Two Suitcases

A long wait and a new excerpt

Eve Neuhaus 7 Comments
Draft of the cover for the hardback version of Red Vienna

Red Vienna is coming, I promise you. But, as anyone who has published a book will tell you, it always takes longer than you hoped.

While I wait I’ve been working on Underground, the second volume of Two Suitcases. After the fascist government of Austria banned the Social Democratic party, its activist members went underground, hence the title of the volume. In the outer world Leo works as a printer, and Hugo grinds lenses for an optician, but their real work takes place very discretely in a basement room in one of the social housing complexes.

Here’s the part I wrote today.

Chapter 19

Hijinks

April 20, 1935

a hidden room in the basement of Goethe-hof, a social housing complex

Leo and Hugo lean over a heavily crossed out and written over text, the harsh light above them creating a circle on the old table. Next to them is a stack of the official stationery of the President of the Police, Dr. Skubl. The pages even have his rubber-stamped signature at the bottom.

“No,” says Leo, pointing to the text. “Change it to make Skubl say, ‘As our noble police are currently occupied with arresting Socialists, Communists, and other anti-Fascists, the duty falls upon the public to keep down common crime.’  Add the word ‘noble.’”

“Right, right, that works better,” Hugo answers, looking up a moment and cleaning his glasses. “And the next part is good too, but let’s also make him assure the people that their taxes are being well-spent. Huh. Why don’t we invite people to inspect the police headquarters so they can see with their own eyes the absurd sums of money our government is spending on armaments to deploy against political opponents?” 

Leo laughs. “Great idea!”

Hugo thinks. “How about advertising an Open House at police headquarters every Sunday morning? The invitation would specifically say it’s to see the vast armory of tanks, machine guns, rifles, gas weapons, etc., etc., ready to kill their neighbors and co-workers, all funded by their taxes. Let Skubl say it’ll start in May.”

“That’s it, perfect. Write down what you want it to say. I’ll get the type set.”

“We have a dozen sheets of this stationery, more than enough to get it out to the state newspaper, the radio, and the foreign press.”

“I can do some posters and flyers announcing the Sunday Open Houses, too.” Leo smiles at the thought of the police headquarters being overrun with people demanding to see the armory.

“Excellent. Make sure they give the reason for the Open House clearly: to see the weaponry meant to control the opposition.”

“It’ll have to be very carefully worded.”

“Of course. I trust you,” Hugo says, putting on his jacket. “Show me the first drafts when they’re ready.”

At just the same time in another neighborhood

Frau Selma Schmid of Habbichergasse is looking out of the window of her small apartment. The weather is changing. Soon it’ll be raining again, she thinks, and it’s so cold for April. I should start a fire. As she takes some old papers from the pile to throw into the cold coal stove, she glances at the program from an event she and her husband attended the week before. How proud she felt to see Major Fey, noble leader of the Heimwehr, as he was installed as Regent of Austria. Such an honor. Frau Schmid loves pageantry. Fondly, she recalls standing next to her father as the funeral procession of Emperor Franz Josef went by in 1916.  Life was much better under the monarchy, even at the end, during that horrible war. 

As she’s about the crumple the program up, she notices the words, “Free to the bearer of this program” and she looks more closely. What is free? Nothing is free anymore. 

The door opens and Herr Schmid, disheveled after his afternoon nap, comes in. “What are you doing?” he asks grumpily. “We can’t afford a fire. It’s the middle of spring, what are you thinking?”

“But look, my dear! To think I almost threw this away! On the back of the program to Regent Fey’s installation is a generous donation by his supporters. It says that if we bring this program to any of the shops listed here, we’ll be offered our choice of goods worth 10 schillings! That’s three loaves of bread!”

“Now, why would anyone do that? It makes no sense at all to me,” mutters Herr Schmid, sitting down to look at the program. 

“But that’s what it says,” his wife points out.  “Look at the list. All these merchants are making the offer just to celebrate Regent Fey.”

