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

By Peter Singer

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504005081

Peter Singer

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.

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PART I

Prologue

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.

Thinking about my own work raises another question: What am I doing in Vienna with my grandfather’s papers? Why am I planning to put much larger issues aside to study the life and work of a minor, forgotten scholar who died half a century ago? Because he was my grandfather? Why should I be so concerned about my ancestors? What difference does the fact that this man was my grandfather really make?

The Viennese Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, whose life span coincides exactly with that of David Oppenheim, wrote:

Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. Never—and I say this without pride, but rather with shame—has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.

There lies part of the fascination that my grandfather’s life holds for me. He came of age at the end of a century of peace and progress. European civilization was at its peak. Europe ruled the world because it was more enlightened than any other civilization before it—or so it seemed. For the educated classes in Vienna, life was good. It was not difficult to earn an income sufficient for a comfortable apartment with a live-in maid, evenings at Vienna’s famous opera or theater, time to sit and chat over an excellent slice of cake at a coffeehouse, and in summer, a vacation by one of Austria’s many lakes set amid tranquil forests and alpine peaks.

By the time my grandfather reached his sixtieth birthday, this world was in ruins. Europe was, for the second time in his life, in the midst of a devastating war, and all the humane values and enlightened reasoning of his youth had been defeated by visceral emotion and brute force. The tragedy of this moral collapse is compelling in itself, but that is not the only reason I feel the need to confront it. When the Nazis came to Austria many Jews, my parents among them, immediately began seeking another country to which they could go. My grandparents did not. There is a terrible, tragic irony in the fact that my grandfather spent his whole life trying to understand his fellow human beings, yet seems to have failed to take sufficiently seriously the threat that overwhelmed Vienna’s Jewish community and ultimately led to the loss of his own life. Did my grandfather perhaps have too much confidence in human reason and the humanist values to which he had dedicated his life? Did this render him unable to conceive that they could be so completely trodden underfoot as to allow barbarism once again to hold sway across Europe? These questions lead to a disquieting thought. Since my own life, no less than that of my grandfather, is premised on the possibility of reason and universal ethical values playing a significant role in the world, could I be sharing my grandfather’s delusion?

There is one other factor that urges me to read my grandfather’s writings, something related to the fact that it wasn’t just illness or accident that deprived me of the opportunity to grow up with my grandparents around me. It is because to read him is to undo, in some infinitely small but still quite palpable way, a wrong done by the Holocaust. We all know that six million Jews died, but that is a mind-numbing statistic. I have a chance to portray one of them as an individual. But if I am to do it, I must do it soon. The handful of people still alive who knew my grandfather are getting old. My grandfather’s thoughts and work will be brought back to life as fully as possible by me, now, or not at all.

It’s getting late. I want to get some sleep, but first I need fresh air. The room has a tall casement window set in a white-painted wooden frame, curved at the top, divided down the middle and held together with a brass handle. I turn the handle and the doors swing toward me, but I have forgotten about the double glazing. There is another window, with a similar handle. That opens too, and now a blast of cold air hits me. I look out at the deserted streets. These buildings were here when the Nazis came to Vienna. Fifty-five years ago my grandparents were living in an apartment a few kilometers away, dismissed from their employment, forced to take other families into their apartment, made to wear the yellow star whenever they went out, not allowed to use public transport, or even to walk in a park, learning of friends and relatives being deported to the East and not knowing their fate. That is when they wrote the letters I now have in this hotel room. Fifty-five years seems a relatively small amount of time that I must push away, if I am to get to know my grandfather. Less than one lifetime. Yet there is such a gulf between their times and mine. Has the world changed so much?

Looking at the streetlights, I can see snow falling gently. It tells me that I am a long way from home. In Australian cities it never snows.

2

In My Aunt’s Flat

July 18, 1998

My intention to get to work on the pile of papers I brought back from Vienna fell victim to more urgent tasks. Now that at last I have time to read them, I recall that Doris had, in her thesis, quoted from letters that my grandfather had written to my grandmother before they were married. But these letters are not in the papers I have. Where are they? Doris, who sadly has begun showing signs of dementia, has moved into a home for elderly people. When I ask her about the letters she is vague, but happy for me to look for them. Michael, her son, gives me the keys to her flat, and one wintry Saturday morning, I go looking for my grandfather’s letters to his bride-to-be.

