One can even conceive of the monstrous case of a Jew who would feel nostalgia for Vienna. Vladimir Jankélévitch
Axel Corti’s film Welcome in Vienna (1986) left a vivid trace in the memory of the French spectators who had the good fortune to see it on its theatrical release, a quarter of a century ago now.1 One recalls its 35 mm cinematography, the so particular grain of the black and white that seemed to reanimate the postwar newsreels, and the keen and patient eye of the cameraman, which some judged “worthy of the Rossellini of Germany Year Zero.”2 One was likewise sensitive at the time to the vigor of the dialogue, to the great modernity of the actors’ playing — most often stage actors in Austria — and to the poignant tonality that the images derived from the adagio of the String Quintet in C major, D. 956, op. 163, which Schubert composed two months before his death, and which passes, not without reason, for one of the most overwhelming in the chamber-music repertoire… One will have somewhat forgotten, on the other hand, the political current events that marked its release and no doubt accentuated its box-office success. More than 150,000 French spectators turned out, which remains a respectable figure for a demanding film, moreover the laureate of numerous international prizes.3
A trilogy
One recalls above all the unprecedented story of its main character, Freddy Wolf (Gabriel Barylli) who, at the end of 1944, returns to his homeland in American uniform, after having been driven from it seven years earlier. From the outset, then, it would be more just to associate with the director’s name that of his screenwriter and friend, Georg Stefan Troller, since the film is the third and final part of his autobiography. With its first two installments made for Austrian television, God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore (1981) and Santa Fe (1985), he thus concludes his trilogy entitled Wohin und zurück, translated a little flatly into French under the title Vienne pour mémoire.4
The first avatar of Troller, the one through whom the end of his adolescence comes back to life, is in fact named Ferry Tobler (Johannes Silberschneider). He is only seventeen in November 1938 when he witnesses in Vienna, obviously powerless, the antisemitic violence that accompanied the annexation of the country. The suicide of his father, the despoliation of all his possessions, force him to flee, and his story, in the first installment, is not without echoes of that of Ludwig Kern, a character in grave peril in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Les Exilés (Flotsam), tossed without respite from one European border to another, from detention center to detention center, because he is a Jew, illegal and undesirable.5 The first film accompanied the hero in his flight and abandoned him abruptly in June 1940, at the turning of a dead-end street in Marseille, while the roundups carried out by the Gendarmerie Nationale heavily mortgaged his future. In Santa Fe, however, we found the same character again, without a visa and forbidden to disembark aboard a dilapidated cargo ship, putting in to the harbor of New York in 1941. In an attempt to save from drowning a young émigré woman who had escaped from a camp and was placed in the same hopeless situation, he threw himself into the water and, against all expectation, lost his life.6
It is his companion in misfortune, met during the crossing, Alfred Wolf, known as Freddy, who in a sense takes over from him and becomes the screenwriter’s second avatar. We follow him to New York, and meet the circle of German and Austrian émigrés who survive more or less with difficulty in this America still quite insensible to the dramas being played out in Europe. Finally, imbued with the irrepressible desire to return to Austria, Freddy decides to enlist in the Army, and it is with the stripes of an American sergeant that we will find him again in Alsace, in 1944, at the beginning of Welcome in Vienna.
Return to Vienna
To reach Vienna, he will have to wait several more months, for it is only in September 1945, after thirty-five minutes of running time, that he finally enters the city, in large part destroyed. He now belongs to the American occupation forces who, along with the Soviets, the British and the French, as in Berlin, will divide the capital among themselves until 1955. This return is once again placed under the influence of Schubert: the opening bars of the adagio performed by the Alban Berg Quartet signal an ellipsis but also a pause in the narrative, a breathing space. They lend all their gravity to the images of the crossing in a military ambulance, and the vehicle will not have been chosen at random, so true is it that the wounded city now seems to require intensive care. The slow but incessant movements of the camera, naturalized by the journey by truck and the curiosity of the two passengers, reveal first, here and there, large portraits of Stalin, direction signs in Cyrillic, red stars; people queue, bucket in hand, before a water pump on the sidewalk; only rare horse-drawn carriages circulate for civilians, but women and children push by main force heavy handcarts. The passersby carry many suitcases and parcels; everywhere people shovel away rubble, for the city is very largely in ruins. Numerous tottering dwellings are held up by props, like that severely war-mutilated man who crosses the screen from one side to the other, supported by his crutches. “Long live the Red Army, liberator of Vienna” proclaims a banner proudly. Freddy turns his gaze left and right, looks with all his eyes, appalled, and his Berliner-Jewish comrade Adler, equipped with a camera, remains silent at his side. Newsreel archives — the only ones in the triptych — skillfully integrated into the décor are reflected in the windshield of their vehicle, the slow movement of the ambulance seems to be set to the rhythm of the melody. So many mute impressions before images of desolation that, to understand them, there is no need to compare them with those of prewar Vienna reproduced in the first installment.
