The Chosen Ones

Although every kind of cripple is offered an opportunity to work and every effort is made to suit that task to each one of them, we must not forget that the survival of the fittest is not based on compassion and charitable attitudes but rather a struggle in which the stronger and more competent must and will be victorious, if only for the benefit of sustaining the species … We must be prepared to grasp that, as a consequence of the war, many of the incompetent, or, in other words, ‘negative variants’, are likely to reproduce and so heighten the risk that the proliferation of such negative variants will, to an extent greater than at present, generate a need for support and hence a burden for the next generation. Thus, while it may sound cruel, it must be stated that the continuously increasing demands for support for such negative variants is ill-advised in terms of management of human assets, as well as wrong in terms of racial hygiene … Improvements in quality must begin with the child. If it is the case that we are unable to manage reproduction according to qualitative goals, then we should at least make every effort to promote high-quality breeding practices. Childcare provision, regulated in accordance with biological and social principles, is part of this.

Julius Tandler:
Krieg und Bevölkerung

(
War and Population
, 1916)

The care institution ‘Am Spiegelgrund’ is charged with the duty of subjecting all mentally deviant children and young people, from infanthood
until they come of age, to the most precise and attentive examination leading to a full assessment of their mental and physical skills and abilities, before directing them to the appropriate care home or institution. In addition, these experiences will be collected with a view to later scientific study.

Currently, we manage 15 groups of boarders consisting of 30 children per group and two double groups – that is, each with 60 boarders. We maintain our own unit for infants and young children with an average bed occupancy of 50, and also units for two groups, each containing 30 school pupils with psychopathological conditions. […]

We require, already at the time of admission […] that the referring authority, whether it is – as has so far been the case – a young people’s social service or a healthcare department, should provide us with a complete report of the grounds for the transfer of the child and a thorough family history, in which information concerning all heritable handicaps and environmental factors with damaging effects is especially valuable. Furthermore, a careful account of school performance is also required to allow assessment of any matters of concern raised by deficiencies in the upbringing of the child or other noteworthy defects. […]

At the time of admission, it is the immediate duty of the institution’s medical officer to establish the child’s
status somaticus
and to suggest appropriate treatment to mitigate any physical health deficits; should a condition already be under treatment, a complete medical history is required. The examination will take cognisance especially of internal medical and neurological issues. […] Also, the institution’s medical officer will obtain, during visits by the child’s parents or close relatives, or after summoning such persons, a detailed case history with regard to hereditary biology as well as to psychiatric and somatic conditions. All boarders will immediately have their height and weight measured and photographs taken for anthropological purposes after a brief evaluation
of anthropological status. Until such time as we have in place the necessary equipment and the required scientifically trained support staff, the child’s status will be brought up to date through exact anthropological and phrenological measurements and completed by dactyloscopic records of skin patterns on hands and feet.

Once settled into our institution, the boarder will undergo a psychological assessment that in part also serves as an intelligence test as per currently accepted methodology, but which is somewhat expanded and readjusted to aim not so much at establishing an intelligence quotient (although for practical reasons we will still keep this aspect) as to enable us to arrive at an overview of the child’s personality and to assess that he or she has the mental and physical abilities critical for upbringing and training. In the context of the written appraisals of meticulously selected themes which in particular ways are suited to offer insight into the inner mental processes of the child or young person, and also not infrequently provide important data on the development of his or her character, we will furthermore acquire quite spontaneously written text samples that very often complete our insight into the boarder’s character in the most remarkable manner. These psychological tests will be administered by trained and experienced psychologists who have been specially selected for this task and are under the supervision of academic psychologists with pedagogic experience. In joint meetings and through constant scrutiny of our results, we will attempt to arrive at a methodology appropriate for our particular purpose.

Hans Krenek:
Beitrag zur Methode der Erfassung von psychisch auffäligen Kindern und Jugendlichen
(
A contribution to methods for assessment of children and young people with psychological abnormalities
, 1942), Archiv für Kinderheilkunde (Archive of Child Medicine)

It is certainly legitimate to write a history of punishment against the background of moral ideas or legal structures. But can one write such a history against the background of a history of bodies, when such systems of punishment claim to have only the secret souls of criminals as their objective?

