Harry´s Blog

Apple Strudel and Arthur Schnitzler

I found the book in a chain bookshop in Heathrow Airport. It contained interviews of “former” high-ranking Nazis made in the late Seventies and early Eighties. (I cannot credit the book at this writing, since it absconded from my library. Unfortunately, I did not note down the author, title or publisher. I’m trying to track it down, and once I do, I will make the insertion.) The interviewer was a student who had seen Holocaust, the TV mini series. After viewing it, in order to provide answers for the questions that arose in his mind, he set about interviewing those Nazis who were still alive. Most of the ones he contacted received him warmly, and proudly told of their past. One was Günther von Wolffe the co-founder and former Dean of Lebensborn, which was a college for breeding the Master Race. Young Aryan men were assigned to socialize with nubile Aryan girls before getting to know them at closer quarters and fabricating racially-pure offspring. The Dean’s wife, who acted as his chorus, constantly chirping in approval, served the interviewer a marvelous apple strudel.

That interview made me think of my mother, who baked strudel masterpieces. I imagined her meeting the dutiful wife and exchanging recipes. Of course my mother would never have talked strudel with anyone she knew to be a Nazi, or anyone having Nazi sympathies. And Frau Wolffe certainly would not knowingly have engaged in a conversation with a woman who had my mother’s background.

But let’s say they met in a compartment on a train trip and they didn’t know who they were talking to!…The point I want to make is that sometimes you have something in common with someone you have nothing in common with.

And I can’t help injecting that I am a non-smoker and hate sitting in smoke-filled rooms. Who is the most famous non-smoker of all time? You guessed it? Do you see what I mean?

I was watching Holocaust at the same time as the student. I rejected it for dramaturgical reasons and plot loopholes. It struck me as being slapped together in typical Hollywood slapdash fashion. However, the film seems to have acted as an effective catalyst. Like Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter, which in my view, doesn’t even contain five minutes of moving drama, it made controversial subject matter popular and brought about some positive action. Which goes to show that mediocre dramas can sometimes be effective.

Due to my emigration, I lost my mother tongue as a primary language and picked up English. However, I was brought up on Austrian culture and cuisine. Besides serving remarkable strudels, my mother she helped provide me with a taste for Schnitzler and other Austrian authors.

And speaking of strudel, I know a good if I’m lucky enough to get one. Right now I’d say most are soggy and mealy. The best that you can get are to be had in Jewish delicatessens in New York. Strudelmakers, as well as artists, writers and film and theater directors found themselves in the New World due to forced emigration.

Austria’s favorite son Adolf, caused the truncation and did his part in disseminating Austria culture internationally. Involuntarily, to be sure, but nevertheless!…

After Adolf’s demise, there was indeed a renaissance. But that renaissance was a renaissance of cruelty and brutality, which was channeled into the arts, very much in keeping with his philosophy. Along with strudel, Austrian culture, to a great part, has become equally soggy and mealy.

I was lucky enough to immigrate at an early age, which enabled to learn the new language properly, and English became the linguistic love of my life. However, I wanted to get back to my roots and relearn the language that became lost to me “due to historical circumstances,” and I wanted to read the Austrian authors I admired in the language they wrote in.

I turned fifteen in 1950, which was a crucial year for me. I saw Max Ophüls’ La Ronde, his film version of Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen in the Normandy Theatre on 57th St. in New York. That wonderful film introduced the play to me and also spoiled it for me in a way, for I knew and know that any other production could never match it. Ophüls introducer the character of the conférencier, who runs the carousel and connects the episodes, as well as turns up in them in various small roles, which is a touch of the director’s genius and is in keeping with the author. What’s more, the film is an encyclopedia of the great French actors and actresses of the time. After seeing it, I read Schnitzler, who became one of the authors most dear to me.

That same year I picked up a 35-cent pocketbook edition of European short stories on rack in a Trenton drugstore. The collection included Stefan Zweig’s Moonbeam Alley, and after reading it, I was hooked on Zweig. In those days cheap editions of world literature were ubiquitous in drugstores, newsstands, bus and railway stations, as well as in bookstores. I still have that wonderful little book in my library and would never part with it.

