The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [98]
All that day there are arrests – arrests of anyone who has supported any previous political party, prominent journalists, financiers, civil servants, Jews. Schuschnigg is in solitary confinement. That evening there is a torchlit procession through the city led by the NSDAP. There is the din of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ sung in the bars. It takes Hitler six hours to make the journey from Linz to Vienna. It takes this long because of the crowds.
On Monday 14th March Hitler arrives: ‘. . . before the shadows of the evening sank over Vienna, when the wind died down and the many flags fell silent in festive rigidity, the great hour became reality and the Führer of the united German people entered the capital of the Ostmark’.
The Cardinal of Vienna has ordered the bells of Austria to ring, and the bells of the Votivkirche opposite the Palais Ephrussi start pealing in the afternoon, and the noise of the Wehrmacht as it grinds round the Ring makes the house shake. There are flags: flags with swastikas and old Austrian flags with swastikas painted on them. There are kids climbing the linden trees. There are already maps in the bookshop windows showing the new Europe: one solid German nation stretching from Alsace-Lorraine to the Sudetenland to the Baltic to the Tyrol. Half the map is Germany.
On Tuesday 15th March the crowds start early past the Schottengasse, past the Palais Ephrussi, along the Ring, all going in one direction, towards the Heldenplatz, the Place of Heroes, the huge square outside the Hofburg; 200,000 people are jammed into the square and the streets. They cling to the statues, to the branches of trees, to railings. There are figures on the parapets silhouetted against the sky. At eleven o’clock Hitler comes onto the balcony. He can hardly be heard. As he comes to his peroration, the noise prevents him speaking for minutes on end. You can hear it all the way to the Schottengasse. Then: ‘In this hour I can report to the German people the greatest accomplishment of my life, as Führer and Chancellor of the German nation and the Reich, I can announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.’ ‘The scenes of infatuation at Hitler’s arrival defy description,’ writes the Neue Basler Zeitung.
The Ring is made for this, the massed crowds, the parade ground of emotion, the uniforms. As a student in 1908, Hitler had planned two huge arches to complete the Heldenplatz, an architectural climax: ‘an ideal spot for mass marches’. Long ago he had watched the imperial pageantry of the Hapsburgs. And now once again the Ringstrasse becomes ‘an enchantment out of “The Thousand-and One-Nights”’, but one of those stories where someone is transfigured before your eyes into something terrible, morphing out of control as you say the wrong words.
At half-past one Hitler returns to review the massive display of marching soldiers and trucks, while 400 planes fly overhead. It is announced that there will be a plebiscite – another one, this time legitimate. ‘Do you acknowledge Adolf Hitler as our Führer and the reunion of Austria with the German Reich which was effected on 13th March 1938?’ On the pale-pink ballot there is a huge circle for Ja and a diminutive one for Nein. To encourage Vienna to think hard about this vote, trams are sheathed in red bunting, and St Stephen’s Cathedral is draped in red, and Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter, is shrouded in Nazi flags. In this proper plebiscite, Jews are ineligible to vote.
There is terror. People are picked up off the streets and bundled into trucks. Several thousand activists, Jews, troublemakers are sent to Dachau. In these first few days there are messages from friends who are leaving, desperate phone-calls about people who have been arrested. Emmy’s cousins Frank and Mitzi Wooster have left. Their closest friends,