“Well,” grunts her husband. “That’s what it says alright. Put on your coat. We’ll go to Oberhoffer’s—you see, he’s listed here—and see what’s left in his shop. Very little, I’m betting. He’s an old fool to have made such an offer.”

“Herr Oberhoffer is an honorable man, Richard. And a patriot. I’ll get my bag.”

Ten minutes later, the couple is entering the bakery while another couple opens an umbrella outside the shop. 

“Georg! I told you it was a scam!” the woman is saying.

“But it was the official program. The guard at the gate was handing them out. I saw it myself,” her husband insists as they walk away.

“Ha,” says Herr Schmid to his wife Selma. “I told you so. You heard that. It’s a scam.”

“I’m going in anyway. I want to hear what Herr Oberhoffer has to say,” she replies, entering the shop.

“Nothing!” comes a shout from behind the counter. “I have nothing to say! Except that it’s not true, I’m not offering anybody anything for free!”

The Schmids stare at the baker.

“Nobody gets anything for free from me!” the baker goes on.

“What a miser!” says Herr Schmid to Selma as he turns and leaves. “He should have been generous and gone along with it even if it was a scam. That’s the last he’ll see of me!”  

His wife hurries out after him.

In the hidden room in the basement of Goethe-hof

Leo says to Hugo, “Before you go, do you happen to have heard how the programs for Fey’s installation as Regent of Austria worked out?  I printed a thousand of them even though they only expected a few hundred at the event. Franz said they’d be distributed at the event itself and that the rest would be left here and there all over the city.” He chuckles. “Halfway through the program we said Fey would be officially declaring himself Regent of the country he destroyed. That was the exact language. Of the country he destroyed. I wonder how many people read far enough to see that.”

“I’ll bet they read far enough on the back to see the list of shops in Vienna where they could get 10 schillings worth of free goods by presenting the program. I’ll have to ask around to see how that turned out.”

“It makes me laugh just to think of it,” Leo smiles.

“It’s incredibly frustrating, though, that our communication system is so limited. Without being able to use the post, telephone, or the telegraph, sometimes it takes weeks before I hear the results of something we planned and printed right here.”

“That’s true. Our illegal network is disrupted ridiculously often. Collection points can’t be accessed because a new neighbor moved onto the block, or worse, because one of our ‘postmasters’ has been arrested. All too frequently I send out a draft of something to someone who doesn’t dare come here in person to check it, and I get a reply days or weeks after the event I was printing the flyers for was supposed to have happened.”

Hugo opens the door to leave. “It feels like we’re in the middle ages, doesn’t it?” he says. 

Echoes

Eve Neuhaus 3 Comments

Much of my time last week went to proofreading the newly laid-out copy of Red Vienna. It’s amazing how many missed errors you find when you reread something in a different font and format. While I was working on it, the US House of Representatives was leaderless. Here’s an excerpt from my book that covers similar events that took place in Vienna’s parliament in 1933:

Cafe Rüdigerhof, Brigittenau

March 7, 1933

Max closes the shop early to meet with the others at the coffee house. The news that Chancellor Dollfuss had eliminated the parliament hit the press earlier that week, and on the same day, it had been announced that the Wartime Economy Authority Law, an emergency law passed in 1917, would be used as a basis to rule.  It gave Dollfuss significantly broader powers than he had under the parliamentary system.

In fact, every day that week brought what seemed like earth-shattering news. Wednesday, the National Council couldn’t agree on how to settle the railway workers’ strike. When an agreement was finally reached, irregularities were found in the vote, and Karl Renner, leader of the SDAP, resigned as Chairman of the Council. 

“You’ve all heard how it came about? It was apparently one of our people. He passed his voting card on to be handed in by someone else while he went to the lavatory,” Hugo says. “And they called it a voting irregularity.”

“Renner shouldn’t have resigned. He should have fought it,” says Leo.

Hugo shakes his head. “He took the high road, though, and he’s out now.”

“If it wasn’t true, it would be unbelievable,” says Max. “That one man responding to the call of nature could cause the cascade of events that led to the downfall of democracy in Austria.”

