In an alternate reality, Vienna is my hometown.
I suppose the version of me that was born there in very different then the one that lives in this reality. He’s not the least bit Japanese, for example. He probably doesn’t care about baseball. Heck, he’s only got about a quarter of the same DNA as me. He’s more like a first cousin than a doppelgänger. But that guy doesn’t exist and I do, because, well… Hitler. Or more specifically my great grandfather having the mix of foresight and resources required to get away from Hitler after he annexed Austria with the overwhelming support of Austrians.
Of course, in most of the alternate realities the multiverse might spit out, there is no me because the Nazis killed all of the Jews. More than any sci-fi continuity reason, or general ignorance of physics, this is why I hate the may worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The rise of Hitler is my sliding doors moment, as it is for innumerable others. If the door to National Socialism never opens, then maybe we never leave and life is very different. My family got lucky—incredibly lucky—but so many didn’t. I do not have survivor’s guilt. After all, I wasn’t the one who survived, but I do have survivor’s…conscience… maybe. It wasn’t me, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been.
As a result of this conscience, or perhaps because intergenerational trauma actually exists (note: or maybe because of my very real but very well managed obsessive-compulsive disorder), I keep my eyes open and I try to prepare for the worst. I am an optimist by nature, I really am, but I am never, ever, under the illusion that “it can’t happen here.”
Of all the imagined laws of history, the most real is probably that anyplace can go to sh!#. Countries face uneven risks, of course, but nowhere is automatically safe from extremism, bigotry, war, greed, or madness forever, not America, not Switzerland, and certainly not Austria.
Despite all of this, I have largely positive associations with Austria. My grandmother, who fled after her older sister but ahead of her parents in 1939, mostly gave me the good side. From her I got much more Mozart and Mohntorte than Hitler. Part of the reason for that is that she left as a 17-year-old and probably not a terribly worldly one at that. Another explaination may be good old denial. Certainly some of her peers in the extended family wondered if her long battle with depression was a function of repression as much as anything else. I doubt it completely explains all of that pain, but it certainly couldn’t have helped.
I went to study German in Austria in 2002, about 11 months after I first visited the city of my ancestors and laid eyes for the first time on 3 Lobkowitz Platz, the old family homestead in Vienna’s celebrated first district. I stopped in Vienna on a visit to a friend who was working with orphans in western Romania.
While lying in the hostel that night, utterly smitten with the idea that this city was my birthright, I concluded that there was no reason I couldn’t study in German in Vienna. One dollar bought 1.10 euros back then, and, even without earning my pathetic salary as a junior PR person, the difference between rent in Vienna and Boston made Austrian life downright feasible.
If a dumb, love sick me hadn’t curtailed my planned six months of study after two months, I might speak fluent German now, but I suspect the life impact of an additional four months might have been marginal. Being in Vienna changed me.
During my two plus months, I went everywhere. Not only did I hit every last tourist attraction in the the Rough Guide to Vienna, I visited innumerable sites that would be of no interest to anyone who wasn’t in my family. A couple times a week, I would call my Granny Licy in Woburn, Massachusetts on my first ever cell phone (note: fueled by a calling card purchased from a Nigerian barber shop), and we would take walks.
We’d always start from 3 Lobkowitz Platz, just like she did as a youth. One day we’d walk to her elementary school. Another day it was her secondary school. On a third it was the Gymnasium attended by her sister Trudy who, unlike my grandmother, loved school. And, perhaps most meaningfully, we walked to the less posh and more Jewish second district where her cousin Herti, who was as close or closer than a sister lived.
My grandmother had never gone back.
“You don’t go back to someplace they throw you out of,” she said quoting her father. But it was more. She had enormous anxiety about travel, probably partly as a function of the refugee experience. Our walks together
, were the closest she ever got.
They were magic.
I also visited the grave of a number of our relatives at Vienna’s Central Cemetery (Zentral Friedhof). Seeing the soil where my relatives rested connected me deeply to my origins, but seeing the graves in the Jewish part of the cemetery overgrown for lack of living relatives in Austria to care for them agitated me. It was like that a lot of me in Vienna. I loved the place and was mad that it wasn’t mine, or at least that I wasn’t its.
For a couple years after that, I felt deep connections to Vienna. I went there semi-regularly, albeit often as a stop on the way to more exotic destinations like the mysterious Balkans, but I was connected to both the place and people who lived there.
And then the visits stopped.
I knew Vienna so well and there was so much world to see that, well, I guess I moved on. I made an effort to return by applying to study at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in 2007, but my bid was rejected, and pursuit of a woman led me to fall in love with Africa, before pursuing Africa led me to fall in love with a (different) woman. (Note: Read all about it in my upcoming book tentatively entitled Africa: A Love Story, and previously entitled White Dan’s Burden—available when I finish it.)
Once it became clear that we’d be taking a break from living in Africa, or at least a break from trying to live in Africa, and moving to Geneva, I knew I’d make it back to Vienna eventually, and I started reaching out to old friends. It was a long but feasible drive or a short flight. And besides, I’m a citizen now—I have rights.
I’d originally looked into Austrian citizenship shortly after I returned from the studying in Vienna in 2002. I assumed that it must have been possible for the descendents of Austrian Jews to make a claim. After all, didn’t it seem like half the people I grew up with had Irish or Italian citizenship? And many (note: though not all) of their families hadn’t even been chased out.
But no. The consulate explained, almost dismissively, that the only way this would be possible would be for my grandmother, who absolutely was entitled to Austrian citizenship, to claim it, followed after some interval by my father, and then eventually by me. So no, I was not eligible.
But in 2019 the law changed, as laws have been known to do. The Austrian government agreed to offer citizenship to the descendants of Austrian victims of Nazism.
I was in.