The “return” properly speaking takes place in the second part of the sequence, at night. It begins with a rapid dissolve resembling an iris opening: it is the beam of a flashlight that uncovers a gaping window frame while the pit music dies away softly: here is the interior of a building of which nothing remains, nothing but a fragment of wall at the back of a vacant lot. Freddy has led his comrade to the scene of his childhood:
Adler: Are you sure? Freddy: Yes, this is it. Here, this is the candy shop. And there was our pharmacy. Adler: Shit!
The hesitation in the use of verb tenses betrays well enough the quite understandable disturbance of the character who finds a wasteland in place of the house of his birth: “Hier ist das Zuckerlgeschäft, und da war unsere Apotheke.”
Freddy: Seven years, how many days is that? Adler: I don’t know… two thousand five hundred? Freddy: Then for two thousand five hundred days I have waited for this moment. Up there, that was my room (…). Adler: Did any of your family still remain in Vienna? Freddy: In thirty-eight, yes. Adler: Now, it’s you who are here. Freddy: Ok! Ok! Ok! It was really worth it! It was really worth it…
One might think that these last words of Freddy’s concern his project of return and possess an ironic connotation, but the rest of the dialogue will set us straight: it is to the tragically derisory character of the Nazi enterprise that Freddy is alluding. For, strangely, nothing seems able to divert the hero from his enterprise, not even the non-place that the site of his birth has become. To be sure, Freddy is indeed here now, but this “being here,” the rest of the film will not cease to call into question by tightening its limits. If Freddy manages, with more or less ease, to mourn his childhood and its sweets, how to explain that nothing comes to blunt his fierce, his absurd will to return?
Return to the source
For Freddy-Troller was truly never at home in Austria, a country of old antisemitic tradition according to the author, where one is antisemitic “as one wears little hunting hats or gray-green clothes to show one’s love of the homeland.”7 The unkind remarks that the anonymous Viennese distill around the hero, the antisemitic insult they always seem to have on the tips of their tongues, which they still utter in German before him but which they will doubtless not fail to translate into English the moment he removes his uniform, do not necessarily make the country a haven of serenity for a Jew. Therefore, and since he is a common man, despised then hunted in his youth, since he does not belong to the intellectual aristocracy of a Joseph Roth or a Stefan Zweig, his return cannot quite be conflated with that of an exile. “I never heard the word exile. In our family, in our circles, in that crowd I was mixed in with, I was a nothing, a zero among other zeros; in that crowd the word exile does not exist. ‘Exile’ was something far superior to us.”8
In fact, if the question of return admits an answer, one will not find it immediately, not explicitly in the film, and its screenwriter himself cast doubt on cinema’s capacity to transpose this subject: “But the essential thing, that hidden humiliation, of which we have the presentiment in Kafka, and which means that, from a certain moment on, one will do no more than play one’s life because one finds oneself dispossessed forever of a dwelling on this earth: I wonder whether it comes through clearly in these films.”9 The lost homeland that Troller-Freddy has come to seek in Austria does not lie between the Danube and Lake Constance, but it might well be reincarnated elsewhere, in the theater, for example, or in the cinema!
In Vienna, Freddy has fallen in love with Claudia, who preferred to remain in Austria rather than follow her father, head of Nazi counterintelligence, Colonel Schütte, to whom the Americans hasten to offer hospitality. The young woman, formerly an actress at the Landestheater in Salzburg, knows her Schnitzler well, and does not confuse Schiller with Grillparzer… For Freddy, the return to the homeland could thus be this beloved young woman and, through her, the Viennese theater that he can help bring back to life in agreement with his comrade Adler, now a liaison officer in charge of cultural affairs. But disillusionment comes quickly: the new repertoire is American. So they will stage The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, for the actors “would be happy if they could play the new plays, the democratic, American plays, of which they have been deprived for so long.” The deprivation, however, cannot have been unbearable: the poster for the antisemitic play Rothschild Victorious at Waterloo, commissioned during the war by the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude, still hangs proudly in the theater, and no one, apart from Freddy who tears it down in a rage, seems unduly moved by it.