After Renner’s resignation, Rudolf Ramek, a Christian Social, had been named Chairman. He declared the previous vote invalid and called for a new vote. Another uproar followed. Ramek then resigned, and Sepp Straffner, leader of the Pan-Germans, became Chairman, but he also stepped down immediately. The resignations of Renner, Ramek, and Straffner left the house without a speaker, so the session couldn’t be closed and the National Council was incapable of acting. Not knowing what to do next, the members of the Parliament left the chamber..

In response, Chancellor Dollfuss had declared a constitutional crisis. The parliament, he said, had “eliminated itself,” a crisis not provided for in the constitution. Dollfuss then set up an authoritarian government without a parliament. The establishment of wartime rule gave him complete authority.

So far, the president of the United States hasn’t eliminated the House of Representatives and instituted martial law, but the parallels are striking.

Maybe even more than the desire to share a story based on my parents’ experiences, it’s echoes like this one that compelled me to finish the book.

Watch for it in a few weeks or months.

Red Vienna – a novel

Eve Neuhaus 5 Comments

Heinrich Schmidt’s iconic image of Austerlitz-hof in the late 1920’s

At last.

After—how many years is it? roughly ten?—I just submitted the first volume of Two Suitcases to the publisher, WingSpan Press, the same people who published my fantasy, Journey to Mythaca, in 2006.

Red Vienna will be available in paperback or ebook format in about six weeks. I’m working on a website for it, which can be seen in its incomplete state here. At this point, nothing will happen if you push the “buy the book” button because there isn’t a book to buy yet, but if you sign up for the email list, you’ll be among the first know when it becomes available.

The trilogy, Two Suitcases, will eventually cover 1929 to 1942, from when the main characters, Gisi and Max, meet until they leave for America. The first two volumes are set in Vienna and the third in France.

When I began the book, which I thought would be one book and not three, I intended it to be a work of non-fiction, telling the story of my parents’ escape from Nazi Austria as accurately as possible. Early on, though, the characters began to claim their independence, and I made the decision to let the story unfold as it wanted. So, though most of the main characters are based on real people and some of them are historical figures, it’s not only the dialogue that I added. What could I do? The characters fell in and out of love, they developed quirks, their lives followed trajectories that might have happened, given the setting, but probably didn’t. It’s fiction.

I tried much harder to keep the setting accurate, which I think it is. Writing historical fiction is entirely different from writing fantasy. It takes years of reading and researching, probably the main reason all this has taken this long.

If you’d like a look into my writing process, much of it is explored on this blog in posts tagged “Two Suitcases.” Some of the posts are linked below.

The second volume, tentatively called Underground, is about half written and now I’m eager to get back to it. I hope it takes less than ten years to finish.

May 2019 “March 1933”

December 2018 “Two Suitcases- an update

January 2016 “Two Suitcases – in process”

January 2016 “Two Suitcases – an update and an excerpt”

January 2016 “Two Suitcases – an update and an excerpt”

August 2015 “Two Suitcases – progress and a little taste of what’s to come”

Read an excerpt from book 2, Underground

Pick your favorite

Eve Neuhaus 22 Comments

Quite a few of the queries I’m sending out to literary agents ask for a one sentence pitch for the book.

Which of these do you like the best? Do you have a better idea?

1. Can young love and a passionate commitment to high ideals survive the forces of fascism, populism and propaganda in Red Vienna on the eve of World War II?

2. In Red Vienna, idealistic young lovers Gisi and Max watch their dream city fall to the forces of fascism as the second world war looms

3. In Red Vienna, young idealists Gisi and Max fall in love at the 1929 International Socialist Youth Congress and set to work creating a more caring world, but can they hold onto their vision when their beloved utopia is destroyed by racism, nationalism and civil war?

4. With shocking parallels to recent events in the United States and Europe, this book – based on a true story – tells of an idealistic young couple confronting the forces of rising fascism and civil war in Vienna on the eve of World War II.

Thanks so much for your input.

