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By Root 1535 0

under the very same two-party system of Catholics and Socialists, had become a stable, enormously prosperous and neutral little republic, perfectly satisfied – some might say too satisfied – with its identity. But this is a historian’s retrospect. What was a middle-class childhood like in the Vienna of the 1920s? The problem is how to distinguish what one has learned since from what contemporaries knew or thought, and the experiences and reactions of adults from those who were children at that time. What children born in 1917 knew of the events of the still young twentieth century which were so alive in the minds of parents and grandparents – war, breakdown, revolution, inflation – was what adults told us or, more likely, what we overheard them talking about. The only direct evidence we had of them were the changing images on postage stamps. Stamp collecting in the 1920s, though it was far from self-explanatory, was a good introduction to the political history of Europe since 1914. For an expatriate British boy it dramatized the contrast between the unchanging continuity of George V’s head on British stamps and the chaos of overprints, new names and new currencies elsewhere. The only other direct line to history came through the changing coins and banknotes of an era of economic disruption. I was old enough to be conscious of the change from Kronen to Schillings and Groschen, from multi-zeroed notes to notes and coins, and I knew that before Kronen there had been Gulden.

Though the Habsburg Empire had gone, we still lived on its infrastructure and, to a surprising extent, by pre-1914 central European assumptions. The husband of one of my mother’s great friends, Dr Alexander Szana, lived in Vienna and, unhappily for his wife’s peace of mind, worked on a German-language newspaper thirty miles down the Danube in what we called Pressburg and the Hungarians called Pozsony, and what had then become Bratislava, the chief Slovak city in the new Czechoslovak Republic. (It is now the capital of an internationally sovereign Slovakia.) Except for the expulsion of former Hungarian officials, between the wars it had not yet been ethnically cleansed of its polyglot and polycultural population of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks, assimilated westernized and pious Carpathian Jews, gypsies and the rest. It had not yet really become a Slovak city of ‘Bratislavaks’ from which those with memories of what it had remained until the Second World War still distinguish themselves as ‘Pressburaks’. He went there and returned by the Pressburger Bahn, a tram which ran from a street in the centre of Vienna to a loop on the central streets of Pressburg. It had been inaugurated in the spring of 1914 when both cities were part of the same empire, a triumph of modern technology, and simply carried on; as did the famous ‘opera train’ by which the cultured of Brünn/Brno in Moravia went for a night at the Vienna Opera, a couple of hours’ distant. My uncle Richard lived both in Vienna and in Marienbad, where he had a fancy goods shop. The frontiers were not yet impenetrable, as they became after the war destroyed the Pressburg tram’s bridge across the Danube. The ruins of the bridge could still be seen in 1996, when I helped to make a television programme about it.

The world of the Viennese middle class, and certainly of the Jews who formed so large a proportion of it, was still that of the vast polyglot region whose migrants had, in the past 80 years, turned its capital into a city of two million – except for Berlin by far the largest city on the European continent between Paris and Leningrad. Our relatives had come from, or were still living in, places like Bielitz (now in Poland), Kaschau (now in Czechoslovakia) or Grosswardein (now in Romania).1 Our grocers and the porters of our apartment buildings were almost certainly Czech, our servant-girls or child-minders not native Viennese: I still remember the tales of werewolves told me by one from Slovenia. None of them was or felt uprooted or cut adrift from ‘the old country’ unlike European emigrants