I Am Through You So I Read online

  DSR: As I have already said, Jesus and God were simply names for the Great Mystery. The new aspect was that now, whenever I wanted, I could have access to this Mystery in my own heart. Through the Jesus Prayer, I could go to my heart center, find Jesus there, and feel protected. That is what this experience amounts to in the end. That was something new and lasting, it is true.

  JK: But it is astonishing that you had this experience so early. I imagine it made complete sense to you only later, in the time when you were a monk. Was it something you felt intuitively?

  DSR: I believe it made sense to me from the very beginning. Over the course of my life, I learned to understand it more deeply and practice it better. But it made sense to me immediately. It was like a sudden enlightenment.

  JK: You said that this is where a dynamic impulse is added to the experience of melting into Jesus in your dream. How do you conceive of these two sides, melting and dynamic?

  DSR: What is dynamic is that I myself can actively go to this place. My dream was simply an experience that stayed in my memory. I was not even aware that it influenced me. With the Jesus Prayer, something entirely new started, which is the dynamism: there is a presence of God within me that I can approach and to which I can return repeatedly.

  JK: In what kinds of situations do you feel urged or drawn to pray the Jesus Prayer, to return, as you say?

  DSR: Mostly, of course, whenever the outside situation becomes difficult. In this context, I remember the dramatic experiences of bombing and war and all the things that were truly externally threatening. But I find also my own anger threatening. My own short temper has gotten me into trouble again and again. Essentially, anger has been the main point of friction with my environment.

  JK: Where did your anger come from?

  DSR: My mother sometimes said, “Just like your father.” My father was also very short-tempered. I probably inherited that.

  JK: Can you remember any situations in which your temper got the better of you?

  DSR: Of course! For example, we had huge oak armchairs that came from my ancestors’ old home. I once picked one up and threw it on the floor, so that it split in two.

  JK: Can you still remember why?

  DSR: I have not the slightest idea. The smallest causes could make me angry in such a way.

  JK: Which made the Jesus Prayer something saving?

  DSR: Yes. It is, of course, also possible that this anger was caused by repressed pain, such as over my parents’ divorce.

  JK: So, things return…. One significant Catholic intellectual movement with which you came into contact early on was what was known as the liturgical movement in the 1920s, centering around the theologian and Augustinian choirmaster Pius Parsch.10 Parsch had advocated making the Bible and the liturgy comprehensible and immediately understandable for the people. Against the initial opposition of his superiors, who continued to advocate the Latin liturgy, Father Pius Parsch, almost forty years before the Second Vatican Council, did something then unheard of: he held congregational Masses in the church of St. Gertrud, where parts of the Tridentine Mass were sung by the congregation in German. That won recognition at the Katholikentag in 1933, where a so-called Singmesse was first held. What is astonishing is that, at the age of seven, you participated at that very gathering in Vienna, holding your grandmother’s hand. How much of that can you remember?

  DSR: The only thing I can remember is the microphone, because my grandmother pointed it out to me explicitly: “Look, that’s the Cardinal speaking into a microphone. That way we can all hear him much better.” And this thing consisted of a large ring, with the actual microphone suspended in the middle of it on long springs. That image is very clear in my mind. Nothing else—no people, no flags, nothing. As for Pius Parsch: as adolescents during the war, we would walk on foot to St. Gertrud’s to hear him preach. First, we had to walk through Kahlenbergerdorf down to Nussdorf. Then, up along the Danube all the way to Klosterneuburg. That was a wonderful long hike. And on quite a few Sundays, we walked that way to celebrate the Eucharist with Pius Parsch.

  JK: Were you impressed by that at the time?

  DSR: Very, but in my school, we were already celebrating the Mass turned toward the people—likely influenced, in fact, by Pius Parsch.

