Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

by Peter Singer
Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

by Peter Singer

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Overview

This account of a teacher in Austria—a friend of Freud and one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust—is “beautifully written and deeply moving” (Joyce Carol Oates).

Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away is a rich and loving portrait of the author’s grandfather, David Oppenheim, from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of his life in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Oppenheim, a Jewish teacher of Greek and Latin living in Vienna, was a contemporary and friend of both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. With his wife, Amalie, one of the first women to graduate in math and physics from the University of Vienna, he witnessed the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, the nascence of psychoanalysis, the grueling years of the First World War, and the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism.
 
Told partly through Oppenheim’s personal papers, including letters to and from his wife and children, Pushing Time Away blends history, anecdote, and personal investigation to pull the story of one extraordinary life out of the millions lost to the Holocaust.

A contemporary philosopher known for such works as The Life You Can Save and Animal Liberation, Singer offers a true story of his own family with “all the power of a great novel . . . resonant of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink or An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro” (The New York Times).

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Singer, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781504005081
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 04/14/2015
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 266
Sales rank: 1,056,610
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. The most prominent ethicist of our time, he is the author of more than twenty books, including Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save. Singer divides his time between New York City and Melbourne, Australia.

Read an Excerpt

Pushing Time Away

My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna


By Peter Singer

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2003 Peter Singer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0508-1



CHAPTER 1

Vienna, Now and Then


January 1997

A freezing fog hangs over Vienna, softening the light of the street-lamps. There is snow on the ground, and the bare branches of the trees are tipped with frost. I am walking down Porzellangasse, a broad street in Vienna's Ninth District. It is 7:00 P.M. The street is quiet, for most people prefer not to drive in this weather, the roads are too slick. The street is lined with buildings four or five stories high. They have changed little since the days before the First World War, when Vienna was one of the great cities of the world, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that empire was a major power, surpassed only by Russia in the extent of the European territory over which it ruled. Its lands spread northeast as far as what is now Ukraine, east over today's Czech and Slovak Republics, and southeast through Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia to the fateful city of Sarajevo.

All of my grandparents lived in this city then. I knew only my mother's mother, Amalie Oppenheim, the sole survivor of the tragedy that overwhelmed Vienna's Jews after the Nazi annexation of Austria. But tonight, pushing away the time that has passed since that calamity, I will begin to get to know one other grandparent. In a backpack I am carrying a stack of papers—they must weigh about fifteen pounds—by and about my mother's father, David Oppenheim.

Included in this treasure trove of family history are more than a hundred letters my grandparents wrote to my parents, Kora and Ernst Singer, and to my mother's sister, then Doris Oppenheim, after they left for Australia in 1938. I have just collected them from Dr. Adolf Gaisbauer, director of the Library of the State Archives of Austria, who last year published some of them in a book called David Ernst Oppenheim: Von Eurem Treuen Vater David. The subtitle means "from your faithful father David" and is the way in which my grandfather closed his letters. Although I had long known of the existence of the letters, which Doris and my mother had carefully preserved, I had never read them. I can read German, but my grandfather's handwriting was difficult to decipher, and its legibility was not helped by the fact that the letters were often written on both sides of very thin paper. When my mother and Doris had, many years ago, read one or two letters to me, I had been busy with my work as a philosopher and bioethicist, writing and teaching about the ethics of our treatment of animals, and life-and-death decisions in the care of infants born with severe disabilities. I did not ask them to read me the other letters.

I learned more about my grandparents ten years ago, when Doris retired from her career as a social worker and wrote a master's thesis about her father. I returned it with a scribbled note:

Doris,

I read this with great interest. Congratulations on making your father live again. Now I'd like one day to read his works myself, to see what parallels (if any) there are with my own views, despite our rather different fields, and intellectual backgrounds.


One sentence from Doris's summary of an essay my grandfather wrote on the Roman philosopher Seneca struck a particular chord with me. She described how her father distinguishes between the "genuine philosopher," who aims to integrate his teaching and his life, and the "theoretical professor," who is concerned only with his professional standing and personal reputation. This distinction resonated with me. I certainly hoped that I was a genuine philosopher, in this sense, and for the first time I wondered how much I had in common with this grandfather I had never known.