The End of Red Vienna

Eve Neuhaus 15 Comments
Viennese Social Housing Block

As those of you who follow this blog know, Two Suitcases, my book project, grew to three volumes some time ago. There was just too much material. My plan was to break the characters’ journey into their years in Vienna, their years in Paris, and their years in the south of France.

Though it’s five years since I began the project, and much of that time I was working on the project with a sense of great urgency – I even dreamed that my mother was telling me “work faster!” once – I stopped for two years when Mama Ganache needed me. And then there was the move to France which caused further delay. In retrospect, though, I think the gaps improved the book. Sorry, Mom.

Recently, as I was researching and writing about the period leading to the 1934 February Uprising (or Austrian Civil War), the parallels to what’s happening in the United States now became unmistakable. I posted an excerpt last year about how Austria became a Fascist dictatorship when Englebert Dollfuss dissolved the parliament and adopted martial law.

I continued writing until I reached 1936, all the while following the news of Trump’s America. Then that sense of urgency returned, and it pushed me to change my plans. The first volume, Red Vienna, would end after the February Uprising. The period when the characters are forced underground in Vienna, 1934-38, would be the second volume, and their period in France, 1938-1940, will be the third.

At that point, I went back and revised and rewrote the first book, which is now called Red Vienna, to prepare it for publication. I’m pleased to say that I’ve begun the process of seeking representation for it.

My real reason for this blog, though, is that I read this morning that Michael Caputo, one of Trump’s toadies, was warning people of armed uprisings, and that sense of urgency returned. I’ve posted an excerpt from Red Vienna below. It was hard to choose a piece because the events happen over a period of years, but this one is a pretty pointed parallel. It takes place immediately after the uprising.

Austrian Civil War 1934

February 18, 1934

Brigittenau, Vienna

Max’s apartment

At four in the morning on February 18, Max, stinking, hungry, and thirsty, furtively unlocked the door to his family’s apartment, slipped in, and immediately locked it behind him. He had climbed out of the sewer at Karl-Marx-Hof just two hours earlier, and managed to make his way home flattened against the walls of buildings, deep in the shadows, through the darkest alleys and streets of the city.

Leaving his mud-caked boots in the hall, he skirted past his sleeping father and went into the kitchen where he threw some bits of coal onto the embers in the stove, and drank down every drop of the boiled water left in the pot. Then he refilled the pot and set it on top of the stove again.

He shivered as he took off his clothes and put on his threadbare bathrobe. It would have been a good thing if he could have thrown those clothes away, but that was out of the question. Instead, he pulled the big galvanized tub out from under the sink and began to fill it, pot by pot, with water heated on the stove. As he waited for the water to heat up, he ate whatever he could find: some dry bread and most of a can of pickled herring. An hour later, when the tub was full enough, he stepped in, sighing deeply as the steaming water surrounded him and slowly warmed him. He washed himself thoroughly and then lay back and relaxed until the water was almost cold. Later, dry from the heat of the fire and wearing his nightshirt, he added another pot of boiling water to the washtub and dropped his filthy clothes into it.

It was after six in the morning when he lay down on the settee. He slept for the next twelve hours, barely stirring when his father came into the room and pulled a blanket over him.

*   *   *

After covering his son, Seppe left quietly to go to his cafe, where he found Dolf and Fredl sitting in a booth in the back room. 

“Quick, sit,” said Dolf. 

“It’s safe?” asked Seppe. 

“I haven’t seen anything to make me think it’s not. But who knows anymore?” said Fredl. “They’re picking up more of us every day. We’re taking a big risk being here, but being at home could be an even bigger risk. Who knows anything anymore.”

“Max is back,” Seppe told them.

“Thank god!” said Dolf. “Did he tell you where he was?”

“He’s still sleeping.”

“At least he’s home. The news is all very bad.”

“Yes, Dollfuss is telling the world the housing complexes were built as fortresses to store weapons for an armed takeover, and that they stopped it from happening just in time,” Fredl said.

