The Exiles Return: A Novel

By Elisabeth de Waal and Edmund de Waal

WITH A FOREWORD BY EDMUND DE WAAL, AUTHOR OF THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES

SET IN THE ASHES OF POST–SECOND WORLD WAR VIENNA, A POWERFUL, SUBTLE NOVEL OF EXILES RETURNING HOME FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER FLEEING HITLER'S DEADLY REIGN

Vienna is demolished by war, the city an alien landscape of ruined castles, a fractured ruling class, and people picking up the pieces. Elisabeth de Waal's mesmerizing The Exiles Return is a stunningly vivid postwar story of Austria's fallen aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence.

The novel follows a number of exiles, each returning under very different circumstances, who must come to terms with a city in painful recovery. There is Kuno Adler, a Jewish research scientist, who is tired of his unfulfilling existence in America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, seeking to plunder some of the spoils of war; Marie-Theres, a brooding teenager, sent by her parents in hopes that the change of scene will shake her out of her funk; and Prince "Bimbo" Grein, a handsome young man with a title divested of all its social currency.

With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. Mesmerizing and tragic, de Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781250045799

Elisabeth de Waal

Elisabeth de Waal was born in Vienna in 1899. She studied philosophy, law, and economics at the University of Vienna, and completed her doctorate in 1923. She also wrote poems (often corresponding with Rilke), and was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Columbia. She wrote five unpublished novels, two in German and three in English, including The Exiles Return in the late 1950s. She died in 1991.

Book preview

Part One

Prelude

It was in the middle fifties, a short while before the conclusion of the so-called State Treaty which led to the withdrawal of the Allied Occupation forces and finally restored Austria’s independence, that a small item appeared in the local news columns of the newspapers. It concerned a fatal accident which had occurred in the country house of an American millionaire. A young American society girl who had been on a visit to her Austrian relations had died of gunshot wounds while inexpertly handling a gun. The gun had gone off and killed her. There had been one eyewitness of this unfortunate event and one only, the Jesuit Father Ignatius Jahoda, who had been able to testify that no other person had been implicated in the shooting, which had been purely accidental. Since it had happened in the American zone of occupation, in a house belonging to an American citizen, and the victim had also been American, no Austrian being involved, it had been deemed wise by all the authorities concerned to treat the occurrence, perhaps rather irregularly, on a quasi-extraterritorial basis – so as to put no strain on Austro-American relations in this last period of the occupation which would soon be coming to an end. Therefore the incident was officially considered closed.

This did not prevent the tabloid newspapers from sending their young reporters into the district, the Forest District of Lower Austria, to find out what they could of the surrounding circumstances. For the mere mention of a millionaire and a ‘society girl’ gave the incident a succulent flavour bound to be relished by the bulk of their readers more interested in the ‘human angle’ of such a story than in the legal niceties which had been applied to it. Millionaires are glamorous, always interesting to hear about, as if the mere fact of reading about them cast a glint of their gold over the drab mediocrity of the reader’s circumstances, and especially if there is a pinch of sly satisfaction when something unpleasant or scandalous happens to them. And ‘society girl’ has somewhat similar connotations. Typists and young lady shop assistants enviously absorb the aura of expensive clothes, long manicured fingernails and total freedom from routine, crowded tramcars and cheap meals, but death from gunshot wounds is equally unlikely to come their way.

What the young reporters did find out was the name of the owner of the house, a Mr Kanakis, and of the girl victim of the accident, a Miss Larsen; also that several young men had been staying in the house at the time, and that another young man, not a guest, had been seen in the park in the early morning, although they had not been able to track him down; anyway, he had probably had nothing to do with the affair. But they did find out that the girl was supposed to have been engaged to be married to Mr Kanakis. The names, both foreign ones, did not mean much to the Viennese public, with the exception of one elderly taxi driver whose cab was regularly stationed near the Opera. Having chewed over the information for a while, he turned to his young neighbour and said, ‘Kanakis? Of course I know who he is. He must be the son – no, the grandson – of the Kanakis for whom my father was coachman. They lived over there, in that house on the corner of the Ring, opposite the Hotel Bristol. They had a huge flat, the whole of the first floor, my father said. Greeks they were, very rich. They kept their horses and carriage in the courtyard. I remember sitting on the box as a small boy with my grandfather when the horses had to be taken out for exercise while the family were away. That was much more exciting than this thing.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder at the taxicab. ‘Kanakis, of course I know who Kanakis is.’

His young colleague was only mildly interested in these reminiscences. ‘In any case, he seems to have landed himself in a proper mess,’ he commented, ‘shooting his fiancée. But the Americans have quashed the whole affair, luckily for him.’

