I Am Through You So I Page 4

  JK: What effect did that have?

  DSR: Joy in life and complete trust that everything would work out—and a spirit of adventure is obviously part of that as well. The phase of a young hero going out into the world was one that I experienced very clearly and at an early age, between ten and twelve. That was also the time during which we went camping, another experience of independence.

  JK: Clearly, there were some teachers who understood themselves as companions for life, as mentors and promoters.

  DSR: As a boarder at Neulandschule, many of them I can remember well, especially our housemaster, Friedl Menschhorn, whom I feared—he was quite strict—but who also inspired me. Dr. Franz Seyr, who was my German professor, also became a dear friend to me and my family. We had the good fortune that, when the Nazis invaded, he did not need to flee and could energetically continue communicating the spirit of Neuland during that time.

  JK: He wasn’t replaced by someone loyal to the party?

  DSR: Dr. Seyr was not the director, but our homeroom teacher. He helped me again and again—politically as well. At one point, he advocated strongly for me when I was in real trouble. I had serious problems with the Nazi leadership of the school. He managed to find the least harmful formulation to put on my report card: “A positive attitude toward national socialist schooling would seem desirable.” I’ve kept that report card. Even in this muted form, the warning was signaling great danger. But he protected me. He also helped me a great deal by introducing me to the writings of Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner.5 He himself was later the editor of Ebner’s collected works.

  JK: Ebner was a personal-dialogical philosopher who worked as an elementary school teacher in Gablitz near Vienna, but also one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. Unfortunately, and unjustly, he is less well known than Buber.

  DSR: Several of the things that Martin Buber was to write in I and Thou, Ferdinand Ebner had already published two years earlier in The Word and the Spiritual Realities. Throughout his entire life, Buber felt somewhat defensive in this respect. He knew that Ebner had published certain insights almost verbatim, a little earlier than Buber himself had.

  JK: Did the two know each other personally?

  DSR: I do not believe so.

  JK: At the time, life under Nazi rule meant that people had to show their colors. You and your friends from the Neulandschule lived in spiritual resistance against the Gröfaz, the “greatest general of all time.”6 When you say that your counterimage was Christ as Führer, you are referring to a spiritual leader who himself can do nothing against the power and violence and terror of Nazi rule. At the same time, he must have been a powerful source of motivation for the resistance. How did faith help you at the time, in the face of brutalization, persecution, and violence? What enabled you to stay upright and even advocate for others?

  DSR: The poems of Reinhold Schneider helped us a great deal.7 We often sent out a newsletter to our friends in the military, and those would frequently contain poems by Reinhold Schneider, and of course a great deal of Rilke and things we had written ourselves. Our hero, our leader Jesus Christ, did not seem powerless to us at all. I can only speak for myself here, but what I pictured was that at some point, all this terror will be over and Christ reigns eternal.

  JK: At the same time, one did see that the powers of this world were almost omnipresent and that to many, resistance against them seemed almost hopeless. Early on, what one believed in probably had little power against the things happening politically, on the battlefields, or in the concentration camps.

  DSR: We did not think in those terms. There was no question that the power belonged to God and to Christ. We never doubted that. However powerful the others might play themselves up to be, it might be a difficult and very unpleasant situation, but it always remained on a completely different, much lower level.

  JK: This situation was not merely unpleasant, but deadly at times.

  DSR: It was a dreadful reality, but we could laugh about it. There was this joke: “The first volume is called My Struggle; what will the second one be called?…My Paintings of the Island,” which implies sending Hitler, the former painter, to an island like Napoleon before him. The comparison between Napoleon and Hitler seemed appropriate. We thought that it won’t be long, and he’ll be gone again. That was how one thought of it, even early on. Horror and comedy need to be seen alongside each other. On the one hand, the comedy: from the very beginning, we were constantly making fun of the Eternal Reich, the Thousand-Year Reich. That it could be both ridiculous and deadly, deadly in the full sense of the word, for more of my friends than survived it—as it might have been for me by a hair’s breadth—these two things somehow stand close together.

  JK: Adolf Hitler, the great demagogue and nation seducer of the twentieth century, privately admired, as Friedrich Heer has shown, the historical power of the Catholic Church.8 Though he had contempt for the Church and for clerics, and subjected them to bloody persecution, My Struggle actually contains a theological justification for his project of destruction, the Holocaust, when he says, “Thus did I now believe that I must act in the sense of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jews I am doing the Lord’s work.”9 Hitler was not a theologian, and his thinking was certainly influenced by atheism, but he conceived of and legitimized his political actions in theological terms. The ideas of providence and destiny are another example. Consequently, he could tap into a religious language and symbolism that his adherents at least knew from cultural memory. Looking at the party conventions in Nuremberg, one can understand how well the Nazis knew to hijack religious rituals politically and reinterpret them with the goal of making people subservient. Why, in your opinion, was it possible for so many people to succumb to this fascination, to this “political religion,” as Eric Voegelin has described it?10

  DSR: Put succinctly, they were blinded. The way I understand it, Hitler, Himmler, and all these other great evildoers were blinded. Today, we present it as if Hitler had known exactly how bad his actions were, but that he cast them in a kinder light and performed them anyway. I cannot believe that. I believe that it is closer to reality to say that he was completely blinded. He truly believed that he was acting justly, for example, by exterminating the Jews.

