and life, are all deceptions, and each issues from a different form of government: Socialist, Communist, Capitalist.
Kiev’s water is contaminated. Cancer deaths will multiply in Russia, Scandinavia, Poland, everywhere. Freud’s hysterical patients reflexively coughed, feeling they were choking. We’re choking for real.
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"People fight, often to the death, to resist knowledge they don’t want." Sounds like America 2024, a Freudianism that has stood the test of time. And so have these stories. The keen observations about the architecture of Vienna...the buildings are more appealing than the people...the male people, anyway. And one of Lou Reed's few political songs is "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim."
"Freud’s most brilliant insight into history was seeing that human beings endlessly try to rewrite history—both events in the world and things that happened to them. He grasped that people fight, often to the death, to resist knowledge they don’t want." A brilliant, insightful and disquieting piece of writing. A wonderful dispatch from the past and it's uncanny how it finds its echo in the present.