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the social security network to all Austrians. They also
promised payments to the unemployed and vacations to
schoolchildren. The war over, we woke up with a major
hangover and buried our shame under geraniums and
furniture polish. When a new referendum was ordered by
the Nazis, workers and bourgeois alike jumped at the
chance to sit in their German uncle’s lap. He might have
rapacious jaws and wandering hands, but his wallet was
well stuffed.
Marianne Gödel had warned us in vain. The more clear-
sighted among Kurt’s Jewish friends were already gone. I
was blind and married to a man who was deaf. Giving in to
my own panic would have dragged Kurt down into a deep
and crippling anxiety. My job was to smooth things over. A
minority was still sounding the alarm, but I belonged to the
silent majority. How do you go against the current of
history when your comfort and your hopes for personal
fulfillment are not in any way altered by that current?
I can’t lie: I saw the broken shop windows, the families
kneeling in the gutter, the abuse of the elderly, the street
arrests. Like all the others, I reacted as though bobbing in a
whirlpool where, to keep from drowning, you think of
yourself first.
I’d asked Anna if I was making a mistake in not
accompanying my future husband to America.