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The beauty of the Prunksaal — the Austrian National Library’s most impressive room —contrasts with the circumspection of the photographs displayed on large posters. In the photos, men and women, all Austrian intellectuals, are visibly brutalized by the Nazi rise, giving the visiting public a look of dismay.
On the night of March 15, 1938, 75 years ago, and a few yards away, on the balcony that looks over the Heldenplatz (Square of the Heroes), the Austrian Adolf Hitler, the creator of the Third Reich and the Holocaust spoke with his usual virulence on his first major political victory. It was the month of the Anschluss, the annexation of the country by the hands of the then German Chancellor. Hitler left his indelible mark on Vienna.
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There wouldn’t be, according to the curators of the exhibition, a most appropriate place to pay tribute to those who were lost during the Austrian Nazism period. Entitled “Night Over Austria – Flight and Expulsion”, the exhibition is a portrait of the difficult times that the idea of the Großdeutschland, the Greater Germany brought upon the fragile country, which still protested the collapse of the of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Roberto Almeida/Opera Mundi
There were 250,000 people gathered in the square to hear Hitler, while many others were packing to escape the Nazi wave. The exhibition features 15 fugitives – musicians, writers, scientists – who left Austria behind before Hitler could sweep through what used to be the prominent Viennese cultural circle, home of classical music, pompous theaters, literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis.
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The writer, essayist and poet Erich Fried, a descendant of Jews, was only 17 years old when he went into exile in London in 1938. Aligned with the youth of the Austrian extreme-left wing, he was an easy target for the Nazi persecution. “Father dead, mother in prison and I in the nebulous England / Grandmother blind in Vienna, without rights, poor, old, haunted / See, this is the work of Hitler, this is the new century [unofficial translation],” he wrote.
Roberto Almeida/Opera Mundi
Fried’s escape, however, was relatively easy compared to the stories of despair and frustration of other Austrian intellectuals. The Jewish writer Albert Drach spent 1938 and 1939 in Split, Croatia, in Trieste, Italy, and in Paris before arriving in Nice, southern France, where he was captured. He escaped by a whisker — and with a dose of cynicism.
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One of his papers had the initials IKG, acronym for Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Israeli Community. Asked by Nazi officials, he was fast in explaining that initials meant “Im Katolischen Glauben”, “I’m a Catholic Believer”, and survived during the war as a mushrooms picker, skating teacher and translator.
Besides the cases of Fried and Drach, the exhibition presents other characters of the Austrian tragedy through several escape plans, personal photos and travel documents. But it is a childish drawing of Hitler that cries out for attention. Susanne Schüller, or Soshana, as she is known in the world of fine arts, is responsible for the naive picture of the Führer.
Roberto Almeida/Opera Mundi
Only 11 years old during the annexation, the little girl closely followed the political movement in Vienna without knowing what would happen next. Shortly thereafter, her life would be turned upside down, jumping from country to country to find refuge in New York, where she met her husband, Beys Afroyim, connected to the Communist Party.
Her first exhibition was in Cuba in 1948, in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, in Havana. After long trips through Asia, where she collected references and was influenced by calligraphy. Today, Soshana is 86 years old and lives again in Vienna, in a nursing home, where she paints every day. She is, to the exhibition, an example that proves that Vienna’s artistic scene, deprived of its golden years, is still alive in its characters.