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So we practiced.
    I tell you, the sound we made was indescribable. I bit my lip, I bit my knuckles, I practically ate the sheet music, but nothing could prevent me—and everybody else—from dissolving into hysterical laughter.
    The socialists called a general strike. But in 1934 over one-third of the workforce in Vienna was out of work. How could you go on strike when you weren’t working in the first place? The equally foolish government called in the army, which shelled the workers’ houses. The socialists fought back. Hundreds were killed and wounded. And so the two forces in Austria that needed to be allied against the Nazis were divided for all time by anger, bitterness, and mourning.
    Dollfuss would exile the Nazi leaders, and Hitler would welcome them and set them up with a powerful radio transmitter in Munich from which they harangued and threatened us. They would tell atrocity stories about how German burghers were being butchered by Bolsheviks in Czechoslovakia, and about how the “thieving, lying, murderous” Jews had caused the economic depression which had thrown millions out of work. I refused to listen to the Nazi radio, so I never once heard Hitler screeching.

    Nazi students instigated fights and riots to disrupt university life. They beat up students and professors who spoke out against Hitler. They threw stink bombs into the auditorium, making it impossible to assemble there. The police in turn tried to break up student demonstrations with tear gas. If we had any doubt what it would be like in Austria if the Nazis came to power, there were German authors who came to lecture at the Konzerthalle and warn us: Erich Kästner, a hero of mine, author of Emil and the Detectives ; and Thomas Mann, the Nobel laureate, author of The Magic Mountain , tall and severe and so grim up there at the podium that my heart froze to look at him.
    “I don’t know what this evening means to you,” Mann said to the anti-Nazi crowd gathered in Vienna to protest the escalating violence, “but it means more to me.”
    Some people we knew wore white socks to show that they were Nazi sympathizers. In addition to Rudolf Gischa, there was my old morning math student “Fräulein Einstein,” and Elfi Westermayer and her boyfriend Franz Sehors. I thought they had gone temporarily insane.
    You see, I cultivated blindness the way my grandmother grew cactus in Stockerau. It was the wrong plant for this climate.
    The Austrian Nazis began to assassinate socialist leaders. On July 25, 1934, they murdered Chancellor Dollfuss.
    Martial law was imposed. The streets seethed with policemen, armed guards who stood watchfully at the gates of the many embassies in our neighborhood. Once, as I walked home from my law classes, two men walking ahead of me were suddenly cut off by a policeman on a motorbike who demanded to see their papers and made them open their briefcases. I turned the corner onto Argentinierstrasse, where a young man was being frisked. His girlfriend—just about my age—was being interrogated.

    Truthfully, I would have enjoyed being detained myself. It would have been an exciting event for me to talk about with my friends. But no one noticed me! If anyone even glanced my way, it was without concern. Something about me said “silly,” “innocent,” “unimportant.” So I walked freely through the alarmed, dangerous town, a twenty-year-old law student who looked fourteen and posed no threat to anyone.
    A new chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, came to power after Dollfuss’s death. People did not love him so much, but they respected him and thought he might be able to extricate us from Hitler’s aggressive plans.
    Pepi and I took long walks through the city, read to each other, and dreamed of the socialist paradise. Meanwhile the German Army invaded the supposedly demilitarized Rhineland, and then the Nazis instigated a civil war in Spain. The Italians, who were supposed to be Austria’s allies, instead allied