  In the arms of my grandmother

  2

  Becoming a Christian

  Between Human Dignity and Humiliation

  1936–1946

  The things we remember, but also the things we forget, say a great deal about how we see ourselves. I know that what my memory selects from my lived experience, and the structure and order I give the memories when relating them, depend on inextricably tangled connections. Nevertheless, I feel justified in singling out from the first decade of my life my dream of melting into Jesus Christ and my encounter with the Prayer of the Heart. They laid the groundwork and paved the way for my later experiences. After all, that dream was the dawn of a conception of myself that would deepen in each subsequent stage of my life—and that deepening continues today.

  What seems significant about the Prayer of the Heart is that to the more static conception of who I am inside, the prayer adds the dynamic component of being able to come home into my heart. Only because I know that I can always return to my center, am I able to face what confronts me in the second decade of my life.

  To begin with, there is the departure from my home, which is painful. I am sent to a secondary school, which, in my case, is a boarding school. Though the Neulandschule1 gives me all that my heart, open as it is to wonder and joy, could wish for, I feel terrible homesickness when, after a weekend at home in the country, I sit on the evening train back to Vienna. Only returning to the home in the center of my heart can help me with that pain, and so I gradually learn to live in the Prayer of the Heart.

  That is the only way to endure the blows that will rock my young life again and again: the Germans march into Austria and my brothers and I are suddenly Mischlinge, “mixed breeds.” My grandmother cannot return home from America; her sister disappears in a concentration camp. Systematically, the Nazis destroy the spirit of our beloved school. I am drafted into the German army. At boot camp and in the barracks, the Jesus Prayer allows me access to a hidden inner world in which I can calmly continue to live my true life; there I am often hardly aware of the things going on “outside.” Even when being bombed and during the chaos at the end of the war, I can always return to the interior of my heart, where—in the poetic words of Werner Bergengruen—“there is nothing that may frighten you; for, you are at home.”2

  Again, there are two experiences that allow me to understand my memories of these years in terms of their inner structure—two diametrically opposed experiences. The first epitomizes our lives as Neulandschule students and summarizes the most important things for which I am grateful to this school. Without any sanctimonious displays of pietism, the chapel service was unquestionably the heart of our school life. Even then—a lifetime before the Second Vatican Council—the altar faced the congregation. There were no chairs or pews. We stood throughout the Mass—the boys typically with their legs spread wide—or knelt on the bare floor. Much of the liturgy of the Mass was read in German and prayed by both congregation and priest. One of the prayers during the preparation of the Eucharist kept calling itself to my attention. It began with the words, “God, You created Man wonderfully in his dignity, and even more wonderfully renewed him.”

  Dignity was a word that I had quite possibly never encountered in everyday speech before. That might be the reason why it especially impressed me; but I slowly grew to realize that human dignity was at the core of all that mattered in our education at this school, in becoming a Christian, maybe in all of life. The very fact that we were permitted to address our teachers by their first names gave us dignity—and them as well. For “Mr. Teacher” is nothing but a title, and using a family name sounds far less personal than calling people by their given name. And, it is through personal encounters that we
experience appreciation and dignity. This is what I learned at Neulandschule.

  It would be hard to find a more harshly opposing approach to personal relationships and appreciation than in the German military. If the atmosphere of dignity at the Neulandschule taught me what living as a Christian means, in the barracks of the Pioneer Corps at Krems, I learned what the opposite looks like. Everything there was designed to eradicate any consciousness of human dignity. We children in uniform—for that is what we were—were trained to think of ourselves as nothing but tiny, mechanical, easily replaceable parts of the war machine. Our task was not to murder people, but quite impersonally “to kill the enemy.” Self-confidence was systematically dismantled. One—in hindsight humorous—example stays with me.

  As recruits, on days when we were not crawling through mud, we had to take part in classes and take oral exams in front of all others. One wrong answer and the punishment was immediately given: “Squat on your locker and scream eighty-six times: ‘I am an ugly little dwarf!’” The metal lockers for our uniforms reached almost to the ceiling. Whoever had to squeeze into the space on top of them soon did feel like an ugly dwarf. The number 86, meanwhile, was the number of our Pioneer division. (Often, we wished for a lower division number.)