‘But he didn’t shoot her. It was an accident. They say.’

‘How do you know? I bet he did. She was probably carrying on with one of the other young men in the house, and he was jealous. Very temperamental, these Greeks. Anyway, who cares?’

One

When the train pulled out of the great echoing hall of Zurich Central Station, gathering speed as it travelled eastwards along the shore of the lake, Professor Adler knew that he had passed the point of no return. He was committed, he was going back. As long as the train had been standing in Zurich he could, he told himself, have got out. There was the platform, just under the window of his sleeping compartment, there was even a porter, looking up expectantly at the two large suitcases and the coat and hat hanging on the brass hook opposite the long, narrow red plush seat. It would have needed only a tiny gesture, or just a smile, and the man would have been with him, hauling down his luggage, speaking to him in the guttural intonation and sing-song inflexion of Swiss-German, which he had not heard for so many years. Adler kept his eyes fixed on his suitcases, and the urge to stretch out his arm was very great. For a few concentrated seconds he was deeply conscious of his freedom of choice. Then, at the instant when the mounting tension became almost unbearable, the train gave a jolt and began to move. He sat down again. He was alone in his compartment, a second-class one designed for two, but the train was not full, and he had had it to himself ever since he had boarded in Paris. It was only a short time ago that long-distance rail services into Central Europe had been re-established and not many people were travelling.

Adler sat by the window and looked out at the flat shore of the Zurichsee and then, as this receded, at the meadows dotted with apple trees and the neat farmhouses with gabled roofs, sliding past with increasing speed. The suitcases were still in the rack above his head. His sense of freedom to do as he wished, and the accompanying tightness in his chest, had left him. Instead he felt like an automaton, like a piece of machinery that, a long time ago, had been conditioned to behave in a definite way, to carry out certain instructions, and was now doing so, mechanically, according to plan. At the same time his mind was quite clear and able to reason about it, to maintain that he had all along been, and still was, a free agent.

He could, of course, have got out in Zurich. It would have been perfectly plausible for him to have undertaken the long journey from America in order to go there. He could have gone to call on an eminent colleague with whom he had corresponded about their different methods of studying the structure of certain molecules in a type of hormone cell. It would have been quite obvious to everyone concerned that he wished to have a live discussion with Professor Schmidt and to observe his laboratory work at first hand. If his wife happened to have told anyone that he was on his way back to Vienna, it would be clear that she had misunderstood his intentions, or wilfully distorted them. Their closest acquaintances knew that he and Melanie were barely on speaking terms and that she had been bitterly opposed to his going. So, if she had denounced him to her friends for having deserted her – crazy, irresponsible, sentimental she had called him – and for having set out to go back to that ‘little hole of a country that had turned them out’, well, he could say that he had never meant to go there. He had come to Switzerland to see Professor Schmidt.

But now Zurich was left behind. He had not got out, so this explanation of his movements had become untenable. Or had it? The Arlberg Express in which he was sitting would not stop again until it reached Buchs, at the frontier. But Buchs was in Switzerland, on this side of the Rhine; here only a little river that formed the actual boundary between Switzerland and Austria. He could get out in Buchs if he wished and wait for the next train back to Zurich. No one would know. And even if they did – why would it matter? He had been deep in thought about the chemical structure of certain secretions and had not noticed when they got to Zurich, and all of a sudden he found himself in Buchs. That’s what he would say. He was an absent-minded professor, the kind that hunted for his spectacles while they were still on his nose. Then he smiled at himself. He was really being ridiculous! Who was he arguing with, who was he trying to convince? He was not accountable for his actions to anyone, to anyone in the world. Not even to Melanie. Or least of all to Melanie. She had never understood him or made the slightest effort to do so. She had no insight into his feelings, and would not take any notice of them if she had.

Since they had been in America, Melanie had made a life of her own, setting herself up as a corsetière and making a tremendous success of it. Suddenly the rather nondescript, meek-looking little woman who had been his wife had discovered in herself a stupendous ability for business. She had started making foundations to measure, to special order, and women had flocked to her; first to the tiny living room of their little flat in a shabby Upper West Side street, now to her elegant salon in uptown Madison Avenue. He had been very grateful to her at first, she had made it possible for them to make a start in New York; for it had taken a long time before he was earning even a modest salary and had secured an appointment as assistant pathologist in a hospital sponsored by a Jewish foundation.

