The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [114]
And there are things that I have been searching for ever since I heard the story almost thirty years ago when I first met Iggie in Japan. There is a space around Anna, like that around a figure in a fresco. She was a Gentile. She had worked for Emmy since she got married. ‘She was always there,’ Iggie would say.
She gave the netsuke to Elisabeth in 1945, and Elisabeth put the persimmon and the ivory stag and the rats and the rat-catcher and the masks that she had loved when she was six, and all the rest of this world, into a little leather attaché case to take back to England. They can expand to fill a huge vitrine in a Paris salon or a dressing-room in Vienna, but they also fit into next to nothing.
I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her. I never thought to ask, when I could have asked. She was, simply, Anna.
29. ‘ALL QUITE OPENLY, PUBLICLY AND LEGALLY’
Elisabeth took the little attaché case with the jumble of netsuke home. England was home now: there was no question that she would take the family to live in Vienna. Iggie, demobbed from the American army and searching for work, felt the same. Returning to Vienna was something that very few Jews would do. There were 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. Of these only 4,500 returned; 65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed.
Nobody was called to account. The new democratic Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.
The return of émigrés was felt to be harassment of those who had stayed. My grandmother’s novel of return to Vienna helps me understand how she felt. There is one moment of confrontation in Elisabeth’s novel that is particularly revealing. The Jewish professor is challenged as to why he returned, what he was expecting out of Austria: ‘You did choose to leave a little early. I mean you resigned before you could be dismissed – and you left the country.’ This is the key, powerful question: What do you want by coming back? Have you come back to take something from us? Have you come back as an accuser? Have you come back to show us up? And, as a tremor beneath these other questions: Could your war have been worse than our war?
Restitution was difficult for those who survived. Elisabeth fictionalises this in one of the strangest moments in the novel, when a collector, Kanakis, notices ‘two dark, heavily-framed pictures hanging on the wall just opposite his chair, and a faint smile creased his eyelids’.
‘Do you really recognise those pictures?’ exclaims the new owner. ‘They did in fact belong to a gentleman who was surely an acquaintance of your family, Baron E. You might possibly have seen them at his house. Baron E unfortunately died abroad, in England, I believe. His heirs, after they had recovered what could be traced of his property, had it all sold at auction, having no use for this old-fashioned stuff in their modern homes, I suppose. I acquired them in the auction-rooms, as well as most of the things you see in this room. All quite openly, publicly and legally, you understand. There is no great demand for this period.’
‘There is no need to apologise, Herr Doktor,’ replies Kanakis, ‘I can only congratulate you on your bargains.’
‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that, on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945: Austria had become the ‘first victim’, rather than an agent in the war.
As the ‘first victim’, Austria had to hold out against those who would damage it. Dr Karl Renner, a lawyer and post-war president of Austria, was clear about