11. A WORTHWHILE JOB

The present Chamber of Workers and Employees used to be Eichmann’s office, and from here he directed the bureaucratic organization of the racial policies of the Third Reich. At his trial Eichmann remembered his period in Vienna as “the happiest and most successful of my life”. That work evidently cost him few embarrassments in the city which Grillparzer, the Austrian national poet, defined in the nineteenth century as “the Capua of the spirits” and which has always been mistress of the art of self-mystification. In the (certainly formal) referendum which took place in 1938 after the Anschluss, only 1,953 Viennese – according to Christian Reder in the above-mentioned alternative guidebook – voted against annexation to the Third Reich, even if the suicides that year numbered 1,358, as compared with the annual average of 400.