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

Jewish Community Council of Vienna.
    Aware of the anti-Jewish laws instituted in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power, my parents understood that the violence in Vienna was not likely to fade away. They knew that we had to leave—and to leave as soon as possible. My mother’s brother, Berman Zimels, had left Austria for New York a decade earlier and established himself as an accountant. My mother wrote him on March 15, 1938, just three days after Hitler’s invasion, and he quickly sent us affidavits assuring the U.S. authorities that he would support us upon our arrival in the United States. However, Congress had passed an immigration act in 1924 that set a quota on the number of people who could enter the United States from the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe. Since my parents were born in territory that was at that time Poland, it took about a year for our quota number to come up, despite our having the necessary affidavits. When the number was finally called, we had to emigrate in stages, also because of the immigration laws, which specified the sequence with which family members could enter the United States. According to this sequence, my mother’s parents could leave first, which they did in February 1939; my brother and I next, in April; and finally my parents, in late August, just days before World War II broke out.
    Because my parents’ only source of income had been taken from them, they had no money to pay for our voyage to the United States. They therefore applied to the Kultusgemeinde for one and a half tickets on the Holland America Line, one ticket for my brother and a half for me. A few months later, they applied for two tickets for their own voyage. Fortunately, both requests were granted. My father was a scrupulous, honest person who always paid his bills on time. I have in my possession today all the documents supporting his request, which show that he religiously paid his membership dues to the Kultusgemeinde. This view of him as an upstanding man of integrity and character is specifically mentioned by an officer of the Kultusgemeinde in his evaluation of my father’s request for assistance.
     
     
    MY LAST YEAR IN VIENNA WAS A DEFINING ONE. CERTAINLY, IT fostered a profound, lasting gratitude for the life I found in the United States. But without a doubt, the spectacle of Vienna under the Nazis also presented me for the first time with the darker, sadistic side of human behavior. How is one to understand the sudden, vicious brutality of so many people? How could a highly educated society so quickly embrace punitive policies and actions rooted in contempt for an entire people?
    Such questions are difficult to answer. Many scholars have struggled to come up with partial and inconsistent explanations. One conclusion, which is troubling to my sensibilities, is that the quality of a society’s culture is not a reliable indicator of its respect for human life. Culture is simply incapable of enlightening people’s biases and modifying their thinking. The desire to destroy people outside the group to which one belongs may be an innate response and may thus be capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group.
    I doubt very much that any such quasi-genetic predisposition would operate in a vacuum. The Germans as a whole did not share the vicious anti-Semitism of the Austrians. How, then, did Vienna’s cultural values become so radically dissociated from its moral values? Certainly one important reason for the actions of the Viennese in 1938 was sheer opportunism. The successes of the Jewish community—economic, political, cultural, and academic—generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews, especially those in the university. Nazi party membership among university professors greatly exceeded that in the population at large. As a result, the non-Jewish Viennese were eager to advance themselves by replacing Jews in the professions: Jewish university professors, lawyers, and