Among my unusual experiences in Austria was meeting other Jews my age (now 70) who grew up here.  In my first months in Vienna I wanted to swim and so contacted a group run by Hakoah, the Jewish sports club that was revived after the Second World War.  

I was told there was a shortage of lane space in the late-Covid swim environment, and I also understood by inference that my age and speed were not at the group’s level.  But the coordinator kindly told me about another group of swimmers, previously or presently affiliated with Hakoah, that meets informally at one of Vienna’s public pools, Stadthallenband, and she introduced me to Bobby Beig. 

Bobby is a very good and fit swimmer—at 75 he still competes periodically with Hakoah—and a very gracious and interesting man.  His parents returned to Austria after the Second World War, so he is Jewish and born and raised in Vienna.  To me, the American child of a Vienna-born refugee,  this was extraordinary, almost unthinkable.  I had known refugees, other than my mother—my father’s consulting business partner, a cousin, relatives when I was young—but before meeting Bobby (and then his friend Shimon), I had never met anyone Jewish who had grown-up and lived in Austria.  

The novelty of our meeting was I think mutual.  The Austrian government began offering passports to the direct descendants of refugees in 2021; my sister and I were among the earliest to apply.  I was among the first, or perhaps the first 70-year-old to knock at the Hakoah swim group’s door.  I have met other Austrians, but Bobby’s story was particularly compelling to me, so I asked him to allow me work with him on this oral history. 

Following are a few recorded interviews—my apologies for the quality of the recordings–together with notes from our conversations, which were later edited by me and by Bobby.  Listening, you will hear the story of two young people who escaped to England in the 1930’s, met, and returned together to Vienna in 1946 before Bobby’s birth in 1948.  You will learn how they got out and why they came back, about their work, their lives and their politics, and you will hear about Bobby’s grandmother who survived the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and lived with them.  You will learn about Bobby’s years in grammar school and at the University of Vienna, about his growing interest in the sciences,  his graduate studies, his teaching and working years as a physicist, and about his own family.  You will begin to know who Bobby is.  

I did these interviews to satisfy my personal interest.  There is something familiar about Bobby, like a brother or a cousin, despite the significant differences between us, and there is something hauntingly familiar about Austria.  Interviewing him I thought might explain these impressions to me.  They did and they did not.  

These recordings were also for Bobby’s grandchildren, so that they can know a part of where they come from, and permit themselves to be different.  Jews are interesting, somewhat unusual people.  We have the capacity for closeness and love with the people around us, but we are also unlike others, and there are bonds between us despite time and distance. 

These recordings are for Bobby, who can listen to his own thoughtfulness, be reminded that he is unusual and that he has had a fulfilling and successful life.   

Finally, these recordings are dedicated to Louise, Bobby’s partner, with thanks for the warm welcome in her heart and household, for wonderful meals at her apartment, and for ever-better conversations, as I slowly learn German, the language we left behind us and forgot.  

Larry Sicular

January 2024

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Bobby Beig, Oral History Notes

Vienna, Austria

Notes on conversations, with some clarifications.  These were recorded on April 28,  May 5 and May 12, 2023 and  February 5 and  May 26, 2024

Session 1, Recordings 1 and 2

These recordings are for two people who are still very small, Bobby’s grandchildren, although we might decide that they will be of more general interest. 

Bobby grew up in an unusual family, in Vienna, after the War.  His outline:

• Identity.
• What is a Jew. 
• Growing up in Vienna

How far should we go in defining identity?  I am not sure how far we should go.  How we see ourselves and how others see us.  I have a problem when an identity becomes highly noted—when people try to find their roots in a vague way—not like you coming to Vienna—but I want to distance myself from that.  But there is a bare minimum that my grandchildren should know. 

An identity requires distinguishability.  How we are seen and how we see ourselves, but I want to distance myself from anything mythical, I want something more light, something which is a bare minimum that my grandchildren should know when they want to know where they come from. 

Identity is a number of features, of properties, which I have, which includes experiences, things which I could list and refer to one by one.  Defining this is going to be tough, and there is one more complication, as I now am a 75 year old person.   It’s not quite the same person.  There is the person I am now, and the person who I was when I grew up.  These are two different things.  Of course I can look at things from my present point of view, and imagine how I perceived my life as a child.  

Things that define me today: I am a scientist.  I am striving for definitions and generality, my strength and my weakness.  Being a Jew is one of them, probably not the most important thing.  Without it, my life – at least the first 15 or 20 years of my life – cannot be explained.  The concept of a Jew is something baffling, even controversial.   Jews are first and foremost a religion, I guess; they are a tribe, by a gene test I did some time ago, I was identified as 100% Ashkenazi Jew, but I have no idea how accurate this is—there is probably no such thing as a pure Jew.  There are a number of things I associate with Jews, complicated things, there is a history of persecution of Jews, and they are associated with a number of stereotypes—these are not necessarily all wrong, we identify ourselves by some of them—smart people; we have a tendency for feeling guilty, a strong conscience.  The one thing I fully identify with, and which I associate with Jewry, is humor.  This is to me I think the most important feature.  There is something as a Jewish humor.   It has been said that there are many things of which one can accuse Jews.  We cannot be accused of a lack of humor. My father thought of himself as having a good sense of humor, but it was actually my mother who had a very natural sense of humor.  

My parents met in London in about 1940.  They both were emigrants from Austria; they had emigrated for racial reasons.  My mother was Jewish; my father’s parents had converted to Protestantism; my father was baptized as a Protestant.  They met in the middle of a group of exiled Austrians, maybe drawn together by homesickness.   My father had emigrated with his mother; his father had already died.  My mother had come to England on a Kinder transport. 

The organization where they met was called Young Austria.  It was quite unique in a way.  

The unusualness of my upbringing in Vienna goes back to the unusualness of this group.  A group of people from Austria, opposed to Nazism; in the jargon of socialists/communists, they were anti-fascists.  Jewishness was not the main thing in this group.  It was political.  This group was communist, Stalinist.  This group of people was ordered after the war to return to Austria, probably by Moscow, but that has to be researched.  My ‘aunt’, actually my grandmother’s cousin—as  I grew up, she would visit us regularly, but she would never have dreamed of returning to Vienna.  That is true of most people I know, certainly of your mother.  My parents came back to Vienna in 1946.  I was born in 1948.  

Maybe we  could change perspective a little bit here, and talk how I perceived these things when I was a child.  

My mother was from a petty bourgeois family; my father’s family was slightly more bourgeois.  My father’s family were Hungarian and partly also from Czechoslovakia.   The roots of my mother’s family were wholly Czech.  In both cases they had been in Vienna for some generations.

My mother grew up in the 2^nd district in an almost entirely Jewish area; she had almost no non-Jewish schoolmates.  This was in Leopoldstadt, also known as Matzesinsel—a word that was used back then and occasionally today.  She grew up in Tempelgasse, near the synagogue which was burned down in Kristallnacht, in a fairly modest environment; they were not poor, they even had for a time a farm girl to help them, she would sleep in the kitchen.  They were affluent enough to have that kind of help at home. 

My father’s father was a Prokurist (German), an authorized signatory.  He worked for the Credit Anstalt (CA), one of the leading banks in Austria, now with Bank Austria.  But he died in the early 1930’s, so my father was basically raised by his mother.  My father was Protestant by religion, but in those days in Vienna he was clearly discernable as a Jew.  He attended a grammar school in Vienna in the Döbling district, the same grammar school that my daughter attended, much later.  There were the pro-Nazi kids and pro-Jewish kids; my father was on the side of the Jews; of course there was antisemitism.  

There are several things that could be said in this connection.  There is an reference to this in a novel written by the nephew of a well-known Austrian writer, also my father’s schoolmate, an article on the last days of the Jewish boys in this school.  The book is in German,  by the Austrian-British author Michael Stone, Das Blindeninstitut. Bruchstück einer Jugend. Kupfergraben, Berlin 1991.  My father is mentioned in the book, in one or two sentences;  apparently he was bad in math, which was noted in the article.  The teacher was an anti-semite.  “With one equation with two variables, the Talmud won’t help you.”  (Very much later, my father was irritated by my interest in mathematics.)  

There was an exodus on this particular date of the Jewish children from this school.  The other children saw them leave, with strange feelings, and also the professors.  One of the children who left was the math teacher’s best student. The teacher was shocked; he didn’t know he was Jewish.  The child showed something that referred to his father’s suicide after the Anschluss.   This is very interesting.  It shows the relationships before the war, between Jews and non-Jews.  Yet this was before the Holocaust—our present perception is dominated by the Holocaust–yet even then everyone knew that something important was happening. 

My father’s family left–my father’s mother was entitled to a retirement pension because she was widowed, a pension that she received from the bank.  She was able to get this paid out and to use this money to leave; it was just she and my father.  They were not members of the Jewish community; I think they left in a Quaker transport.  But she left behind her sister and her mother; both of whom perished. 

