The broken violin E-Book

Wolfgang Schulz

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Born in 1940, Wolfgang Schulz experienced the war and post-war period in Austria from a child's perspective and recorded his memories in a series of vivid stories. Intense experiences of nature alternate with bizarre episodes from everyday life and special incidents that highlight the conditions of the war and post-war period for younger readers.

Leseprobe

Wolfgang Schulz

The broken violin

Foreword

Memories of childhood are a "subjective truth" in which gaps in memory are often replaced by plausible links. The chronological sequence of events is also sometimes difficult to reconstruct and can often only be determined with a certain degree of certainty with changes of residence. When I've talked about my childhood with friends, I've often been criticized for the fact that my parents come off rather badly in the stories. And I would also be too critical of my years at boarding school, the teachers and their educational practices. I try to present everything here as I experienced it, without embellishment. These are memories with their emotions. The "terrible" stories are also more memorable, although I also report on positive events and experiences here.

I am probably writing these episodes down for myself today so that I can look at them from a distance. But perhaps the episodes are also a consolation for those who experienced similar things, be it that problems dominated the upbringing or that the living conditions were similarly restrictive as I experienced during the war and in the post-war period. Nevertheless, I had a very interesting and happy childhood during this time (1942-1952), as we didn't experience much of the war while living in the countryside. In fact, I had a largely free childhood, with relatively little adult control and an intense contact with nature that is almost unimaginable today.

Some of my memories of this time of rural life are probably difficult to comprehend from today's perspective. They are described in great detail because, on the one hand, they are characterized by an intense experience of nature, which could almost be described as the "idyll" of growing up in the countryside, and yet, on the other hand, by the (today probably unimaginable) cruel and sometimes frightening events of everyday life. The level of medical and technical care in rural life at the time is certainly one aspect of this, but so are the conventions of the time.

I was born in Vienna in 1940 and my memories of my childhood date back to 1942 at the earliest. I spent the war and the end of the war in the village of Zirking and Oberzirking (Upper Austria) with my grandparents until I went to primary school in the fall of 1946. As the small farm in Zirking was very close to the Mauthausen concentration camp, this time is a prominent part of my memories. The years 1942-45 therefore play a very important role (Section A).

Another section refers to events in Zirking after the end of the war. Since starting my school days in Vienna (fall 1946), I was only in Zirking during the summer months, the "long summer" of school vacations (part B). After the sale of our small farm (around 1952), Vienna became the focus of my life (parts C and D).

As my father had lost his or our apartment, we lived as subtenants for a short time and then in a very small apartment (Lenaugasse, eighth district). My mother managed to buy a relatively large middle-class apartment, also in the eighth district, with the share from the sale of the small farm in Zirking and some money borrowed from her sister who lived in Greece. Although the house was very old (about 250 years old, called "Zum goldenen Schwan" in Lange Gasse), it was very solidly built, with thick brick walls and high rooms.

My childhood ended for good when I attended the fifth grade of secondary school at a boarding school, the Neulandschule in Vienna Laaerberg, in 1955. The following, for me unforgettable experiences of boarding school life - with cruel events that are unimaginable today - are recorded in Part E.

Part A

Before the end of the war, mainly in Zirking, 1942-1945

Mother does not want to be a mother

In my memory of my earliest childhood, there was a bright, middle-class apartment in Vienna. There was a "walking school" in one of the large rooms, where I spent a lot of time, but I didn't like it because I was usually alone there and felt cooped up. My father was practically non-existent in my early childhood as he was "called up", i.e. in military service. My father came from Rottenschachen (now Rapsach/Czech Republic) near Gmünd. After the war, his party membership was his undoing, the apartment was taken away from him - although it was not aryanized - and we were moved into the same house as subtenants (1945). There were no large savings, so our family always had a housing problem from 1945 to 1951. It was too cramped and poor, we lived as subtenants, then in a substandard apartment (room and kitchen). It was only later, in 1951, that my mother managed to buy an apartment with four rooms. We had more space there for the first time. My mother, née Leitner, came from Zirking near Ried in der Riedmark and was the youngest of her three sisters and three brothers. She trained as a qualified nurse in Linz. She met my father in Vienna; he worked as a primary school teacher, but later moved to the municipality of Vienna for health reasons, where he finally worked as a senior civil servant.

I didn't experience much of the war in Vienna as my parents had decided that my mother should take me to live with my grandparents in the country; there would probably be no fighting there and there would always be something to eat in the country. The war was therefore the main reason why I was able to spend my early childhood largely in nature and without supervision. However, I must have felt the fear of the air raids. In my dreams (until my middle school years), I often dreamed of roaring, buzzing flying objects and flying platforms from which I had to flee to safety. I can only assume that as a small child I sought shelter in cellars with my mother during air raid alerts (around 1944) and heard a lot about the explosions and bombs dropping. But I have no clear memories of that time. However, my mother told me about it later.

