MANES SPERBER
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listened until late in the night. Thus I witnessed the sounds of the
masses streaming in from all sides to the Ballhaus and soon
overflowing the entire Heldenplatz. "Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler! Sieg
Heil!" - ceaselessly those cries rang through the shabby room of my
miserable hotel. In the course of that night a strange feeling of
lostness overcame me, which went hand in hand with the sense of
rootlessness. Naturally I felt anxious about my whole family and the
many friends who should have emigrated long since, but had not
done so because they could not tear themselves away from that city.
In that night I discovered to my astonishment that Vienna was not
just a city that had become closed to me for who knows how long,
like Berlin since 1933. No, it was as though in those hours Vienna
must disappear. In that night I forbade myself any homesickness for
that city that I had boundlessly adored while still back in the shtetl,
and which I had first begun to love, seriously and passionately, once
she had disappointed me with her wicked enchantments.
"He knew this city too well, as one knows a woman one no
longer loves," I wrote in my thoughts of Vienna, twenty-five years
after that July 1916 when I had first set foot in the city. I was living
at the time, in the fall of 1941, near Nice. When I looked out of my
small window, I saw a tiny inlet and beyond it, shining in the sun,
the surface of the sea, while to the left on a projecting height there
was an olive grove. What a wonderful country! I appreciated it at
every season, yet it was clear to me that I would not pine for it the
way I had pined long years for Vienna, no matter where I happened
to be. It was Vienna I pined for, not Zablotow, which I had never
loved, even though it was there I had first experienced what it meant
to be at home.
•
•
•
Throughout my youth I lived in the belief that we stood at some
threshold and had to be ready at any moment to cross it. Or, to put
it differently we were in a passageway that we wanted to leave as
soon as possible, so that we could finally pass beyond the intermezzo
and enter the real action . Everything we did could only be prepara–
tion. When we attended - always in the cheap standing room - the
expressionist plays of Hasenclever, Toller, Brecht, Bronnen, or
Georg Kaiser, or read expressionist poetry, or looked at cubist pic–
tures, we were not always enchanted by them, but we felt, though
not always clearly enough, that all this was particularly relevant to