Of course one couldn’t avoid reading Kafka, and I certainly was not one who wanted to avoid him. Reading him in English was not a problem since everything he wrote was available in translation. Kafka was and is international.

Zweig had been a best selling author in the States in the Thirties and Forties, but when I read that story he was all but forgotten. Of course there were English translations of most of his works in American libraries, so an English reader could read Zweig if he took the trouble of borrowing his books.

Schnitzler showed up in anthologies now and then, but he was relatively unknown in the English-speaking world at the time, and although there are more translations available today he is still not a household name. In the Fifties, if you wanted to read Schnitzler, you had to be able to read German.

One of Austria’s leading cultural schemers, who is now no longer with us, founded and ran a Literary Society. He acted as sycophant to anyone who was anyone, but as afar as others are concerned, he was a master in the arts of blocking and undermining. I caught him in the act of intercepting an invitation that had come for me for a foreign literary festival to recite my translations of Austrian poets, as well as my own work. The leading schemer intended to cancel me out, replace me with one of his minions, and pick up my connections for himself.

When I published an article in Index on Censorship in London on his gambit, I thought that the exposure would cause a climax. However, it was merely a beginning in a very negative sense. The enmeshment I was tangled in became tighter, and I would never be able to extract myself from it to this day, which is more than two and a half decades later.

Prior to that conflict, one of the schemer’s subordinates in the Society told an editor who had recommended me: “Kuhner is insignificant as an author and will never read for us.” That was three decades ago at this writing.

The question is why were things and are things the way they were and are? What is the cause? Am I really “insignificant as an author?” Or is something else at the core. Is it anti-Semitism? Could it be as simple as that? According to the concrete information I have, that aspect is certainly has played a role in the marvelous promotion I have had in Austria. But that’s not the whole story! Sure the Index article was my first defensive reaction and it hit home. No they didn’t love me for that!

My physiognomy is a dead giveaway. It conveys a message before the mouth opens to speak and my pen is uncapped to write. The face says that this one is not a fellow traveler and a yea-sayer. No, he won’t play along and he can’t be put to good use. This one is not one of us.

Indeed they smelled a rat, and they had my number before I could give it to them. They had me pegged and I had them pegged, almost as quickly.

The types that run the show may be stereotypical panders of mediocrity, but they do have their qualities. Spotting the nay-sayers right off the bat is one of them. They recognize the potential enemy before he acts. They engage in war, but do not declare it. The ambush is their favorite tactic. The schemers do not approach you with a sword. The stab in the back is the method they use.

The story the leading schemer told was that carried a pistol and that he was afraid that I’d gun in the Society during one of his events. That was indeed a tall tale. Firstly the Society was not one of the venues I often frequented, and unfortunately or fortunately for him, the only weapon I carried was a pen

I quote from Memoirs of a 39er: “Dr. Laus stated before witnesses that I carried a gun and that he was afraid of being shot. Although I had not kept my index finger holstered, I did not carry a firearm, nor did I have one at my disposal. During the dispute, I had never made a threat of any kind and had made a point of being pedantically correct in all of my written and verbal statements. When you’re in the position of being one against many, and the majority has an apparat at their disposal, a slip-up of any kind can be catastrophic. Besides, I didn’t want Laus to die. I wanted him to live so that I could stab him - not with a knife, but with a pen, as I’m doing now. At the time, Laus had a new book just off the presses. It was a call for public officials to act courageously and to make decisions as individuals, rather than as members of a bureaucratic apparat.”

He died in bed not too long ago. Being shot down by a mad-dog in of an author his Society would have been better exist. It would have been more dramatic than his peaceful demise, and it would have made a martyr of him. But I didn’t do him that favor. The only “piece” I carry is my pen. Actually, the pen was only part of my arsenal. At the time I was also armed with a typewriter, and now that has been replaced by its high-tech cousin, the computer. Furthermore, I don’t want his ilk to leave the scene. I want them to stick around, so that their machinations can be exposed.

In 1988, which was the Golden Anniversary of the Austria’s Anschluss, my manuscript of the Ausschluss, which translates as exclusion, was excluded from financial support. I quote the eminent intermediary, Dr. Ursula Pasterk, who was then Municipal Cultural Coordinator of the City of Vienna: “The jury, which is independent of the Municipal Cultural Department, has unanimously cast its vote against this book….I feel that I must adhere to that decision”.

