Mississippian considers potential last waltz in Vienna

At the Albertinaplatz in Vienna, Austria, our Russian tour guide directs our attention to a sculpture of a bearded Jewish man scrubbing cobblestones, a memorial dedicated to victims of war and fascism that resembles a park bench. 

“This was what Viennese Jews were forced to do when Nazis invaded Austria,” she says, reducing it to a minor tragedy: Jews had to scrub the street, then the war ended.  “A terrible time,” she adds.

The Anchluss, as the period is known, was hardly an “invasion,” given that the country welcomed Hitler as their new volkskanzler, or “people’s chancellor.”

I do not point this out.

The guide talks about the hundreds of Viennese who died after seeking refuge in a bomb shelter in a building here during Allied air raids on the city in March 1945. “Now let’s move on to happier things,” she says.

I had not wanted to come back to this country that turned its back on my mother and her parents in 1938, but I came with a group of women from Mississippi to celebrate William Garfield Walker, his orchestra Nova Orchester Wien, appropriately nicknamed NOW!, and their upcoming performance at Vienna’s Konzerthaus concert venue.

Walker is from Jackson and is a brilliant, young African American conductor in an otherwise snooty, all-white musical world. About 12 Mississippians have traveled here, including Walker’s mother, Romaine Richards, and his former pediatrician, Dr. Geraldine Chaney Buie. Walker and the NOW! Orchestra give me a chance to focus on something positive in Vienna, despite the city’s — and the country’s — troubling past and present, and inevitable reflections on the United States.  

Every time I land in this part of the world, I get sucked down the Holocaust rabbit hole, and consequently, return home to the States very sad. But this time feels different. This time, I am traveling with a fantastic group of accomplished women, most of them Black, and it makes all the difference.

We are here on the cusp of Austria’s elections. Political posters hang all around us near shop windows and bus stops. Our guide points out a picture of Herbert Kickl from the far-right party in Austria FPÖ, which was founded in the 1950s by the SS, Hitler’s paramilitary group. 

“There are too many immigrants coming in to Austria,” the guide says, though she is herself a Russian immigrant. “Refugees are a big problem.” She crinkles her nose as though something smells bad. Clearly, she means people coming to Austria who don’t look like her – blued eyed, with dyed blond hair.

We move towards the Spanish Riding School. “The Lipizzaner horses are born dark and get lighter as they grow,” she says. “They are a very special breed.” 

Also on my Viennese travel agenda is meeting a man named Reinhard Nowotny, who had emailed me a year earlier saying he lived in my great grandparents’ former home. He had read my books about my Austro-Hungarian family and said whenever I found myself in Vienna, to please look him up. 

When I later arrive at the house, Reinhard apologizes for the furnishings, says his aunts who lived there had taken the good furniture when they moved. The chandelier he describes as “common,” though it is original, as are the parquet floors. 

My great grandfather’s parquet floor company, Adolf Engel & Sons, had laid the floors. Almost every room has a different pattern. I like to think that my great grandfather Moritz did so for his new bride, Marie, who was 23 when they moved into this home (he was 35). I knew and adored Marie when she lived in Washington, D.C., where she moved after the war.

Reinhard shows me the original floor plans, and for a long time I stare at Marie’s pretty black script on the architectural papers, remembering the letters she wrote to me on the backs of paper place mats from the Lisner Home. After Moritz died of a burst appendix in 1924, Marie moved in with her son, my grandfather Friedrich, a few blocks away. That was where my mother grew up. They called it the Hofzeile, and when the SS muscled their way in one night to search the place, the Nazi threat to the family became suddenly very real.

My grandfather converted to Catholicism. His wife and his daughter, my mother, were already Catholics. Marie refused to convert. In April of 1939, she also refused to leave Austria with them, and instead hid from the Nazis in a farmhouse in Czechoslovakia. When the war ended, Marie walked miles through snow to a Red Cross tent, losing three toes to frostbite. Eventually, she made her way to D.C. I was with her in 1975 when she died. She opened her eyes, greeted me and told my mother, who sat beside me, that she was ready to go home. She was 105.

As we talk, Reinhard’s wife, Berthe, worries that her Sacher torte is too dry because she didn’t have enough preserves to spread between the layers of chocolate cake. Berthe does not speak English, but when we sit down with our cake and coffee, Reinhard tells me she has something to say to me in English. “I'm sorry for what my country did to your family,” she states very carefully. I think she must have memorized the sentence.

I swallow hard. It is extraordinary to hear someone apologize for the sins of her country, but there it is. I did not know that I needed to hear this from Berthe, a woman I do not even know who is living in my great grandparents’ home, but I now realize I did. I feel an urge to take off my boots and put my bare feet on the parquet floor. The cake is both sweet and bitter. I sit quietly with these two kind people for as long as I can, refolding the napkin in my lap.

