Viennese Romance
June 2013
David Vogel / Scribe
The world in which the Holocaust is still an impossible event is that contained within the precious but flawed pages of Viennese Romance, an unfinished manuscript discovered more than sixty years after it was penned. Its own history is as fascinating as that which it evokes. Written over several decades between Vienna and Paris, it swings between cosmopolitanism and philosophical enquiry.
There is a dichotomy that lies at the heart of this novel. David Vogel was forever the outsider; born in the Russian Pale of Settlement, he emigrated to Austria where he was arrested as an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War I. In Vienna and later Paris, he lived as an impoverished writer; bohemian, haunted and always visibly Jewish. Even in language he stood apart, writing in a blended high and modern Hebrew. The anti-hero of Viennese Romance, Michael Rost, is a kind of fantasised alter ego, an eighteen-year-old womaniser who has his world at his feet after a Magwitch-like figure becomes his patron. Rost’s remembering of his hometown in interludes tinged with poeticism are some of the most affecting sections in this sometimes ruptured novel.
This is the Vienna of Freud, Arthur Schnitzler and Otto Weininger; its fin de siècle sexual consciousness more risqué than other Western cities. Sexual acts are often accompanied by the threat or semblance of violence. Eroticism and taboos are explicitly encountered and the subject of Rost’s affections, virginal Erna, whose mother is already his lover, is in the dramatic throes of adolescent sexual awakening.
Admittedly, there are scenes that are highly chauvinistic. As one Hebrew scholar has noted, Vogel is an early Woody Allen and some of the success of his comedy relies on the use of the absurd statement. But what endures, alongside the images of a bourgeois society consumed by decadence, is a portrait of an émigré Jewish community which congregates at Stock’s Kosher Eatery, made flesh with anarchists, effete intellectuals, lecherous Rabbis and heroic tenors. Whilst the surrounding culture of hedonism is stultified with various states of ennui, enervation, boredom and inertia, Stock’s is awash with liveliness, camaraderie and an earthy Yiddish humour. Memorable ripostes abound, “A person might as well talk to a herring as waste words on you. You should be hung up to dry.”
Emotional states and physical depictions of dark and light are continually in interplay. Rost is not entirely an unlovable cad; besides being witty, he is solicitous about Misha the anarchist and depressive aristocrat Fritz Anker, outsiders haunted by what they perceive of as the void of life.
By the time the manuscript was rewritten by Vogel at the height of Hitler’s rule – although there is a difference of opinion as to the timeframe – Rost embodies everything the Jew should not: virile, anti-intellectual, of carefree sensibility and blonde. There is a pleasure to be derived in imagining Rost living forever, amoral but vigorous. Then reality interjects: his intellectual, dark-haired Jewish creator was killed in Auschwitz as he too, in all likelihood, would have been if he was not buried underground for the duration of the war.
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