But there is worse: some actors have a more than dubious past, and the director Oskar Pelz himself is a former SS man. We will see further on that the men of the theater too have blood on their hands. No matter, “the Viennese love their actors so much, how can one forbid them to perform?” Freddy, who cannot bring himself to give up his hopes, has nonetheless clearly perceived the highly symbolic dimension of these accumulated small and large renunciations. They are a matter of realpolitik and concern today the great theater of the world:
“In Austria, they continue to play with the same cast, and without intermission. We are at the fifth act, and it is we who hastened to write it for them.”
Behind the gallery of our characters, now autobiographical and now archetypal, this first great Austrian film to thus look back on the country’s past also interrogates the world of cinema and its relative silence. Axel Corti knows well The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed’s film, from a screenplay by Graham Greene which, as one recalls, set its action in this same Vienna of the immediate postwar period, and from which he borrows a certain number of elements: a damsel in distress, the cabaret, the theater, an atrocious trafficking in medicines, and even the evocation of Santa Fe… But it is in order to draw up a far clearer and more terrible reckoning of the compromises. In Welcome in Vienna, there is still the question of the denazification of Emil Jannings, the great silent-film actor anointed by Goebbels, whom the Allies banned from the screen after the war. Yet one will have grasped that here the tree hides the forest, that amnesty is not far off — it has already won over people’s minds — and that the former Nazis will quickly recover their civic standing. Freddy soon has the painful experience of this: his sweetheart, indulging in a transparent emotional blackmail, declares to him indeed, all shame cast aside, that she is quite determined to work with a former SS man, so long as she can work… What place, then, did young Freddy intend to hold — he who refuses to forget — in this Vienna that aspires to rebuild itself by making a clean sweep of its recent past?
Return upon oneself
“And that obsession of really wanting to have a homeland, of wanting to be in a country where my language is spoken… one cannot imagine how mad it is… what I did to have a German book to read. I remember, I was in Pau, in the Basses-Pyrénées, there was nothing, not a word of German, I had to read in German and I dreamed at night that there must be a public library in the château. There must be a book on German literature… they would perhaps have a few lines, a few quotations in the original language. Indeed, they had that. They had poems with books on old German literature, and there were two lines of poetry there, one line of poetry there, immediately copied, learned by heart, because there was a tiny bit of Hölderlin, a tiny bit of Goethe… I needed that. Without it, I could not survive (…) It was like that for years. It was such an immense thirst to have my language around me.”10
One will have understood it: the desire to return that seizes the character is not the nostalgia for an improbable Ithaca; there is little trace in him of a fascination with the native place that would derive from “the intrinsic nature” of the place or from the mere fact of having been born there. Nor does Freddy return as an “avenger and dispenser of justice, sword raised high, to reestablish the status quo and put things back in order.” Even if it would be unjust to see in him only that “softhearted poet” of whom Jankélévitch speaks,11 his true native land is his language. Hence, in the film, these recurrent allusions to German, this impression that the American language is gradually effacing itself in its favor, this preliminary reminder, from the very first sequence, of the specificity of the Austrian language with its multiple variations, its reputedly more melodious accent, all of whose subtleties the Berliner Adler does not always understand. Hence, too, in the second installment, the endearing figure of Dr. Treumann, a Viennese writer who became, in order to survive, a grocer in New York, forced to write in English to economize on translation costs, and who ends by dying of being deprived of his own language. The character is inspired by Robert Pick, the screenwriter’s uncle, a friend of Remarque and of Hermann Broch, whose publisher he also was.