  JK: One always acts under the impression that one is doing the right thing, sub specie boni.11 But Hitler had announced his intention to destroy the Jews. The idea is presented and can be read in the book My Struggle.

  DSR: Until the end, Hitler believed that he was doing something good by doing what he did. There is something tragic in this belief; it shows the dangers of ideology and answers also why so many people fell for it. They were equally confused and let themselves be blinded by ideology.

  JK: It is possible, perhaps, to explain confusion and blindness. But the question then becomes whether I start killing other human beings in the name of blindness and confusion.

  DSR: That is precisely what the confusion consists of: to believe that one can feel compelled to commit injustices against others because it is God’s will or the “right thing” to do. Unfortunately, that compulsion still exists today.

  JK: The danger isn’t over?

  DSR: While we exclude anyone from the circle of belonging, we are “sinning.” In other words, we are making a tear in the fabric of the world and of humanity. We are tearing it asunder. (Sin and asunder are related words.) Only when our sense of belonging is all-embracing can we speak of love, the lived “yes” to mutual belonging. It does not need to be the emotion of liking someone. Today, that is becoming relevant again regarding the question of refugees.

  JK: Where specifically do you see that relevance?

  DSR: In the question, Do we belong together, or Are those people “the others”? Are they our sisters and brothers or “a problem” to be handled somehow?

  JK: Today, though, people who are afraid ask themselves certain questions. Some might think that maybe we do belong together on some higher l
evel, but there are still too many in my immediate surroundings who do not.

  DSR: In practice, of course, those are very difficult questions. But if you truly say, “We belong together on a higher level,” we need to ask ourselves how we, together, can find a solution to our problems on the lower level. How will we manage that? The point is not that others are a problem for us. No, we all share a problem. How can we solve it together? Our starting point must be the perspective of togetherness.

  JK: Let’s return to the topic of National Socialism, to the fascination that emanated from Hitler and his movement of a fresh start. Was there tense discussion within your extended family?

  DSR: There were no differences of opinion about it. Hitler was our enemy. There was no question about this at the time. But, of course, that was also caused by the fact that many members of our family were Jewish. My brothers and I were considered “quarter-Jews” as well. We did not talk about it much, but we were aware of the danger we were in.

  JK: That description is based on the Nuremberg Laws regarding race. Did you feel Jewish in any sense based on cultural or religious belonging?

  DSR: No, but we were close to our Jewish relatives who had to flee. My favorite aunt, my grandmother’s sister, died in Auschwitz.

  JK: So, to return to the topic, there were no discussions in your extended family that…

  DSR: …that there might be something good about Nazi ideology?

  JK: Or that some would have taken that position out of opportunism, as was the case in some families. Some might have said, “Well, then we’ll just need to come to some arrangement,” or, “It’s not so bad, let’s wait and see,” or, “Finally we can get work,” or whatever other arguments were brought forward.

  DSR: No, there was nothing like that in the part of my family that I knew. After the divorce, we stayed with my mother’s family, and there was no debate about that, if only because my mother was a “half-Jew.”

  JK: If your mother, according to the Nuremberg Laws, was half-Jewish and her sisters and close relatives were deported to extermination camps, then would your greatest fear not have been for your mother? And, vice versa, did your mother not have the greater fear for you and your brothers, since as spiritual resisters, you were always in danger of being detected and persecuted by the Nazis?

  DSR: It is one thing to recognize the danger and another to feel anxiety in daily life. I would call what we felt caution rather than anxiety. We just had to be cautious. One knew whom one could trust, and we even knew spies who had infiltrated the youth movement. Someone had shown us pictures of them and warned us. I can still remember it clearly. Near the end of the Number 38 tramline,12 a friend pointed out to me a man who had tried again and again to infiltrate the movement. We were careful, but I cannot say that we lived in constant anxiety or fear. Instead, we lived in the conviction that the situation is terrible but would pass. At one point, my mother was sick in bed, and a Gestapo officer came and asked her with whom her children fraternized. She was prepared and mentioned people who really were our friends, such as Klaus and Lopi Brehm, the children of the writer Bruno Brehm, who was popular with the Nazis.13 Because my mother looked Aryan, the Gestapo officer believed that she was the Aryan partner in her marriage. He even said to her, “It is a real shame that you married a Jew. That is just like crossing a thoroughbred horse with an ass.” Afterward, all my mother said was, “If I had not been so ill, I would have jumped out of bed and strangled him.”

  JK: She seems to have been a brave woman, your mother.