Afterward, they take me to the cemetery and lead me to the family graves, where I had been once before when I was researching my book, In My Mother’s House. Back then, the cemetery was a mess, but now it is spruced up. The Engel de Jánosis are buried next to Marie’s friend, Theodore Hertzl, who formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine to form a Jewish State. Hertzl’s grave is well tended, with green ivy growing in an iron planter, his gravestone lined with stacks of rocks from visitors. Reinhold gives me a candle to light right below Marie’s gravestone, the epitaph of which reads, “Going Home.”

On the way out, we drive past where my mother’s house, the Hofzeile, used to be. Allied bombs hit the house at the end of WWII. Now it is the site of the Estee Lauder Business School, in the Döbling district of Vienna, between Pyrkergasse and Hofzeile. I take pictures because the yellow building and gardens look like what my mother, who would later meet my father and make her way to Mississippi, had described.

Minutes later, two police cars pull us over. Then another police car moves in.

Reinhard gets out of his car. I hear him speaking in German with a frowning young policewoman and four men, their guns in holsters, their bullet proof vests marked Polizei.

I hear Reinhard say “Engel-Jánosi” and see him point toward me in the car. One of the police officers walks toward me and motions for me to get out. Reinhard informs me they’d like to see my passport. 

It feels like 1938 all over again. They might as well have been asking for my papers.

I give the officer my passport. I know enough to keep my mouth shut and let Reinhard do all the talking, but a part of me wants to dare them to kick me out of Austria. Add one more family member to the list. 

Across the street, I notice another poster of Herbert Kickl, who calls himself the volkskanzler, the term Nazis used to describe Hitler. He calls his political opponents “traitors” and has said he wants to put unfriendly journalists on “arrest lists.” His Freedom Party has echoes of MAGA and is so normalized in Austria, few people are shocked by it. The party is also close to Russia. In 2016, party officials signed a formal declaration of friendship with Vladimir Putin’s party. Karin Kneissl, the Freedom Party’s 2017 foreign minister, moved to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. While the rest of Europe has mostly cut off ties with Russia and ceased using Russian energy since the invasion, Austria has not.

The police officer speaks to Reinhard as she copies information from my passport. I hear her say “Taylor Swift” and am reminded of the series of Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna which were canceled after a terrorist plot was foiled in August. One of the suspects was reportedly an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen, the others Austrian. The cancellations led to national debate about immigration and safety. To think that a few years ago, I was getting weekly reminders from the Austrian consulate, urging me to apply for Austrian citizenship as a way to reconcile their role in the Holocaust and the destruction of my mother’s family. 

Back inside the car, I put my passport back inside my wallet while Reinhard explains that my case will be resolved quickly.

“I’ve got a case?” I ask. It feels like I’ve stepped into Kafka’s world.

“Someone called and reported us,” he says.

“Because I was taking pictures with my phone?”

“They thought we were terrorists. There are cameras everywhere.” 

I notice Prince playing on the car radio.

“Welcome to the police state,” he says. 

 For a while we don’t say anything as he drives.

I ask Reinhard whether he was scared. 

“No,” he says. “Because we had done nothing wrong.”

When I ask him again, he says, “Maybe, a little. They control everything. And sometimes they can get creative with the truth.” 

Later, at the Wiener Konzerthaus, I introduce Reinhard to my Mississippi friends. He leans in to understand their particular southern accents. He will say that to hear them talking all at once was like listening to jazz.

William Garfield Walker’s Nova Orchester Wien, founded in 2020, is committed to diversity and includes musicians from more than 20 countries: Ukraine, Syria, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and others, 70 percent of whom are women. On stage, they exude the underrepresented.

After the Verdi Overture, and after Debussy, we reach the heart of the program, Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major. I don’t know much about music, but I can hear the harmonies and I can see the music resonate with the audience. 

After the concert, I will receive an email from Reinhard with news that Austrian voters had handed Herbert Kickl and the Freedom Party a solid win. He is disappointed and hopes this isn’t Austria’s final note.

But for now, in the Konzerthaus, we listen to music reminiscent of The Blue Danube Waltz played throughout Vienna at the end of a previous century, marking the end of an era, music that promises solace and inspiration in turbulent times.

Given everything that’s happening in Austria, I find myself wondering what Walker might think about it, but it would be risky to discuss in the current moment, and the subject will never come up – he is 100 percent focused on making beautiful, timeless music. 

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Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books including In My Mother’s House and How I Found the Strong. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Hill, The Bulwark, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, The Morning Consult, The Morning Edition, The Huffington Post, National Geographic, The Sun, and Kveller, among others. She received an NEA Fellowship and a Fulbright in Hungary to research her memoir, Where the Angels Lived. She writes full time in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Images: William Garfield Walker conducting the NOW! orchestra; Mavis James, Dr. Geraldine Chaney Buie, Walker’s mother, Romaine Richards; Walker; Beverly Hogan, Delores Bolden Stamps, Carla Kirkland (both photos courtesy Margaret McMullan).