As featured on The Cambridge Language Collective
Illustration: Lily Lowe
As I was writing the last chapter of my Year Abroad Project, like every other MML student I know, not more than a fortnight before the deadline, I stumbled across a book which not only articulated everything my dissertation had set out to cover, but was also engaging, personal, and incredibly moving. I put aside my laptop, spent two days reading the book, and finished it with a much clearer sense of where my dissertation was heading, and what the point of writing it was - always a helpful thing to know. The rules of the University state that I can’t reveal much about my dissertation at all, but some thoughts on The Lost Café Schindler will hopefully explain why it provides far more of an engaging insight into Austrian cultural history than anything I’ve cobbled together.
Published in May 2021 and currently only available in English, Schindler’s historical memoir is a striking new addition to a fairly overcrowded genre. Having spent a delightful year in Vienna sampling Apfelstrudel and thinking about what it means to be Austrian, it was the final paragraph of the blurb which had caught my attention:
“Through the story of the Café Schindler and the threads that spool out from it, this moving book weaves together memoir, family history and an untold story of the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It explores the restorative power of writing, and offers readers a profound reflection on memory, truth, trauma and the importance of cake.”
Following the death of her father in 2017, Meriel Schindler set about piecing together her family history, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the stories her father had told about their ancestral past. From conversations with relatives scattered across the world, dusty files in Austrian archives, and the jumble of papers and artefacts left behind in her father’s cottage, a complex story spanning over the past two centuries emerges. Where it is so easy to be weighed down by historical contextual information or biographical details, Schindler brings her ancestors to life by telling of their daily joys and struggles with sensitivity and feeling. As the story unfolds, we witness turmoil caused by the two World Wars seep into the personal and family sphere, and the devastating reality of anti-Semitic policies and laws. The focus on the Café Schindler, a Viennese style Kaffeehaus at the heart of Innsbruck, ties the many threads of the family history together, while the changes in its management and customers provide a more tangible way of charting historical developments.
Working in the library on my dissertation, it was all too easy to keep historical sources at an arm’s length, to maintain a safe distance between the academic work of the present and the uncomfortable realities of the past. Picking up The Lost Café Schindler brought these realities into my hands; the suffering and losses of one family told so evocatively I could hardly look away. The German word Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, comes to mind and describes many of the themes and questions raised by such books. How do the stories of our ancestors, the gaps in family trees and the old buildings around us fit into the narratives of the present? What is the most effective way to remember the stories cut short by the Holocaust, the voices of the oppressed throughout our recent history? Changing the school curriculum, marking important historical anniversaries, and creating memorials are just a few of the ways German and Austrian governments and institutions have gone about doing this. Yet as a fellow German student recently reminded us in class, the great Austrian author Robert Musil famously wrote, ‘Nichts ist so unsichtbar wie ein Denkmal’ – ‘Nothing is as invisible as a memorial’.
The passage of time means that there will come a point, most likely within my lifetime, when the last of those who lived through the War will pass away. The duty of learning about the past and remembering the suffering of previous generations will fall to us ‘millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’. What then? Just the phrase ‘Gen Z’ conjures up cringeworthy TikTok compilations and queues for bubble tea. It’s rather striking to consider our generation assuming the responsibility of our grandparents in terms of Erinnerungskultur.
These are much broader questions which The Lost Café Schindler does not set out to answer, but rather prompts us to consider urgently. In the epilogue, Schindler writes of the installation of Stolpersteine in Vienna in 2020, which bear the names of Sofie Schindler, and of Martha and Siegfried Salzer, her great-grandmother, and great-aunt and great-uncle, who were murdered in the Holocaust. They add to the approximately 75,000 little stones nestled among the paving stones of Europe which bear the names of the victims of the Holocaust. These small reminders which interrupt mundane walks to work embed the past into the present day and recall names which are as much a part of the city’s history as the names on the doors they lie beneath. There is something very powerful and moving about happening upon a forgotten name or an untold story. I hope that you too will stumble across The Lost Café Schindler soon.