Marjorie Perloff |The Vienna Paradox

davy crockett's hat

by Douglas Messerli

 

 Marjorie Perloff The Vienna Paradox (New York: New Directions, 2004)

At dinner one night at Marjorie Perloff’s house—an event with just a handful of couples as opposed to her usually larger affairs—the conversation turned to the subject of what those around the table, all quite renowned in our fields, had done before embarking upon our current careers. I can’t recall large parts of this friendly dinner conversation—which I believe included the artists Susan Rankaitis and Robert Flick, Marjorie’s daughter Nancy, a curator at the Getty Museum, and her husband Rob, scholars Renée Riese and Judd Hubert, and Howard and me—but I do remember reminding Marjorie that she had once told me that early in her career she had been so desperate for a job that she had applied at small colleges such as Beaver College (now called Arcadia University). Knowing of Marjorie’s erudition, her brilliant writing and teaching abilities, and gift of language(s), the idea of her teaching in that self-advertised pastoral place of peace and quiet in the Philadelphia suburbs was unthinkable for everyone in the room.

 

    Marjorie laughed, admitting that as a young housewife she’d had numerous jobs, even producing German titles for American films. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to translate the humor of Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz’s The Long, Long Trailer into German. How do you say, as Lucy does, “turn left right here, which leads Desi to swerve right?” “I also worked on Davy Crockett,” Marjorie admitted, “I still have a coonskin cap!” We broke into delighted laughter, while she went to find it in a nearby closet.

     The very thought that this great woman of academic renown had once worked on the very movies that I had attended as a child with my entire family was a revelation. As a family unit we shared perhaps only four movies (the other two being White Christmas and The Ten Commandments), and the idea that Marjorie had in any way had been connected to the other two films seemed almost miraculous; I remember feeling at the time that it may have been the only thing in our backgrounds, outside of the classroom camaraderie of teacher and student, that connected us!

     Soon after, the conversation turned to Marjorie’s childhood. We all knew that she had been born in Austria, the daughter of highly educated parents, and that she had escaped with her family via train on the night of March 13, 1938, the day the Anschluss (Austria’s political annexation by Germany) took effect. “My parents simply could not believe that the Austrian government could possibly submit to the Germans,” she reported. When asked to describe that shattering event, Marjorie demurred. “I can hardly remember anything. I was just a child at the time. I can only recall my mother telling my brother and me to be very quiet.”

     The publication of her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, accordingly, was more than just an event of interest for those of us close to this remarkable woman; it seemed a sort of personal answer to our dinner time questions.

     That book’s reproduction of the first two chapters of her childhood travel journal, “Die Areise” (“The ‘A’ Journey”) poignantly reveal the mixed feelings of a six year-old girl experiencing the excitement of events, but perhaps not recognizing their intense danger and significance; she translates:

 

 

“On the Train”

 

“On the train, we went to sleep right away. But my cousins, as is typical of them, complained they didn’t sleep all night. In Innsbruck, we had to get up and go to the police station where they unpacked all our luggage and my poor Mommy had to repack everything. There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hatbox and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good. And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book. Well, I hadn’t experienced much yet but, just wait, there will be more!”

 

     Perloff compares that charmingly innocent view of the family’s circumstance with a letter from her mother sent two days later to her sister in London, in which the family’s terror is quite clearly elucidated: the intense planning and packing up of family possessions, the sleepless night of March 12th, the “incessant shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!,” the sound of bombers flying overhead and vehicles rumbling through the streets, the hurried goodbyes, the tears. The same events of the young daughter’s travel journal are far more dramatically detailed in her mother’s recounting:

 

     So we finished packing and left in the evening: my father-in-law, Stella, Otto, Hedy and Greta, and Aunt Gerti. Those who didn’t have the same last name had to pretend not to know one another. This applied to the children as well: they were not allowed to speak and in fact didn’t speak. We traveled comfortably second-class as far as Innsbruck. The children slept. In Innsbruck, there was passport control: for Jews, the order was, “Get off the train with your luggage.” Aunt Gerti was allowed to continue. Evidently, they took her for Aryan although no one asked. We were taken by the S.A. to the police office, across from the railway station. There, we were held in a narrow corridor, heavily guarded. One after another, we were called into a room where our passports were examined, our money confiscated (since the rules had been changed overnight). They took 850 marks and the equivalent in schillings. We didn’t care the slightest. Our thought was only: will they let us travel further? Will we be arrested? Then all of our luggage was unpacked piece by piece. Finally, we were allowed to leave. …Back on the train, we passed one military convoy

after another going the other way. At 10 in the evening, we arrived [in Zürich]. …Here we are deciding what to do next.”