The process was laborious. I needed numerous documents, including birth certificates across multiple generations, all with an “apostille” a sort of formal voucher by a state or national government for the authenticity of each document. Despite the fact that I had been an honest-to-God accredited consul not that long ago, I had never heard of an apostille. They’re pretty. Sometime they come with a ribbon or a shiny, gold sticker.
I needed further to ensure that getting a second citizenship would not cost me my job with the U.S. State Department. There was no doubt that I remained loyal, exclusively, to the U.S., but making sure that a well-intentioned security officer doesn’t see it differently was essential. The Department answered questions about whether taking a second citizenship would present a problem for me in classic bureaucratese. They explained that the Department evaluates people on an ongoing basis for suitability for clearance based on a whole person approach that continually examines individuals across a variety of axes. In other words, “maybe.”
I reached out to a former colleague who was a diplomatic security officer and begged him to interpret for me.
“They’re saying as long as we don’t get into a war with Austria, it will probably be fine,” he explained.
“Perfect!” I thought. “We’ve only been to was with Austria twice in the last 125 years, so I’m probably good!”
I got the citizenship eventually, as did my daughter. My son was born too late in the process to add to the same application, so I’ll need submit his application separately sooner rather than later. It shouldn’t be terrible, I have all of the documentation… except for the apostille on his birth certificate.
Some months ago, my daughter, who is named for my Austrian grandmother, asked me, “Daddy, can we go on an airplane trip just you and me without Mommy and C?”
“Well, of course, sweetheart, and I know just the place.”
So, after more than 20 years away, I, an Austrian citizen, returned with my Austrian daughter to visit OUR country. We didn’t have passports or anything, but the point holds. Eighty-five years after my grandmother fled for her life, we were going, if not exactly home, to someplace we belong.
Being in Vienna had been meaningful to me on previous trips; it had connected me to both my ancestry and the history of central Europe, but this was somehow more. Being a parent, as anyone with kids knows, amplifies things. It raises the stakes. As intense as I feel any slight or unfairness towards me, I feel it double for my children. And it this case I was giving my daughter something she was owed, something that the woman for whom she is named had stolen from her. Finally, after four generations, it was restored.
In the run up to our visit, I tried to explain Austria, at least a little, to my daughter. Like her great-great grandparents living in Vienna, she loves monarchy. They liked the fact that the Hapsburg’s annexation of what is now Western Ukraine gave them a better life and access to the metropole; my daughter likes that monarchs have shiny things and get to boss people around. So I was certain we were going to see a number of the important Hapsburg sites. In particular, I thought she’d be interested in Empress Sisi and, to a lesser extent, her husband Emperor Franz Josef. But that entailed explaining who they were.
“Were they a good King and Queen?” she wanted to know. “Did they help the people?”
How to answer that?
“Well, they weren’t bad. Of course, the Emperor had a war against the United States. Well, it’s complicated.”
It got more complicated still, explaining why Granny Licy did not stay in Vienna.
“There was a very evil man who took over the country and wanted to hurt a lot of people, so our family needed to run away.”
“So he was against the people?”
“Well a lot of the people liked him, maybe they liked him because he was so bad.”
“Why? They shouldn’t have done that.”
Kids tend to have a fundamental, albeit egotistical, sense of fairness. It is easy to explain to them why segregation, homophobia, racism, transphobia, anti-semitism, and the like are wrong. They get it. What is hard is explaining why some people feel that all of those things are good. To put it in the current American context, it is very easy to teach children why bigotry is wrong. It is very hard to teach people why so many of their ancestors thought it was right. It is hard because there are only bad answers: fear, arrogance, ignorance, and the fundamental weakness of human beings. Arguing “well, they were doing what they thought was right,” may be the most defensible answer, but it is an answer in defense of the villains of the story. Of course, they thought it was right. Man is, more than anything, a rationalizing being, so human beings can always convince themselves that what they’re dong is right. The problem is that so, so often it isn’t.
And that is what I tried to explain to my precious daughter. That we were victims. That America saved us, and we saved ourselves, but that that does not mean that America—or we for that matter—are always the good guys. That doing good, that being good, means working, and thinking, and trying to understand people who are different from you and always, always keeping kindness at the center of your being. I explained that we have both been blessed to have both survived and to have recovered some of what we’d lost, but that doing so was the work of generations, aided again, and again, by good people, many of whom we didn’t even know, who tried to make the world a little less unfair and a little more just.
One of the walks I telephonically took with my grandmother in 2002 was from Lobkowtiz Platz to the Eissalon am Schweden Platz. My grandmother, who had not been there since 1939, said it had the best ice cream in town. How she knew this was still true 63 years later, I do not know. I’m not even sure how she knew it still existed. But this little ice cream shop, founded in 1886, was still there in 2002, and it’s still there now.
I don’t remember how to walk to Granny Licy’s schools, or to Herti’s house, but I know how to walk to the Eissalon, and on April 28, 2024, my Austrian daughter and her Austrian dad took that walk. She had vanilla and I had strawberry. In cones.
It’s not far from where Vienna’s Gestapo was based, but the Gestapo is long gone and the Eissalon is still there.
And so are we, because it’s Vienna, and damn it, that, as much as anywhere, is where we belong. We went back to exactly the place they kicked us out of, and we brought my grandmother’s name with us
There’s no place like home.
Loved this, especially the telephone tours with your grandmother. And the original book title made me LOL for real.
Thanks for sharing.
This was a great one Dan. I had an incredibly strong emotional reaction to the two weeks I spent in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and that is hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian-Polish border where my family comes from. To walk in the footsteps of your grandmother with her namesake daughter is just an incredibly poignant moment. I am so glad you got to experience that. I honestly cannot imagine it. I would probably be holding back tears the entire time, probably quite unsuccessfully.