Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (1934)

This is Mitchison's account in diary form of travelling to Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the civil war of early 1934. Social Democrats had been attempting an uprising against Dollfuss' increasingly right wing and authoritarian government. As far as I can understand, the fledgling Nazi party was as poorly thought of as the Social Democrats. There was a state of affairs where many cultural currents overlapped, either actually or notionally. The Nazis were still seen, as their name implied, as socialist. The Dollfuss government itself was anti-Jewish, seemingly 'owning' that standpoint; Nazi agreement with it being virtually a side issue. In this web of unclarity, the uprising had been crushed, initially by gun power, though to be fair the uprisers were armed and their socialist housing complexes, newly built post-war, became gun emplacements of their own. But subsequently, the crushing took a less obvious aspect. Known Social Democratic sympathisers were jailed without trial, some were 'quietly' shot in small altercations. Women and children, left behind in virtually mortar-bombed non-functioning flats and houses, were given no aid, no food, no medicine. Jobs, particularly in the government sector, were lost. Lawyers and solicitors were intimidated into not providing assistance in the few cases which actually came to court. There was an entire portion of the population left in a kind of non-belonging limbo, and struggling to get even the most basic necessaries for life. Into this desperately frightened and dangerous situation came a number of foreign activists and journalists, seeming to be simply travellers or harmlessly interested onlookers; Mitchison was one of them. As recorded in the diary she travels around surreptitiously examining conditions. The plan is to show solidarity with her fellow socialists and distribute assistance from Britain where it isn't forthcoming from anywhere else - the Quakers have a good operation already in place, but it's missing people it doesn't know about. Because this activity is necessarily on the quiet, the diary must be quite carefully written, just in case it is ever confiscated. So names are replaced, or become simple initials, or even just dashes. Lists of names needing help are passed from one activist to another in various forms - sewn into knickers for safekeeping, for example! The main thrust is quite clear; this diary is meant as a revelation of desperation. But she also allows it to be subjectively humanised - gives herself time out to record happy alcohol-soaked dinners at one or another of the journalists' hotels, or shows the picture of herself staring lovingly into shop windows at clothes she likes. The best way to explain the effect this book has is I think to call it a muddy mosaic - it has an impressionistic feel in many instances of particular knife-edge situations being represented, with travel or lighter feeling following, and then another heartbreak looked forcefully into. The writing is typically toughly straightforward, with contrarily redolent belief in a brighter future punctuating the darkness. So, between the passion and the straightness, the misery and the inconsequential lightness, a shifting picture appears of life and death in frightening times.