How I Found the Future
Of children playing in bomb craters, legions of one-legged men and the most terrifying sound of WWII.
“You see something metallic, you don’t touch it”, said the man to us children at kindergarten.”It can explode. If it looks like a toy - all the worse. The Russians dropped those toys that exploded when touched and ripped children like you apart. They are still around.”
Even though I was born a quarter century after WWII, we children were instructed about the danger of unexploded bombs and booby traps that in the war killed and crippled so many children.
I had not known what war was, but I had heard its echoes. I saw it in the countless bomb craters that still peppered many a field in the outskirts of Vienna. I played in the bomb craters. For me they are just as another playground.
There were the ruins of houses and factories, abandoned areas where we should not go because we could blow ourselves up. It was the shadow of something nobody talked about. My grandparents never mentioned the war. What I heard was just what they said when they thought I was out of earshot.
My grandmother told the story of when she had been bombed out. One day she came home and the house was gone. There was just a big hole in the ground filled with rubble that used to belong to her, her clothes, her books, her bed, her family photos, the landscape of her life.
How was Childhood when the Bombs were Falling?
I remember the serenity of life back then, in my childhood. Everything was dead serious, serious as death. All of Vienna was like a giant graveyard of serenity where the living pretended to be dead.
What did I know about war? What did I know of childhood in a city that burned? I didn’t know how it was when your eardrums burst when the pressure wave of a bomb attack hit the cellar you were hiding in. What did I know when you saw your sister cry but couldn’t hear her because your eardrums were gone? How could I know that some children called themselves lucky because it had just been a bomb attack, and not an attack with fire to burn them alive?
I did not know because I had never experienced it myself. But I experienced the war through the traces it had left in others.
The Burning Children Haunting the Living
There were nights when liquid fire fell from the sky and burned the children and there was no protection against it. Either the fire killed them, or the heat killed them or the fire consumed all oxygen and they asphyxiated in their bomb shelters.
One story stuck with me. A group of children ran across the street to reach a bomb shelter while fire was falling from the bombers. The asphalt was boiling hot and soft and the children sank deep into it and got stuck in this bog of asphalt. Then the fire - phosphorus canisters that burned like napalm - hit the ground. The air reached a temperature of 1000 degrees. Their flesh ignited and the children burned like candles, their little bodies black like wicks.
The lucky ones had been killed by regular bombs that took the roofs of the houses so the city would burn better.
I had cartoons, too. Children’s stories. Astrid Lindgren. The children of Bullerbyn. Science fiction for kids. But the burning children mingled with them. They appeared right next to Tove Jansson's Moomin and were in Walter Ernsting’s spaceships. How could you have been a child in those days? Ten-year-old boys had to go to war and do battle against hardened adults, equipped with weapons that did not work.
There was a sound that scared children out of their wits. It was the sound of the cuckoo. Not the cuckoo that echoed through the halls of trees in the forest. It was the cuckoo call that came from the radio. It was code. It said: the bombers are coming to kill you. Go. Run! Hide!
How much those children feared the cuckoo. They heard it and it was to them like the hiss of the alien in Ridley Scott’s movie ship, the Nostromo.
I walked the city and saw the facades of old buildings, still riddled with bullet holes from WW II. There were overgrown big holes in the ground. Bomb craters were expected street furniture like benches and traffic lights.
The city had been helpless. There were flak towers, built in the style of medieval fortresses. On top of them stood the guns that fired at the bombers. They were pretty. But they couldn’t protect the city.
Twice Vienna had survived the siege by the Ottomans who tried to conquer Europe and enslave Europe. Vienna had resisted. Vienna had been their point of return. Vienna had sent them packing. But what could you do against fire falling from the sky if you had no planes to keep it away?
The Legions of One-Legged Men
I saw the one-legged men every day as they were walking the streets. They were quiet men, their gaze turned inward as they moved along in their one-legged man’s stride with two crutches and one leg, two crutches and one leg, crutches, then leg, crutches, then leg, a terrifying rhythm that was the Morse code of their destruction. Every day we saw six, seven, or even ten of them.
We did not count them, as we counted the Volkswagen beetles as they were parked on the roadside. How many of them would be lined up without interruption by another make of car, an Opel or even one of those rare Mercedes? The record stood at 23.
Those one-legged men were still so present so many years after the war. Now they were about 50 years old and stuck with the loss of a leg they experienced at 18 or 20 years of age. The sun was shining warmly as they moved past, but their gaze was turned inward as if the world were making them feel cold.
It was as if the sun were not shining for them. How often had those men asked themselves: what if? What if I had not stepped on that mine that day, what if that machine gun burst on the Eastern front had not fragmented my leg so badly it could not be saved and had to come off with a saw. What if I had been able to get a medical orderly to pick me up, what if the Russian snipers had not prevented that and I had not lain with my leg shot to pieces for days until the Russians had been pushed back and my friends had gotten me out? By then gangrene had wrought its destruction and the leg had to come off with a bone saw.
And how I remembered that vibration of the saw when it cut into my bone. I would never forget it. It had been in one of those front emergency stations. It was just a table, an old dining room table in a tent and the orderly had knocked me out with a piece of wood - they called it wooden anesthesia - because they had not had any anesthetics.
When they had carried me back to their own lines and put me on that table and I had been so full of pain and fear and told them to leave me my leg! There were already three sawed-off legs lying in a heap on the ground waiting for mine to be thrown on top. They would throw them all out later, those legs, out on the trash heap. This had made me a one-legged man, isolated from the rest of the world and from sunshine.
So they walked by, those one-legged men, so quiet 35 years after the war and the war had been with them every day since the vibration of the saw had cut into their bone. They had felt it every day since that day on the Eastern front. They went to bed one-legged and woke up from a one-legged nightmare and were still one-legged in the morning.
One-legged men had been so ubiquitous that in the hit show of the Austrian 70s “Kottan investigates” about a crazy cop in an even crazier Police department, the coll of the detective had been a one-legged man. The actor had lost his leg in the war. It had been cut off without anesthesia in an emergency operation during a battle to save his life.
The Black Hole of War
War was in every adult I met. It was in the teacher. It was in the shoemaker. It was in the grocer, in the insurance agent, in the poet, in the painter, the trader, the merchant… They had been at war and had seen things they could not forget and could not talk about. Their war had never ended.
Nobody talked about the war even though it was still going on in their minds. There was no armistice for the soul. They had come back from a nightmare that had swallowed up their personal lives and the sunshine and their friends without giving them anything in return.
They survived, but not all of them. A part of them was left in the war, be it a leg or a piece of their mind or their peace in general. In those dark days that dimmed the brightest sunshine they still heard the echo of war.
How could a child, who did not know what they had been through ever hope to reach them?
A Future Different from the Past
The future does not have to look like the past. It will look like the past if we just move on. Even if we were not at war, the war was at war with us through the destroyed minds of those who had physically survived.
When I, the child, discovered the science fiction collection among the thousands of books of my father, I found a way out. I had found a future that was different from the past, a future that was… promising!
It would not be an easy one. But it would be a future.
Hot and Cold Wars: How I found the Future
I grew up during the cold war. It was a cold war, but it was still a war. It was cold. The cold seeped into adults and children, leeched into conversations and love relationships, bogged down architecture, literature and film. The Cold War took something away from each human being. It dressed him in an invisible uniform.
The contrast between the liquid fire of the phosphorus attacks and the gray, serious society that followed is chilling. And the pivot to SF as escape hatch is fascinating. When the past is a nightmare and the present is a funeral, the only place left to breathe is the future. Nice one!