Cold and musty though it is, the empty flat is still very much the home of European refugees. Pictures of old Vienna hang on the walls, the bookshelves have uniformly bound sets of the works of Goethe, Schiller, and other German writers. Right by the entrance door is a large Oppenheim family tree, tracing Doris’s ancestors—and mine—back to the sixteenth century.

I walk down the passage to the small study that Doris used as a bedroom for her grandchildren when they visited. Folders are heaped on every flat surface in the room. Inside the first one are gas bills. The next contains postcards from friends on vacation. But soon I find a folder containing a small envelope with a faded pink stamp portraying Franz Josef I. On the envelope is written, in black ink in my grandfather’s spidery handwriting:

An Fräulein Dr Amalie Pollak,

Wien

II Malzgasse 5

I turn the envelope over, and on the back I read: Abs: Dr D. Oppenheim IX Pramerg. 6. The postmark is clearly legible: Wien, 1.6.05. Both the date and the use of my grandmother’s maiden name show that this is one of the letters I am looking for, written by my grandfather to my grandmother before they were married. The address shows that Amalie Pollak lived in Vienna’s Second District, only a few blocks from where my grandparents were later to make their home.

In a filing cabinet, I find more of my grandfather’s papers, and a few more letters, all from David to Amalie. I check the desk drawers. Just old bills and bank statements there. Across the back of the room, behind a sofa, are built-in floor-to-ceiling cupboards. The bottom section is stuffed with coats, scarves, hats, and other items of clothing. There is a separate door to the top section. I reach up to open it, and find myself in a scene from a Three Stooges movie: a book falls on my head. As I bend down to pick it up, folders of papers cascade over me. When I get them, a lamp shade follows, then a handbag, some large brown envelopes, a plastic bag containing something heavy, and more folders. I wait, my arm protecting my head, until I am confident that the avalanche is over, and then I take a look at what is now around my feet. Some of the folders contain more old bills—how long does my aunt think she needs to keep a phone bill?—but the large brown envelopes are made of a different kind of paper, the kind I now recognize as coming from Austria before the war. In one of these I find a passport. Republik Österreich it says on the front, for it was issued in 1929; but a large red J for Jude (Jew) was added on October 19, 1938, showing that the passport was still used after the Republic of Austria had ceased to exist. Dr David Ernst Oppenheim is described as having a face that is oval, brown hair, and gray-green eyes. A good-looking man stares out at me from his passport photo. His hair is brushed back from his forehead. He has a mustache that points out horizontally on both sides, and a short, neat beard, confined to the area of his face directly below his mouth. I flip through the pages used for stamps from border control officials. There are a few showing entry to and exit from Czechoslovakia in the summers of 1936 and 1937—to visit relatives, presumably. Then on the next page is a series of stamps added after the Nazi takeover of Austria. The first one says Wien 17.IX.38, and next to it is written Freigrenze 10km September 1938. A ten-kilometer limit on freedom to travel. Similar stamps appear for October, November, and December. The remaining

Reviews for Pushing Time Away

[pamelad_570511 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Singer's grandfather, David Oppenheim, died in the Thieresienstadt ghetto in 1942, his ashes dumped, with those of 1800 others, in the river. Singer has commemorated his grandfather's life with this book.David was a member of Freud's Wednesday group then, after a split with Freud, aligned himself with Adler. Singer has used his grandfather's letters and writings to shed light on the bitter feuding between the pioneers of psychology.Oppenheim participated in the intellectual and cultural circles of Vienna, so the story of his life is also a history of the city from the end of the Hapsburg Empire, when 15% of the population was Jewish, until 1942 when no Jews remained.Much of interest in Singer's book, in particular the reality of people's lives in Vienna after the German annexation, and in the ghetto of Thieresienstadt.

[praymont_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The focus of this book is Singer's Austrian grandpa, David Oppenheim, who taught in a 'gymnasium' (high school) and was a member of Freud's circle. Singer's parents fled to Australia, but his grandparents delayed their exit -- Oppenheim fought for Austria in WWI and thought this would afford him some security and respect. He died in Theresienstadt. His story is similar to that of Otto Selz, a psychologist who believed that his WWI medal would shield him from persecution and who died in Auschwitz.