Nevertheless, my work in ethics continued to take priority over delving further into my grandparents' life. So last year, when I read the selections from the letters in Dr. Gaisbauer's book, I was reading them for the first time. They reached across nearly sixty years, and opened up a world that was closely linked with mine and yet utterly different from it. My parents were educated people, my father a businessman and my mother a doctor, but neither of them was a serious scholar, and they did not spend much time thinking about the big questions—about understanding human nature, or how we ought to live. My career had seemed, to some, a surprising turn—my cousin Michael Liffman, Doris's son, once told me that of all the people he had known at university, I was the only one who had followed a path that he could not have predicted. By that he meant, I think, that he had expected me to go into my father's business, or perhaps to practice law, like my sister. Instead, I had taken up philosophy. David Oppenheim, I now learned, wrote about fundamental values, and what it is to be human. Was my own life echoing that of a grandparent I had never known? That thought began to take hold of me, and would not let go. I had to find out whether, despite the different times and places in which we lived, there was something that bound us together.


At the end of Porzellangasse, I cross Berggasse, just a few doors from number 19, where Sigmund Freud had his home and his consulting rooms. Earlier in the day, seeking traces of my grandfather, I had visited Freud's rooms, now a museum. Here the famed "Wednesday Group," more formally known as the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, met. My grandfather became a member of the group in January 1910, and attended its meetings for nearly two years. On April 20, 1910—his twenty-ninth birthday—he gave a presentation entitled "Suicide in Childhood" to a group of sixteen people, including Freud and most of the regular members of the society. His paper was a great success, stimulating so lively a conversation that the group voted to publish a pamphlet including David's talk and the ensuing discussion. Quite a birthday present for a young high school teacher! As I left Freud's rooms, I imagined my grandfather walking down those same steps in a state of elation. As a talented young scholar with whom Freud was eager to collaborate, he appeared to have a bright future ahead of him. Yet within eighteen months my grandfather had parted from Freud, following instead the first of the great heretics of psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler. In opposition to Freud's insistence on unconscious sexual desire as the key to understanding human behavior, Adler developed the idea of the inferiority complex, and saw the drive to gain power, as compensation for a sense of inferiority, as more significant. Why, I wondered, did David take the decision to side with Adler, knowing that this must mean the end of all further contact with Freud?

Another man also celebrated his birthday in Vienna on that April 20, 1910. His prospects were not so good. He was living in a shelter set up by the municipal government to provide beds for single men at a token cost, on the fringes of the city. Having twice failed the entrance test to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, he was making a meager living painting postcards in watercolors. A friend sold them for a few pennies in taverns and cafés. Here, on the day my grandfather had his twenty-ninth birthday, this second-rate painter turned twenty-one. While my grandfather was trying, through his work with Freud and then Adler, to understand the springs of human nature, the would-be artist had his own shrewd insights into the yearnings of millions of Germans and Austrians. His fiercely nationalist and anti-Semitic aims were diametrically at odds with my grandfather's hopes for the spread of a universal recognition of our common humanity. But in 1910 the improbable intersection of the lives of Adolf Hitler and David Oppenheim lay many years ahead.