  All the experiences in this second decade of my life can be slotted into the broad spectrum between dignity and humiliation; all have some connection to one or the other of these two opposing poles. I experienced the spirit of the Neulandschule for barely two years. In that time, I became acutely aware—admittedly more intuitively than by logical speculation—that being a Christian was linked to the appreciation of human dignity.

  Then Hitler came. We heard on the radio how thousands in the streets cheered the invading German troops. My Jewish relatives sat weeping in the half-darkness of their apartment in the inner city of Vienna, their curtains drawn. I would never see most of them again. Soon, the shop windows of Jewish businesses lay shattered. Those who refused to participate in the boycott were denounced publicly: “This Aryan swine buys from Jews!” My mother was considered only a “half-Jew,” and therefore did not have to wear a yellow star. But during a crowded Sunday Mass, I happened to stand near a woman who was wearing one. Soon, I could hear voices: “You there, get out! There’s no room in here for Jews!” She hesitated for a moment; then she was gone. I wanted to run after her, say something comforting, but what? And already I had missed my chance. To this day, I am ashamed of that.

  Hitler’s reign in Austria coincided precisely with my teenage years, so my typically teenage rebellion against authority found its obvious release in resistance to Nazi propaganda. But my rebellion was also clearly articulated in the ideal of being a Christian. We would probably have simply said, “Our Führer is Jesus Christ.” Admittedly, one could not say any such thing aloud if one valued one’s life, but we sang, “When all become disloyal, we shall remain true,” and knew secretly what we meant by those words.

  We also sang the German folksong, “Die Gedanken sind frei” (Thoughts are free) with fervor.3 Many of our friends from the Neulandschule sang that song as loudly as they could when they were arrested and taken away in police vans after attending a concert of the Don Cossack Choir. The Secret Police knew that “resistant” youths would sing Russian songs in protest and always attended the choir’s concerts in droves. After one of those concerts, conducted by Serge Jaroff in September 1940, my brothers and I were fortunate to escape. Approximately two hundred others, among them our friends Bernhard and Georg von Stillfried, were held for two days by the Gestapo at their Vienna headquarters and interrogated before being given an official warning and then released. Over a dozen of those arrested that evening, however, were never seen again.

  Contempt for human dignity found its most gruesome form in the slaughter of youths on the front lines. Again and again, the youth Masses we celebrated, half illegally, with Father Arnold Dolezal had to be Masses for the dead to honor recently fallen friends. And how passionate friendships are when one is so young! But time and again, a friend would be drafted into the military and be dead soon thereafter. No one could escape military service.

  Then I was called up myself. My drafting orders on May 31, 1944, felt like a death sentence. I could not know that, as if by a miracle, I was to spend eight months in the barracks instead of being posted to the front, and then, at the end, be able to go into hiding at home in Vienna. Even during those dark days in the barracks, a light of humanity kept shining through in my memory, brilliant and unforgettable: Once again, as the rest of my division was sent to the front, I stayed behind because I had been assigned to a different unit. That entire unit came from the same area: they were Black Sea Germans, whose ancestors had emigrated down the Danube in the eighteenth century. These young men spoke German as one might have heard it in Vienna over a hundred years earlier. Hitler had “repatriated” them, put their wives and children in a camp somewhere, and drafted the men into the army. The dignity of these people, the regard with which they treated one another, will always remain in my memory. With what tenderness, almost shyness, they spoke of their women and children when the lights had been turned off in the sleeping hall, and with what deep sadness! After the weeks of our training together, they were sent to the front, while I, once again for some mysterious reason, was kept back at the barracks. Rumor had it that their transport train mistakenly drove into a train station occupied by Russian forces. As Russian citizens, they were considered traitors and shot on sight.