In my mother’s family, her brother had already left for Israel, and my mother was sent on a Kinder transport.  My grandparents were kicked out of their apartment, and lived in another apartment where a number of people were concentrated.  They were then sent to a concentration camp, Theresienstadt.   My grandfather died there a few days after liberation by the Red Army.  After the war, my grandmother came back to Vienna and stayed in a home for displaced people.  They had both contracted typhus; she survived with some heart condition.  He (my grandfather) was burned (cremated), for hygienic reasons, but his urn is nevertheless buried in the Jewish cemetery, which is normally not allowed.  My grandmother is also buried there, as is my mother. 

My father was not quite 16 in March 1938 (he was born in October 1922). The Gestapo once picked him up for a night but then sent home.  A woman living opposite to their house in Biedergasse had made an allegation that a Jewish boy had thrown a stone at a Hitler picture in her window; and that of course was a signal to Grandmother that they could not stay there.   She had been used to a comfortable life, even as a widow, it was a brave decision on her part.  In addition she left her sister and her mother, whom she was close to.  My grandmother told me, on her visits to Vienna after the war, that her mother came to Döbling from the 6^th district, and would come to their place every day with the shopping and did the cooking.  Her mother had been a good cook and housekeeper. 

Session 1, Recording 3

I grew up in an unusual family, as Larry has said.  This is to some degree in retrospect.  For some time, I wasn’t aware of it.  There were some things though that I noticed and also I must say that I liked.  The fathers of other children in elementary school; most of them had been soldiers in the German army.  What that meant or was, on average, that the parents of my school mates were much older than my parents.  For the parents of my schoolmates, the time of the war was lost to these parents, whereas this wasn’t the case for my parents in England.  I was proud that my parents were young. 

The other thing was my parents had a lot of friends; I knew them.  I would call them by their first names, without calling them “uncle” which was more typical.  My parents were modern in questions of education.  For example, they did not believe in physical punishment.  I was slapped by my father, just once in my life, for a totally bad reason.  90% of my school mates were Catholics; I was officially without religion, so when there was religion in class, I was doing homework elsewhere.  These were the differences. 

My parents being communists, there was a contempt of religion.  They also considered Judaism to be unimportant somehow.  Communism in those days was opposed for example to Zionism.   Although my mother had a brother in Israel, who had fled to then Palestine, that was almost a non topic.  They had little contact.  I had some ideas why that was the case, but that’s a bit complicated.  I lived with my parents; I had no siblings.  There was my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, as one would say today. Of course at the time I did not know what a Holocaust survivor was, nor what a Jew was. 

She was an important person for me.   She adored me; for her I could do no wrong.  There were some things that maybe were strange. On weekends, she insisted on not using the elevators; that was a matter of argument—she had a heart condition. I didn’t understand these things.  At some point my parents decided they had to explain something to me.  I was playing in a park, near the Belvedere near where we lived, and some other kids were singing an antisemitic song, which I found funny.   I came home and sang it, and my mother decided she had to explain.  Well you know, she explained the non-use of the elevator, her (grandmother) adhering to what she considered the rules of the Jewish religion. This is how I discovered being Jewish. I was in elementary school already by then. 

Of course this is an event that I remember.  It was certainly a sign of difference, I’m not sure how important it was.  I don’t remember that my early school years were affected by this. I had a school teacher a man, whom I liked and who liked me.   He certainly knew my family background, yet I was the only Jew in a class of 30.  My parents’ friends were practically all Jews.  They had children whom I knew. 

When my parents came back (to Austria) in 1946, my father would have been 24 and my mother 22.  My mother had no special training; she had simple office jobs.  My father had mostly done physical work.  For him, well his dream would have been to be a lawyer, but since he couldn’t finish his school career in Austria—maybe he could have tried–he thought he needed to work to support his family.  Immediately when they came back, there was no one here expecting them, other than the communist party.  The party gave them some help, an apartment, perhaps previously aryanized apartments.   My father worked for some time for an American newspaper, which he had to be allowed to do by the Party—maybe they thought he could get some information about the Americans.  Vienna  had been heavily affected by air raids in WW2. And of course there was poverty.  At some stage, my mother was asked to lead a group of young people.  Most of these young guys were not gangsters, but they were more or less delinquent young men.  She had to deal with them—some of them had become violent.  My mother was proud at having been able to handle these young kids.  My mother wasn’t very fearful.  

My father, after some time, he worked for the  steel firm Wagner Biro, which was owned by the Russians. Later he worked for an insurance company.  My mother worked for a logistics service, that was owned by the communist party.  When my father’s salary was high enough, she stopped working. 

My parents friends were members of the communist party.  Some worked for the party, but most of them had other jobs. They were also friends and met on a private basis.  My parents did small amounts of volunteer work for the party for a number of years, but that stopped after some time.  There was an organization within the party, trying to help people rent apartments.  One could be a member of that organization, and they collected fees for membership. 

Of my grandmother’s experience in Theresienstadt I know little; it was not really discussed.  My mother told me much later, after her death, that my grandmother would have been quite willing to talk about her own experience, but somehow nobody would have wanted to listen, including her, her daughter.  The story that she told me was my grandfather had some function as a guard.  The Nazis used Jews in some kind of self-organization in the camps.  There was something like this at Theresienstadt.  My grandmother said something about this to my mother, about this role of her husband, in a proud way.  My mother recalled having said something nasty to her.  This must have been connected to the fact that my parents, particularly being communists, believed in resistance to the Nazis.  This role was to them a form of collaboration. My mother described herself as something of a Daddy’s girl. The “wrong” person had survived.  This contradicted her image of him.  My mother’s negative reaction ended the conversation; my grandmother was offended.   

After the Anschluss, my grandfather tried to look after the family, somehow to postpone the deportations, not only for his wife, but also for his mother in law.  My grandmother had two brothers.  One, Otto Fischer, was a football star and later football coach who perished in Latvija. 

(Note added: there is a book about his life: “Otto ‘Schloime’ Fischer – a Jewish football star”, by A. Juraske.) The other one, Hugo Fischer, was in forced labor. There were small labor camps all over Austria.  When these labor camps were shut down, everyone went back to their places, and then they were all deported to death camps. Thus Hugo, together with his wife and daughter, ended up in Auschwitz. 

My parents came back in 1946.  My grandmother had been in a home after the liberation; after some time, they took her in to live with them because they considered it their duty.   Much later, I did not think this was such a good decision.  But this is what they did.  She was there when I was born.  She did no professional work of any kind; for women of her upbringing this was not an option.  She lived with us; at the time when my mother did office work in the logistics firm, she would sometimes cook in the evening, but my grandmother would warm up the lunch for us to have together.  Then she disappeared for a nap; the story was that even as a young woman she napped.  That was talked about by my parents in a derogatory fashion.  She wasn’t as much respected as I think she deserved.

My grandmother was there when I came home from school.  I felt close to her.  She passed away in 1976, when I was 28.  To my grandmother, being Jewish was an obvious thing.  I cannot recall.  Of course, there were situations where this would have been obvious, but it was not something that she carried forward.  There were funny scenes.  Like many Jews, she was from a social democratic background, so having a social democratic chancellor that was also Jewish, Kreisky, was somehow wonderful.  The fact that he was critical of Israel, where her son lived, didn’t really matter. 

My mother’s brother was never happy in Israel and lost an arm in an accident.  When he died, my parents consulted the family doctor, who was from the same circle: he said to my mother that her mother would not survive the news.  So my parents decided that my grandmother would not know of his death.  They hid it from her, and even wrote fake letters and they took away letters.  She did not know.  They somehow had him vanish.  Maybe this is something that relates back to communist ideology, at least it’s not completely unrelated.  When Mao died, he officially didn’t die.  They had actors appear on the balcony, pretending to be Mao for some time.   My grandmother talked about her son, and they kept the subject down.   

There were some things that separated me from my school mates, but they didn’t matter to me so much.  I was in a grammar school that was a public school in the continental sense.  At the age of 15, I moved from a sexually mixed class to a boys’ class, at a time of puberty. I was a child not very good at defending myself.  Then there was the time when there was antisemitic mobbing. 

There was something called humanistic grammar school, with an emphasis on classical languages: Latin and Greek.  I decided to take the so-called the realistic section, with a stronger emphasis on science, it was purely for boys, which in my case meant I had to change class. 

There was some kind of antisemitic mobbing, which was unexpected.  It was related to an archetypical image of the Jew as a peddler.  One wonders.  In those days there were even fewer Jews than there are now.  This wasn’t a public topic, so they must have heard this from their parents.  How could they have known what a Jew was like, or that I was Jewish?

They didn’t beat me up or anything.   When I approached them, they imitated submissive kind of behavior they imagined as being typical. This I found very offensive, because this had nothing to do with me. 

I remember a few of them participated.  There was one boy who sometimes was also sometimes laughed about, although he was not mobbed; he was from a religious Catholic family, and he had absolutely no intention of participating.  This is something one doesn’t forget.   He became a friend some time later.  The mobbings lasted for two or three weeks, and then my father went to talk to the Director, who stopped them.  He was also very Catholic, and it was somehow known that he had no Nazi sympathies.  He  had some academic career— I’d have to look that up, but he was decidedly anti-Nazi.  I don’t remember why it was known.