That was a thing that had taken him completely by surprise – this virulent anti-Semitism rampant in so many walks of American life, even in academic, even in medical, circles. He had scarcely known it in Vienna. Of course, it had always been endemic there, but in such a mild form that one had almost been able to forget about it, until the threat of Hitler made it loom huge and terrifying. He had not been prepared for it in America, where, although there was no danger of physical extermination, there was an ever-present insidious consciousness of it, like a suppressed toothache which one could never quite forget. But it had no place in politics or in business, and Melanie flourished entirely uninhibited. Gradually she drew her clientele from the more fashionable and, in the end, from the most exclusive society, and treated women whose names were stars in the social register with blatant familiarity. They did not, of course, invite her to dinner, but she got her satisfaction out of them by unashamedly humiliating them in her salon, especially the not-so-young and the not-so-slim who were the majority of her

Reviews for The Exiles Return

[geraniumcat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I must be one of the few people who hasn't read The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, though one of my reasons for not having done so has to be that it was written this century and I've been reading a lot from the last one. When I was asked if I'd be interested in reviewing one of the most recent Persephones, though, the description made me leap at the chance. It's a previously unpublished novel about five people returning to Vienna in the early 1950s, and there was every indication that it was going to be one of those rather quiet, uneventful novels that I like so much and that Persephone Books do so well. The author is Elisabeth de Waal, grandmother of Edmund, and herself an exile from Vienna, which she left in 1939. This book is her "return" to the city where she grew up.I wasn't disappointed in my expectations, unless it was because it seemed to be over so quickly. That's not to say there was anything rushed about it, just that I was so absorbed in the life of the characters that I wanted more of them. When Professor Kuno Adler decides to return to Vienna, his wife is appalled. She has made a success of their life in America and the promise of reinstatement to his old job has no absolutely appeal for her, so he goes alone. "Reinstatement" turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, and there is awkwardness with former friends who had stayed throughout the war, but there is some small pleasure in rediscovering the city, and the surrounding areas. Kanakis, on the other hand, wants to recreate the life he had before the war, and is looking for "a pavilion of graceful eighteenth century proportions...a little palais" such as he thinks he might have heard of once, and which just might have survived the conflict. While he's looking for his perfect house he meets the rather louche "Bimbo" Grein, a pleasure-loving but penniless young prince who will, sooner or later, be hanging out for a rich bride, and Bimbo's serious older sister Nina.The remaining exile is the beautiful Resi, daughter of one of the Princesses Altmandorff, who has grown up in America but really doesn't fit in there. Her parents, unsure what they can do for the best, send her to stay with her aunt on the family estate, and the scene is set for the intertwining of the lives of all our characters. At first Resi is absolutely content at Wald; lazing in the garden, helping with the flowers, "she floated on the broad unruffled stream of life". The idyll is interrupted, though, by the arrival of cousins and friends, including Nina Grein, who unwittingly ousts her from the position she's happily fallen into as her aunt's companion, setting her adrift again.The lives of these returning exiles become intertwined, providing the focus for the second half of the book. And it's here that I have some reservations about the overall shape, since it felt a little like two separate books stuck together. Professor Adler, who is in some ways the most interesting and fully-rounded character, fades into the background for a long section, so much so that I wondered whether he was ever going to reappear! Resi, on the other hand, is of interest mostly because she's a misfit - she's actually rather young and dull, and given to melodrama, and she didn't emerge sharply enough from the pages for me to feel much patience with her. However, the eventual contrast between two people searching for a place to feel at home, the faltering Resi, and the quiet Professor Adler, aware as he is of so much about the recent war that is unspoken, becomes a compelling study of identity.In the end, I felt that this was very nearly a wonderful novel. But its minor flaws are more than compensated for by its interest as a remarkable piece of social history, one which offers a rare insight into postwar Vienna. It's certainly an excellent addition to the Persephone canon.

[nasowasgabi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sehr schön geschrieben. Evoziert Gefühle und Eindrücke die mich sehr an "Effi Briest" erinnern. Mir gefielen auch die Nuancen des österreichischen Deutsches im Vergleich zu typischem Deutsch.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Elisabeth de Waal grew up in an affluent Viennese family, rescuing her parents from the Anschluss in 1938 and returning after the war to a very different country (a story brilliantly told in her grandson Edmund's memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes). Her novel, The Exiles Return, grew out of that experience. de Waal introduces several "exiles" in post-war Vienna: Kuno Adler, a scientist returning from America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach (aka Bimbo) and his sister Nina, who lost their parents to the Nazis, and young Marie-Theres (aka Resi), an American of Austrian descent visiting her aunt. Their stories, initially completely disconnected, slowly weave together. The storyline is straightforward, even simplistic, but the plot exists only to support the character studies, and exploration of exile and its effects on the human spirit. I found Edmund de Waal's account of his family's war experience more action-packed and compelling, and it made this novel more interesting because I understood the events framing the author's point of view.