Troller thus points us toward the matrix origin of his own culture, to which he also pays homage in the composition and the harshness of the dialogue, which send us back to the great Viennese satirical tradition, that of the likes of Karl Kraus, Tucholsky or Nestroy. One thinks, for example, of the scabrous discussion with the neighbors, the members of the Kleinhöfler family to whom Freddy’s mother is supposed to have miraculously “ceded” the pharmacy before disappearing, but also of the naïveté of Adler hoping to find among the Soviets a model of democracy, of the Mozart cemetery whose century-old trees are felled without scruple, of the letter from Washington from Claudia’s father, which Freddy cannot keep himself from reading on the sly, more and more dumbfounded:
“Dear Little One, Thank you for your news. What you tell me about life in Austria is truly strange and striking. Here, indeed, everything is far better. You would be astonished… Frankly, and even though you have explained to me why, I do not understand how you, my daughter, could have begun a liaison with a Jew. Even here in America, it would be absolutely impossible, in our circle… To be sure, you say this Jew could currently be very useful to you from a professional point of view… yet you should break off contact with him as soon as possible. None of my American friends would want… his child… with a Jew…”
One thinks above all of the character of Treschensky, a kind of Good Soldier Švejk gone wrong, former custodian of Freddy’s lycée, who has not forgotten the humiliations the character once inflicted on his Jewish teachers, after the Anschluss. Totally opportunistic, the man was in turn a member of the communist youth (he has kept its rhetoric), a props assistant, a Nazi, a Wehrmacht soldier, an executioner, and soon close to the conservative forces, future member of the People’s Party… Thanks to the black market, he begins a new career after the war, engages in trafficking of all kinds: fake American “Mickey” watches, cigarettes, furs, saccharine… Petty then large-scale trafficking, since he also diverts entire shipments of penicillin… It falls to him to pronounce the title phrase, ever so ironic, addressed to Freddy: “Welcome in Vienna”! And yet, as Freddy himself has the bitter experience, the insidious character is quite hard to hate. Did he not protect the young man and his Jewish friends, at the lycée, each time the antisemites attacked them, asking nothing in return? Nothing… except a snack, or even a schilling! Adler has every reason to conclude by quoting Schnitzler: “The soul is a foreign land”…
Impossible return
The articles that accompanied the film’s release in Paris, in October 1986, propose for the most part, as has been said, a very political reading of the work of Troller and Corti. It is true that the Austrian magazine Profil, then the New York Times, had recently revealed that the autobiography of Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary-General of the UN and candidate in the presidential election in Austria, was strangely full of gaps. The disturbance concerned obviously his activity during the period 1938–1945, but the grave accusations leveled against him did not prevent him from being elected — on the contrary, say the most cynical… For the critics who recall that the Allies had decided, as early as 1943, to consider the Austrians as the first victims of the war, the film addresses above all the question of East-West relations, of compromises of all kinds, of the nauseating past that continues to befoul the present, of the failed denazification and that of the Austrians’ behavior toward their own minority. The journalists sensitive to the question of the extermination and of its representation — as it is posed here, in our view, in a nonetheless very acute manner — appear far rarer, despite Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s great film released a year earlier. It is all rather as if the staging of Austrian antisemitism — and its scandalized critical evocation — formed a screen. The opening scene of Axel Corti’s film could nonetheless have alerted those spectators.
Across the snow-covered plain of Alsace of that late December 1944, in the jeep that carries them back eastward and that advances indeed from the right to the left of the screen, Freddy Wolf and his companion Adler drive on without stopping, without concerning themselves with the defeated soldiers traveling in the opposite direction, and without even seeming slowed by the numerous explosions that form dangerous craters all around. Soon, before them, leaning against a tank carcass and then standing, an enemy soldier in rout signals, screaming, that he surrenders. He carries in his arms a shape resembling that of a human being. Adler has to resign himself to stopping. Although it remains largely off-frame, one eventually perceives that the shape is in reality a woman, in striped garb, whom the questioned soldier claims to have protected and carried through the night, and who is said to have died two hours earlier. One can therefore understand it from the outset: for Wolf the path of return is as if forbidden, it is here dramatically barred by the still-warm corpse of a deportee woman.