Of course there was something after this that remained on my part; I was maybe more careful in some way.   I mean these are small things.  One guy says nasty things, then others  laughing or trying not to laugh. . . well apparently it does matter in a lifetime. . 

I studied all the standard  subjects:  Geography, history, English, German.  I was an average student.  I mean I was never in any real danger, but I was an average student.  All of the scientific friends I met later at university had been excellent students.  I never was.  I was good at math, and at physics, and English and philosophy.  I was good at the things I was interested in.  I was not good at things that didn’t interest me.  I was the only Jewish student.   There was a time, when a boy whom I know, the son of one of my parents comrades, was in the same class, because maybe they changed apartments, but only for a short time.  We were living in the 4^th district; the grammar school was in the 5^th, on the border between the 4^th and 5^th , within walking distance.  It was a local high school.  

Session Two, recording One

May 5^th, 2023

I am not really qualified in historical detail, but the Moscow Declaration was based on a conference in Moscow in 1943, between the allies and China, I think.  It concerned what was to happen after the war, including the punishment of war criminals, and there was a document concerning the fate of Austria.  That document referred to Austria, not as an accomplice, but as a victim of Nazism.  It’s not totally a lie, but it is certainly not totally true.  But it was used as an excuse by many Austrian governments, to exculpate Austria from evil deeds, although that has changed in the past 20 or 30 years.  That (perspective) played an important role in postwar Austrian history. 

It also played a role directly for my parents.  Their Young Austria refugee group was run by communists, it was mostly Jewish and some also some political refugees.  When my parents first met, they would never have thought of returning to Austria.  My grandmother who survived the concentration camp—her expectation had been that my mother would bring her to England, which obviously she didn’t do.

The idea of returning to Austria was based on this Moscow Declaration—the idea of recreating an independent Austria. It was the duty of communists to return and help build up socialism.  I don’t know whether there was a direct order from Moscow, but this played a role.  My parents and their friends took  this is as a clear order that they should return to Austria, although later in life occasionally my father was occasionally unhappy with his professional life, which was rare, and my parents sometimes said that perhaps they should not have returned.  My mother who had seen things here before the Kinder Transport, said that she was ambivalent about coming back. They never acquired British citizenship.  My father’s mother got it a few years later.  

Why didn’t she (my paternal grandmother) come back?.  Why should she have?   It is coming back that cries for an explanation, not remaining.  My grandmother always spoke English with a very Austrian accent.  My parents would have had found it easier to integrate into English society.  

What would my life have been like had my parents remained in England?  There was one interesting experience I had in this connection.  In the late 1980’s, after my paternal grandmother’s husband had died—he died after his wife–I went to England to dissolve the household.  On the way back, sitting behind me was an old gentleman with his children.  He spoke English with a clear Viennese accent whereas the two children, probably students at the time, were very British.  They came to Vienna for a similar reason.   A family member had died and they had inherited a big house in the 13^th district.  He had immigrated not to England but to Scotland, and the children were asking about family in Austria. 

It is unclear of course.  The education system in England in those days was not as open as in Austria.  If I had studied at say Cambridge, maybe things would have even been better, but they could also have been significantly worse.  These are speculative questions.  

My paternal grandmother remarried, also an Austrian,  whose family background was German speaking Czech Jews.  He could also speak Czech, as did my maternal grandmother.  When they visited he spoke Czech with my maternal grandmother.  My paternal grandmother was widowed in the 1930’s before she emigrated with my father.  She had had a boyfriend in Vienna, which wasn’t much talked about, he was apparently a wealthy man, who wanted to marry her.  He ended up in the US, via England.   He wanted her to marry him, but she had gotten to know this man, Eric Guttman, who had no money, and from the point of view of my then family, little to recommend him.  But she adored him and married him, and although he didn’t always treat her very nicely, they had I think a happy and successful marriage.  

She never worked except in the first years of the emigration when she was a housemaid for families.  He was first in the Czech part of the British army, spent some time in India, and then worked for Vickers, a British aircraft firm.  He was an engineer and he had gone to a Viennese grammar school where he had acquired most of his engineering skills.  He was an engineer in the aeronautical field.  My grandmother was clearly not communist, although they didn’t have great arguments about it with my parents.  Nor was my maternal grandmother.  She was liberated by the Red Army, but that played no role.   She wasn’t very political nor very educated.  (She was social democratic, but not communist.)

My maternal grandmother’s family had been here for two generations.  They spoke Czech as a second language-they had links.  Neither my mother nor her brother spoke Czech.  I’m not sure whether my grandmother’s brothers spoke Czech. 

Session 2, recording two

May 5, 2023

In the first Austrian government, there were communists in the Parliament, even an Austrian communist minister of education.  But the communists never made it in any subsequent election. There was hope that this would happen.  The party was organized into sections, for different districts.  There was one place  for meetings in the 4^th district, where we lived, occasionally they would have meetings there.  I don’t know what was discussed.  But I do remember the May Day celebrations, where there were marches through different places in Vienna,  towards Parliament.   We would gather at the district meeting place, and be given flags and sing certain songs and march and so on.  This is a nice memory.  They would organize us children; it was a happy thing.  There were sausages, etc.  There would have been the standard pictures on the wall of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin.  There was a communist belief that was passed on to me, and which I defended later in grammar school.  It had been passed onto me in an explicit way, but also implicitly. 

We went someplace once, on a weekend excursion, when I was small.  There was a beggar.   

I asked my parents to give him some money.   We were not rich in those days, but we had some money.  My parents were very negative, the reason they were negative, was of course that poverty is evil, but the way to avoid is by state intervention not by private gifts.  I don’t know precisely what they said, but this was my first political lesson.  This is still true.  Even social democrats now don’t believe that the future of mankind can be solved by private charity.  But my parents were not fanatic, so they gave the man some money, to keep me quiet.  Maybe this is something that I just happen to remember, but it is typical of how beliefs are passed on. 

My parents were not highly educated; my mother of course never went to high school; my father didn’t finish.  They were reasonably smart people but not intellectuals spending time thinking about theory.   The general mood in Austria those days was strongly anti-communist for very good reasons and the not-so-good reason that that had been part of Nazi propaganda—telling them what would happen if the Russians won the war.  And there were rapes and things.  These things were discussed at home, but there was denial of persecution in the Soviet Union—although that (position) became more difficult over time.   

But coming back to earlier times, in school I learned there was democracy (and there was dictatorship), and in democracies the freedom to vote, and I found that pretty convincing.  So I said this to my parents.   My father would answer that in a capitalist society, yes, you are free to die of hunger, whereas in a socialist society (a stage before communism, the ultimate paradigm) the state takes care of you. . he would say things like that to me. 

This came with decreasing certainty . . .  My father from the late 1950’s worked for an insurance firm.  He sold policies and so he had customers or people he wanted to turn into customers.  He got to know people who weren’t communists.  Occasionally those people would visit us at home.  That was a time where the books, the Stalin and Lenin books in our library, would be moved to the second row.  

This was typical for this whole group. . . In 1956, there was the invasion of Hungary—there were all of these refugees, most didn’t stay.  Clearly caused by not a friendly invasion, this was the first blow to the belief that the Soviet Union was a peaceful and well-meaning nation, to the other countries in the Soviet block.  Like most of their friends, they swallowed this, but then the final blow, for most of these people, was 11 years later, in 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia.  That was too much for them.  My parents like most of their friends, left the party.  But it was also a time by which my father had a good income, and that had changed his outlook.  My mother didn’t work at this point.  The party was a connecting link.  People were still bound together—you might have a hard time leaving the party before 1956, but not in 1968. 

In terms of prestige, a general manager of the biggest bank in Austria (his father’s father), was something different from being an insurance agent. Being an agent,  you have to  be nice to people in order to sell something.  When I heard my father speaking on the phone, I disliked this very much.  It helped me to know what I did not want to be.   When I first saw the play ‘Death of a Salesman’ by Arthur Miller, I saw a piece of my father,  I knew that I did not want to be a salesman.  

Interest in science.  This example of what I did not want to do played some role.  My interest in sciences in  general just happened, like a flash of insight, maybe similar to religion;  it happened when I was 15.  This idea that mathematics can be used to describe nature was something wonderful.  I knew immediately this was something I wanted to do. I read popular books about  the theory of relativity.  Relativity is a theory of physics which has elements of mathematical and also some philosophical relationships.  Those things interested me immensely.  When I was 15 or 16, I said to myself, not only did I want to do  physics but also relativity, and this is what I ended up doing. 

There is general relativity.  The special theory of relativity is a theory of space-time, which replaces classical concepts of physics that had been around since Galileo.  It’s a framework more than a theory governing the universe.  I didn’t have anyone in those days to talk to about my interests.  I happened to have from the 6^th form, when I was 15, a new physics teacher.  He said a few things that immediately struck me, and from there I went off by myself.  We spoke a few times, but I followed up by reading popular books on my own.  Today we talk about people being supported and guided, but often with such things–the right person is confronted with new ideas and becomes a self-runner, as one says in German.

