ABSTRACT
In March 1938, when Hitler marched into Vienna, I was a skinny girl of thirteen, a stellar student at the Wiener Frauenerwerbverein, and an aspiring swimming champion. Like many daughters of upwardly mobile and assimilated Jewish families, I was slated to acquire a profession in the arts, some sort of off-shoot of the Wiener Werkstätte, “because one never knows what might happen.” But no one in my family seriously believed that I would ever really need to work, that I would not be happily married by the age of twenty-one, like my mother. Or that Austria, however anti-Semitic some of its citizens might be, would willingly welcome any Anschluss to Germany. Even after Sigmund Freud’s books were burnt there in 1933, he too was certain that his Austrians never would follow suit. Along with Karl Kraus, the editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), my parents believed that psychoanalysis was the sickness it set out to cure. However, they all were at one in their ambivalence about being Jewish. Neither dreaming of converting nor of practicing their religion, most of Viennese godless Jews made fun of their parents’ conventional views, and of conventions. Like my parents, they kept their children in the dark about politics and other serious matters. “Was e net weiss macht me net heiss” (what I don’t know doesn’t bother me) was one of the countless proverbs most Viennese parents lived by.
