About the Author
Walter Abish is the author of three novels, three collections of short stories, and a book of poems. He has been the recipient of a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His other awards include a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and the 1991 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.
From The Washington Post
In the early 1980s, a friend of mine, Mark, found himself seated next to a German-Jewish émigré on a flight to San Francisco. The former refugee told Mark a tale of escape and adversity, followed by enterprise and success in California agribusiness. Mark asked him whether he had ever returned to Germany. "Never," came the decided answer. "I could never set foot in that country again, after what the Germans did. I do go to the Salzburg Festival every year; that is different, that is Austria -- but Germany? Never! But you say you are a historian in a college in Cambridge? How marvelous to be a scholar, having the time to read the world's greatest writers: Schiller! Goethe! . . . "
Much has changed in the past two decades. Yet the horror of Germany's past continues to cause agony, not least for German-speaking Jews who escaped the Nazis. Many, like novelist and poet Walter Abish, went on to successful lives in the lands to which they emigrated, and quite a few were able to overcome the ordeal of their personal Germany. Many others, though, never were able to come to terms with their German past enough to reconcile themselves to the German present.
In Double Vision, Abish seems to think that he has not been affected by the distorting trauma of the émigré experience. He professes in this interesting but strangely dissatisfying memoir to be puzzled when Germans accuse him, as a Jew, of letting his experience of the German past prejudice his view of the German present. But shouldn't we take the title of his memoir at its word and look for a double vision -- not be content with what Abish wants us to see but also look for what he shows of himself, willingly or not?
Double Vision is two intertwined memoirs. "The Writer-to-Be" sections describe growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, escaping the Nazis after 1938, exile in Shanghai and life in Israel in the aftermath of independence. "The Writer" is an account of Abish's trips to Germany in the 1980s, after he had written his novel How German Is It, an intriguing, postmodern combination of romantic thriller and disquisition on the German condition, made all the more intriguing by Abish's having written it before he ever set foot in Germany proper.
Both autobiographical strands have their picaresque charm. Abish writes touchingly of his family while conveying the surreal crisis through which he lived as a child and teenager. Also interesting is the description of his encounters with the Germany that he had only imagined before, with the added curiosity that, in a book published in 2004, he's still writing largely from the perspective of the 1980s.
Abish's vision of Germany holds the two memoirs together. He shows how he and his German-Jewish friends in Israel, such as the writer Felix Rosenheim, with a bust of Goethe on his desk, retained a sense of Germanness that survived exile and, regardless of modern Germany, never really changed. Double Vision is more effective as a commentary on How German Is It than on its own. A reader considering the book purely as a memoir is left with a sense of something missing.
Abish's return to his native Vienna lies at the very center, and it is here that the memoir falters, for the author simply cannot face up to the truth about his "familiar" hometown. He insists, as though writing an official Austrian tourist guide, that "Vienna is the very antithesis to Germany" because of its melodious dialect and its mixture of humor and understatement. He writes graphically about the way in which the Viennese welcomed the Nazis in 1938, and yet he does not look further and see just how implicated Vienna and Austria were in the crimes of Germany. Instead he retreats to the Baroque garden of the Belvedere and a discussion of the 18th-century definition of taste. He says of Vienna that "the terror of history didn't lie heavily on this city." He is writing about the Vienna of 1982, before the Waldheim affair unmasked the mendacities and denials that had shaped postwar Austrian identity. Even so, faced with this delusory statement, one cannot help but ask whether Abish just does not want to see beneath the surface, for sentimental, old times' sake.
Abish's memoir lays bare the fraught nature of the Jewish émigré relationship to the Nazi past of Germany and Austria in ways the author cannot perceive. He cannot see modern Germany (or Vienna, for that matter) for what it is, rather than what it was. It is a case of double vision in more senses than one.
