Spring and No Flowers

Albertine Gaur

Description

Albertine Gaur shares with the reader her childhood memories of the period just before, and during, the Second World War in Austria, her homeland. She relives this time of great social and political upheaval, depicting it through the eyes of a childhood as she passes from infancy to adolescence. It is a unique story, full of naïve poignancy, told with a poetic simplicity which helps us have a better understanding of how 'events' were seen and interpreted by a young person, struggling with the many diverse problems of 'growing up'. Incidentally, the book gives us an insight into child psychology and how children came to terms with fear, horror and violence but were to bear the scars of the trauma throughout their lives. It is a moving narrative, individual but, at the same time, universal in its appeal. She relates a personal drama, often with tragic implications, in which the characters are 'ordinary people' but who, in their different ways, portray the very passions and emotions which motivate society. To read about it is an enriching experience.
Chapter One: The Time in the Garden

Chapter Two: Jesuits and Nazis

Chapter Three: 1945 – Endgame 83 Contents

Sujets

• Mathematical
• Earth Sciences
• Sciences et techniques
• Nazismo
• Austria
• Earth science
• Geography
• Nazism
• Computational
• Family history
• General officer
• World War II
• Physics
• Psychology
• General
• Nazisme
• Cultural Studies
• Science
• Autriche
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509525
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Spring and No Flowers
Memories of an Austrian Childhood
Albertine Gaur
First Published in the UK in 2006 by
Elm Bank , an imprint of Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2006 by
Elm Bank, an imprint of Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213- 3786, USA
Copyright 2006 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84150-943-4
Consulting Editor: Keith Cameron
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Cover illustration from a woodcut by Raimund Zotl.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.
Contents
Chapter One: The Time in the Garden
Chapter Two: Jesuits and Nazis
Chapter Three: 1945 - Endgame
The Time in the Garden

