Return to Vienna: A Journal by Hilde Spiel (review)

After the racially motivated killing of her renowned philosophy professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna in June 1936, Hilde Spiel’s decision to emigrate to London, along with her husband and author Peter de Mendelssohn, was only “reinforced” (80). A decade later, a decade full of the nightmares and traumas of Hitler’s brutalities all over Europe, Spiel landed as the war correspondent for the liberal New Statesman at the Schwechat airport, which was “riddled with craters” (10). Spiel faces her bombed and impoverished hometown, aware “that from now on all my journeys will be shadowed by memories” (10). Yet, with an unsentimental pose she affirms, “I have not come in order to grieve for my early life. I am returning to my origin, alienated by long absence, steeled by many a loss and ready for a hard, presumably painful experience” (10).

This slim postwar narrative, masterfully rendered by Spiel’s daughter and professional translator Christine Shuttleworth, stands out in more than one way. First, the text itself deserves some special observations. As Jacqueline Vansant notes in her concise afterword, Spiel “uses the diary form, but we know from multiple versions housed in the Austrian National Library that the compact volume was not written during this trip” (120). Whereas the first two, even shorter versions are in English, it is Spiel’s translated German Rückkehr nach Wien—Tagebuch 1946 that was published twenty-two years after her first postwar encounter with Vienna and Austria in 1968. This reader, therefore, would have liked to know whether this translation might have made use of the first two versions written in English or to what extent the multiple transcultural exchanges and the recirculation of the text(s) had an effect on its “highly constructed nature” (120). Whereas Vansant weighs the “literary diary [. . .] among Spiel’s finest works” (120), it invites questions about the presumed authenticity of her first re-encounter of Vienna or her Austrian identity vis-à-vis her British one in exile or her omissions vis-à-vis chosen facets, observations, and narratives such as a day trip from Klagenfurt through the Alps to Italy. Spiel’s re-translation coincides with an earlier reprint in German by the Milena publishing house (Vienna, 2009), so the text’s own multifarious history has only grown. In a 2009 edition of Der Falter, Vienna’s preeminent weekly newspaper, Julia Kospach sums up the hybridity and elegance of the text’s character in her review: “Er ist Selbstbeobachtung und Stadtbeobachtung in einem, eine Mischung aus Persönlichem und historischer Momentaufnahme. Alles geschrieben in dem für Spiel schon früh so typischen glasklaren, unumwundenen Stil poetisch-analytischer Präzision.”

As layered as the textual history is and as blended her narrative perspectives are, just as varied are Spiel’s encounters with people, places, and proceedings. She revisits their former apartment in the 3rd district and sees again her former servant, attends a press conference at the chancellery, meets with some of those who had resisted the Nazi regime, witnesses the outdated world of former aristocrats, convenes with idealistic communists, and tells of a camp for displaced persons in Carinthia who see Europe as a graveyard, “one big graveyard with our mothers, fathers, sisters” (96).

Sixty-four years have passed since Spiel’s wide-ranging experiences and encounters during her five weeks in desolate and impoverished Vienna; in addition to the black-and-white photographs already included, the translated volume would have gained from the inclusion of commentaries and extensive footnotes in order to provide more context. While the editors wisely chose as their cover an older photograph of St. Jacob’s Church in Heiligenstadt with the familiar St. Nepomuk in front of it, there is no explicit connection made to Spiel’s moving passage when she returns to the adjacent Probusgasse, “where I spent the first ten years of my life” (34), before narrating how she enters the small and centuries-old church pictured on the front...