The closed world of Vienna’s postwar Jewish reds
Historian, writer and film-maker Helene Maimann reflects on her life as a member of a pioneering group of radicals in the Austrian capital
► HELENE MAIMANN and the friends she grew up with in postwar Vienna were the sons and daughters of Displaced Persons, refugees, concentration camp survivors, resistance fighters and veterans of the Allied fight against Nazism.
Their parents lives in a close-knit community. They were communists and many of them were Jewish, and they raised their children in their own little world.
In her new book, The Shining Star, Maimann, a writer, historian and film-maker whose parents survived the war in Britain before returning to Austria, looks back on her life and the lives of those who shared her very particular experience.
“My parents had a very close mental and emotional relationship to England. England saved their lives,” she tells the JC one afternoon in a coffee house near the Vienna State Opera.
Her mother, Friedl, was 19 when, following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, she received a domestic permit and escaped to England.
Living in Epsom, Surrey, Friedl was able to get her mother, Sura, a cook and a seamstress, a permit too. But Sura never used it, not wishing to abandon her second husband in Vienna.
In August 1942, Sura was deported to Riga. “I can understand her decision to stay in Vienna,” Maimann reflects, “but there is a difference between understanding and having the feeling that you would have made the same choice.”
Her father, Martin, was 15 when he left Vienna on a Kindertransport to Britain in December 1938.
After arriving at the Kitchener Camp in Sandwich, Kent, Martin found a home with a car mechanic in Swansea. He learnt English and undertook an apprenticeship.
During the war, he was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle Man before being released in January 1941. He went on to serve in the British Army with the Royal Scots.
Martin and Friedl met in the summer of 1943 and were married the following spring before Martin was sent overseas with his regiment, taking part in the liberation of Europe.
He was posted to Vienna in spring 1946. Friedl joined him that autumn, living at the Maria Theresia barracks where British occupying forces were stationed. Helene was born in 1947.
Helene Maimann says her parents’ experiences of England showed up at home: English porcelain, dance music, Typhoo tea, Marmite and English cheese.
Being part of the Allied war effort also meant “they didn’t feel that they were victims”, she explains. “That was something very important. They were not only survivors. They won the war.
“For my father, this was very decisive. He fought a personal fight against Nazism and he won that fight. He lost his family, his mother. He once told me, ‘If I hadn’t come back to Vienna, Hitler would have won the war somehow.’”
It was also in this context that her parents, like many Jews in Europe, found their way to communism, a journey that began in the 1930s in leftwing Zionist youth movements such as Hashomer Hatzair.
The war and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Maimann says, heightened the importance of communism for her parents: “They had this idea, like many of this generation, that it was either socialism or barbarism.” Back in Vienna, her parents and their friends were active in the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ). Her father ran a company, Turmöl, which was one of a network of firms founded during the Soviet occupation of eastern Austria that financed the KPÖ for decades. Austria after the war was covered by a veil of silence, one which cloaked Maimann’s life too. She didn’t find out that she was Jewish, she remembers, until she was eight or nine years old.
I think we had a lot of freedom in our childhood
She also knew not to tell anyone else she was Jewish, nor that her parents were communists. “We behaved in a conspiratorial way,” she says.
Maimann has curated major exhibitions about Austrian history that presented new ways of thinking about subjects such as Red Vienna and the Austrian civil war.
Among her peers described in The Shining Star are the popular television documentary film-maker Elizabeth Spira, born in exile in Glasgow; the poet Robert Schindel; and the leather goods designer Robert Horn, a child of Schindler Jews. “We were also architects. We went into medicine. We became pioneers in some way: in photography, in art. It was a postwar generation that invented a lot of new things,” says Maimann.
“I think we had a lot of freedom in our childhood,” she says, reflecting on how this extraordinary generation that questioned and challenged society came to be. Her parents circle “was a Nazi-free zone. We didn’t have to think about what our fathers did during the war.”
That in itself was a liberation, as growing up on society’s fringes under the red star “nobody cared about us. Nobody was watching what we were doing when we were kids.”