It was probably 1941/42 when my mother took me for a walk along the Danube Canal, not far from Liechtensteinstraße (which is close to the Ring and the Danube Canal site). I was strapped into a small baby carriage, which my mother called the "Sportwagerl". I can still remember the place exactly, as I often passed by there later. On the left was the Danube Canal and on the right the subway, which was still called the Stadtbahn back then. Mother parked the carriage in front of a bush and explained that she was leaving now but would be back soon. I wasn't particularly worried as I was used to my mother's longer absences. Suddenly mother reappeared in the distance, but she was behaving strangely. She acted as if she was sneaking up on me. She finally reached me, but her face was strangely distorted. When I said "Mummy", she replied: "I'm not the mummy, I'm the witch." Her face was distorted and I didn't know what was wrong with her. I said again: "No, you're the mummy!" And she said again: "No, I'm the wicked witch." This went back and forth for a while until I finally started to cry - I didn't doubt that she was the mummy, but I couldn't understand her behavior. The scene finally came to an end and the day was back to normal.

There were other strange events that I couldn't interpret as a child. One day on a hike, she hid in a water shaft, closed the lid over herself and remained completely silent, so I got worried and called out: "Why don't you come out again?" But that took a while.

The most serious scene for me was once when my mother stopped on the footpath over one of the Danube bridges in the middle of the river and, pointing to the eddies and whirlpools of the bridge pillars, said: "If it hadn't been for you, I would have thrown myself in there, I was so unhappy." I was still very small back then, what should I say? Should I say "I'm grateful that you didn't kill yourself"? I probably wouldn't have been able to say that as a two-year-old, but I remember taking note of my mother's comment with disapproval, in the sense of: "Life is interesting, you want to live." In any case, I understood: Mother is a different person to me, she takes a lot of things too seriously. I only found out much later what exactly was so difficult for her: Father had already had a love affair with one of his cousins before his marriage to mother, and it was difficult for him to let go of this relationship. This was certainly a great burden for my mother.

With my father's parents

My mother probably didn't want to live alone with me in Vienna. My father was a ground crew member at an airfield in what is now the Czech Republic. He was bilingual (German, Czech) as he came from Rottenschachen, now Rapsach, near Gmünd. Until the First World War, his homeland was the monarchy; after the First World War, Czechoslovakia claimed the railroad junction near Gmünd. This became Czech, as did his birthplace Rottenschachen, where my father's parents had a large inn with a bowling alley. The family also owned a mill, the Schulz Mill. With Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, Rottenschachen became "German" again, and after the loss of the Second World War, it became Czech again. My father and his siblings went to Austria, mainly to Vienna, while my grandparents and a cousin stayed in the ČSSR. My father, who had graduated from the teacher training college in Wiener Neustadt, taught in Vienna, including at a Czech school. The end of the Second World War meant that my father was unable to visit his elderly parents because he was afraid of being imprisoned due to his former membership of the NSDAP. As a teacher in a German-Czech border region, it was practically impossible for him not to join the party at the time, even if he did not sympathize with "Hitlerism". Moreover, the former Sudeten German region (Pilsen, Karlsbad, Marienbad, Brünn) was his real cultural home, in which he moved. Not once after the war was he able to visit his old homeland.

I was probably two years old (1942) when I went to Rottenschachen with my father and mother. My cousin Daniele - a young girl at the time - looked after me wonderfully. This was particularly important for me because I couldn't speak to other children at the bathing area (they spoke Czech). The relationship with Daniele continued for a long time, she was married to a Czech bank director and they often visited us in Vienna. Daniele had a son, Libor (or Liborek), with whom I had good contact for a long time. When Daniele died, Libor let a full year pass before he decided to bury his much-loved mother. There were only four people present at the funeral in Budweis (Budjevice): Libor, his friend who conducted the funeral as a priest with the usual prayers, then me and my wife. It was the strangest funeral I have ever attended. Libor had gone from a slim, handsome young man to a highly obese human barrel in the space of a year. He couldn't walk more than fifty meters without having to rest. Since then, Libor has also completely broken off contact with us. It was the last contact with my father's family of origin.

Figure 2: The author with a relative at

Rottenschachen/Rapsach (today Czech Republic), 1942

With my mother's parents

I know almost nothing about my grandfather's origins. He had a typical Austrian name: Leitner (= the one who lives on the Leiten) and married my grandmother, a very diligent and hard-working woman (Josephine) from the Bleiner farming family (from Gutau in the Mühlviertel). With my grandmother he had four daughters (Poldi, Annemarie, Gretel and Hilde, my mother; one daughter died at the age of twelve) and three sons (Albert, Sepp and Franz). The number of births was still high back then, family planning was alien and contradicted religious teachings.

