Last Waltz in Vienna

by George Clare

Book Overview

A beautiful book: a fascinating piece of history' Beryl BainbridgeOn Saturday 26 February, 1938, seventeen-year-old Georg Klaar took his girlfriend Lisl to his first ball at the Konzerthaus. His... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030604060
• ISBN13: 9780030604065
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The rise and fall of a family of Viennese Jews and the Hapsburg legacy

The author George Clare was born Georg Klaar -- his name was Anglicized after he joined the British Army in 1943, having fled Vienna as a teenager in 1938. LAST WALTZ IN VIENNA is both a personal memoir of growing up in and then fleeing Vienna and an account of his Jewish family's settlement, assimilation, and rise to social semi-respectability in Vienna over the course of several generations, before the abrupt volte-face of the Thirties. By the end of WWII, there were no Klaars left to waltz in Vienna. Clare's writing at times is too cliched, even florid, and on a few occasions he gives us too much detail about family members who are of only marginal interest to the overall story. But those are the only flaws to this highly worthwhile book. LAST WALTZ IN VIENNA is a superb account of the life of bourgeois, assimilated Jews in Vienna and Austria during the half-century before WWII, and then the gradual but persistent slide of the Viennese/Austrians to the Anschluss and Nazi fiefdom. It also adds considerable background and context to the decision of so many Jews to stay until it was too late, rather than get out while that was possible. LAST WALTZ IN VIENNA is particularly instructive on the fond frame of mind which almost all Jews from within the bounds of the Hapsburg empire bore towards the Hapsburgs in the century between 1850 and 1950. The author's great-grandfather, Herrmann Klaar, was born in 1816 in the Bukovina -- now part of Russia but then the Hapsburg empire's easternmost province -- but he managed to go to Vienna for education as a doctor. The author's maternal grandfather was born in Galicia, into a family of Ashkenazy Jews that wore the caftan and were very orthodox, but he became a very successful merchant and also found his way to Vienna. Thus, as Clare writes, his family was "typical of Central European Jewry * * * who, within a short space of time, moved from the narrowness of the East-European ghettos into that wide and glamorous world of West-European culture, absorbed it, became an essential part of it, [and] climbed to new heights during the enlightened nineteenth century." While they experienced some anti-Semitic discrimination, "Austria was also the Austria in which a young Jew could free himself from the shackles which had kept Jewry in bondage for centuries." Even unassimilated orthodox eastern Jews from Galicia and elsewhere within the Hapsburg realm were able to live and follow their religion in a far different atmosphere than those "of the shtetl regions of eastern Poland and Tsarist Russia": "the Jews in the eastern regions of the Austrian empire led a life free from fear of the pogroms unleashed every so often on their unfortunate brethren within the Tsar's power." Clare writes that his own father, who served in the Austrian army in WWI, while "certainly no monarchist," "had the usual nostalgic respect for old Franz-Josef." Reading LAST WALTZ IN VIENNA reminded me of a recent colloquy in connection wit

A century of a Jewish family until the shoah

This well-written, incisive, and even-handed telling of the author's Klaar family in Austria, 1842-1942, is a fine way to find out about how many Jews entered into the middle classes out of the shetl and worked their way up into the military and civilian ranks. The end of the narrative, when the author becomes a protagonist as he does in the opening pages, really captured my interest much more. I wish Clare had taken more time with his own gripping story rather than so much focus on his predecessors, but this undoubtably is out of humility and respect for his forebears. I cannot tell if the book was written in German and then translated by the same author or if Clare only wrote the German original and the original publisher (Macmillan in London) anonymously translated it into fluid, forceful, and thoughtful English. Perhaps a minor point given the impact of the climax of the tale he tells of his kindred, but I commend him for the effort he put into his work, in the telling and the style both. Also recommended: Charles Fenyvesi's account of how he excavated the roots and found the branches still flourishing of his Hungarian Jewish ancestors over the past 300 years, "When the World Was Whole."

An earlier edition of a now reissued family saga

This book apparently has been reprinted by Pan Books in Britain more recently, but is available in many libraries in the US, although it remains here out of print. I copy my review from the Pan edition hereafter; this Holt copy carries the whole subtitle. This well-written, incisive, and even-handed telling of the author's Klaar family in Austria, 1842-1942, is a fine way to find out about how many Jews entered into the middle classes out of the shetl and worked their way up into the military and civilian ranks. The end of the narrative, when the author becomes a protagonist as he does in the opening pages, really captured my interest much more. I wish Clare had taken more time with his own gripping story rather than so much focus on his predecessors, but this undoubtably is out of humility and respect for his forebears. I cannot tell if the book was written in German and then translated by the same author or if Clare only wrote the German original and the original publisher (Macmillan in London) anonymously translated it into fluid, forceful, and thoughtful English. Perhaps a minor point given the impact of the climax of the tale he tells of his kindred, but I commend him for the effort he put into his work, in the telling and the style both. Also recommended: Charles Fenyvesi's account of how he excavated the roots and found the branches still flourishing of his Hungarian Jewish ancestors over the past 300 years, "When the World Was Whole."