The camps will be alluded to several times in Welcome in Vienna. In a minor key at first, in the first part, where one sometimes believes one can make out in the background other striped garments; in the dialogue too, and if one is to believe the locals, it would now be fitting to forget: “life must go on, after all.” But the evocation of the genocide concerns the screenplay as well. In the last half-hour of the film — we are in the winter of 1945 — Freddy goes to the home of Stodola, the father of Susi, herself secretary at the cultural delegation for military affairs. The man is a draftsman and a tinkerer in his spare time. On a shelf, a strange wooden model intrigues the young man: it is the swing of Boger, the executioner of Auschwitz of sinister memory. One could not imagine a more minimalist representation. On this scale model, Stodola calmly explains the workings of the instrument of torture, and Freddy’s curiosity will soon be satisfied. He himself, the old man explains, was at Mauthausen, but one of his comrades had direct experience of it. No, he specifies, the SS were not the only ones to “whip people with passion.” “Later, the ordinary guards took a liking to it. And shortly before the end of the war, they mobilized the entire male staff of the German Theater of Prague, Germans and Austrians. (…) When they arrived, they showed such imagination! such imagination…”
In staging the erratic itinerary of Ferry Tobler alias Freddy Wolf in the Europe of the war years, Troller and Corti, as one sees, did not pass beside the essential. Their film poses, with great measure but obstinately, the question of the representation of disaster. It proposes convincing dramaturgical answers and signals the unspeakable with a great economy of means. The authors also test the aesthetic possibilities of their art. One of the last scenes of Welcome in Vienna deserves finally to be noted in this respect.
While the relations between Freddy and Claudia are loosening, the young woman reproaching her lover for “wanting to break everything because they broke him,” we are suddenly plunged into night. Facing the screen, emerging from the fog and apparently lit by the harsh light of floodlights, a steam locomotive heads three-quarters toward the screen amid the howl of a siren. One thinks obviously of the famous sequence from the original film by Wanda Jakubowska, The Last Stage (1948), which Alain Resnais will borrow to illustrate his own film.12 But here, the scene does not reduce to a mere homage. We are well and truly in a marshaling yard, a sloping track allowing, by gravity, the freight cars to be maneuvered: cattle cars. In shot-reverse-shot with the gaze of a stunned Freddy, and filmed in close-up, the camera dwells at some length on the isolated cars that seem to follow, for no apparent reason, their random itinerary. This nocturnal scene of the separation of the cars could in turn have inspired Arnaud des Pallières, who made Drancy Avenir a dozen years later:
“It was an image of the extermination that had slowly drifted down to me, to my present. There is no hidden meaning behind this image; it simply lingers in our world today, available to whoever wishes to seize it (…) it is an image, irreplaceable, that vanishes with each present that has not known how to recognize itself as its target.”
Notes
The film is to be re-released in French cinemas at the end of November 2011.↩︎
Michel Mardore, “La loi du silence politique,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 October 1986.↩︎
Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival 1986, Best Director award at the San Sebastián International Festival 1986, Best Film award at the Chicago International Festival 1986, Best Film award at the Baden-Baden Festival 1986, Bronze Leopard at the Locarno International Festival 1987…↩︎
The expression Wohin und zurück (Where to? and back) is said to have been inspired in Troller by this well-known and terrible witticism: two Viennese Jews meet, shortly after Kristallnacht: — That’s it, I’m leaving tomorrow, I managed to get a visa for Australia. — Australia! that’s far… — Far? Far from what?↩︎
Erich Maria Remarque, Les Exilés (Liebe deinen Nächsten), 1939; Paris, Plon, 1962 for the French translation. The novel, expurgated of any allusion to the characters’ Jewishness, nonetheless enjoyed a fine adaptation in the cinema under the title So Ends Our Night (J. Cromwell, 1941).↩︎
“When I arrived in New York, I was dead, quite simply dead inside, after having lost what nourished me: the motherland, in the most classical sense of the term. As if, in losing the homeland, one lost contact with one’s own feelings. That is the meaning of the death of Ferry Tobler, on arrival in America, who passes the baton to Freddy. It deliberately breaks the possible identification with a hero, but it corresponds above all to a real death, an inner one.” Anne Laurent and Michel Prat (interview conducted by), “Vienne pour mémoire, an interview with Axel Corti and Georg Stefan Troller,” Esprit no. 124, March 1987.↩︎
Gérard Pangon (interview conducted by), “La Sale Histoire,” Télérama no. 1916, 1/10/86.↩︎
Alain Dhote, “Interview with Georg Stefan Troller,” Chimères magazine no. 2, summer 1987. Article available online: http://www.revuechimeres.fr/drupal_chimeres/files/02chi10.pdf↩︎
Georg Stefan Troller, “Écriture et tournage,” Welcome in Vienna, Avant-scène Cinéma no. 354, November 1986, p. 14. “These films” are those of the trilogy.↩︎
Alain Dhote, “Interview with Georg Stefan Troller,” op. cit.↩︎
Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, Paris, Flammarion, 1974, p. 285.↩︎
Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), 1955.↩︎