  The end of the war in a city destroyed by bombs, lacking water and electricity, and without food was, admittedly, even more chaotic than the years of the war. For hours, we stood with our pails, lining up to use one or another of the few water wells that still existed in the neighborhood. Our main source of food was ragweed, a common flowering plant, that had sprung up on the rubble of bombed houses.

  But amid this chaos, our chaplain, Father Alois Geiger, gave a shining sign of human dignity. Each day, punctual to the minute, he would climb over the mounds of rubble from destroyed homes to visit the survivors and offer us holy communion. Even with many of the Russian soldiers we experienced warm human relationships, especially the first wave of occupying troops that consisted of friendly young men who supplied us with bread and soup, and there were even some among them who spoke German. One of them had a wounded hand, and my mother made him a dressing with her “miracle ointment.” He came back to our home every day to get the bandage replaced. One day, he was thoroughly drunk, and while bandaging his hand, my mother appealed earnestly to his conscience. The next day he refused to come into the house, but called from the street and stuck his hand through the garden gate for the bandage to be changed.

  The second wave of occupation forces turned out to be far less friendly. Day and night, one could hear women yelling for help. Many were raped. Several times, my mother escaped as if by a miracle, and later fled to a convent in a different part of Vienna. The Russian soldiers were also after a Ukrainian forced laborer, Nadja, who had worked in the house across the street from ours, but had flown from the soldiers. They threatened to shoot me if I did not “send Nadja out” immediately. Our neighbor, who had heard the threat, tried to help. They let me go and shot him instead. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). I am conscious every day of the fact that I owe Viktor Springer my life.

  In early summer of 1945, amid all this turmoil, the word began to spread that Vienna’s Archbishop, Cardinal Innitzer, was calling on students to help the Sudeten German refugees who, exiled from newly founded Czechoslovakia, were streaming across the Austrian border by the thousands. We dressed in priest’s cassocks, because that granted us at least some respect from the Russian soldiers, and set out without the slightest training, instructions, or medication. Compassion and awe for the suffering of the refugees were all we brought with us. All we could do was set up improvised camps in parish rectories and empty schools and try to ensure the greatest p
ossible hygiene in toilets and the water supply. Here, too, regard and appreciation of their dignity amid their misery proved to be the most important, perhaps the only things we could give these poor people. Today, in the face of new waves of refugees in Austria, this memory again seems relevant.

  At the end of the second decade of my life, the image of the tulip from my childhood memory reappears. This time it was in the form of ten thousand tulips that Wilhelmina, queen of the Netherlands, gave to the city of Vienna as a gift at the war’s end. In April 1946, they bloomed in their springtime splendor all over the city, even in small plots of green between the ruins, where handwritten signs—“3 Russian and 5 German soldiers. Names unknown”—still marked mass graves. Nothing could have given back to humiliated people a renewed consciousness of their dignity more impressively than this truly royal gift.

  Dialogue

  JK: According to the Greek philosopher Parmenides, faith begins as a deep trust in being. To me, your years of youth seem to have been accompanied by this deep trust, which then takes shape in a specific religious practice. As an adolescent, you learned how to be a Christian, or rather, how to become Christ-like, as you have said. Your school years fell directly in the era of a fresh start in Catholicism, the Neuland movement. You attended the Neulandschule in Grinzing in Vienna, founded in 1926. The late 1930s, in which the German Anschluss of Austria also took place, was a humiliating time, a time that deprived people of their dignity. Meanwhile, human dignity that grew out of a Christian spirit was the lived spiritual environment at the Neulandschule. How did that place influence you at the time?

  DSR: When I think back, the most important and decisive gift the Neulandschule gave me was the joy of life, expressed in a completely new way as a kind of independence. That probably also includes being personally appreciated in dignity. As students, we were taken seriously, we felt honored. Today, when I pray the verse spiritu principalis confirma me from Psalm 51,4 that reminds me of the spirit of a young prince, and every time that makes me think of the Neulandschule. In the first two years of school, that is, in the time in which the spirit of the Bund Neuland still permeated the school, I really did feel like a young prince.