I learned from my good students … I never thought that I taught them a lot. Of course I taught them, but this triggered some kind of dynamic in them, and then they ran on their own.  One of the wonderful things about science is that there is progress, this is not obvious in the social sciences.  There is a famous book by C.P.Snow on the  ‘Two Cultures’.  The romantics and the scientists.  Of course I was on the side of the scientists.  

Later at University, that viewpoint was challenged.  1967, that was the time of the student revolution: Berkeley and Paris and Berlin.  There was some of it in Vienna.  Many children from communist families took part in this, and so did I to some degree.  In those days there was some something like a contempt for the sciences in those circles.  Maybe also because of Marcuse, who was one of the heroes of this movement.  Obviously science can be used for evil and for good things.  There is atomic, nuclear weapons in physics. Generally there was contempt for a field that lends itself to any causes whatsoever.  And so I also–I knew many of these leftist students–but I didn’t devote a lot of time to political work, I was more interested in the physics and the mathematics. 

Session 2, recording 3

Friday, May 5, 2023

I got interested in physics and mathematics at the age of roughly 15.  It was clear to me that it was something that I would want to do.  I didn’t know whether I was cut out to do this; I hoped I had the talent, but it was certainly something I wanted to do.  It was clear that I would study physics. There is a year between completion of high school and the start university, when I had to serve in the Austrian army, which was obligatory in those days.  I could talk about those years, but they don’t fit into what we are talking about now.  Those 9 months in the Austrian army  were useless in terms of what such service were intended to be, governed by silly commands, a waste of time. But this in turn was also useful.  After these months, I was hungry for intellectual things.  University study is not necessarily all fun, but having missed study for an extended period, I was ready to accept it and try to get over that.  

The question was where I would study.  Living in Vienna, it was for me obvious that I would study at the Vienna University.  Within Austria, people who lived in a city with a university, went to the university in their city.  For my parents, it was something remarkable for my father that I would go to university and be supported while I went to University.  There were no fees then.  My grandparents in England suggested that I try to get into Cambridge.  I don’t know how easy that would have been, but that would have meant significant fees, which my parents, my father, were not prepared to pay.  Maybe if I had been determined, and this had been a great place for physics, I might have tried, but somehow that was beyond my thinking.  The answer is that I did not see any choice.  

Also one should mention that the university system in continental Europe is still quite different from the United States, and it was even more different in those days.  When one studied at the University of Vienna, in the philosophical faculty, one had a primary and a secondary subject, and the only way to complete it was to do a Phd.  You had to go all the way to the PhD.  

Now, for some 28-30 years, in all of Europe, with some exceptions there is a BA.   In the sciences, nearly all go for the masters.  Now the Phd is the exception, for those who will remain in academia.  In the biggest firms, at the highest grade, there were also Phds. In those days it was slightly different in the technical universities, where you ended with an engineering degree equivalent to as master and a Phd was the exception, but that also was an extended study of 5+ years.  If you became say a physics teacher, you wouldn’t do the Phd, but something else.  Nevertheless, in the biggest firms, at the highest grade, there were Phds.  

I thought my Phd should be in physics; I thought of physics as superior to mathematics because in physics mathematics is not used for its own sake, but to describe nature and make predictions. Today I would choose to become a mathematician.   I think I  turned out to be a better mathematician.  As a child, I had a fairly good understanding of physics, but then I was exposed to some bad teaching at the University.  I then decided on physics—mathematics and physics have made tremendous progress in the past 10 to 15 years—there have been Nobel Prizes in subjects that are fairly close to my interests.  But today our everyday life is filled with mathematics, and I find this interesting. 

(In the 1960’s) there was some kind of standard curriculum in physics, which has been streamlined.  One had to study mathematics and also do some lab work, the latter of which I disliked and was not very good at.  

I spent my whole professional life in universities, mostly at Vienna University.  There is this general admiration in academia of professors, but I was never really affected.  I was never very proud of being a member of the University, nor did I have a great respect for many of the professors.  I rather judged them—at first I just listened to things, and then I tried to do things myself.  Then one compares oneself. . the longer I did this, the more I judged them by their work and less by their statements and presentation.  (I was not always impressed by their work.)   

Universities at the time were very old fashioned, there was the figure of the professor, who was important by virtue of presenting certain courses—just being himself–and this is not possible now.  Some people in the system never had any doubt that they should be anything else.  But I didn’t come from this kind of family, and I always asked myself if I was good enough.

Study at an Austrian or German universities in those days was a very individual thing, very different from a US undergraduate study in those days, which was more similar to the last two years of an Austrian high school.  Here there was a big gap between high school and university.  There was a core curriculum, and then one was left to one’s own devices.  In principle you could have gone for a Phd in 4 or 5 years, but very few actually did.   Basically you approached an institute or a person and asked him or her to propose a topic for your Phd. 

My natural anchor was the Institute for Theoretical Physics.  There was a test, after 4-5 years, to determine if you were suitable for the Phd.; that was quite a barrier.  You spent those years doing course work, (and only then did you take this test.)  You were more or less expected to discover by yourself if this was suitable for you.  Of course there were exams along the way. And then there was this one exam, which was for permission to do a degree in theoretical physics.  You had to solve exercises, all in a field that wasn’t really my field of interest. 

My doctor father (mentor), shortly after having given me my PhD topic, left the field, so then again I was completely on my own.  Of course you write it up and present it , and then you have to pass, but it took me more than two years to do this.  He gave me a problem which had arisen from a conversation of his with Richard Feynman in the United States, one of the great masters of theoretical physics.   So he passed this idea on to me, but he gave me no tools to approach it.  It was just a thought.  So I had to slightly change the topic into something feasible, and I did this on my own.  I had desk in a room, which still exists, the Schrödinger room.  Schrödinger had been the last Austrian Nobel prize winner in physics, until Anton Zeilinger in 2022.  There was a room bearing his name.  This belonged to the library—there were all these books.  I was sitting there with nothing to do, so I took one of those volumes, and found articles, by people related to Einstein, articles that were loosely related to my Phd.  From them, I found something that I could do and moved forward.  

Session 3, recording 1 

Friday, May 12, 2023

Maybe we could come back to as early as my school years.  Clearly I stuck out somehow from my schoolmates, more because of my political background than from my Jewish background. 

That turned out to be an important lesson for me—I shared the views of my parents, although I already then found some things hard to believe.  This was Austria in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  Communism was badly viewed–the Iron Curtain, the Hungarian revolution.  People were afraid of the Soviets, but I followed my parents and defended them in discussions in places. . . To me in retrospect, of course, the viewpoint of the teachers and other pupils were right.  I was wrong.  Still, it was good to learn to speak up for one’s opinion.  On the other hand, trying to be courageous in the sense of defending a minority opinion, does not mean that one was right. 

The Social Democrats, in the very old days, had had a strong Marxist background. This was an argument by the conservatives against them in elections.  This was posed as a threat.  They couldn’t shake this off.  Finally  Kreisky managed to do this —he came from a bourgeois background.   Claiming that the social democrats were communists didn’t any longer work.  

Austria as always had a center-right majority, most of whom are Catholics. In the Nazi period ties with the Catholic church were weakened. After the war many became super catholic again.  That was one of several reasons the atmosphere after the war was both politically and culturally very conservative.

Coming back to myself. Being in a minority position does not make you right.  I spent 9 months in the Austrian army for my military experience.  By that time I had turned into a pacifist–which is not really what communists are—again I was in a minority situation.  It turns out I registered for 12 months, instead of 9 months, because my father had a customer who advised that I would be better off so I could do something more—I was somehow in a section of the army that was more elite (i.e. people with a high school degree).  

At some stage we were required to write an essay about Austria’s military defense, over Christmas at home.   Of course they wanted us to express the official view. I decided to write an essay expressing my own (pacifist) view. In fact, I wrote Austria should be completely disarmed.  What then happened I had discussions with officers.  To them I was dangerous.  After these many years, my viewpoint has changed completely.   Now I live in a society where young people don’t have to do this military service, they can do social service.  Now I believe that Austria needs a strong army, at least within Europe.  So it seems to be that my opinions are always in the wrong place or at the wrong time. 

The apparently naïve points of view, of which my superiors in the army wanted to persuade us: e.g. there being a natural right to defend oneself (‘Imagine if you are together with your girlfriend and someone attacks her what do you do?’).  Now I actually believe these views are justified  (think of Ukraine). 

First of all, as far as my family was concerned, Austria was part of their political creed.  They considered themselves Austrian patriots, like the resistance fighters.  There is one brand of Austrian patriotism, that is related to the foundation of postwar Austria by people who had been in the camps or the resistance.  This is the framework for people like my parents.  But the widespread view is that there was not much patriotism before Kreisky.   Much of this patriotism consists of not being German—this is at least 50% of it.  ‘Germans have no humor.  They are more bellicose than us; they have a sense of order that is too much.  

As for myself I consider myself an Austrian patriot. Some people, with a background similar to mine, are much more critical of Austria than I.  But under different circumstances I might have turned out differently—I might have been a proud Englishman.   