Reviewed by Steven Beller
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Writer-to-Be
Vienna
That’s why things happened the way they did. The oppressiveness of good manners. The emotional repression. My discontent. That’s why my head is shaped the way it is. That’s why my eyes are blue. We are talking about genes. About inherited traits. The way I smile—reluctantly. The way I reveal my anger. The reason I walk in a certain way. Is there no freedom at all from the family? The efficiently cool and remote mother and the energetic businessman father. Their distinctly separate worlds, their separate concerns collide uneasily in my brain. I would like to think that together, though each not communicating his or her desire to the other, they managed, if you will, to fabricate a writer. They, who essentially did not and could not know how a writer functions, by their approach, their passion, their view of everyday life, combined to turn me into one. It was their unspoken plan—a desire they had never voiced. Evidently a desire so secret that after I became a writer they continued to withhold their approval for fear that I might yet change my mind. “Ah, a writer!” My father glanced doubtfully at me, not wishing to say anything that might wound me. “A risky business!” On the other hand he couldn’t restrain his enthusiastic approval at my driving skill—“You’re a far better driver than Frank”—when, on one of his infrequent visits to New York in the early seventies, I picked him up at La Guardia and drove him to our home. It may have been the first time he had seen me at the wheel of a car. From him, this favorable comparison to Frank—a close friend of the family and, in the U.S., his business partner—was the ultimate compliment. Was it that he had never been led to expect much from me? Observing me drive well may have given him a little more confidence in my general capabilities. Driving was one thing he could judge me by. Clearly, in that respect I had passed with honors.
How readily I was able to identify with my sophisticated mother, and yet, in retrospect, it’s my father I love unabashedly. No complications there. I love him, I have to admit, because he is so easy to love. He concealed his complications, if any. He didn’t burden anyone with the intricacies of his thoughts. He hid everything but his overwhelming affection and generosity. His readiness to help, to give of himself: today he’d be labeled a softie. Not infrequently he was censured for this. All the same, for many he was exemplary—ideal, special. Yet, wasn’t there also underlying this near-unanimous esteem and praise (“Ah, Herr Abish, a wonderful man!”) a mild condescension? As if his conscientiousness and trustworthiness—or more likely, his reluctance to shine—implied a deficiency? Indeed, he disliked being the center of attention. Receiving gifts made him uncomfortable. He was easy to love. He was emotionally predictable—by that I mean he didn’t ever seem to question or measure the degree to which he was fond of someone. There was a perseverance to his attachments. In his uncomplicated way he did not seem to waver in his commitments. Whereas for my mother, attachment, like so much else, was transitory. It had first to be examined for probable flaws, for defects. So much seemed to be at stake—above all, one’s self-esteem, one’s picture of oneself. My mother preferred to control the display of her emotions, control—to the degree this was possible—any expression or even sign of love. I suspect to heighten the love she might have felt, it needed to be made more tangible, it needed to be staged. Then, only then, like any well-rehearsed performance, it could be both exquisite and irresistible. For one thing, it enabled me, as the infrequent recipient of her love, to appreciate the setting in which the emotions were given their release—in order to what? Wasn’t it to love as tentatively and as provisionally but with a kind of exquisite grace?
