Salzburg I: (Re)Making History

The fascinating thing about being -- and BE-ing in multiple senses, whether as an individual, a member of a community, a citizen of a city, or of a country -- is the opportunity to make history every day; indeed, it's the opportunity to re-make history every day.

And what is not history?  It doesn't have to be the big things.  Rather, the small things, the daily events that have huge implications -- these make history.  And so Edison uses a tiny strand of everyday metal.  WWI begins as a family feud.  JFK is killed by a small piece of metal.  A vaccine is made from a mold spore.  A bomb is created by splitting a minuscule atom.  History: it's the small things.  And whether created with good or ill intent, it can, in some measure, be re-visited, remade, even if time cannot be re-wound.  History can even, in some measures, be remedied for its ills.

That opportunity exists every single day.  It means re-visioning the past, embracing and facing mistakes, and making things new (insofar as possible) -- and when there's been hurt, it means relieving suffering.  What an opportunity.

On a recent trip to Salzburg, Austria I began to study some local events which occurred in a building near my hotel.  Ironically they took place precisely 74 years from the date of my arrival in Salzburg: 10 November.

The "Stolpersteine" at 4 Rainerstaße: "Stumbling Stones" (Photo: Author)

Placed by Guter Demnig, these brass "Stumbling Stones" provide an outline of the events as they transpired for former residents of the buildings [Link: Stolpersteine].  At 4 Rainerstraße lived seven people who were ordinary and productive citizens of Salzburg.  For instance, there was Anna Pollak:

Anna, born in Salzburg on December 28, 1873, was a daughter of Adolf and Katharina Pollak, who were among the first Jewish people allowed to settle in Salzburg after a new constitution for Austria-Hungary granted Jews the right to live anywhere in the Empire after 1867 (previously, Jews had been barred from living in Salzburg ever since their expulsion in 1498). The Pollak family lived at and ran a second-hand shop on the ground floor of 4 Rainerstraße from 1887 until 1938. The unmarried Anna operated the shop from the time of her parents’ deaths in Salzburg until it was destroyed in the notorious "Reichskristallnacht" pogrom. On the night of November 9-10, 1938 the seamstress- and rummage-shop was devastated and looted by Nazi Storm-troopers and SS men led by a native Salzburg SS man named Hermann Höfle (who went on to become a major perpetrator in the Holocaust). Anna Pollak was a native-born Salzburger who had lived here for 65 years, but she was expelled to Vienna in November 1938, deported to Terezín in July 1942, and in September 1942 she was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp where she was murdered [modified from Link].

 

4 Rainerstraße, Anna's shop, looted and destroyed.
This photo: the morning of 10 November 1938

4 Rainerstraße, exactly 74 years later: November 2012 (Photo: Author)

Six other people lived in this building, each having a story, each killed in camps -- with one exception:

Judge Johann Langer, of 4 Rainerstraße [Link]

Dr. Johann Langer was a judge who acted in Austrian courts to convict the Nazis who, in their coup attempt, had killed the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.  After the Nazi's 1938 annexation of Austria, the convicted men were released, and Langer was sent to Dachau where he suffered repeated torture at the hands of the SS.  To escape further torture, he killed himself.  So I suppose one might equivocate over the point: he wasn't exactly murdered.

And still, the accounts go on.  At another house in Salzburg, the owners, like Anna and Johann, above, were collected with their family members, sent to Vienna (a sort of holding camp), then moved to and killed in the death camps.

What stands out in this this case? Surviving relatives, rightful heirs, brought suit after the war to re-obtain the house and property.  The Austrian courts made a judgement: it was a court order in favor of the plaintiffs (1951).  What happened?  Nothing.  Austria has never enforced that judgement.  After killing the owners and as much of their family as they could capture, the Austrian government never restored the property to the rightful heirs -- against its own legal judgement.

Others who survived and returned from the camps sought the legal, victims assistance, something allowed to survivors and relatives of those who perished in the Holocaust, only to be denied it for specious reasons.  One woman, among these, had been by law denied a work permit because she was "married" to a Jew.  Solely for the necessity to work (which she could not do if married to a Jew), she divorced her husband (who was killed in a camp), but thereby the state could and did deny the woman any victims assistance....  She was no longer "married" to a victim.

Not to quote Kurt Vonnegut (but why not?), "So it goes."  And on.  And on.  And the ideologies behind such deeds continue to emerge today in quite ordinary events -- in 2012.

One example is from a high-level politician, Heinz-Christian Strache, in Austria: he posted an anti-Semitic cartoon [Link] on his Facebook page in August 2012 (where it remains posted with slight modification).  I would diagnose here a simple case of "Valdheimer's Disease" (i.e. it makes you forget you're a Nazi).  That cartoon is directly proscriptive of the ideology that shaped Nazi Germany.

And this year, in other locales, the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) that mark the homes of those displaced and killed have been torn out of the sidewalk or defaced.  That is, after those lives were erased from the earth, people remain today who would continue in an attempt to erase the memory of the many Annas and Johanns from the face of the earth.  And there's this: [Link], which illustrates the persistence of this attitude.

What of it?  It's history.  There have always been and will always be such people....

And yet, each individual, each person living where crime has been -- all have the opportunity to revisit and face squarely its history and attempt reparations as much as might be possible.  What's the value of doing so?  It is first to alleviate suffering.  Second, it is to remake an image, an identity, a sense of self.

It is freeing to remember and to face the past honestly, whether that past was like that of so many other cities and countries and people -- those either complicit in or passive against the pogroms and crimes like those the Germans and Austrians -- and people of so many other countries -- precipitated against people in various times and places.  (Yes, just plainly and simply people.  You wanna make a distinction between flesh and flesh?  Fabric of any color and weave burns generally as well as that of any other color and weave, no?  If you find yourself hauling yourself around in a body -- I suppose you will rightfully think it's as precious, no matter the color or shape, as another person's body.  That's the point forgotten in the politics of the 1930s and 40s.)

I don't care so much if it's Austria or Germany or Somalia or Lebanon or the US or elsewhere, or events of any other time.

The simple question is this: what has been done to alleviate suffering?  That's largely what reparation means.  Withholding victims assistance?  Keeping someone's house after it was "Aryanized" (i.e. stolen from someone deemed to be outside the dominant ideology)?  Continuing to assert petty prejudices with cartoons that essentialize?  Further attempting to erase the last vestiges victims' identities from sidewalks?  History will not be cast for its truths by such things, nor the suffering of surviving relatives alleviated -- nor one's own sense of self remade.  To reify the ideologies that made past deeds possible is to hold down oneself not to change an ill that history has brought about.

Yes.  Perhaps it is difficult to face such pasts and alleviate their continued suffering.  But difficulty is relative to what we desire.  What do we owe people we have wronged -- I mean, what do we own them beyond mere memory and empathetic understanding of their suffering?  It's an easy question with an easy answer: acceptance, kindness (for we are of the same kind, walking around in the same kind of bodies), offering the same opportunities we should enjoy, and giving back what was not ours -- whether lives, loves, property, objects....

But more: they must have their own, personal sovereignty and the right to exist, to go about their lives in peace.  That is everything.  Not least in places where such sovereignty has been denied.