“And they’re putting out that we were in league with the Soviets,” finished Dolf.  “The headline on the Fatherland Front paper says ‘Armed Insurrection Averted.’  

Fredl said, “They claim only two hundred died, but I’ve heard it’s in the thousands.”

“And they’re hanging more as we speak,” said Seppe.

The loss of story – further reflections on the crumbling of perceptual boundaries

Eve Neuhaus 7 Comments

When I consider the lessons of our divestment over the past several years, the house on McCollum Street, the house on Park Street, Mama Ganache, a lifetime of acquisitions – I find I always return to the center: what I am, I take with me.

What I am has nothing to do with the things and stories that surround me. It doesn’t need even one suitcase to contain it, much less two. When nostalgia for what I had begins to fill me, wherever I am, I can go to my heart and feel at home with who I am, and that is enough.

Ceiling tile for sale on a street in Morocco

It’s where I find hope, where I can recover that sense of eager anticipation the Hathors recommend in these times of failing expectations and beliefs, the loss of story, and crumbling perceptual boundaries.

One of the seminal books of my hippie years was a typewritten channeled teaching called Season of Changes. I’ve forgotten the details of the predictions, but I’m sure they’ve been borne out or will be soon enough. It was a dark view of the future, full of cataclysm and apocalypse. Written in question and answer format, the last responses concern how to respond to the changes. As I recall, the advice most forcefully given was to practice meditation.

It’s comforting to imagine that more people than ever are doing that, at least in my own bubble. It’s less comforting to remember how tiny a percentage of the world’s population my bubble contains.

But it’s sound advice. When the now threatening storm of storms is full upon us, when that moment of personal and collective apocalypse that we all feel coming finally arrives, it’s the meditators who will be able to hold the rudder.

Storm coming in at our house in Cordes

Meditation takes you to your center, to the center, the one we all have in common. It takes you out of the chaotic whirl of stories to the place of no story, where energy is conserved instead of fueling the miasma of outer experience.

It takes you beyond imagination, beyond the limits of space and time, and beyond the singular focus of our culture on the physical: on acquisition (growth vs. maintenance), on hierarchy (dominion vs. sharing), beyond your own little bit of the apocryphal elephant.

Letting go of the world as we know it, the world of perception, this particular consensus reality, is necessarily heart-breaking. It’s painful to separate from the things and people and stories we love, and love is, after all, what it’s all about.

The tricky part is to connect love to the universal rather than the particular.

And that’s where meditation can take you.

Arrived: Cordes-sur-Ciel

Eve Neuhaus 15 Comments

Who would have guessed that the line to rent a car at the Bordeaux airport would take 2 1/2 hours? Or that not one of the three agents would adjust their customary style to – at the very least – shorten the conversations they usually enjoy with each customer? Imagine how exciting the story of our journey from California would have been. Arnaud at Avis was particularly skilled at drawing out his clients’ stories, but I kept looking over my shoulder at the dozens of families with small children behind us: a sea of impatient grimaces, hungry whines, and tapping feet. I’m not sure it made any difference.

It took us close to three hours to get onto the road.

Outside, it was 38C, record-breaking heat, but the thoughtful GPS took us along the back roads, so we enjoyed the ride –

– even the muddy track through the cornfields that saved us a good two minutes over the more conventional route.

Eventually we arrived at the office of M. duMartin, the notaire (real estate lawyer), in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, where the couple from whom we bought the house and our real estate agent were waiting.

I will be eternally grateful that Tom is fluent in French! M. duMartin, jowls and chins indistinguishable, thick steel-colored hair brushed back and plastered to his head, melted into his ornate chair behind the expanse of his ancient desk, and read aloud document after document after document. Do we understand that there can be no changes to the outside of the house, not even to the paint on the blue voleurs (shutters)? And here, this is very important, you see where the back of the house goes under the one on the street above? The well is in your house, but a shaft goes up into the house above…

Periodically a young assistant in short shorts, long legs, and assorted tattoos brought more documents, or copies for us all the sign. M. DuMartin’s wife, gray hair in braids circling her head, appeared behind him from time to time, ghostlike.