Kreisky opened Austria to the world.   He welcomed Arafat.  Abortion became legal in the Kreisky years.  Louise is from a more conservative background—she may have voted for him once because of abortion, but she is strongly opposed to a policy of excessive government spending which started under Kreisky.

I started out as a leftist, but I ended up as something more of a conservative.  There is no conservative party in the good sense.  Not really the OEVP, but I voted for them on certain occasions, even when I knew they would make a coalition with the Freedom Party, which is impossible for me to vote for directly. 

From its origins the Freedom Party is a Nazi party—it is a right wing populist party, attractive to people who don’t want to try hard.  They are happy to have social security but they are jealous of other people.  They ended up fishing in the same pool as the Social Democrats. 

I am in principle willing to vote for any party—other than the Freedom Party.  But I became dissatisfied with the leftists, which is why I vote for the conservatives.  But calling myself a conservative is too much.   The left as I see it has turned hypocritical, a better term is dishonest.   

I agree with our general social democratic structure.  There is a general consensus about this. 

There are some things in left wing ideology which are not common sense.  Things are never your fault, they are the fault of society.

The Freedom Party is not opposed to a policy of strong government intervention in the economy.  This fact is often ignored.  National Socialism was also socialism of some kind.  One of the big scandals was when Haider was governor of Carinthia.  He was accused of Nazi sympathies.  At some point he said the Nazis had had a good employment policy.  This caused an uproar, and this caused his resignation as governor.  But this had some truth.   They built up the army and they stole from the Jews, but they had some kind of social democratic policy.  There are connections and similarities between the outer left and the outer right.  

Session 4, recording 1

February 5, 2024.   

Larry:  Bobby and I had three previous conversations and we are having our last conversation for this purpose today.   We would like to talk with Bobby about his career and his life as a father of two children.  We are also sitting in Bobby’s apartment eating wonderful cake made by Louise and having coffee—I’m in something better than a Vienna coffee house because Louise’s cake is better than in most coffee houses.  Let’s talk about your professional post-doctoral career and how you ended up teaching and the kind of work you did as a scientist.

I studied at Vienna University, which ended in 1974;  a year later I married, a catholic woman, Elizabeth, whom I had met in the midst of the leftist students movement.  She was part of that; I was part of that naturally because of my background; in Vienna it was not as big as its German analog.   Many  of the people participating were like myself, people from a leftist or even communist family background—so many were Jewish youngsters from a communist background.   My wife is from a Catholic background in Styria, so her family was by no means leftist.  

But as to the professional thing, I remained at Vienna University.  I got what would be called in the United States an assistant professorship;  I continued what I had been doing in my Phd plus some teaching. It was then called Universitätsassistent.   I must say I sometimes feel a bit to my shame that most of my career was at Vienna University.  In that sense most of my career was quite linear.  Physics and mathematical physics are of course  highly international disciplines—I had extended stays at Oxford and Cambridge and in the US, for reasons of research or scientific collaboration or giving lectures, but except for a whole year at Oxford, I was always based in Vienna.  In terms of the subject on which I worked, I was educated as a physicist, but there is of course, the way that mathematics is being used, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities.  At Oxford in 1977 I was at the department of astrophysics.  My field in physics gravity and relativity has a close relationship to these things.  But I disliked getting more physical and close to observations, so I became more mathematical. 

Physics is the study of the basic laws of nature.  This concerns all non-living things, but in principle also organic things, if one is as I am, a reductionist, then practically everything, including living things and the brain, all come down to physics in the end, even if carrying that out is a project for the future.  The phenomenon of conscience for example is a problem for biologists and philosophers, but for us it comes down to physics.  What makes it physics is the way these laws are described, namely that they are described in the language of mathematics.   Physics finds these laws and making predictions from them, and comparing with observation.  There is a spectrum, how mathematical one wants to get.  My field is general relativity, this is very mathematical, and it has turned out, particularly in recent decades, that predictions made on purely mathematical analysis have been vindicated by experiments.  The primary example of this is black holes, which are mathematical predictions, there is now huge experimental evidence of their existence.  I ended up being a bit more of a mathematician than a physicist. 

The movement of the planets, where physics started by Galileo and Newton, radiation, etc., all studied by astronomers and astrophysicists—this is not what I’m really good at.  I like to concentrate on small things.  Within mathematics, one has some clear assumptions, one starts with everything on a piece of paper, focusing on a problem. 

Of course for reasons I’ve just mentioned, it’s not something that is very closely related to experiment, but the first real problem I tackled, 2-3 years after my Phd was something like the following.  If you think of a heavy body like the earth, and it’s gravitational field, and you look at it from a large distance, it is rotationally symmetric.   As you move closer, you see more details of the shape of this body, and you look at it order by order, with more structure.  There is a way to describe this field by certain quantities, called multipole moments.  There are more of them as you move closer.  There was a question as to whether these multipole moments allow you to reconstruct the gravitational field that these moments create.   Together with a younger colleague, I was able to solve this problem.  This was one of my first successes.  

Astrophysics is its own discipline, derived from a number of theories, but too complex  to be mathematically rigorous.

I work from problem to problem.  In most cases, it was a logical thing.  I moved from one to the next.  Every solution gives rise to new questions. Of course there were changes.  One relatively drastic change, happened in about 2000, exactly the time of the breakup of my marriage   ( I married in 1975.)   I worked with  Bernd Schmidt, with whom I had already collaborated before. He was German.  He proposed to me the field of continuum mechanics, bodies have elastic properties, they are not merely points.  He posed this issue to me.  That for me was a wonderful experience, personally and as a scientist.  When my marriage broke up, since it was I who had left, I had a bad conscience, and everyone had known me as a family man.  I was worried about retrieving my humanity, and it helped to have friends who still thought of you as a friend, even under changed circumstances.  I had to some degree to recreate myself.  This new subject was very different from what I had been doing before.  I had always been concerned with the vacuum.  There can be gravitational fields without bodies. In principle, the world could exist without bodies, but lots of interesting things could still be going on.  For example a gravitational wave: In principle to understand these things, you can imagine them as something, not created by matter, but freely propagating in space.  We know that the universe started in a big bang.  There can, in principle, be different kinds of radiation, that were there from the beginning.  There is a class of differential equations that describe waves, a wave of particles, or electromagnetic waves, without particles, just waves in vacuum.  A lot of things can be done in my field by ignoring matter.  It was a big change for me, in 2000, to now start to think about matter.  The theory I worked on with Bernd, was elasticity, elastic bodies.  We started developing tools.  This was my main interest for 20 years, a bit less since Bernd died a year ago.  We worked on this together for almost 25 years.  He had been a scientist at an astrophysics institute in southern Germany, then in Potsdam, and then lived his last years in Munich. 

This is not the highest profile field.  It is a bit of a fringe subject, but I think it was a success.  I think we were able to do things that have some lasting value.  That has been my main focus, trying to produce some things that have usefulness over time. 

Session 4, recording 2

February 25, 2024

Bobby was telling me about the re-orientation of his work after he began working with his colleague Bernd. 

I want to spend a few minutes talking about friendship as I experienced it in connection with scientific collaboration. I have always had very few friends, almost all of them were colleagues.  Not all of them; Larry is a recent acquisition as a friend.   Science of course is not only collaborative, it is also competitive.  There can be friendship but also enormous competition and hate.  There are fields where people are so eager for success that they might even steal their colleagues ideas.  In my field I was lucky that this rarely happened.  I had situations like that, but mostly I found there was friendly collaboration and a positive attitude towards what other people are doing. In a collaboration one is interested together in solving some scientific problem, and there is the personal side.  One is invited to dinner and gets to know each other’s family.  But mostly one does not talk too much about those things.  Nonetheless this is a way to get to know each other very well, maybe even better than from discussing one’s private life. 

When you work on a problem, there are several things that you have to learn, for example.  

The two people are not good at the same things.  There are things where I can rely on the other person more than on myself, and the converse.  For that reason every collaboration is different because of the different capabilities. Also there are emotions which are not reflected in the end product but which play a role in pursuing the subject.  Most of the people with whom I collaborated, I think I knew them very well, and they knew me very well.  

It had been a deficiency in my marriage that we had very few friends whom we would meet on a regular basis.  So there was much focus inwards rather than outwards.  For example, when I left the maternal (marital) apartment, I stayed in my mother’s place for a few weeks.  For many weeks I received no phone calls, after we split up.  Of course I had meetings with my children and things to discuss with my ex-wife, but there was no one around to miss me.  But this was made up for in my professional life. 

In the previous recording I mentioned a change of field in connection with the breakup of my marriage.  Bernd suggested the topic.  Of course there would have been many things in a different setting—people might have asked what happened or how I was feeling.  But this was not done.  What Bernd gave me was something to work on.  In addition to this area having been of interest to him for a long time, he knew exactly what was needed for me.  The other thing; it was good; they (Bernd and his wife)  had known my family and my wife, and they welcomed Louise.  They had in those days a wonderful house in Werder near Potsdam, and we visited them. I spent extended periods at the Max-Planck institute there working on this new project.  Louise who was still married in those days was here (in Vienna).  They did not have initial reservations; they could have viewed her as the culprit.  They didn’t, and that was something wonderful that they did for me and for us,  I might say.  