 

     This letter alone might have been a scenario for a film.

     But Perloff’s profound memoir is more than another story of escape from Nazi control. For Marjorie is less interested in how her family escaped, than she is in why they and others like them had waited for the very last moment to leave their beloved home; how their seeming assimilation as Jews into the anti-Semitic Austrian culture so completely misled these brilliant individuals; and, just as important, how these assimilated Austrians readily adapted themselves to their new American situations.

     Gabriele Mintz was born to Ilse Schüller Mintz and Maximilian Mintz in 1931. Her early childhood took place in the comfort of the Ninth District of Vienna near the University and Votifkirche (the neo-Gothic cathedral built in the mid-19th century on the sight of the attempted murder of the young kaiser Franz Joseph), the neighborhood she herself describes as “Austrian upper-middle-class.” Their apartment on Hörlgasse contained a high-ceilinged nursery painted white, heated by a large porcelain stove; a dining room and adjacent salon with floor-to-ceiling bookcases; and a maid.

      Gabriele’s father, Maximilian was a lawyer with a passion for poetry and art, which he shared with a circle of friends known as the Geistkreis, which included noted economists Friedrich Hayek (the group’s founder and a major influence on American Libertarianism), Gottfried von Haberler, Oscar Morgenstern, and Fritz Machlup, legal scholar Herbert Fürth (also a partner in Maximilian and his father’s law firm), art historians Otto Benesch and Johannes Wile, musicologist Emanuel Winernitz, political philosopher Erich Voegelin (with whom the father continued to correspond from 1938 to the late 1950s), the phenomenologists Felix Kaufmann (also a member of the famed “Vienna Circle”) and Alfred Schütz, the historian Friedrich Engel-Jansi, and the mathematician Karl Menger (former tutor to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg and, later, founder of the Austrian School of Economics). The group, in Perloff’s words, devoted “evenings to the theater, opera, concerts, and their own areas of reading.” But the group’s influence—with its interweaving memberships with other such Vienna groups: the earlier “Menger circle,” the first “Austrian school,” and the “Vienna Circle”—made it influential to 20th century thinking.

      It must have been difficult for Gabriele’s mother, Ilse, to accept the role of silent hostess, serving coffee and cake before discreetly leaving the room at the Geistkreis meetings in Hörlgasse 6. For she, like her husband, was a “proud intellectual,” with a doctorate—a degree also attained by her two sisters—in economics. Some of the reviews of Perloff’s memoir refer to her mother’s role in her later life in the United States as a “housewife.” But in fact, she took a second doctorate in economics at Columbia University, later combining teaching at Columbia with a position, alongside noted economists Martin Feldstein (later president of that organization and chief economic advisor to President Reagan) and Milton Friedman (winner of a Nobel Prize) at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A search of the NBR website still calls up several essays by Ilse Mintz on such subjects as “Determination in the Quality of Foreign Bonds,” “American Exports During Business Cycles, 1879-1958,” and “Cyclical Fluctuations in the Exports of the United States Since 1879.” I recall Marjorie’s humorous dismay in our early friendship in Washington, D.C., when, after discussing Pound, O’Hara, and David Antin, she observed, “Of course, my mother is distressed that I’m not reading Goethe.”

      The young Gabrielle’s grandfathers were even more illustrious figures in Viennese culture. Her maternal grandfather, Richard Schüller, born in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, traveled to Vienna to study law with Karl Menger, later serving as the Austrian representative to the League of Nations. In the Austrian government, he served first in the Department of Commerce and later in the Foreign Office under chancellor Dollfuss (and the successor upon Dollfuss’s murder, Kurt Schuschnigg), a position from which he negotiated major trade agreements and foreign loans for the Austrian government (including a trade agreement with Mussolini). Schüller escaped Nazi-controlled Austria at the age of 68 by hiking through the Alpine pass into Italy. Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Mintz, was an eminent Justitzrat (King’s counsel) who, in his youth, was a member of the noted literary coterie meeting at the Café Griensteidl that included Arthur Schnitzer, Hermann Bahr, and Peter Altenberg.