It was stiflingly hot in the room. I struggled to follow, using all the skills I’ve acquired from years of hearing loss: catching enough words to get the gist, applying what I know from similar situations, and watching everyone else’s responses very carefully. Still. French legalese!

We signed the papers at last and went to the house with the agent and the sellers for a few lessons in house’s quirks.

And now we are here!

We woke to a gentle breeze coming through the wide open window.

Such a view! Come see us!

Two Suitcases and One Pallet

Eve Neuhaus 2 Comments

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The current state of the pallet.

We’re experimenting with what to take and what to leave behind, and piling up various configurations of it on the driveway. Pretty soon we’ll have a good enough idea of how and what will fit and the pile will move indoors.

Since my project is called Two Suitcases, I took the idea of moving to France with two suitcases pretty seriously. Well, with two suitcases apiece. Eventually it came to me that, though it would offer me to opportunity to partially replicate my parents’ arrival in the same part of the world in 1940, it was a thoroughly romantic – and therefore impractical – notion. We shifted our thinking to shipping one pallet of boxes.

Right now the boxes making the cut contain: the library I’ve collected to use as background material for Two Suitcases, a few boxes of my papers and other books, some of Tom’s papers and books, framed photos of the family, art, kitchen things, winter clothes, and some items to make our new home feel like our old one. Carpets, my computer, Tom’s keyboard, and more art will be shipped separately.

IMG_2314

Most of my days are filled with sorting and packing. This box has our favorite mugs at the bottom, some delicate pieces of art and glass in the middle, and at the top, some of the birds that lived in our houseplants or flew around the ceilings in our home here.

At its center, packed very carefully, is the crystal bell my father bought my mother with his first paycheck in 1943, less than a year after they arrived in Philadelphia. He always said he bought it to remind her of what is important.

IMG_2316

A thoroughly romantic notion.

 

 

 

 

 

A shift in the wind

Eve Neuhaus 16 Comments
It’s five weeks until Tom’s and my exploratory trip to France following the final sale of Mama Ganache, and less than four months until our projected move to France.
This immense choice to change countries, and languages, and neighbors is largely driven by my current project, Two Suitcases, a series of historical fiction pieces based on my parents’ three escapes from Vienna, Paris, and the south of France. In order to do research in all three settings, we planned to move to Luçon, a city of 10,000 on the Atlantic coast, very near to Centre Tripura and dear friends.
IMG_0153
As these things go, the moment I fell totally in love with Luçon, having explored it in great detail via leboincoin, the French Craigslist, Google Maps, and a series of wonderful five-minute broadcasts by Sud Vendée TV, the direction of our adventure seems to be changing.
It occurred to me to consider moving directly to the region of southern France where my parents were in hiding, rather than settling in Luçon immediately. Do the the research out of chronological order. Ease into our new life in a furnished apartment in a small city  more like San Luis Obispo or Ithaca, walkable, culturally and historically rich, with no need for a car.
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Our trip to France in May will now include a few days in Montauban , a city of 58,000, four hours southeast of Luçon. If the right furnished apartment in center of the city shows up, perhaps we’ll end up there for our first year of footlooseness.
An hour north of Toulouse, Montauban was my parents’ destination when they left Paris as part of the great exodus of June 1940. Under the combined auspices of the Austrian Social Democratic party and the French Resistance, they spent the next two years in hiding outside a small village about an hour from Montauban. As I was growing up, both of them – but especially my mother – spoke of retiring to Montauban.
So we will see where the shifting winds blow us. Stay tuned.

Two Suitcases – in process

Eve Neuhaus 4 Comments

PD62488014_4-Membe_2493417b

This is the first image that arrived on my desktop when I began the research for Two Suitcases. I googled “Socialist Youth Movement Vienna 1929” and this magical doorway into the world in which my parents met opened.

When I read about Edith Tudor-Hart, who took the photo (a show of her work is making the rounds called The Soviet Spy with a Conscience), she immediately joined my list of possible characters in my book. It’s a long list. There were so many extraordinary people around in Red Vienna that many of the people on that list haven’t shown up in the book yet. Edith jumped right in.