  DSR: We called her the lion mother. In the last days of the war, when the German soldiers were fleeing from the Russians, the front lines were passing through our house. One night, two wounded German soldiers came into our house and asked, “Aren’t there any men here who could lead us to the German lines?” My mother was keeping a friend and me hidden; so, to get the soldiers out of the house quickly, she said, “There are no men here, but I will lead you!” Then, in her bathrobe and in the middle of the night, she led the two soldiers through the vineyards to the German troops. Then, she had to run back quickly to be home again before the Russians came after the Germans. She was also a serious mountain climber and had already been up the Matterhorn. At the time, it was not yet the tourist attraction it is today. We boys would look up cliff faces and say, “Look, Mother has been up there.” We would never have dared to attempt those difficult climbs, not even later as young adults.

  JK: At the time, the Catholic Church was certainly under immense pressure, even if, from today’s point of view, one would have wished for more courage for resistance. How did you experience that time in which minds differed so radically, in which true Christian faith had to stand its ground in the face of a racist-populist ideology of salvation?

  DSR: I experienced that only in small ways, in our own situation. At the time, we asked our spiritual counselor, Father Arnold Dolezal, “Can we kill Hitler?” It was the old question of tyrannicide. His answer was, “Yes, if you can get hold of him.” The chances of that were slim.

  JK: This circle around Father Dolezal, the so-called Do-Circle, was an important nest of spiritual resistance and central to your religious education?

  DSR: The Do-Circle gave us religious education and strengthened our resistance in those days. Dolezal himself hid one of our friends, Alfons Stummer, in a small room behind a closet in the rectory of St. John of Nepomuk in the Praterstraße for two years. Alfons was a deserter. We knew nothing of this. No one did, back then. Father Dolezal was a brave man, indeed. In fact, he was the main figure giving us strength and stability. The Do-Circle was incredibly important to us. We celebrated Masses weekly and held discussion groups. That was our real source of strength.

  JK: How big was this circle?

  DSR: It got smaller and smaller because more of us kept getting drafted. But there were also many girls who were part of it. I would say we were about twenty to thirty people.

  JK: During these war years, Christian ideas were one prong of resistance, but you also read a great deal of Rainer Maria Rilke in your circle of friends and in the Do-Circle: Rilke’s Book of Hours and his story “The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke.” Why this highly aestheticized literature in the face of death and destruction?

  DSR: That very fact may have been considered a retreat from harsh reality. Resistance of this kind is often accused, in retrospect, for not being aggressive enough, for pulling back. We did also read Trakl: “Mankind Marched Up before Fiery Jaws,”14 I remember it well. But what somehow did give us stability and comfort was Rilke’s Book of Hours. The story of the Cornet we inherited from the youth movement; it belonged to the Hitler Youth as much as to us. The youth movement only split in the mid-1930s, although slowly. One group placed the religious aspects more in the center; Neuland was part of that. The others were gradually subsumed by the Hitler Youth, but our roots were the same. It is not fashionable to say that these days, but it is true: even the Hitler Youth still promoted a good many positive values.

  JK: Such as?

  DSR: Such as connectedness with nature, the genuine joy in what is natural. My friends and I would not have wasted a second look at a girl who smoked, wore high heels, or put on lipstick and makeup. Our ideal was the simple life. Wiechert’s The Simple Life was a book that both we and the young Nazis devoured in those days.15 I do not believe that the Nazis promoted it as a decoy for less praiseworthy aims, and still, it might lure young people into the wrong camp. Those who were lured into Nazi ideology looked primarily at the positive values but came to accept all the rest. Those who could resist the lure appreciated the same positive aspects but did not accept the negative ones. That was the difference.

  JK: To return to Rilke, what was fascinating, what gave strength in these days of depression? What was so fascinating for you about the Book of Hours?

  DSR: These poems were really prayers—but written in a language that appealed greatly to us. They were so completely different from the litu
rgical prayers, and we could make them our own more easily. Praying was of vital importance to us in those days. One of Reinhold Schneider’s poems begins with these words: “Only the praying may yet succeed in staying the sword above our heads.” We’d recognize this as a thought that could give us guidance. Georg Thurmair was important to us as well.16 The picture calendars that were popular with us often featured verses by him as captions to the pictures.

  JK: In an earlier conversation, you described the war years in which so many of your friends and companions lost their lives due to bomb strikes in Vienna as “years of the utmost aliveness.” How should that be understood, given the fact that you could have despaired and fallen into resignation at each stroke of fate? Where did the defiant sense of life and life-affirming courage come from?

  DSR: I think that many people today experience the same thing when they encounter mortal dangers: aliveness flares up even more. For me, the reason seems to be that one is forced to live completely in the present. The degree of our aliveness is measured in the degree to which we do not cling to the past or look to the future but are truly in the Now. In those years, we were forced to do that, and that is why we were so alive and joyful, despite everything else.

  JK: Because you were looking death in the face?

  DSR: Yes, death was constantly before our eyes; so, we were forced to fully enjoy those possibly last moments of our lives.

  JK: So, live each day as if it were your last.

  DSR: In that sense, yes.

  JK: You do not know whether you will wake up tomorrow.

  DSR: As children, we had to go to the air-raid shelter practically every night during the war years.