      In short, one could not imagine a family more involved in Austrian cultural life. How could they be so oblivious to the problems—particularly after Dollfuss’s murder? Perloff analyzes the problem first within the perspective of her own family: Richard Schüller was asked by his government superiors to allow himself to be baptized (he refused “the honor”); his brothers Hugo and Ludwig became Lutherans, the latter committing suicide in 1931 upon the collapse of his bank; and a distant cousin, Robert, was a devoted Nazi who after the Anschluss was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Perloff then considers these issues in the context of accounts such as that of art historian Ernst Gombrich (colleague of Perloff’s uncle, Otto Kurz) of the physical assault against Jews in the university, long before the Anschluss, where it became increasingly common for Nazis to beat up Jewish students, sometimes defenestrating them so that upon the sidewalk they might be charged (if they survived) with disturbing the peace (an incident also described in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento story, “Julia”). How could they tolerate these assaults and still describe themselves as Austrians? she wonders, a question reverberating, quite obviously, back upon her own family’s acceptance of their disintegrating Viennese life.

     Ultimately, she suggests that they saw their assimilation through a cultural lens that did not include ethnic and racial concerns. Since they shared cultural interests such as their love of Goethe, Stefan George, and others, they perceived themselves as Austrians without realizing that for their countrymen in general they remained racially “outsiders.” Their allegiance to the Germanic tradition blinded them, in a crucial way, to the religious and ethnic differences embedded in German and Austrian thought.

      Gombrich’s statement that he doesn’t “believe that there is a separate Jewish cultural tradition” may signify his failure to comprehend the deeply ingrained ideas of his countrymen, but it simultaneously points to the reason why many Austrian Jews, including Perloff’s parents, were able to quickly readjust their lives to their new American experience, were able to reinvent themselves as émigrés. While recognizing and disdaining the anti-intellectualism of their new home, Perloff’s parents quickly adapted to their now “lower middle-class” situation. Her father abandoned law to become an accountant, and despite now having to cook all meals by herself in their one-bedroom apartment, Marjorie’s mother still found time (and energy) to return to university studies.

      Gabrielle, moreover, like young immigrants everywhere, adapted to her life at an even faster rate. Within a month of her arrival in a new country, she switches from German to English in mid-sentence of an autobiographical entry:

 

Abe rim September musten [sic] wir angemeldet werden. Ich und

eben der Hansi [the son of Professor Felix Kaufmann, of Geitskreis

fame, and his physician wife, Else] kamen erst in de erste A, mein

Bruder in die drite [sic] A und meine Cousinen in die vierte B.

But my Kronstein cousins went to another school. After three days

I and George [as Hansi is now called!] skipped to 2A.

 

She has not only skipped a whole grade in three days, but crossed the language barrier as well. When Gabriele graduated high school, she changed her name to Margie, and later Marjorie.

     Much of The Vienna Paradox recounts the education and transformation of its author from an Austrian-born child to a professor of contemporary poetry—answering some questions we had begun to ask at that dinner-time conversation years earlier. She recounts her education at P.S. 7 and at The Fieldston School—sponsored by the New York Ethical Society—as well as her later graduate education at Catholic University. She mentions also her early employment at the Bettmann Archive and her short-lived job as an M-G-M title writer, which included her work on The Long, Long Trailer and Kiss Me Kate. But Davy Crockett and his hat has disappeared from the narrative, replaced in her memoir by her recollection of composing rhymes for Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Song” of Rose Marie, a job which earned her a “trapper’s hat.” Was my memory wrong? Had my desire for connections been so strong that I had transformed Nelson Eddy into Davy Crockett? It hardly matters; as we know, memory is often unreliable, and the story was the same. Most likely Perloff’s research of the events of her life had revealed something different from what she herself had recalled that long-ago night.

     Over time perspective changes. As she relates of her 1955 return to Vienna, the city “looked like a set for The Third Man,” “I tried to find Hörlgasse 6…but something got mixed up and [we] took a photograph of the wrong house.” “From my vantage point in 1955, none of this seemed very real.” Perloff, accordingly, has little patience with those who perpetually tout the superiority of pre-war Viennese life over their new American lives in the present. The young Gabrielle clearly grew up more involved in American popular culture, perhaps, than her Iowa-bred student—and with the advantage of a cultural heritage that deepens and enlivens her observations on American literature and art. And in that sense Perloff is herself a “Vienna paradox.”