Michel Foucault:
Surveiller et punir
(
Discipline and Punish
, 1975)

The Institution
   They brought him to Spiegelgrund for the first time in January 1941, on a cold, clear winter’s morning when the pale light closest to the ground shimmered with frost. Near the top of the mountain that rose behind the pavilions, Adrian Ziegler remembers seeing the institution’s church, its dome green with verdigris against a blue sky, an unreal blue like that of postcards or colour-printed posters. The car stopped just inside the hospital gate, in front of the buildings that housed the directorate and the administration. A nurse came to escort them, first to meet the elderly director, a grave, pale gentleman in a dark suit, who signed the documents, and then to a pavilion to the left of the main entrance, where a doctor was waiting to examine him. Another nurse was there as well and she shouted at him to undress at once and step onto the scales. Adrian would claim that he had no idea who the doctor was until much later. It was only then, when he finally saw the medical report and recognised the signature of Doctor Heinrich Gross, that he identified the Spiegelgrund doctor as the man who pursued him for the rest of his life, even long after he had been set free. But on this first day, the doctor is simply a frightening stranger in a white coat who forces his jaws apart as far as they will go, and then probes and squeezes the bones in his skull and spine with strong fingers. The examination lasts for an hour and the doctor uses instruments that Adrian has never seen before. The top of his head is measured using a kind of circular tool with a sharp point at the tip. He is told to sit
on a tall seat made up of a loose board with flaps on either side and then Doctor Gross lowers another measuring thing to determine the distance between his eyes, and between each eye and his chin. Next, the doctor pulls on a pair of gloves, prods Adrian’s testicles and pushes a finger up his anus. When the examination is done, the escort nurse comes to collect him. It is still early. They walk along a corridor where the white winter daylight bounces off the monotonous pattern of rhomboid floor tiles and it will often come back to him afterwards how the floors and walls in corridors and dormitories glowed with an unearthly luminosity as if alive in their own right, independent of the children who stayed there and somehow more substantial than they were. But, of course, the nurse has no patience with him.
Stop staring and come along, we haven’t got all day!
They go outside through a door at the back of the building. Now, he has his first glimpse of the extent of the place that will be his home for several years, of its many pavilions lined up side by side, pale and shut-off in the long, frost-white shadow below the mountain. All the pavilions look the same, with barred windows and plain brick frontages broken by bays. The narrow tracks of a tramline apparently link the pavilions. From a little higher up, a small train comes along, three freight wagons pulled by a red and white locomotive. It looks like a toy train. He is to be housed in pavilion 9, in the third row to the left of the central path. The nurse pulls out a huge bunch of keys from her apron pocket and flicks through them with practised fingers until she has located the right one. The dormitory doors must be locked even though it is mid-morning. If there are any children behind the doors, they aren’t making the slightest noise. The nurse leads the way to a store cupboard next to the washroom and hands him a towel and a piece of grey institutional soap. He has a bath and afterwards she inspects his fingernails and ears, then lets him have
his clothes back. She gives him a pair of felt slippers to wear indoors and a short, grey woollen jacket, but he isn’t allowed to put the jacket on even though the corridor is as cold as sin. She leads him to a tall white door with
IV
painted on it. At first, he thought the children behind that door were just sitting very still and holding their breath. Later, he thought maybe they were already dead but pretended to be alive for his sake. So he wouldn’t lose heart straightaway.