The first thing I remember clearly is a dream. The dream came at regular intervals when I was about two or three years old. Not later. The dream never varied. I was in Aunt Paula s room, it was late in the afternoon and the sun was shining. There was a big wardrobe full of beautiful clothes. Aunt Paula opened the door and allowed me to look at them. I remember how I reached out and spread the skirts of the dresses, felt the fine texture of the material, admired the beautiful colours. We did not talk. Talk was something I had not yet fully mastered. We communicated our delight entirely without words. These looking-at- her-clothes seemed to be a well-established ritual, known only to Aunt Paula and myself. Eventually Aunt Paula closed the door of the wardrobe. I clearly remember standing there, with my back to the room, Aunt Paula no longer within my vision, the top of my head just touching the door handle. And then everything changed. Froze. The light, so beautifully golden, took on a deadly white, colourless quality. I took a deep breath and at this moment I knew that if I touched the door handle I would breath out. And then I would begin to scream and go mad. I had a full and absolute comprehension of the meaning of madness. The unspeakable, irrevocable isolation it would bring about. Sanity was only a thin wall of glass, which the scream would scatter. I would pass through it into another dimension, another reality. I thought, but I am only a child, I should not know this, it is too early, something has gone wrong. The grown-ups will punish me if they find out I already know about madness. And at this moment the dream would simply fade away and I, presumably, woke up. But this is something I do not remember.
I was not frightened of the dream in the daytime. If I remembered it at all, I remembered it as something I did not fully understand, and that was therefore of little consequence. But every night the dream returned. Then I also remembered that I had been through it before. There was a particular type of recognition, guilty recognition. Only, as far as I could see, there was no reason for guilt. Just disbelief and shock at my powers of recognition. I realized that my understanding in the dream outstripped my waking capabilities, that in my dream I was transcending the prescribed dimension of my existence.
I have sometimes wondered what could have provoked this wholly premature, abstract recognition of madness. On the surface, our household was secure. The place where I was born was a small baroque town, forty miles west of Vienna. We lived at its southern edge in a rambling house with a large garden. On a clear day one could see mountain ranges from the first floor windows at the back of the house. They were just a gentle blue line in the distance. When I was born my parents, my mother s parents and my mother s younger sister, Paula, lived with us. Not an isolated nuclear, but an extended family, one could almost say a joint family. Such families were in the 1930s not uncommon in Austria. Indeed, as I was to find out, a good many of my school friends lived in a similar way. But ours was not supposed to be a permanent arrangement. In a way it was I who had caused it - or so my mother liked to put it.
My mother was the dominant figure of my childhood, not emotionally, but factually. Her dominance was not so much based on love, but on the fact that she was able to claim exclusive ownership of my person. There was an element of revenge in this claim. She had not wanted me to be there in the first place, now that I had arrived, unasked and at the most inconvenient moment, she wanted to make sure I was kept in my place. I was to be restricted, prevented from causing more trouble. There might even have been a secret element of fear in her attitude towards me. A suspicion that, if not properly watched, I might become her executioner. (As subsequent events proved, her suspicions were perfectly justified. The way we often help to create a situation we most fear by our efforts to prevent it).
Mama s (as I called her) family had originally come from the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia. Her grandmother had been the only daughter of an impoverished (very impoverished) minor nobleman. Hapsburg Austria was flooded with noblemen and noblewomen. Unlike in Britain, there was no clear right of progenitor; all sons and daughters inherited the title. In addition, there was the nobility by merit, who were usually more concerned with their dignity than those who had inherited it. When great-grandmother (her name seems to have been Theresa) was eighteen years old, her own mother died and she was sent to stay with relatives in Vienna. From the fragments of conversation I picked up here and there (none of this was even openly discussed in front of me), the relatives seem to have occupied some minor position at the Imperial Court, and the young girl from the provinces was soon enveloped in the social life of 19th century Vienna. Eventually she fell in love with an officer of the Imperial army and it was there that her troubles started. Officers of the Imperial army were not expected to marry young, their wives had to come either from the right background or, at least, provide a substantial dowry that would enable the couple to live according to their station. Even Jewish women were accepted. Vienna had always been thoughtlessly anti-Semitic but, providing the money was right, and the girl converted to Christianity, the marriage could take place. Whatever else, great-grandmother could not produce a dowry. As to her social station I am not quite sure, but the relatives, in whose house she lived, were certainly not of the right social level. Otherwise her (I think it was some kind of) uncle would not have had to work for money. Whatever the job, at the end of the 19th century working for money always implied lower rank. I am not at all sure what happened. It does not seem that her lover actually deserted her, but his family behaved in a fashion, which so wounded her pride that she wrote to her father, informing him, she would return home and consent to any marriage he saw fit to arrange. Was she pregnant? I do not know. Though I had already developed considerable talent for hearing things I was not supposed to hear, this particular fact would certainly have been beyond my comprehension. The husband her father chose, rather quickly, seemed to have been quite rich (there were apparently a good many debts in great-grandmother s family), much older, a widower, an alcoholic, and there were veiled indications that he had once been ill .
I have only ever seen two pictures of my great-grandmother. One was taken during her stay in Vienna. It showed a slim girl in an enormous crinoline. A tiny waist and soft coloured eyes blazing with light. The other was that of women with three small children. A frozen face, blank eyes. After her father had died, she took her three surviving children and left her husband, a move that immediately made her a social outcast. For the rest of her life she lived in her father s house, saw nobody, took no interest in her children or in anything else. My grandmother s older sister became the head of the household -a very poor household. Great- grandmother used to walk through the house at night with a burning candle in her hand, looking for her lost lover. I was impressed by her constancy, her power to shape life into a coherent story (a Schnitzler story?), divide the essential from the peripheral. Her proud disregard for facts, I admired her like a beautiful poem, a perfect sculpture. I never looked upon her as a possible role model. I knew that even if I tried, my life could never be like hers.
Great-grandmother was entirely indifferent to her children. They were part of the factual world that no longer touched her. This indifference towards children was handed down through my Grandmother to Mama. Her three children, each in his or her own way, carried the taint of her obsession. Great-grandmother died when I was about three years of age. Neither Grandmother nor Mama went to her funeral. Nor did Grandmother s brother who lived somewhere in America. I remember that there was talk that he too had been in the army and that he had left because of gambling debts. (Many years later, when I was a student in Vienna, I happened by chance to come across a woman who had known Grandmother and her brother when both of them had stayed in Vienna. She hinted, maliciously, and therefore not totally trustworthily, that the reason for grand-uncle s sudden departure had been a scandalous suggestion of incest.)
Mama mistook manners for emotions. I had to say: Good morning! individually to each member of the family, curtsy whenever I received a gift. If the gift came from Grandmother, Mama or one of their women friends, I had to kiss their hand. Any omission to say Please or Thank you at appropriate, and sometimes quite far-fetched occasions,