Mariahilfestrasse. In these rooms lived Uncle Otto, a great-uncle of mine on my mother’s side. For decades the waves of history tossed him this way and that, but always ended, quite by chance, in carrying him upwards to safety. During the First World War he was in Trieste as the Austrian official in charge of supplies, an office which he carried out scrupulously, and which enabled him to get through those years of shortage without particular hardship. In 1918 the Italians arrived in Trieste, and he was summoned by General Petitti di Roreto. He got to the appointment slightly late, to find that a small crowd in the street outside had already beaten up his ex-colleague in the same job, yelling “Down with the Austrian starve-master”, and its aggressive tendencies were already too thoroughly glutted to give him the same treatment. The general, struck by the neatness of his registers, asked him to be in charge of rations during that difficult transitional period and took him along to a box in the theatre, where they were celebrating the liberation of Trieste, and where the ovations and cries of “Long live Italy!” automatically rained down also on my great-uncle.
On the advent of Fascism he transferred to Vienna, where during the years of the great economic crisis his experience gained him a similar job. He told me that sometimes, before some demonstration, a number of Socialists would come to his office and inform him that the following day they would be demanding that he hand over 200 cwt of flour. He was bidden to say he was prepared to release 100, and in the end they would settle for 150. They then asked which of the rooms in his offices were least used, in case it became strictly necessary to throw stones at a few windows. Having retired from public life, during Nazism he protected a number of persecuted Socialists and Communists, and maybe for this reason in 1945, during the Russian occupation, the Soviet authorities asked him to look after supplies and the distribution of foodstuffs. As an old man he was made a Knight of Malta, and by instinct turned down an important post which a short while later was involved in awkward squabbles. Having been created Knight Commander, he spent half the year in Rome, in the palace of the Order, along with an extremely ancient manservant whom he, though well into his eighties, helped to move and feed himself. “Come on, Giovanni, let’s go to the mountains,” he would say to him, and the pair of them would thereupon take deep breaths from an oxygen cylinder. He always glided through the midst of events like an expert dancer who does not brush against other couples on the crowded dance-floor.