But why did they have me? I was the wrong child for them. I provided far too little satisfaction, far too little pleasure. Everything in me spelled out a meager diet. It was as if, all along, I had known that I was merely a capricious factor and not the ineluctable concept that fed their notion of a family. True, my pres- ence permitted them to perform their roles more effectively. My presence—trying as it may have been at times—encouraged them to go on with their daily lives, safe in the knowledge that as “parents” they now would be free of criticism. I arrived to regulate their lives, to accentuate the “willed” normality of their coexistence. When I arrived, there was already a schedule awaiting me. Every possible eventuality was taken into consideration. Was it not from a need to avoid the unexpected? I neatly slipped into a niche, my everyday needs and expectations anticipated—or so it seemed. In turn my mother gracefully glided into a caring maternal role, while my father, lacking my mother’s innate skill and intuition, adopted the role of father in the way he had come to accept business opportunities that came his way, gravely and responsibly. Not much personal involvement was required of him. To think that they accomplished this without any prior rehearsal, without any prior instructions! There must have been a Viennese Dr. Spock or Dr. Skinner to guide them. But did they prepare for me the way one apprehensively prepares for a relative who for months has threatened to visit—a visit that has no end in sight? They furnished my room—so confident were they of my arrival. Yes, shortly after their wedding, when the apartment was being redecorated, my future tastes were already being taken into consideration. My mother was preoccupied with the selection of an appropriate name for me. Was it to be Günther, Peter, Fritz, Georg, Ernst, Franz, Adalbert, Maximilian, Magnus? No easy matter, for did not the name define everything that was to take place? As far as my father was concerned, without his having to give the matter a great deal of thought, I was destined to step into his well-polished shoes and, in time, become a successful perfumer. My mother, I surmise, may have had more elaborate and high-minded designs. Each contributed to what I presently am. Each contributed to the doubt and uncertainty that permeate the life of a writer.
I accepted them as parents and yet, in the innermost recess of my mind, I must have remained bewildered to see them together. United. For I sensed they were not—at any rate, not then. Later, much later, yes. What was it that I failed to recognize? I did not see them together often and long enough to recognize anything. What, then, did I find so disquieting? Was it the logic that dictated their shared agendas? The practical motives? The monotonous yet reassuring routine? The harmonious—isn’t that the appropriate word?—routine of everyday life? Was there something about this pattern that enraged me? Was my spitefully divisive rebelliousness a prewriterly criticism of the then-prevailing bourgeois values: an awareness that the rules of conduct my parents observed so religiously were rules that would, if one permitted them, also flatten all joy in life? Maybe so. All my tantrums accomplished was to bring my parents closer together. My father regarded me with serious concern. He could not decipher the symptoms. And my mother? Ah, she decoded everything: every sidelong glance, every hesitant pause, each time I gritted my teeth, every time I clenched my fist.
I was their product. Their first and, it turned out, their sole product. They showed a total lack of interest in trying once more, if only in order to improve the model. “Certainly not!” my mother replied sharply to the gentleman who with great presumption had inquired (in my presence, no less) if she wasn’t intending to have another child. I couldn’t be sure if her marked look of distaste was directed at the man who had so tactlessly raised the question or if it might not be a natural reaction to the thought, the mere suspicion, that my identifying mark, my supercilious smirk, would be stamped like a trademark on the face of the next child. In any event, her terse response was entirely consistent with my prescient view of myself. Largely isolated from the company of other children, I daily breathed the air of my mother’s sharp, uncompromising skepticism and my father’s unreason- able optimism. It was an optimism that withstood our many challenges—the invincible optimism that continued to defy us, soaring high above our heads, my mother’s and mine, flourishing there despite our ceaseless attempts to ground it. How fortunate my father was not to share our interests—not to speak our language! For was it not always a censorious and fault-finding language, a language replete with subtexts befitting a critic?
*****
I was their only child. I was there to observe them, to watch their comings and goings. I was put there to fuel my mother’s frustration. In that respect, each one of us managed to give a flawless performance. My enterprising father, in and out of the house like clockwork. Undemanding, unobservant. Alert only to what interested him. There was little in the house—my mother’s domain—that held his attention. He preferred the tranquillity of his beloved Viennese cafes, these cozy retreats where he could read his newspapers and journals undisturbed. I suspect that the cafes ranked second in importance only to his business, to his treasured perfumes—those tiny, elegantly shaped bottles snugly encased in their pale yellow boxes bearing the name Molinard as well their poetic fragrances: Ambre, Iles d’Or, Habanita, Fleurettes, Orval. Whenever my father would pull out his handkerchief, the entire room, within seconds, was filled with the delicate fragrance of those evocative names. My mother did not conceal her preference f...