The River
   Adrian would sum up his early childhood as hardly the happiest years of his life, but at least a time he could look back on without feeling ashamed. He used to spend his summers with his favourite uncle, one of his mother’s younger brothers who lived out in Kaisermühlen. His real name was Ferenc Dobrosch, though his sister called him Franz. At the time, Adrian and his siblings had the surname Dobrosch, because their mother wasn’t married to their father. Ferenc said that that Dobrosch was a Hungarian surname even though it didn’t sound the slightest bit Hungarian, and explained that the entire family came from a couple of small villages in a part of Hungary that now belonged to Slovakia. Adrian’s mother insisted that the family name was Slovakian and in no way Hungarian, not that it mattered since it was just as good as any Austrian name because all names are fine in Austria, or had been in the old days. Uncle Ferenc had no education to speak of but was a hard-working and enterprising man who earned a living from occasional jobs that he seemed to pick up easily, or at least he did back then. During the summer, he minded the animals down on the allotments at Hubertusdamm, where many of the plot-holders used to keep cows or goats on the old floodplain between the high-water dam and the river. Adrian and his little brother Helmut helped to feed the animals and were rewarded with a churn full of fresh milk
to take home. The animals were calm and warm. If it rained, they would stand close to each other, as if asleep. Ferenc and Adrian lay on their backs on the ground. It was covered in animal dung and rubbish like old tyres and nails from the workshops along the road, so if you were running around barefoot you had to look out or you might get hurt. The air was moist after the rain, the summer sky high and bright. Dense insect swarms rose like pillars above the puddles in the river mud. Ferenc wore an old suit jacket and a beret, but had nothing on under the jacket. His hairy, sun-scorched chest was dotted with red insect bites and he would squeeze the worst ones with his hard nails, then suck the blood from his fingers. It didn’t hurt one bit, he said. Sometimes, he taught them things. How to cheat hunger by chewing grass, for instance. Lying there, looking out over the river, Ferenc said that the river was a curse on the land. Once, Kaisermühlen had been one of the numbered city districts – it was the 2nd Bezirk – and the local farmers had come here to have their grain ground to flour in the water-powered mills. Then the emperor ordered dams to be built across the old branching creeks of the river to direct the flow through a new main channel dug along a line that changed the relationship of the land to the river. For instance, what had been the
left
bank of the Donau ended up on the
right
, cut off from everywhere else by the river. From then on, Kaisermühlen was changed by word of mouth into Hunger Island. People would come looking for work but never managed to cross the river. The same thing happened when they dug the Panama Canal, Ferenc said. And then, as now, many of the labourers had drowned. Adrian asked if he knew anyone who had been a navvy on the river channel but no, Ferenc had been too young at the time, though he had heard that relatives on his father’s side had worked there. They mostly took on foreign labour, though, because the work was so dangerous. The
men had died from typhus or were carried off by the river and surfaced months or even years later, so you never knew who they were or where they came from. Adrian liked the river, especially on clear days after rain, with open sightlines in every direction that meant you could see faraway places like Kahlenberg and the Reichsbrücke and the tower of the Kaiser Jubiläumskirche in Leopoldstadt. He also liked to watch the river, the controlled but irresistible power of the flowing water, and the way it and the sky exchanged light, so that the river looked different from one hour to the next. At dawn, the wind would raise ripples across the mass of water which later, at dusk, could be so still and translucent it seemed you might walk on its glassy surface. This was when they would set out for the walk back home, Ferenc in front carrying the milk churn, followed first by Adrian and then his little brother. Helmut was only three and it was hard for him to keep up. He was a slight, blue-eyed boy with a shock of blond hair. Seeing him, no one thought that this little boy could be Eugen Ziegler’s child, not even Ziegler himself, who accused the mother of having produced this Dobrosch offspring with another man. All the same, Adrian, who shared his life with his younger brother, thought Helmut’s ingratiating smile and the unconcerned look in his eyes made him a dead ringer for their father. The boys walked barefoot because their mother thought it was silly to wear shoes when it wasn’t necessary.

