The German Genius

Jewish businessmen in Austria, and he did not think that “Austria in its present mood would allow Jews once again to build up these family monopolies.” In an American survey in 1947–48, nearly a quarter of all Viennese thought that the Jews had “got what they deserved” under Nazism, while 40 percent thought that the “Jewish character” was responsible for anti-Semitism. For decades Austrians presented themselves as “the first victims” of the Nazis and used this argument to rebuff Jewish claims for restitution, many of which they insisted were fraudulent. (Although the notion that Austria was the “first victim” was accepted by the Allies at the Ottawa Conference in 1943, following the Anschluss the SS was “swamped” with Austrian applicants.)
    Perhaps the most ludicrous—and embarrassing—episode of this kind occurred during the filming of The Sound of Music in Salzburg in 1965, when the local authorities refused to allow swastika flags to be hung in the Residenzplatz as a backdrop. They argued that Salzburgers had never supported the Nazis—at least they did until the producers of the film said they would use instead real newsreel footage, after which the city fathers backed down. 33
    At least three prominent Austrian politicians—Hans Öllinger, Friedrich Peter, and Kurt Waldheim—were exposed (as often as not by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who received death threats for his pains) as erstwhile SS or Wehrmacht officers (very junior in Waldheim’s case) and it was not until July 1991 that the Socialist federal chancellor Franz Vranitsky publicly acknowledged Austrian “co-responsibility” for what had happened in the Third Reich—rather late, one might think. The growth in popularity of the radical right Freedom Party (FPÖ) under Jörg Haider’s leadership belied the fact that the country was really attempting to deal with its past. FPÖ propaganda at times verged on Holocaust denial, claiming it was in any case no different from the Soviet Gulag, while the party’s attitude to immigrants resurrected the terms of biological racism so redolent of the Nazis.
    All this was underlined by what happened at Mauerbach. At the end of October 1997, Christie’s Auction House Vienna sold the contents of Mauerbach Monastery, an old Carthusian building in a sleepy village about thirty minutes west of the Austrian capital. Some 8,400 art objects, which had been looted from Austrian Jews, had been stored in the monastery since the 1960s. It was a dismal affair that did the Austrian authorities no credit at all. From 1945 until 1969 the government made no attempt whatsoever to trace any Holocaust survivors. At one stage the man charged with disposing of the art was the very individual who had masterminded its confiscation in the first place. On two other occasions the Austrian government passed strict laws that made it all but impossible for Jews to identify their property—and this at a time when much of this “Holocaust art” decorated Austrian embassies abroad. In one case where the claimant was eventually successful, he was charged $8,000 for years of storage—for a painting that had been confiscated . Only 3.2 percent of works were ever returned to their rightful owners, and it was not until the American magazine ARTnews exposed what was sequestered in Mauerbach that any action was taken. 34
    T HE C LOSED A RCHIVES OF V ICHY
     
    Although France was one of the more liberal nations in the interwar years, opening its doors to Jewish refugees from Poland, Romania, and Germany, since the war it has fought its own set of demons relating to that difficult time. The classic, but nevertheless defensive statement about France’s role in the Holocaust came from President François Mitterrand in 1992 when, with breathtaking insouciance, he declared that the collaborationist, pro-German Vichy regime that governed unoccupied France from 1940 to 1944 was illegal and “aberrational” and had “nothing to do with France today.” “The French nation was not involved in that,” he said, “nor was the Republic.” 35
    As this implies, French collaboration during World War II has had its own memory pattern. Henry Rousso has given it a name, The Vichy Syndrome . Rousso found that his thesis—that the internal quarrels among the French left deeper scars than either the defeat or the German occupation—was “largely confirmed.” Two of his chapters had “Obsession” in the title and in a