It is fitting and typical that a novel, which stemmed from the first hand experiences of an Austrian remigré should be rejected by an Austrian office and jury on the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of seven years of genocide in Austria.

It’s not for me to judge my own work, but critical reactions have confirmed that it encompasses the theme remigration per se. Of course that story is one that must not be told, as far as Austria’s anti-fascistic and philo-Semitic industry is concerned. The mendacious intermediaries who are cashing in on Holocaust ride comfortably in the first-class compartments of the gravy train. They are the ones telling their watered down versions, and they do not want it come from the horse’s mouth!

The thing that belies the alleged assessment of my work by the schemers is their fear of having it proliferated. I say “alleged,” for one doesn’t have to muzzle someone who’s mediocre, and one doesn’t have to fear anyone who’s off keel.

Here’s a quotation by the leading schemer: “Herbert Kuhner is an exceedingly weak author who would certainly not be able to represent Austria in any way.”

Four years later, in order to avoid litigation, he wrote my lawyer: “I am glad to state that I have high esteem for the accomplishments of your client as a poet and above all as a translator of Austrian poetry into English.”

Two of the jurors were poets whom I had translated prolifically, and both of them had praised the translations. The other two were alumni of the Literary Society. One is a pioneer promoter of violence under the guise of art, a phenomenon I took to task in the novel.

And here’s the clincher: the other is of course is the Schnitzler scholar, who’s also a promoter Brutalo-Art like the first man, and all the other jurors for that matter.

Is it possible that he and I both share an admiration for Schnitzler?

I know of cases when scholars chose to write about authors for reasons other than admiration. Sometimes had to take a second or third choice, and sometimes a “choice” was forced on them. And opportunism often plays a role especially for opportunists.

Sure, anyone can read Schnitzler and anyone can write about Schnitzler. Doing that doesn’t have to mean that one is worthy that magnificent stylist and liberal thinker. My admiration for him is consistent with my tastes in present-day art literature, and I hope I have lives a life which is consistent with his liberalism.

Schnitzler’s books were burned in the Nazis bonfires of 1934, and he was verboten for the duration of the Third Reich. As an author who has been constantly blacklisted and censored in Austria, I am the last one to be an advocate of blacklisting and censorship. And I abhor those who favor and practice these methods today.

I think you can see what I am getting at. My love for that great author began in 1950, and my tastes haven’t changed. Can I be blamed for not wanting to have something in common with a mean and petty man? I know that it is not my decision to make and that I have no right to say this, but I emphatically refuse to share Schnitzler with that man.

I have not had the occasion to speak to him for over three decades. Fairly recently, I saw him having a cultural business lunch with a neighbor of mine at outdoor table at a neighborhood restaurant.

I was tempted to sit down uninvited and intrude in their conversation. I wanted to ask the scholar the question I had in mind.

Of course, I passed by, keeping my thoughts to myself. I have never given in to the temptation of engaging such aggressive intrusions. And even if I had intruded and asked the question, I would not have gotten an honest answer. I probably would not have gotten an answer at all.

So I can only hope that opportunism is the answer.

And this is where the strudel comes up again. Sharing the ability to bake a tasty strudel is quite not in the same league as dealing with a major literary figure, but then a good strudel is not something to scoff at.

****

Theme augmented in
Der Ausschluß: Memoiren eines Neununddreißigers
Edition 39, Vienna, 1988
ISBN 3-90091500-8
Der Ausschluß: Memoiren eines Neununddreißigers
(Memoirs of a 39er: a novel of sorts)
Edition 39, Vienna, 1988
ISBN 3-90091500-8
“This novel is a story of unrequited love,
for those who love without being loved in return,
a rude awakening is inevitable.
Kuhner brings experiences of remigration to life in bright colors.”
(Stella Hershan, Austro-American novelist)
“According to Kuhner, the reality of present-day Austria
can most effectively be depicted when treated as fiction.
He uses his pen as rapier, at times angrily,
at times bitterly and at times humorously.
The aspects of Austrian life that the author brings to the fore
must not be hushed-up.”
(Karin Bauer, Der Standard, Vienna)