In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel Read Free Book Online

the vote would favor an independent Austria. Hitler responded by mobilizing troops and threatening to invade the country unless Schuschnigg postponed the plebiscite, resigned as chancellor, and formed a new government with an Austrian Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as chancellor. Schuschnigg turned for help to Britian and Italy, two countries that had formerly supported Austrian independence. To the dismay of Viennese liberals like my family, neither responded. Abandoned by potential allies and concerned about needless bloodshed, Schuschnigg resigned on the evening of March 11.
    Even though the president of Austria acquiesced to all of Germany’s demands, Hitler invaded the country the next day.
    Now came a surprise. Rather than being met by angry crowds of Austrians, Hitler was welcomed enthusiastically by a substantial majority of the population. As George Berkley has pointed out, this dramatic turnabout from people who screamed loyalty to Austria and supported Schuschnigg one day to people who greeted Hitler’s troops as “German brothers” the next cannot be explained simply by the emergence from the underground of tens of thousands of Nazis. Rather, what happened was one of history’s “fastest and fullest mass conversions.” Hans Ruzicka was to write, “These are the people who cheered the Emperor and then cursed him, who welcomed democracy after the Emperor was dethroned and then cheered [Dollfuss’s] fascism when the system came to power. Today he is a Nazi, tomorrow he will be something else.”
    The Austrian press was no exception. On Friday, March 11, the Reichspost , one of the country’s major newspapers, endorsed Schuschnigg. Two days later, the same newspaper printed a front-page editorial entitled “Toward Fulfillment,” which stated: “Thanks to the genius and determination of Adolf Hitler, the hour of all-German unity has arrived.”
    The attacks on Jews that had begun in mid-March 1938 reached a peak of viciousness eight months later in Kristallnacht. When I later read about Kristallnacht, I learned that it had originated in part from the events of October 28, 1938. On that day seventeen thousand German Jews who were originally from Eastern Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and dumped near the town of Zbszyn, which lies on the border between Germany and Poland. At that time, the Nazis still considered emigration—voluntary or forced—to be the solution to “the Jewish question.” On the morning of November 7, a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the deportation of his parents from their home in Germany to Zbszyn, shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary in the German embassy in Paris, mistaking him for the German ambassador. Two days later, using this one act as a pretext for acting against the Jews, organized mobs set almost every synagogue in Germany and Austria on fire.
    Of all the cities under Nazi control, Vienna was the most debased on Kristallnacht. Jews were taunted and brutally beaten, expelled from their businesses, and temporarily evicted from their homes. Their businesses and homes were then looted by avaricious neighbors. Our beautiful synagogue on Schopenhauerstrasse was completely destroyed. Simon Wiesenthal, the leading Nazi hunter after World War II, was later to say that “compared to Vienna, the Kristallnacht in Berlin was a pleasant Christmas festival.”
    On the day of Kristallnacht, as my father was rounded up, his store was taken away from him and turned over to a non-Jew. This was part of the so-called Aryanization (Arisierung) of property, a purportedly legal form of theft. From the time of my father’s release from prison in the middle of November 1938 until he and my mother left Vienna in August 1939, they were destitute. As I was to learn much later, my parents received provisions and an occasional opportunity for my father to work at jobs such as moving furniture, from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde der Stadt Wien, the