Maybe this is neither here nor there, there is something funny about the breakup of a marriage in my experience, which is just an observation that I find interesting: how this is viewed by people outside.  It is a bit as if marriage is an important institution in bourgeois life.   When a marriage breaks up, when people think of it has having been a happy marriage, it’s as if the universe holds its breath for a moment.  Of course there are women, wives of friends, who get worried, who might find that I might be an example for their husbands, so they tend to be a bit skeptical, but also men suddenly say things about their own life which they hadn’t said before and a few weeks later they wouldn’t repeat.  It’s a bit like a moment of truth, happily forgotten. 

Session 4, recording 3    

My children. 

My son’s wife has two practically-grown children whom my son thinks of as his step children.  My daughter has a girl and a boy.  Maybe I could start out by saying something in principle about the experience of birth, from my personal perspective.  I always wanted to have children, so I did.  The advent of a child was something I experienced in a special way, although I received no religious education.  The experience of a child being born—the idea of the Messiah is something which I can relate to in connection with the birth of a child.  In the Christian tradition, this is also very clear and strangely as it may sound, it has some connection with science.  Science goes on and on, knowledge and open problems are also passed on.  When a child is born, one doesn’t know what it will be, it’s specific strengths and weaknesses.  Being born as a human being, the life of this little human being; it will be tested by life, but it’s also that the world is to some degree tested by the new child.  The child can look at the world in a new way, in different unforeseen ways, I mean I’m not necessarily thinking about saving the world, but it could make contributions to mankind, and it could solve problems, and it will be critical of the world.  Particularly young people are always critical about society and their parents.  All these are a test on both sides, so in a scientific experiment, something similar takes place.  

This is a feeling I had when my children were born, particularly when my son was born, this was my first experience.  People told me, at the time that my children were born, that I appeared them somehow different, elated.  I didn’t notice myself, but if that was the case, it was due to feelings like that.  This is why I think it important to have children, it is important to one’s growth as a human being.  Of course there is again in the world of science something similar in dealing with the next generation, with younger colleagues, collaborating with them or seeing the progress they make has been part of the joy in professional life. 

As far as my own children are concerned . . .  when I try to describe them, the first thing is that they are very different from one another.   With a background such as mine, knowing what happened during the Holocaust, I sometimes looked at my children and imagined (sick) that something might happen to them.  (Larry interjects:  You’re not the only one who was raised that way.)  I imagined, supposed, the most terrible thought that they would be deported somewhere.  What would happen and how would they react?   This is a terrible thought experiment but it says how I see the differences between them. 

(Note added: I should rather say the following is how I thought of their difference when they were little – perhaps not when I think of them as the adult persons they are now.)  

If this happened to my son, he would pretend to be dead, to somehow find his way or be forgotten. He would have worse chances to escape in an early stage, but if things get worse and worse, because of his way of somehow pretending to be dead he might be overlooked, but stand a good chance of surviving.  My daughter would behave differently–she would create hell to people, maybe they would let her run way, just to get rid of her.  Maybe if that didn’t work, she would have a worse chance than he to survive.  So this is how I saw the difference between my children. It’s a sick picture; it is something which . . . (Larry: you are describing their personalities in the context of your fear.)

Bobby written notes after the interview:  

Despite their differences in temperament and sometimes different opinions, there are things my children have in common. They are both very intelligent. Equally important: they have independent yet open minds. Families with a Jewish-leftist backgrounds tend to have children – if they have any – echoing their parents’ beliefs. They would typically vote for the Greens and be critical of all forms of patriotism, in particular concerning Austria.  My children, on the    contrary have ‘come a long way’ from where I – and to some degree their mother – stood when I was young. They know of course where they come from. The present document is an attempt to make sure this extends to my grandchildren.

Session 5, new recording

May 26, 2024

This is Larry Sicular sitting in my apartment in Vienna talking with my friend Bobby Beig. 

We are now going to record a last session of his oral history and today’s session is about his family life.  

So, Bobby, we talked about your work, so perhaps you can talk a bit about what you did outside of work. 

So well, I must say, I was never a person, although my work was certainly of great interest to me, and I worked a lot at home on and off, my family also meant a lot to me too, particularly in the growing up of my children.  Also we had colleagues over for dinner, and either they (the children) would listen quietly or take part in the conversation, and what was important to me always was their intellectual development.  I wasn’t so aware of that at the time.  Now that I’m seeing my granddaughter and also my grandson and watching them grow up and listening to the things they say, I am much more aware of this, how interesting it is, what goes on in a child’s mind, and how it expresses it in words.  That is another thing, that concerns my own development.  I never did well at German, but language means a lot to me, even in a scientific context.  Perhaps this will change with AI, but mathematics, as it has been done for centuries, requires language.  I care about language, about clarity in language, and it is something one sees very rarely, and I certainly hoped my children would grow up as persons who try to think hard about certain things and try to express them in a clear fashion.  And that was the most important thing to me.  And I must say, despite their differences, it is something that has worked out wonderfully.  So they are different in many ways.  My son is more gentle in some ways, more understanding.  My daughter can be quite tough, but they both know what it takes to form an opinion and express it in a clear fashion. In writing a text, on politics, science, it is hard to say something both clear and correct.  There are very few ways to say something that is right, correct and relevant.  To be aware of that is very important.  And it is something that I have seen both my children being very good at, in different ways. 

My son now has for most of his life worked as a journalist, so he has to write about things.  When I read things he writes, not always, many times I agree with him, and I also like his style of writing, the way he does write.  This despite the fact that in his political creed he moved—well I did move to the right too—but he more so than I.  But it never goes to the point that he writes in a fanatic or irrational way.  So, yes, he also has a musical talent.  He wrote music; he has training as a composer.  What I have seen when he grew up, was a certain talent that might have cut him out for being a film director, or at least a composer of film music, which didn’t happen for several reasons—Austria is not the right place for such a career—but it is something that I hope.  He has written pieces of music, waltzes; he wrote during the lockdown.  Nothing career wise came out of this, but maybe that could still happen when at some point he retires from his job.  My daughter is a lawyer, but she spent several years at university, not just for the study.  She has written original papers on legal issues which entered books and things and in one case (was) cited by the Supreme Court.  Her training as a lawyer isn’t quite complete yet due to interruptions, such as the children and so on.  But she’s as a lawyer not just a standard lawyer, so she can in principle deal with difficult cases, WITH things that are not a routine job, but which require somebody who understands things from scratch, so to speak, and she is able to do that.  She is fast (at) understanding things and she is able to function under pressure. So I think about strengths in my children and things which I respect and which give me a sense of pride, also because I think that it has to do with them, but also a little bit with the way they grew up. 

How did you and your wife manage things so that they learned these skills?

You don’t learn this, even in science.  The most important things are not the lines but what is between the lines, so for example, one has a discussion about any issue, and then listens to another person.  And then this awareness when a point comes, perhaps a hidden assumption that you have to point out.  So it is this kind of awareness which requires intelligence and growing up in an environment where this is valued.  I think children don’t learn these things directly, but they acquire a sense that this is important, and more importantly they find that they are good at it, and then of course, they further develop it.  

January 2024

I have feelings about this war—fear, horror, disappointment, but it has been harder to know what to think.  I read the newspapers, trying to make up for a lack of expertise and primary sources.   I want to have an opinion. 

Israel

History argues for a Jewish state, some place where Jews are not a hated minority, someplace to run when we are not accepted, a place where some of us can choose  to defend ourselves.

In the 20^th century, defenselessness, our age-old strategy in Europe, was no longer workable.  The re-creation of Israel is more than a connection with our ancient history; it is a statement that Jews, at least some of us, are no longer willing to be passive.  Was any other solution possible?   Did western Europe or the United States save us?  Should we have chosen to disappear?  Israel became a necessity, and so it must survive. 

But I am not Palestinian.  It is not too difficult to understand that after hundreds, thousands of years, the Palestinians were less than enthusiastic about the return/immigration of large numbers of Jews, initially from Europe, the re-creation of a Hebrew society and the establishment of a new/revived, ethnic/religious state.  Whatever, the wisdom of their reaction, and many would argue that they have not been terribly wise—the Palestinians have steadily lost territory in a series of conflicts since 1948.  With more and more of them on less and less land, most Palestinians have been effectively pushed aside. 

Does this excuse terrorism or remove Israel’s right to defend itself?   It does not, and whether or not the reader agrees with that, it won’t stop Israel from doing so.  Israel exists, among other reasons, to defend its citizens and the Jewish people.  But in order to avoid a repeat of endless wars, Israelis, and all Jews, need be guided by an understanding that Israel’s foundations were not entirely pure and good.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to pass around. 

There was/is . . 

–the inevitability of  Zionism (European nationalism and antisemitism).

–the unwillingness of the United States and other countries to accept Jewish refugees prior to the Holocaust.

