After the Anschluss

I prefer fiction to fact and stories to history, so it was just by chance that I happened to see a documentary showing the reunion of a Dutch woman and the Jewish man, neither a relative nor her lover but merely, in the New Testament sense, her neighbour, whose life she saved during the Second World War. She had constructed a hideout, like a priest’s hole, in her ordinary suburban house where he remained undiscovered despite several searches. Marvelling at her courage, I wondered whether similar circumstances would bring out the inner heroine even in people who are normally pusillanimous; in fact, even in me.

I live in an old and rambling Cornish farmhouse which is well equipped with cubby holes, corners and crannies. Could the floorboards cover a coffin-shaped cavity here or a false wall go undetected there? The house might accommodate a hiding place but I have a nasty feeling that I couldn’t, though in fact, as my parents were Jews (who escaped Germany well before the war), my role in such a story would more likely be that of hunted fugitive than saviour. It takes a special sort of long-term determination and courage to risk one’s life for someone else’s sake. Would the friends who protected Anne Frank’s family in their secret annexe have embarked on their heroic act of altruism if they had known of the long haul ahead? In her remarkable novel, Night Falls on the City, Sarah Gainham imagines what it must have been like to keep a deadly secret in such circumstances for years. Julia Homburg is a famous classical actress whose family had been courtiers and Catholics, unassailable members of the Austrian imperial establishment. But Julia’s husband Franz Wedekind is a socialist politician and a Jew. Their story begins in March 1938. German troops cross the borders of Austria. Franz tries to reach Czechoslovakia but has left it too late. He escapes the Gestapo by jumping out of the train and sneaks back home to Vienna. Neither Julia nor their devoted maid Fina has taken any interest in public affairs and at first they don’t understand why he has to hide. When men come in the middle of the night to search the premises they are too dazzled by Julia to be thorough, but she knows they will be back. A secret room must be constructed behind the false back of a cupboard and Franz must be hidden in it, just for the time being. The madness, surely, can’t last for long. Julia carries on performing. She is still the Burgtheater’s star, but as the months pass, and then the years, she becomes ever more silent, withdrawn and tense. There is no room for love or friendship, only fear, duty and the dreadful weight of terror. At this distance of years, for readers in the West, the details of life under the Nazi regime have become the stuff of melodrama, but this book shows it as a dreadful, degraded daily grind and a corruption of all personal relationships because it was not safe to say anything that mattered. So people disappeared, and Jews were deported into the unknown east, and those who knew them dared not comment. There was no predicting who would betray, collaborate or inform, or who would be heroic. Julia’s colleagues and friends, artists, intellectuals and politicians, compromise or close their eyes, refuse to see what is happening or are so absorbed by other problems that political upheavals seem hardly to impinge. But every assumption is overturned. The inconceivable becomes normal. Franz lives in that tiny room for six years. He sees nobody from the outside world except the only other person who knows the secret, their friend Georg Kerenyi, a political journalist and former editor. It is through his intellectual response, and Julia’s more instinctive behaviour, that one of the most dreadful and dramatic periods of history is made imaginable, from the Anschluss to the Russian occupation in 1945. Atrocities remain off stage until the end, when bombs fall and the long-dreaded Russians arrive. Rape and pillage engulf the city and its citizens. The suspense is inherent in the situation: will Franz be discovered, will Julia’s secret be betrayed, will she or anyone else survive? The scenes shift, each vividly if a little too carefully described. A reviewer of an earlier book complained, ‘Miss Gainham knows neither when nor how to stop,’ and I admit that Night Falls on the City is over-long and too discursive, but even at the third or fourth reading it carried me along, excited, moved and interested in the people and the city, which becomes as much a character in the book as Julia herself. Sarah Gainham knew Vienna intimately, since she lived there for much of her life. She was born Rachel Stainer in 1915 though she always claimed it was 1922. She went to Berlin just after the war with the first of three husbands, Anthony Terry, a journalist with espionage connections who is described in unflattering terms in her most overtly autobiographical novel, The Tiger, Life. Many critics regarded this book as literally unreadable and it is certainly heavy going, though it would be a useful source for anyone researching Berlin in the days of the Control Commission or wanting to know how diplomats and foreign correspondents lived among the ruins. In 1947 she moved to Vienna to work with the Four Powers Commission, and she later wrote about Central Europe for the Spectator. When her third husband, Kenneth Ames, committed suicide in 1975, she moved out of town to live (according to her obituary) with several fat cats in a small house on the banks of the Danube. Sarah Gainham’s first novel appeared in 1956, the pseudonym being the name of one of her maternal ancestors. After five competent but forgettable thrillers, Night Falls on the City, published in 1967, became a surprise bestseller. There were to be two sequels, A Place in the Country (1969) and Private Worlds (1971), but neither is anywhere near as good, though both are worth reading if one is interested in the characters, their world and the theme at which Gainham worries away throughout the trilogy, the responsibility of the individual. A Place in the Country picks up the story in 1945. It is told in the unappealing voice of a reserved and humourless young English officer who is in Austria as part of the occupying army, but the account of life in the defeated country is interesting. The plot, based on a Philby-style spy and his eventual defection, is rather less so. By the time the final volume, Private Worlds, was published, Vienna has returned to some semblance of normality, as the city of cafés, intellectual argument, wine, music and flirtation; but the scars of war have not healed. When a former SS General turns up expecting help from those who during the war had collaborated with him, disaster looms for some of Julia’s circle, while she is at the peak of her career, concentrating on a part which she is uniquely qualified to play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Like that queen, Julia creates an invisible barrier about herself ‘in which she moved so surely that it seemed as if other people and inanimate objects must remove themselves from her path’. The words charisma or magnetism are not used but the writer makes one believe that Julia Homburg is not only beautiful, accomplished and admirable, but that she is also one of those rare people whom one cannot take one’s eyes off; and although her inherited civilization may have been engulfed by savagery, she has not. Reading Night Falls on the City now, in a Europe that seems, perhaps misleadingly, prosperous and stable, full of artistic treasures and co-operative citizens, with its wars conducted at a distance, racial and religious prejudices outlawed, and ‘hate-speak’ criminalized, it is hard to recognize that it is only half a century since much of the civilized world lay in ruins; that within living memory, in Europe, people like me (and I admit I take this book and its subject personally) were hunted and slaughtered like animals; that it could happen again. The horrible facts are well known now, and the Second World War is on the school curriculum and is endlessly discussed, but what has come to be called the Holocaust was almost a taboo subject until the mid-1970s. Many people who had lived through that period felt, as my mother once explained, that they did not want another generation burdened with the knowledge that had overshadowed their own lives. Perhaps that is why I did not bring myself to read anything about it before she died, but in the 1980s I began the research for a novel set during the period and read diaries, memoirs and histories from the years immediately before and after the war. However, as those who love fiction know, a novel can often gives insights that no amount of factual research can reproduce, and in Night Falls on the City I found one that brought facts and statistics to life. In Gainham’s own words, ‘you have to see it in one person, through another single human being. That is the only way to understand anything.’ So on a recent visit to prosperous, gemütlich Vienna I felt I was walking in Julia Homburg’s conquered capital; and in my own house, I imagine sheltering a fugitive – or being one.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Jessica Mann 2007