Holocaust Book Review: Meriel Schindler, The Lost Cafe

 

Meriel Schindler. The Lost Cafe  Schindler: One Family, Two Wars and the Search for Truth. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2021. pp. xxiii + 408. Many black and white illustrations.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

This is not quite a Holocaust book because there are no vivid descriptions of concentration camps or gas chambers, though there are brief episodes in which people are beaten up and news received of murders committed. What is at stake in the construction of the plot, rather, is the break-up of an extended family, the loss through Aryanization of a café, business premises associated with it and residential properties—and the confusion and transformation of individual identities. The narrative voice is that of a daughter of an eccentric and difficult father, whose boasts, complaints and lies alienate the daughter who, after his death, discovers letters, photograph albums and other documents which she works her way through to find the truth about her father, her family and the famous café in Innsbruck that disappeared from history but whose reputation is eventually resurrected. Rather than the author whose career in journalism guides the search to identify the people, places and events referred to in the cache of materials left after the passing of the father, Meriel Schindler is an investigative lawyer who uses her skills fit together the pieces of the puzzle, searches through newspaper and civic archives and interviews witnesses to her family’s affairs throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Her research also leads her to local and professional historians who both provide her with additional facts and teach her the methodology of writing history.

Eventually, she is able to prove that in much of her father’s boasting and self-defensive lying there are some grains of truth and enough data to contextualize and explain his obsessive behavior: that his family did have come connections to the famous people with whom they share names, blood and marital connections, as well as business contacts, the Schindlers were not directly related to Franz Kafka, Alert Einstein and many other famous and influential Jewish figures in the German-speaking lands and beyond, but rather to more distant branches of the families, mostly centred on the Tyrol and other rural towns in Austria and Germany. There is a family connection to the Dr.Bloch who looked after the mother and siblings of Adolf Hitler, and to whom there passed a bizarre loyalty and protection of the Führer, in such a way that protected Bloch and family from Nazi thuggery and allowed him to rescue a few Jews in the region from arrest and deportation.

What seems most unusual about the picture that emerges as the various missing pieces are found and put together into an almost coherent narrative of what happened during the 1930as and 1940s—and somewhat beyond into the 1950s—is how ordinary relationships seem between the Schindlers and their non-Jewish neighbors and business associates, and especially in their dealings with the Austrian and German Nazis with whom they had to interact. In the years just before and then after the Anschluss, when life became particularly dangerous and difficult for Jews in Austria, and even while the some of the Schindlers were desperate to sell-up and leave their homeland, wither for other parts of Europe (including in the beginning Germany) and Britain or America, the immediate family of Meriel’s father Kurt’s parents and grandparents still think of themselves as assimilated to Austrian life and especially as loyal to and defined by their residence in the Tyrol. They negotiate, bargain and complain to authorities when their ownership of the famous café that bears their name is alienated from them, their homes confiscated and their status as citizens and human beings is undermined. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich and the subsequent separation of Austria from Germany, Kurt Schindler attempts to regain what the family lost, but he never explains to his family what he is doing—his long absences, his intricate bureaucratic wrangles and financial entanglements, his moving the family back to Innsbruck from England, and his coldness towards his children.

There are thus two major directions in The Lost Café Schindler. One is the narrative of events in both world wars, the disposition of the extended family and the running of the café and associated brewing, jam-making and other businesses. The other interwoven direction is the account of the narrator’s engagement with the inherited texts and photographs, the travels to specific places to see what remains and what they look like, the meeting with various informants and experts, and the piecing together the diverse pieces of evidence to complete the history; as well as the author’s reflections and imaginings of how her father’s attitudes and personality came into being, and the impact of all this on the contours of her own life. Contextualization of these family, business and intimate matters provides what seems to be a vivid history of Jews in Tyrol from the late nineteenth to the close of the twentieth century.

Yet there are troubling aspects to these diverse goals. There is a sense that aside from a few nasty Nazi individuals, the people who were willing to join up with Germany, carry out the programme of aryanization and physically assault Jews, and then collude in their extermination. Most Austrians, and Tyrolians in particular, were probably not ruthless gangsters and thugs, and their Anti-Semitism was of the softer type defined as “not hating the Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”  Wherever possible during the German occupation of Austria and in a renewed independence the SS and police persecutions were carried out with Gemütlichkeit, an unctuous and ironically polite decorum. After all, it was often the same bureaucrats, civic officials and businessmen who collaborated with the Nazis and who afterwards remained in place in very much the same positions they had held during the Nazi regime. Meriel Schindler, using her skills as an investigative lawyer and playing with the still influential family name, seems able to find archivists, local historians and former neighbors of her grandparents who seem obliging and welcoming, although she does note a certain shared structural amnesia concerning the “bad things” that happened, which [polite people do not like to talk about; and, in general, who see themselves and Austria as the first victims of Hitler’s aggression. Having gone to school in Innsbruck, when her father moved back there after the war, she speaks and communicates well with the locals she encounters in her research for this book She, too, is finally proud of the reputation the café achieved, and she reflects happily in its renewed glory, albeit under new ownership and management.

Another of the stated goals of the book is to understand the actions of and words of Kurt Schindler. Why did her father as a young man claim to be a homeless orphan upon returning to Austria after the war when he had actually grown up in England with his parents and many relatives? Why did he in particular insist that he was at home in Innsbrook and witnessed the violence on Krystalnacht when at the time evidence proves that he was already safely in England? Why did he apply to the Jewish council in Vienna for a subvention to make aliyah to Israel/Palestine when he had never before shown any interest in Zionism or an inclination to leave Europe? The author’s investigations and speculations are based on her superficial observations and amateur psychology, not any real discussions of depth analyses “survivor guilt,” “identity crises”, or” post-traumatic stress”. She notes, for instance, the way Kurt and other relatives repeated posed in later photographs prior to the crises of the 1930s with those taken in the heyday of the family’s proud and happy life in the Tyrol; but she doesn’t deal with the implications of such attempts to reproduce their own and their ancestors’ commitments to Austria. She takes the photographic evidence at face value and interprets the pictures in a sentimental way.

Of course, though she adds a few of the key recipes at the end of the book so readers can taste the Gute Schmecken of the famous desserts and tartes that were served to customers, not everything in this book smells quite kosher.