–the forced emigration of hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews to Israel after its foundation (and yet their “return” is no longer an issue)

–the unwillingness of the Arab states to effectively absorb their displaced co-religionists (unlike Israel)

–their unwillingness (until recently) and that of many Palestinians to accept a Jewish state in Israel, despite the arguable justification and, more importantly, the practical necessity of doing so.

–the unwillingness of Israel to effectively foster a separate Palestinian state, when it has had some ability to do so.  

The circumstances of the Palestinians is a problem that Israel should address, differently, since it is now the stronger party, since the Palestinians themselves are unable or unwilling to find a solution,  since the Arab states (and others) will not or cannot do so, and because Israel does not have the power to avoid doing so. 

The Palestinians were dispossessed through a combination of Jewish persistence and their own bad choices;  but there is legitimacy to Palestinian claims.  That does not mean that Israel should dissolve itself—the United States and Canada are not being returned to the American Indians, nor is any country in the Americas, nor will the Germans be permitted to repopulate the cities of Eastern Europe, nor will Islam willingly retreat to the Arabian peninsula and restore Christianity in Byzantium.  Nor is the inability of Palestinians to legitimize Israel the fundamental issue.  Rather, if Israel wants peace, if Jews wish to move beyond present circumstances, we might recognize that our history in Israel has not always been glorious. 

The alternative, the need to always be “right”,  is to continually repeat history, a series of wars, occupation and domination, even possibly genocide (ours or theirs).  All are terrible.   Jews have a self-designated role in the world, that of an enlightened and direct relationship with God.  That view might encourage us to think about solutions that reflect not only our will to survive, but also whom we want to be.   

The October 7 attack and the Israeli response

The October 7 attack was unspeakable; it was barbaric, and since it was an organized massacre of Jews, it was a pogrom.  It was conducted by people who consider themselves to be aggrieved, to be victims.  How else can they have possibly justified and celebrated cruelty?

It was also a major security lapse by the Israeli state, which controlled, or presumably controlled, the Gaza border. 

The Israeli reaction has been fierce, which may be a deterrent, but it has also been argued that it is disproportionate.  The number of subsequent deaths, estimated by Hamas at over 22,000, far exceeds the 1,200 Israelis murdered.  The circumstances of the Gazan deaths may be less barbaric, but only if one argues that death by bombing is less cruel than death and murder close up, by shooting,  by violation and by mutilation.  And this does not take into account the destruction of buildings and infrastructure. 

Israel’s government has decided to destroy Hamas and its military capabilities, even at  enormous cost.  But can Hamas itself, and the base of its support and revival really be destroyed?   Morality aside,  it might be feasible.  Destruction and death, enough of it, can end opposition.  But this assumes a long war, a lengthy occupation, re-education of the Palestinian population to a more moderate position—and a complete rebuilding of Gaza, its buildings and its economy.  This might be something like what the Allies did after beating and destroying Germany in World War II (as Netanyahu has said).  However, the Palestinians continue to have varying support in the surrounding Arab states, and there is substantial international sympathy for the justness of their position.  The Germans may also have had legitimate grievances, but the Nazis sacrificed them to an extreme agenda and were without support at the end of the Second World War. 

Can Israel afford this strategy?   It  would be extremely expensive.  Israel is not likely able or willing to pay for it.  US,  European and Arab participation in a rebuilding project may be inadequate.   Should the US pressure Israel to ease its destructive reaction?  The US government has not applied maximum pressure, at least in public, and in public, the Israeli prime minister has indicated that he will not yield to outside pressure.  

In these circumstances, there is uncertainty as to how much leverage the United States has and how dependent Israel is on US financial and arms support.  The United States may not have the power to insist; this war is viewed as existential in Israel.  Despite a virulent anti-Israel reaction on the left, it is not clear how much free-maneuver the US administration has, given substantial support for Israel in the United States. 

Even in these circumstances, the United States could have taken, and can still take, a more hands off position, supportive, but perhaps less willing to supply arms or additional funding for the very aggressive approach that Israel has chosen.  The administration has argued that it has more influence by working with the Israeli government within the context of overall support, and the Prime Minister’s public statements are already countered by this article in Haaretz, reporting that the US has calmed its demands for an early end to the war, in exchange for more aid and more protection of civilians.   https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-25/ty-article/.premium/biden-lets-israel-proceed-as-long-more-humanitarian-aid-enters-gaza/0000018c-9d79-ddc3-a1bf-bf7fa1f90000

The Israeli government  also had other choices.  The October 7 attack was an intelligence and military failure.  The border was not secured, so Israel’s first reaction might have been to secure it.  Hamas is deeply imbedded in Gaza, so its military structure and military support cannot be entirely destroyed, militarily, without killing much of the population.  Killing all Hamas supporters is not practical or moral.  Killing a  substantial minority of them, even if unintentional or regrettable, is killing nevertheless, and it does not seem to diminish civilian support among  Palestinians, indeed support for Hamas has risen on the West Bank.   

A friend in Vienna, who has some psychological training, attended a meeting with a professional psychologist who had visited Israel . . . his diagnosis was trauma.  Indeed Israel has been traumatized, and its reaction traumatic. 

A more limited reaction, a retaliation against the perpetrators or the leaders, more targeted strikes, together with better border defenses, might have been a short-term alternative to the goal of total eradication.  How to fight a more limited war is not my expertise; Hamas continues to launch rockets into Israel.  A military reaction was probably necessary, but a more strategic, even-if-long-term campaign might have been a better step to a longer term solution. 

A longer term solution for Israel

As we have read, the Israeli government’s (or Netanyahu’s)  previous strategy allowed for the funding of Hamas (by Qatar) and was supposed to have been a material disincentive for this attack.  That failed, although there are no easy solutions against an adversary that does not accept the basis for  Israel’s existence. 

Although it failed, the previous strategy did not require the agreement of Palestinians.  Negotiated solutions require agreements,  whereas strategies and shorter-term solutions can be pursued by one party or the other unilaterally.  Since a negotiated solution may be impossible at this point, it may be preferable to seek progress from a more flexible position.  But what is progress?   Certainly for the Israelis, the first priority is to ensure against further attacks from rockets and from invasions.   That is no easy taske, but next priority should be peace.  How can it best do this?

Hamas funding

A first might be to defang Hamas, even if it cannot be entirely eliminated.  And the least painful way to disable it may be to go after its money.  This was addressed  in an opinion piece by Yair Lapid, the former Israeli prime minister in a December 10 Haaretz article https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-12-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-best-way-israel-can-destroy-hamas-is-by-attacking-their-financial-networks/0000018c-5001-df2f-adac-fe2d39920000    On December 16, there was also an article in the New York Times on this issue.   

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/europe/israel-hamas-money-finance-turkey-intelligence-attacks.html   Hamas has funding and Israel and its allies have some power to reduce or close its funding sources, a critical next step.  Knowing how to do this is going to be critical after this war and in the rebuilding of Gaza.  Mechanisms will be needed to ensure the money goes to civilian rather than to military purposes, if necessary, re-routing or closing the spigot when it does not.  This will be an ongoing and complex problem, as it has already been asserted that aid to civilians in Gaza is being diverted to Hamas.  

A broader strategy

The most interesting and pragmatic summary of a broader strategy that I have heard or read was in Ezra Klein’s (New York Times) December interview with Nimrod Novik,  a former policy advisor to Shimon Peres (who preceded Netanyahu), formerly involved in a number of negotiations with the Palestinians and the Arab states, and a member of Commanders for Israel’s security, an organization of retired military and intelligence people who have been studying this issue.  

The following summarizes and partially re-words what he said, and here is a link to the podcast. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nimrod-novik.html

Right now, there is no prospect for a two state solution, according to Mr. Novik’s group, but it is still important long term.  It has been clear for some time that the status quo is a mirage, given creeping annexation and the increasingly ineffective Palestinian Authority.  The Authority has been delegitimized, weakened and choked financially,  by the Israeli government, and the current Israeli government has also supported Hamas authority in Gaza, despite the periodic violence.  This did not work, yet there are things that Israel can still do to prevent the disaster of a one-state solution. 

Two states is still the preferable solution, because these two people cannot live together in one state.  The Palestinians can govern themselves—that was shown in 2007 and 2008, when the PA was revived dramatically.  Then Netanyahu was elected in 2009, and the Palestinian Authority was choked  and turned into a subcontractor of the occupation.  In the meantime, the PA became increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian.  

Israel must nevertheless commit itself to an eventual two-state solution says Novik.  If there is one state,  Jews will be a minority or a marginal majority in a state with equal rights, or Palestinians will have to forego equal rights.  Neither is possible, so separation is the only choice.  Movement towards separation is possible, even without two states, by reversing the slide towards one-state, that is the increased settlement, and by increasingly the capacity of the Palestinian Authority, while maintaining overall security by Israel until a deal is struck. 

In order to revive the Palestinian Authority, Israel needs to expand its geographic control,  giving-up small chunks of the West Bank, specifically areas that allow for contiguity between Palestinian areas, instead of the current swiss-cheese, which leaves these areas surrounded by Israelis.  There are also economic measures that would allow the PA to deliver, instead of the present practice, that is withholding tax revenue that is theirs and the main chunk of their budget. The PA cannot have legitimacy for its population if it is not the vehicle leading towards statehood, however long that might take. 