Simmeringer Hauptstrasse
   Adrian grew up in Simmering. But not just grew up, as he would say later in life. Apart from the time I was kept at Spiegelgrund, I’ve spent my whole life in Simmering. They had me adopted but even then, where would I end up but in Simmering? Why, I was jailed in Simmering. In Kaiserebersdorf prison. He laughed when he said that but the listener understood
that, to Adrian, it had been something like a curse. There are places you never seem able to leave behind. When Eugen Ziegler moved to Simmering, the Social Democrats had only just set in motion the gigantic building projects which they were determined would once and for all
wipe poverty off the map
, as their election posters claimed. Simmeringer Hauptstrasse was still its old self, as it had been for several centuries: a heavily trafficked through-route that linked a network of workshops, shops and pubs. The family lived in a nineteenth-century building which, like most of the larger ones in the neighbourhood turned a ‘respectable’ front towards the street while the tenements around the inner courtyard were crawling with dubious, lower-class life forms. The house was only two storeys high, but wide, with two separate stairwells on either side of a broad gateway for wagons that wasn’t broad
enough
, Adrian said, because the oak uprights on either side were deeply scored where loads had scraped past, on trucks as well as horse-drawn wagons. There was a pub in the building next door and the landlord preferred to unload the heavy beer barrels in the yard. Mr Streidl, who owned the shop at the front of the building, brought his stock in the same way. The flats were reached by narrow galleries along the inner frontage, one for each storey. The Dobrosch-Ziegler family lived on the first floor, at the far end of the gallery on the right. Tucked well away in a corner of the yard, where the latrines were clustered under a tall horse-chestnut tree, there was a wash house that served the entire building. Every day, regardless of weather or time of year, the women would be doing the laundry and some would bring hordes of noisy children. One of Adrian’s earliest memories is of coming home on an overcast day in the winter, when a billowing cloud of sour-smelling steam fills the big room, washing hangs on the line in the gallery and over the cooker, and Emilia and Magda, their faces glistening with sweat, lift
the big pans of boiling water and shout at him in loud, shrill voices to keep out of the way or he’ll get scalded. Emilia and Magda (Magdalena) were his mother’s younger sisters and, because neither of them had yet got herself a husband, Adrian’s father had condescended to let them live with his family. The flat actually consisted of this kitchen and another, slightly larger room where one wall was covered in mould. That so many people could share this place was really beyond all comprehension. Adrian’s uncle Florian, his mother’s older brother, occupied a kitchen alcove. Florian had always been what was known as ‘peculiar’ and never got round to getting a job, despite his sister’s endless nagging and despite Eugen, Adrian’s father, who whenever he came home would have a go at Florian; although, Adrian said, you wouldn’t catch him saying that he had
come home
, that was below his dignity at the time, only that he had
dropped by
, often bringing booze with him and being generous at first, when he would offer everyone a drink, until suddenly he lost interest and broke into a violent rage that almost always targeted Adrian’s mother and her brothers and sisters, whom he abused, called parasites and vermin, and claimed that they stayed in the flat without his permission and that he had to pay for them all, though there was of course no truth in that, Adrian said, because Florian was only one of the Dobrosch brothers who lived with them, and Uncle Ferenc paid for him, always adding a little extra when he could since Ziegler himself never contributed a cent even though he kept telling them about the big business deals he had on the go. Eugen Ziegler treated Uncle Florian especially badly. Adrian clearly remembers one particular row, when his father grabbed a handful of his uncle’s long, black fringe and slammed Florian’s head against the wall, as if it was a wrecking ball. And did it over and over again. The regular, dull thuds sounded like the back of a wedge axe hitting the chopping block. Florian
didn’t try to resist or defend himself; the whites of his eyes swivelled further and further up and back into his eye sockets. This was one of the few times that Leonie, Adrian’s mother, dared to speak up against Eugen. She shouted that he was to leave her Florian alone and, if he didn’t, she would leave him and never come back. She might well say that, but if she walked out, what would happen to
the others
? They were all her dependents: her brother and her sisters and her growing number of children. Instead, she wiped the blood off the floor, hid the empties under the sink and set Uncle Florian to glue the kitchen table leg that Eugen had broken (he was good at simple, practical things, was uncle Florian; all his sense of the here and now seemed concentrated in his hands). And so Leonie pulled on her beret, buttoned up the brown cotton coat she wore in all weathers, and went to catch the 71 tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and then go on to Wieden or Josefstadt, where she spent all day cleaning for one wealthy family after another, scrubbing their floors and beating the dust from their carpets, though some of her employers might live really far away, as when she had to walk all the way to Salmannsdorf in Döbling because she didn’t even have the money for the ticket. What Leonie Dobrosch earned from her skivvying was barely enough to pay the rent so she would try to bring back scraps of food, leftovers from the tables of the well-to-do that she had begged them to give her, things like day-old bread or potatoes or
