Memories of Vienna 1938

Night Falls on the City: The Lost Masterpiece of Wartime Vienna
by Sarah Gainham
Abacus, 2012, 632 pages, $17.99

Emblazoned on the cover is the quote, “A rare novel of beauty, scope and ambition”. Hmm, my first thought was, a novel, decorated stories. About such a topic? Sniffy me. Second thought came hot upon: where would we be without the novel? Of course there is history—records, recollections, experiences—all essential bones of the past—but what puts the flesh on those bones and makes them again a living body? Narrative: song and story. Characters that speak and weep. From Homer to David Malouf in, say, Ransom; from all the Tudor history ever, to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell (perhaps the mature and charismatic Clint Eastwood of the day). Totalitarianism, terrorism, Nazism, every possible actual horror is made more known and memorable as story: Tom Keneally’s Schindler, or Simon Montefiore’s Sashenka or Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, whose authenticity is reinforced by her own deportation and death, and perhaps greatest of all, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. And the great re-tellings of the First and Second world wars as well as of the horrors of the present times.

This book was first published in 1967 to considerable acclaim but seems to have sunk into oblivion until now. Sarah Gainham wrote two other novels set in Vienna, and articles for the Spectator, Encounter and New Republic. She was born in London in 1915 and in 1947 went to Vienna to work for the Four Power Commission, a body set up for the Allies’ governing arrangements of Vienna. She remained for fifty years and died in Austria in 1999.

The book begins in the Vienna of 1938. I was there then. Fourteen years younger than Gainham, almost nine in 1938, a precious Jewish only child in a family where talking, talking, was the ongoing activity, the child with big ears, hanging around, in times seen by the grown-ups as so terrible that my father decided firmly by 1937 that we must leave Austria, indeed Europe. He was considered a fool by most, and taking wife, mother-in-law and child to Australia was brave indeed. But this book, like others of the time, reminds me how complacent the endangered Viennese managed to remain. I have the clearest memories of the excited anticipation of the Nazis’ coming, of Hitler’s flower-framed welcoming portraits in the shops of Kaerntner Strasse and around the Opera, of all the men selling little silver swastikas and red and black and white ones on street corners, the general febrile air. My father’s timing was a near thing. We were due to leave on the night of the Anschluss: streets full of noisy wild mobs. Very scary. Our trip to the Hauptbahnhof in two taxis, conducted by my father’s unwilling-Party-member dear friend via back streets accomplished, and more excitements to come. 

The centre of this narrative wheel is the rich, beautiful, clever actress Julie Homburg, star of the Burgtheater, Vienna’s great classical theatre, and married to the “clever idiot” Jewish academic, steeped in the past and wrong about the present. Julie is no historian or politician but her life is a learning curve, while husband Franz’s is a high-speed unravelling. The book’s tone is deliberate; at the start of its 632 pages Julia seems to take an almost endlessly detailed walk home, noting everything—bit much for me—but towards the very end the walk is repeated, through total destruction. And one comes to appreciate her specificity: not just the plot, but what everyone said, and wore and ate, and it is this very specificity that is its power. Thus, although Kristallnacht is never mentioned, the action of the brutal, stupid, power-filled killing of two pathetically feeble, poor old Jews, is given in detail, because their existence and death are connected to Julie and Franz and to much else that follows.

But the book is not about the Holocaust; its theatrical and intellectual and ordinary characters are not Jewish at all. Julia is a relaxed Catholic; her later lover’s family are minor landed gentry, interested in having a star like Julie for a house-guest, otherwise just getting on with life as always. For some, cosying up to the Nazis seemed to promise advantage (a friendly general might be the way for a pretty so-so actress to achieve huge comfort and stardom in Berlin). For many people the Anschluss seemed to promise order and prosperity; anti-Semitism was at first a sideshow. The march of events, always specific in the way it impinges on the growing cast of characters, is a learning curve that becomes ever steeper.

The supposedly dead Franz is hidden in their flat, loved and tended by Fina the maid, as well as by Julie, but not for too long. Do you want to know how and why Fina is so devoted? Gainham will tell you. She always does. Julie gets a young lover. Only one person knows Franz’s whereabouts—Georgy, the Hungarian journalist who likes to rattle polemics with him. He is also a great friend to Julie. At the theatre there are more characters—self-serving, self-doubting, honest, deceiving, noble: a growing cast as their connections expand.

Events are what expand their connections, and although there is a lot of love, affection, tenderness and expediency, what contains all this is the grinding of history. The heavy footsteps of the advancing Nazi power bring either enthusiasm or terror to our cast as they (and we) learn ever more about it. It becomes more brutal and random and corrupt. Then comes the Russian Front. From March 1938 to postwar 1945 it becomes a death march. Julie is almost the only survivor. The Opera and the Burgtheater are gone, and she is to become the star of the new postwar theatre, the old variety theatre, Ronacher—to which my father took me to see funny-man S.Z. Sakall, who also survived, to do well in Hollywood (see Casablanca).

It is a great big clever, moving book, and it is the very detail, the specificity of characters and events that make it such a remarkable book. It doesn’t need a précis, it just needs many more readers.