ABSTRACT
It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics. World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age. I was born in Vienna at the end of 1928. However, as I explain in the next essay, I was brought up in France, in the 1930s, by an Austrian mother who disliked her native country (although not to the point of ever giving up her nationality!) and, like so many Central Europeans, preferred the South of France (Nice). But her brothers and their families had remained in Vienna; and they were Jews (converted or not). My first political memory is quite vivid. My mother and I (age 5) were in the garden of a lovely hotel in Vence—a hotel that later became a convent, a garden that now shelters Matisse’s ethereal chapel. She opened the newspaper and found out about the assassination of Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis (July 1934). She turned to me and said that this was the beginning of the end for Austria—and for her family.