I am staying in a small hotel on the far side of the city from Berggasse. I could take the underground, but I am in the mood for walking. I soon come to the Ringstrasse, the broad tree-lined boulevard that, following the lines of the ramparts of old Vienna, encircles the First District, the historical heart of the city. If I were to follow the Ringstrasse to the right, I would pass some of the grandest buildings of late-nineteenth-century Vienna: the Renaissance-inspired university, where my grandfather studied; the town hall, in an extravagant Flemish Gothic style; and the classic Graeco-Roman parliament building. Instead of following the Ringstrasse, however, I cross it and take a more direct line through the center of the city, along narrow streets lined with the palaces of noble families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The shops are closing. I come to Michaelerplatz, one of Vienna's most beautiful small squares. In summer it would be busy with tourists, but on this winter evening it is quiet and lovely. Easy to imagine that it looked just like this when my grandfather lived here. In front of me stands the Hofburg, the great palace of the Hapsburgs, who ruled Austria from 1282 until 1918 and for most of that period also had the title of Holy Roman Emperor, thus claiming a glorious if dubious continuity with the line established by the real Roman emperor Augustus. There is a grandeur in the architecture that reminds me that this was a seat of power. From here, at various times, the Hapsburgs ruled over much of Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and parts of Italy, as well as what later became the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Some of the palaces making up the Hofburg go back to medieval times, others date from the eighteenth century, and the latest additions were still being built when my grandfather was alive. I pass under an arch with an inscription saying that Franz Josef I completed the building begun by his predecessors. When my grandfather came to study at the University of Vienna, the "Old Kaiser" had already been on the throne for half a century. Austria's ignominious defeat at the hands of the Prussians early in his reign was a blessing in disguise, for it led the empire to build a new future as the dominant power in the Danube basin and the Balkans. It included among its subjects not only Austrians and Hungarians, but Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Slovenians, Italians, Croats, and other nationalities. The new constitution of 1867 made Franz Josef emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Everything in the empire became "Kaiserlich und Königlich"—"Imperial and Royal"—or for short, "K.u.K." The new constitution established separate parliaments in Austria and Hungary, and for the first time it extended full equality before the law to all citizens, including Jews. From the eastern provinces, where pogroms were still to be feared, Jews flocked to civilized, sophisticated Vienna. When my grandfather moved here he was joining 150,000 other Jews, making up nearly a tenth of the city's population. The growing Jewish population boosted Vienna's cultural, intellectual, musical, and artistic life to new heights, providing it with musicians like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, the theater director Max Reinhardt, and of course Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. The existence of a large Jewish middle class helped to create the critical mass of an educated public sufficiently numerous to support the theater, opera, and concerts, and to buy books and discuss them over coffee and cake in the city's many elegant coffeehouses. It was the yeast in a cultural mix that made Vienna one of the most exciting cities in the world.

I walk through the courtyards of the imperial palace, and emerge in a vast open space: the Heldenplatz, or Heroes Square. To the southeast it is flanked by the curving wing of the New Hofburg, built in the last flush of imperial grandeur. In the middle of the square are gigantic equestrian statues of two of Austria's military heroes, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who crushed the Turks in 1697, and Archduke Karl, victor, albeit very temporarily, over Napoleon in 1809. The square is snow-covered and empty apart from a couple of civil servants on their way home. In my head, though, is a photograph of this square at another time, packed with people, tens of thousands of them, filling the entire square and swarming over the statues to get a better view. It is March 1938. A few days earlier, German tanks had rolled across the border. Now the people had come to cheer Adolf Hitler's triumphal entry into the city and hear him announce the incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich.

On the other side of the Heldenplatz I again cross the Ring, and emerge onto Mariahilferstrasse, a busy street lined with brightly lit department stores, trendy clothing boutiques, and the inevitable McDonald's. For a few blocks, I am a long way from the Vienna of Freud or the Nazis. Then my hotel takes me back to an earlier era. It is at the end of the department-store strip, in an old building with high ceilings. There is no elevator, and after walking up three flights of stairs, I am glad to get to my room and to take my grandfather's papers off my back.


I sort the papers into several stacks. The largest consists of the letters written to my parents and my aunt. Almost as large is the stack of published writings—photocopies of sections of my grandfather's book, and of his many published articles. I put them to one side and pick up a document in my grandfather's handwriting, an official application to the University of Vienna for admission to the final examination for the degree of doctor of philosophy. The date is May 4, 1904. In my grandfather's handwriting, small but legible, he sets out his course of studies up to that point, beginning with his birth on April 20, 1881, in Brünn—now Brno—the capital of what was then the province of Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic. There he attended high school, after which he went to the University of Vienna to study classics. Over four and a half years he took courses on Greek and Latin grammar, Homer, Plato and Aristotle, the Greek lyric poet Pindar, Cicero's orations and letters, the satires of Juvenal, the elegies of the Latin poet Tibullus, and the histories of Livy and Sallust. To round out his classical education he studied Greek and Roman culture, including the Greek temples, antique art, monuments and dress, mythology, coins, the buildings of the Acropolis, Roman cosmology, the Roman Forum, Pompeii, Roman law, and theater productions in Greek and Roman times. Along the way, he found time for occasional seminars on the history of German literature, on philosophy in medieval and modern times, on Nietzsche, on European folktales, and on high school teaching and reform, as well as taking a basic English course and a course on "Foundations of Psychology."

