The Two-Headed Eagle

The Deutscher Volksbund claimed to be nothing more than a pa­triotic organisation of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But you would certainly have been hard put to it to see any sign of that in our house on the Olmutzergasse. It had been turned into a shrine to the Goddess Germania, with more than a hint of Wotan- worship. Portraits of Hindenburg and Ludendorff hung on the walls, draped in black-red-gold ba

Worse was to come that first evening as I took Elisabeth for a stroll around the town. The atmosphere of the place was oppressive in the ex­treme. It had never been a particularly friendly place as I remembered it: like many towns and cities in the Old Monarchy, it had been disputed ter­ritory between two nationalities, or in this case, between three of them— German, Czech and Polish—who each had their own name for the place and each claimed it as their own exclusive property. In the years before the war the heavy presence of official Austria, in the shape of its gendarmes and civil servants—and in extremis, its soldiers in the barracks on the Troppau road—had preserved an uneasy quiet in Hirschendorf, broken only by the occasional riot. But now that Austria-Hungary was at war in alliance with Imperial Germany, the German faction in Hirschendorf was letting it be known in no uncertain ma

Certainly no opportunity was being missed in Hirschendorf in the summer of 1916 to ram that message down the throats of the non- Germans. The town’s Czech newspaper had been closed down under emergency powers and a number of Czech nationalists had been arrested by the military and interned. The local Polish organisations had been for­bidden to hold meetings and were being watched by the police. Also the statue “The Spirit of Austria” had been removed from the public gardens in the middle of the town square.

The statue had never been much of a success. It had been put up at Vie

But now “the Spirit of Austria” was no more. Both she and the square’s other statue, Imperial General Prince Lazarus von Regnitz—“noted in the wars against the Turk”—had been melted down to make driving- bands for artillery shells, and her place had been taken by a monstrous wooden “Denksaule”: a hideous commemorative column with a bust of Field Marshal von Hindenburg on top and with medallions of Ludendorff, the Kaiser, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Wagner and other German heroes around the sides. It was studded with iron nails driven in by those who had donated money to the War Loan and other such patriotic funds. Stupid and dodderingly oppressive as it might have been, the Old Austrian Monarchy was a state conceived on a human scale, and had undeniably displayed a certain taste in artistic matters. Now it seemed that we were being engulfed by the very grossest sort of Greater German vulgarity: the bloated blood-and-iron bombast; the increasingly crazed gigantism; the total lack of any sense of proportion.

And around this idol to the Germanic war-god set up in Hirschendorf town square there limped its human votaries: the soldiers in shabby field grey enjoying what might be their last leave; the women in black whose husbands and sons had already had their last leave; the overworked house­wives and their ill-nourished children; and the men in the hideous blue uniforms of the wounded, some with empty sleeves, many with dark glasses and white sticks, some on crutches or (in one case) legless and pushing himself along on a little wheeled trolley. As Elisabeth and I sat on the terrace of the cafe-hotel “Zum Weissen Lowe” and drank our raspberry-leaf tea, we saw a proclamation being posted up on the side of the government offices on the other side of the square. It a

The proclamation was taken down the next day so as not to add a sour note to the celebrations of the Emperor’s birthday. I had to turn up of course, in best Flottenrock complete with sword-belt and the Cross of Maria Theresa prominently displayed on my chest.

It was a sultry, overcast afternoon with thunder in the air. The crowd, I saw, was much smaller than usual for the Emperor’s birthday. Because of the war the local garrison had been able to provide only a military band made up of pensioners—one of whom suffered a stroke while playing the “Prinz Eugen March” and had to be carried away on a stretcher. Likewise the usual gathering of local notables seemed to be very thin. In fact it was made up almost entirely of the town’s Jewish worthies: Dr Litzma