My grandfather was a small building contractor, among other things he built a street in Ischl for Emperor Franz Josef and received a ceramic decorative plate from the Wiener Werkstätten as a gift of appreciation. The decorative plate ultimately came to me through family inheritance and still hangs in my living room today. The letter from Imperial Councillor D. J. Schreiber, dated 20.01.1906, is pasted on the back: "Mr. Josef Leitner has taken on the construction of a road leading to our property; after a thorough study of the terrain, he has found the most suitable route ... in the course of many weeks, he has not given me cause for complaint even once ... It is a pleasure to have worked with such a capable, reliable and upright building contractor." Josef Leitner was able to acquire a small farmhouse with a few acres of land from his earnings. That was enough to get my grandparents, my mother with two children and Aunt Poldi, my mother's sister who was married in Greece, through the difficult economic times of the war. Later, Aunt Luise, the girlfriend and later wife of Uncle Albert, my mother's brother, also lived in Zirking.

Apparently I was already with my grandparents in the winter of 1942. My favorite place in the living room was the corner of the dining table, I still remember that clearly. The source of warmth in the living room was a large kitchen stove, which my grandmother kept going from morning to night. When it got dark, either Aunt Poldi or mother would come to the table to clean the glass cylinder of the kerosene lamp and light the lamp. Then it wasn't long until dinner. Grandfather almost always sat on a large couch with his three quietly purring cats on his legs or close beside him. Apparently, the cats loved the warmth of Grandpa just as much as Grandpa loved the warmth of the cats.

Figure 3: Grandparents (maternal side) in front of their house in Zirking,

May 1934 (standing on the right)

The devil visits as Krampus

One evening, a certain tension could already be felt beforehand, the doorbell rang. A white-haired man in a red velvet cloak and a golden bishop's mitre entered the room. This was St. Nicholas, we were told. I had already heard about Krampus as his companion, and when Krampus made preparations to put me in his butte to take me with him, I was a little scared. This was still limited, as I had already had enough experience of adults playing games designed to scare children. Suddenly I saw the Krampus' legs. He had a normal human foot, but the second leg was undoubtedly the foot of a billy goat, with hair and a split claw, just like goats have. For me, this was clear proof that it must be the devil, because only the devil had a goat's foot. Negotiations took place between Nikolo, the devil, my mother and aunt, but by the time it was clear that I wasn't going to be taken away after all, I was terrified. It wasn't until much later that I found out the explanation for the goat's foot: a one-legged war invalid had the goat's foot attached to the stump of his leg in order to look real to children.

The first day of spring that I experience

After a long, cold winter and many rainy days, one day it was warmer and the sun was shining brightly. It is possible that I had been ill for some time that winter; I was often ill as a child and had almost every childhood illness there is, from diphtheria to smallpox and mumps to rubella, whooping cough and inflamed tonsils and more. I left the house and walked around the corner, past my grandfather's bench into the orchard and onto the meadow. It was perhaps my first conscious outing in my life. I couldn't walk fast yet, but the colors of the many flowers shone and said: Look at us, we are the most beautiful thing in the world, admire us! I had really never seen such splendor before and stood in awe of this wonder. There were yellow, red, blue and white flowers. They moved easily, I didn't even want to touch them and just look at them in their beauty. This experience was so powerful and formative for me that I still remember it today as if it were only yesterday. Very specific, meaningful thoughts then emerged: "This is a part of my world that I don't really know yet. I share this world with the many small creatures that also move around in it." I only gradually got to know the names of the plants and animals. I didn't understand many things straight away, for example that three different types of pears grew on one of our pear trees, that it was important to distinguish blueberries from deadly nightshade cherries or the meadow mushroom from the white button mushroom, or that the fruits of the potato plant are poisonous. Distinguishing between dead nettles and stinging nettles also proved to be very useful when you were out and about barefoot all day. Hansel and Gretel is the name of a plant with a blue and a pink flower on its stem. Perhaps I liked it so much because I would have liked to have had a sister.

Figure 4: My world - house and surroundings in Zirking

(Sketch by the author)

Going to bed, the Biki-Baki and the upholstered tip

This story concerns my early childhood with my grandparents and would appeal to psychoanalysts. Having to go to bed meant getting washed, brushing my teeth and then walking through my grandparents' bedroom and climbing the steep stairs up to the attic room where I, my mother and later my younger brother Helmut slept. Mother put me "to bed" but then went downstairs to the other adults, where they talked and joked for a while.