I continue to scan through the documents and find one typed in English. Headed "My Scientific Work," it is five pages long, and looks like a draft because it has added handwritten corrections to the English. Even with the corrections, the English is awkward, showing a good vocabulary and knowledge of the grammar of the language, but no grasp of its nuances and idiom. My grandfather wrote this summary of his scholarly work in 1941, when Jews from Vienna were beginning to be deported to Poland. In the faint hope of improving his prospects of being able to obtain an immigration visa, he sent it to his sister in America, asking her to circulate it among academic circles there. As the 1904 application to sit his final exam portrays a young man setting out on his life of inquiry, so this document, written under much grimmer circumstances, marks the close of that life. Nevertheless, the opening sentences confirm that, despite the differences in our education and in the fields in which we work, my grandfather and I are interested in similar, timeless issues:

As a teacher of the classic languages in a Vienna secondary school I was bound by profession to interest my pupils in classic antiquity.... However in spite of cultivating a field belonging to history it was not the view of an historian that led me to my particular work, but rather that of a humanist, in the original meaning of the word. For retrospections of ages and peoples long past—though I was charmed by them—did not by far seem to me so vital as a thorough insight into what hardly ever changes, the essence of humanity. For this very reason, I preferred to make this knowledge the very aim of my classic pursuits.


When I began to study philosophy at university, my interest in ethics often led me beyond the bounds of philosophy to broader psychological questions about human nature. Is there a conflict between acting ethically and acting in accordance with self-interest? If so, how can human beings act ethically? Why do people do what they know to be wrong? To what extent is our ethics the outcome of our biological nature, rather than our culture? These are questions that David Oppenheim would have been familiar with, for they underlie many of the ancient Greek texts that he knew well, and they link up with the theories of psychology that he discussed with Freud and Adler. As I read my grandfather's outline of his work, I realize that I still don't know what my grandfather thought about these questions. Perhaps the texts in front of me will tell me.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Pushing Time Away by Peter Singer. Copyright © 2003 Peter Singer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

  • Cover Page
  • Title Page
  • Contents
  • David Oppenheim’s Family Tree
  • Epigraph
  • Part I Prologue
    • 1. Vienna, Now and Then
    • 2. In My Aunt’s Flat
  • Part II David and Amalie
    • 3. “A Relationship of the Heart”
    • 4. “Let There Be Truth Between Us”
    • 5. The Engagement
    • 6. Brno
    • 7. The Religious Problem
    • 8. The Erotic Factor
    • 9. That New, Troublesome Highway
    • 10. Marriage
    • 11. Venetian Reflections
  • Part III In Freud’s Circle
    • 12. An Invitation from Freud
    • 13. David’s Choice: Freud or Adler?
    • 14. “Dreams in Folklore”
    • 15. Psychology, Free and Individual
  • Part IV The Soldier
    • 16. The Eastern Front
    • 17. The Battles of the Isonzo
  • Part V The Scholar and Teacher
    • 18. The New Republic
    • 19. “The Secret of the Human Soul”
    • 20. My Grandfather’s Book
    • 21. Independence
    • 22. The Teacher of Humanity
    • 23. The Secular Jew
    • 24. Sexual Equality
    • 25. Vacations and a Wedding
  • Part VI One of the Multitude
    • 26. The End of Austria
    • 27. New Life and Old
    • 28. Enticing Hopes
    • 29. “Best to Stay”
    • 30. Good Austrians
    • 31. Renunciation
    • 32. In My Grandparents’ Flat
    • 33. Theresienstadt
    • 34. Terezin
  • Part VII Epilogue
    • 35. Survival
    • 36. A Good Life?
  • Image Gallery
  • Notes on Sources
  • Acknowledgments
  • A Biography of Peter Singer
  • Copyright Page
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