[I think I will change the names of the characters soon.]

Almost all the settings in the book come from pictures: family pictures and stories, or gifts Mother Internet sends me. I wrote the section on the Youth Congress from a newsreel. The torchlight march was inspired by hearing the songs the kids were singing.

I paste the material into the text above what I’m writing and take them out later. At first I didn’t save the pictures, so I hadn’t seen this one in months until I started collecting the pictures on Pinterest.

Here’s an excerpt in which the current version of Edith appears. My favorite line belongs to her:

“So, why do you think we have wars?”

“Because we are ruled by an elite group of sociopaths who own the banks that fund both sides of war for profit!”  says Edith, slamming her hand on the table.

Here’s the whole section:

July 13, 1929

It is Ernst Papenek’s talk on the benefits of International Socialism on the second morning of the Youth Congress that finally wins Emil over to the cause. At Max’s invitation, he sits with some of the young men from the Brigittenau group: Hugo, Leo, Felix, and a fellow called Franz, and listens to Papanek for most of the morning. Not only does the speaker make Democratic Socialism seem reasonable, caring, expedient and attainable – all important values to Emil – but it turns out that Papanek, unlike Luitpold, is not a pacifist. It isn’t that he promotes or even approves of militarism, but he does believe in facing up to the dark forces that oppose the dream of a unified socialist world. 

Afterwards, Gisi, Toni, and Gert join them at a cafe to share their experiences. Edith arrives from the tent camps where she has been taking photographs. “18,000 kids in 3000 tents! You must find the time to go over to see them,” she announces as she pushes her bulky camera bag under the chair and sits down. “Vienna is housing 22,000 young guests for these three days – and they’re all having a great time from what I see.” 

An enthusiastic discussion follows, but Emil is itching to bring up Papanek’s stand on fighting. At last he finds an entry point.

“The ideas I’m hearing are all tremendous, but I wonder if you aren’t being naive. Even Papanek believes that the children may not be safe in today’s world. We shouldn’t imagine that by not thinking about it, we can make the National Socialists and their hatred disappear. We may need to fight to protect the children.”

“Papanek wouldn’t say that! You misunderstand him!” Edith responds. She gets shrill about such issues easily. “He abhors war!”

“I think it’s you who misunderstand,” Emil answers. “He was quite clear. He doesn’t rule out the necessity of war under extreme conditions. Were you there this morning?”

“But the conditions leading up to war can be mitigated before it becomes necessary,” says Hugo.

“That hasn’t happened yet,” Emil says. “I doubt if it ever will.” He pauses and then asks the group, “So, why do you think we have wars?”

“Because we are ruled by an elite group of sociopaths who own the banks that fund both sides of war for profit!” says Edith, slamming her hand on the table.

“The current coalition government isn’t in control? I thought we were celebrating the success of Democratic Socialism here,” Emil says, one eyebrow raised.

“We are.” Edith lets out a breath so derisive it is almost a snort. “But socialism hasn’t overcome the forces of capitalistic militarism yet. War is far too profitable for the banks to easily give up financing it. They’re just waiting for the right moment to launch a new war.”

Anna says, “That’s why the work we’re doing here is so important. Young people have been raised to think war is inevitable and will always be part of our lives. The generation being raised in the socialist paradigm will know better.” 

“And will refuse to be sacrificed like pawns in a game of chess,” adds Gert.

“I don’t think it’s that easy,” says Emil. “Boys like to fight. You can’t overcome instinct. Ask Dr. Freud.”

“That’s exactly why this afternoon is dedicated to games and sport!” Toni says, ending the discussion.  “Are any of you playing in the games?”

“We’re both on the all-Vienna football team,” Leo replies for himself and his brother. “We’re playing against the Czech team at 4:00. Are you girls coming to watch?”

“Of course!” come responses from all around.

Enjoying reading this? Click on the links above to learn more about the characters and see the material I’m using as resources.