The only solution that will allow Israel to leave the Gaza strip is the PA, even in its current miserable state.  It will take years to revitalize it, and it cannot walk into Gaza as a proxy for Israel.  There needs to be a third party arrangement, for now.  The Palestinian Authority may not now be able to govern in Gaza, but it is needed to give legitimacy to whatever party governs Gaza when Israel pulls out.  The prime minister has said no to PA governance in Gaza, but there is no one else.  Under this government, Israel will be stuck in Gaza, running everything. 

The previous popularity of the Palestinian Authority depended on the viability of the Oslo Process.  That failed.  Now only Hamas is seen as doing anything about the occupation.  Novik blames Israel for teaching the Palestinians the wrong lessons.  After every round of violence, Hamas was rewarded with money and concessions, while the PA was choked, and the consequences in Gaza are devastating.  There are others to criticize, but as an Israeli he channels his complaints to his own government, which is supposed to service the security and well-being of the country.  The right wing members of the current government are using the war to do terrible things on the West Bank and to make sure that there is never a two-state solution.  All he can try to do is advocate a different course that will eventually lead to a different reality.

When Israel play its cards wrong, the consequences are serious.  There was an intelligence failure, where Hamas plans were known but dismissed.  If they had been taken seriously we might be living in a different reality.  The Prime Minister refuses to take responsibility, and he has lost public support.  He is accused of conducting the war with a conflict of interest, given his legal troubles.  He needs to go, and yet he may have an incentive to keep the war going.   We may pay a price for insisting that he is not gone—hopefully other members of government and the military heads are keeping tabs on any irregularity.  

The government did not exist the morning after October 7.  Not a single government agency was able to perform its duties.  It was voluntary organizations that stepped in for evacuees, that organized search and rescue missions, immediately after the attack, to find those in hiding.  The voluntary energy was huge.  When a prime minister appoints incompetent ministers, and they their own hacks, the professionals are unable to perform. 

Either Israelis separate from the Palestinians, or the Zionist dream is over.  It is a question of how to do it and whether the right leader can accomplish it.   The Commanders have been following public opinion, and Israelis don’t vote the Palestinian issue—typically there are other voting issues.   They vote Netanyahu, and he is an effective campaigner, or they vote the economy.  But if you check on the Palestinian issue, at least a plurality, if not a majority, would choose a pragmatic outcome.  If we have an Israeli government that goes for it, it will have majority support.  The problem is leadership.

Views evolve

As I read or listen, my own views evolve.   Without knowing whether Lapid or Novik are entirely correct, these are the opinions that command my attention, because they focus on protecting Israel while being practical and human and offering a vision for something better on all sides of this conflict.  The Israelis will almost certainly win the current war in Gaza.  After the war there will hopefully be peace, and reconstruction, but a long-lasting peace will be a peace that lifts oppression. 

The reaction in the United States

The reaction to the Gaza war in the United States has become a major issue, and it is important for American Jewry.  The present administration, in Washington, has given Israel substantive support, and there is considerable backing for Israel in Congress and in the American public.  Arguably this support has been too unconditional.  Without dictating to the Israelis, it might  have been wiser to condition American support, earlier and more forcefully. 

I have nevertheless been shocked by the intensity of the anti-Israeli reaction. I should not have been—the narrative has shifted from defenseless Israel, surrounded by hostile Arabs, to imperialistic/ occupier Israel, dominating the Palestinians.  The facts on the ground have indeed changed; Israel has become stronger, and both narratives have their truth.  That is not my fear.  Instead is the virulence and the focus on the Israel-Palestine issue, when there have been so many other misbehaviors, including our own historic “occupation” in the United States, the death and displacement in our Iraq and Afghan wars, and this is a short list.  (A quick google search of the number of deaths and refugees in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that the Gaza War is small potatoes, although very intense.)

The focus on this particular conflict has several reasons. 

–There is the virulence of the Israeli reaction, when there are arguably other choices.  (Of course Hamas made and continues to make choices that promote its cause but are seemingly indifferent to Palestinian lives.)

–In addition, and to their credit, the Palestinians have been effective at advocating their cause.  They have had decades and the intelligence to do it, and they have gained support. 

–Israel and the West Bank are the Holy Land; this is a part of the world that commands the attention of the West and of the Middle East.   Because of its history, it is not ignored.  

–Israel has come to be viewed as a western, colonialist state.  This is not entirely true, as more or less half of Israelis come from the Middle East, but it has enough truth to catch on. 

And this is a time when western dominance and western colonial history are justifiably criticized, forgetting perhaps that western colonialism was a recent and effective form of human domination and cruelty, but by no means the first and only one. 

The danger of this focus is that it has leached into antisemitism.  While Gazan civilians are considered to be innocents, even if sympathetic to Hamas,  Israelis are not.   Even American Jews are viewed as white and privileged, which we are in the American context, and as a critical component of US government support for Israel.  This is probably true, whatever our varied opinions.  Nevertheless, I do not accept anti-Semitic co-branding.  It is much too dangerous and much too familiar; the degradations of the 20^th century, the reasons Israel exists, are much too easily forgotten.

Fear

And thus my shocked reaction to recent congressional hearings, where three university presidents gave qualified answers to Elise Stefanik’s question, asking whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules on bullying and harassment.  She cornered them, with the most extreme question possible.

Only Dr. Kornbluth of MIT parried the question, pointing out that she had not heard calls for the genocide of Jews on her campus.  She said she had heard chants which can be anti-Semitic, depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.  The presidents of Penn and Harvard however handled the repeated questions much less effectively, focusing on context and imminent threat, as if calling for genocide were not itself an imminent threat. 

I reacted emotionally to these answers, less so now with time, more reading and listening to the hearings again. I was surprised at how poorly these presidents defended themselves. I understood clearly, as though for the first time, that calling for the genocide of Jews might be acceptable.  For me this means that I no longer assume my safety in the United States.  The life I have had and its privileges no longer protect me.  As the wind blows, as time and politics change, kind, well-intentioned, highly placed people, may not defend us.  Should I be surprised?  Isn’t this Jewish history?   Didn’t I learn, years ago, that ethics yield quickly to general opinion, or self-interest?  But I believed in American exceptionalism and never imagined this. . . not in the world that I come from, not here. 

We do have a constitutional tradition of free speech, and so I remembered something years ago about  Nazis having been permitted to march in Skokie, Illinois.   A 2020 article by David Goldberger is posted on-line,  “How I Came to Represent the Free-Speech Rights of Nazis”, on the American Civil Liberties Union website.   It explains that the logic for taking and winning the 1977 court cases was the ACLU’s commitment to the First Amendment and to free speech, no matter how offensive the opinion.  He wrote,   “Central to the ACLU’s mission is the understanding that if the government can prevent lawful speech because it is offensive and hateful, then it can prevent any speech that it dislikes.”   In court against the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU also argued that possible emotional harm was not a valid reason to deny the Nazi demonstrators’ rights.  (Of course universities are not governments or public places; I have read in more than one source, that private universities do have some right to limit speech on their campuses, although they may choose not to do so.) 

In a recent opinion, Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist, accused the intellectual left of a double standard, arguing that the presumed need to defend free speech runs counter to the actual and ongoing censorship of “unacceptable” viewpoints on many university campuses.  In that context, the refusal to censor a call for Jewish genocide is unacceptable and anti-Semitic.   Free speech he wrote, requires accepting all controversial views.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/antisemitism-college-free-speech.html

My view is that we should have leaders who believe in limits on behavior and moral guidance, whose notions of right and wrong are clear, not absolute but to be absolutely defended.  We already killed the indigenous people in this country, and pushed them into reservations, much more effectively than the Israelis, and not too terribly long ago.  We benefitted, all of us, including those of us who immigrated afterwards, and we have effectively buried that sin.  It needs to be recalled. 

Calling for genocide again is extremely dangerous.  We can allow for criticism without permitting calls for genocide.   Stefanik was right; in this there is no context or relativism.  The sin of genocide is absolute.  

Therefore, within our free speech tradition, not every speech need be permitted, at least not with the public platform of a town park or a university campus.  Nor is the concept of “imminent lawless action” satisfactory.  It curtails speech only when the incitement is imminent and likely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action), yet even an eventual threat can be very dangerous. 

Incendiary speech may not be threatening, when it is unlikely or occasional, and when the speakers are isolated individuals or small fringe groups, such as the Nazis were in the 1970’s.  But extreme views, and advocating violence, become much more serious when they become a movement and appeal to large numbers of people and their leaders.   Do we really want to live in a society where criticism of Israel leaches into overt anti-Semitism or other forms of prejudice or racism on campuses and in our cities?  Should we be protecting speech that advocates violence or extermination, of migrants or of white men or “occupiers”?  We have some rethinking to do if we are to survive as both a democracy and as a liberal society.  A liberal society is democracy with some limits.  No society works on absolute principles.