Knödel
that could be fried up, but before cooking the family meal she had to start cleaning and tidying all over again the moment she arrived, because everything went to pieces at home when she wasn’t there. She had only one day a week that she could call her own: Sunday. Once a week, she threw them all out and allowed no one back in – you’d be told off if you so much as showed your face in the door – got down on all fours next to a bucket of water, scrubbed the floors and
covered them in newspaper afterwards. When the floors were done, Leonie sat down at the kitchen table, on her own or with Florian for company (he alone was allowed to stay), and just stayed sitting there, doing nothing, saying nothing. Because the children had nowhere else to be and because wherever they happened to end up they’d sooner or later be chased away, they ganged up, regardless of age, and drifted from place to place, sometimes begging for things to eat or to trade. They stole, too; mostly easy pickings like fruit and vegetables from the open boxes grocers displayed outside their shopfronts. Adrian, whose aunties rarely had time for him, had belonged to the local gang since the age of just three or four. The children ran about down by the old hospital barracks in Hasenleiten, or by the Donau canal where the banks in the summer were miracles of cool stillness under the canopies of the trees, or they might go to the field with the huge gasometers, monumental brown-brick structures which loomed over his earliest childhood. When they lived on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, he was often the youngest of the child drifters and would quite often get lost. One story that was repeated about him in the family (his sister Laura kept telling it) was about how Adrian once, when he was four, apparently fainted outside the Sankt Laurenz church. It was in the middle of winter and it took time before anyone spotted the tiny snow-covered bundle at the bottom of the church steps. The verger found him in the end. Since no one knew anything about him and there was no one to ask, the parish priest’s housekeeper took pity on the child and brought him home with her, gave him a bath, a meal, and a bed to sleep in. This was the first time he had a bed to himself instead of sleeping at the bottom of his aunties’ bed or sharing with Helmut or Laura. He spent three days with the kind lady and then his mother, brimming with shame and worry, came to collect him. Not that she was ashamed because he had been
looked after by someone else. The other children had of course said where they had been that day, and she’d had a shrewd idea where her little boy was all along but hadn’t wanted to get mixed up with the police (like most people in her position, Leonie Dobrosch dreaded anything to do with the authorities) and, besides, what had happened had happened and the boy might as well stay and sit down to a few decent meals. This was also how Adrian Ziegler himself saw it many years later: his mother had in a way already handed him over to strangers. And it had seemed easy to do because she felt that, when all was said and done, staying with the priest’s housekeeper was
for his own good
, perhaps even a lucky break. Later on, in Spiegelgrund, he would have nightmares about that housekeeper with her hard, thin-lipped mouth and her unkind eyes with bright blue irises that seemed to suck in everything they saw but never offer anything in return. One day, she had fixed him with those blue eyes of hers and asked him if he knew who He was who was throned in Heaven and what His Son was called and then, when he had no answers, she had smiled haughtily, turned away and refused to explain. At home, they talked of neither Heaven nor Earth. They hardly ever mentioned anything that wasn’t right there in front of you. Only Ferenc was given to hold forth about whatever came into his head and his siblings would often rebuke him for it. When the psychologists at Spiegelgrund asked Adrian where his mother and father came from, because they naturally had to find out what kind of blood flowed through his veins, he couldn’t answer that question either. The past was the
one thing
no one spoke about at home because it was guaranteed to cause trouble. That his mother had been a sewing machine operator in a Vorarlberg factory for many years before she moved to Wien and got pregnant by that man Ziegler, was something he learnt while at Spiegelgrund, and then only by chance, when one of the
staff decided to punish him by reading aloud from his notes; and as for who, or perhaps rather what Eugen Ziegler really was, that is, what he was in terms of
biological heredity
, Adrian would grasp only when, after being fostered for four years, his foster parents rejected him and sent him off to reform school in Mödling, where the staff informed him that he’d never be any good, what with his father being of Gypsy stock. But then, something happened. Perhaps it was simply that the war began. One morning, in October 1939, he was told to go to the director’s office. There was a surprise for him, the director said and he opened a door that Adrian had thought just led to a cupboard and none other than his Gypsy King father popped out, like a rabbit out of a hat, beaming at his son as he declared that it was time they let bygones be bygones and started afresh. By then he was ten years old but hadn’t seen his father since he was six and even before then, only a few isolated occasions many months apart. The director told Adrian that he was to go
home
with his father. And seemed to expect him to be happy. Actually, he had never been more scared in his life.