When my grandfather died in 2015, one of the things our family did together was clean out his flat and decide what should be kept, and by who. My cousin and I were assigned the task of going through his papers, books, and extensive classical music archives. I was looking forward to doing so, because in many ways Kurt Reibel was the grandparent I understood the least, in part because his terrible eyesight and hearing towards the end of his life made extended conversations with him taxing for both sides.
At the time, I thought I understood my grandfather’s life reasonably well, even if I didn’t particularly understand the man himself. Born in 1926 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, he was forced to flee the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, at the age of 12, with his mother. The only person they knew in America was Kurt’s older brother, who had emigrated earlier. Kurt’s father (my great-grandfather), and the rest of Kurt’s extended family on both sides (with the exception of two cousins who managed to stay in hiding for the duration of the war) were killed in the Holocaust, as they were unable to get visas in order to emigrate. The only reason Kurt and his mother could leave was because she was born in the Ukraine and the visa limit for Ukrainian Jews was not yet reached, unlike the Austrian-born visa list. The early years in Philadelphia were grueling and difficult as all members of the family had to work and learn a new language. I learned all this from my father and uncle; my grandfather never talked to me about that time of his life.
So, when I visited Vienna with my mother this spring break, I felt obligated to visit Grandpa Kurt’s old flat. On the first day, we took the tram out to the edge of the city to the Ottakring district. When he had lived there, it had been a poor Jewish neighborhood. Not a slum by any means, but also not somewhere the genteel of Vienna spent their time.
In that respect, it was as if nothing had changed. That part of Vienna still has artisanal jewelers, open-air markets selling everything from shoes to fish to celery, and children running wild in the streets. But today, these children are the sons and daughters of immigrants from Turkey, and the signage and cuisine are in Turkish rather than Yiddish or German. A new group of outsiders trying to make their way in a society at best aloof and at worst hostile.
We quickly found the flat; the two children of the Turkish couple living there were playing football on the street outside when we arrived. The parents weren’t home meaning we weren’t able to go inside, so instead my mother told me a story Kurt had told her and the rest of the extended family before I was born. Traditionally (at least in that part of Europe, I don’t know how universal this is/was), Passover concluded with the cheer “Next year in Jerusalem”, signifying the eternal hope of Jews to return to the Levant. The Reibels instead cheered “Next year in Vienna”, because, for emotional and ideological reasons, they did not consider Israel to be their “home”; they loved Vienna and its Jewish diaspora culture and had little interest in Zionism. However, in 1937, fascists had taken over the Austrian government and it looked increasingly likely that Austria would be annexed by Nazi Germany. Knowing that they had no choice but to emigrate or go into hiding, they ended that Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem”. Vienna could no longer be their home, and would never be again.
While Grandpa Kurt never talked about that sort of thing to me, the part of his life he was willing to talk about was his education and career, from the late 40’s to the early 90’s, as an experimental particle physicist. Kurt Reibel had had a distinguished career as the founder of Ohio State University’s experimental physics program and as a sabbatical researcher at CERN and Fermilab, the largest particle accelerators in the world. His work was so esoteric that he had difficulties dumbing it down to my level, but he was always happy to talk about it. So when I went through his office with my cousin, I didn’t think that I would find this portion of his life particularly enlightening, which proved to be incorrect.
In addition to Dvorak’s symphonies and reams of poetry, I also found that my grandfather had a rather large collection of books and essay compilations by Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Albert Einstein, and other prominent leftist leaders and intellectuals. I also knew that these were chosen and stored intentionally, because after my grandmother died two years prior, Grandpa Kurt moved (very reluctantly) into a supervised housing complex for the elderly. His new flat was much smaller than the house, so everything in the flat was something he’d wanted to keep at the expense of something else. I’d never considered what my grandfather’s politics were; he always seemed either too ornery or too theoretical in his mindset to be an ideologue.
When I brought up the collection with my father and uncle, they confirmed that while he was never a member of a communist political organization, he was what was then called a “fellow traveller”, someone sympathetic to the cause but unwilling for personal or ideological reasons to get directly involved. However, they were surprised that he’d kept the collection until his death, as they assumed he had mellowed out in his old age.
The most interesting thing they told me was that in the late 1950’s, my grandfather was brought in for questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee on suspicion of being a communist subversive. He was not accused of spying for the Soviet Union, although that is likely because at the time he was only just finishing his PHD and did not have access to any sensitive information at the time. However, the HUAC apparently feared that, like Julius Rosenberg (son of Jewish immigrants) or Klaus Fuchs (refugee from Nazi Germany), Kurt Reibel’s weak ties to the United States, expertise in particle physics, and his left-wing social sphere would lead him to become a turncoat for the Soviet nuclear program. Luckily, in the end the HUAC did not blacklist my grandfather or prevent him from being hired as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania; my family hasn’t looked to see if there are minutes of his testimony in any archives so we don’t know the precise details.
I was partially inspired to take MO3351 by my grandfather’s life story. He lived a transnational life across borders, cultures, ideologies, and even religions (he was a committed atheist by the time I knew him). Reading his copy of “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” also helped inspire my project on social democracy and colonialism. Persecuted first for his faith and ethnicity, and then for his politics, Kurt Reibel persevered and prospered. That he managed to rise so high in academia and raise a normal family despite everything he went through is amazing, and makes him one of my personal heroes.
Coming from a similar Eastern European/Jewish background, I really identified with your story. Reflecting on why I decided to take this course, I really do think the answer comes down to a curiosity. With my family coming from Hungary, but living in Washington D.C, I have been surrounded by different cultures my entire life. I found myself a bit boring actually only clinging to one passport as high school friends were Dutch but living in D.C or Bulgarian but her mom worked for the World Bank. I definitely took for granted living in the Capital of the United States and the opportunities that presented me.
Back to what you were saying about visiting the old flat in Vienna: I think it is really interesting that your grandparents have such a positive view of Vienna. My grandparents are extremely resentful towards Hungary and do not consider it their home. They fully embraced their new life in the states and saw it as a chance to reinvent themselves. So in that respect, they were transnational actors desperately trying to escape their roots. I think for them it comes down to an element of self-perception. Hungary is notoriously bad with human rights issues, (specifically ongoing rising tides of anti-semitism). Due to the lack of reform and effort from the government in Hungary from the 1940s- till the present, my grandparents feel that Hungary is stuck in the past, and they moved on to bigger and better things (and countries).
The idea that your grandfather was especially tied to his national roots, despite moving to Philadelphia is really interesting and shows a huge range in the “immigrant mindset.” I usually assumed that Eastern Europeans like my grandparents all felt the same: the United States was now home and fully embraced the new passport. The cultural ties and memories that bond together immigrants and their roots back in their homelands are not only a really interesting philosophical complex but also makes for a perfect transnational analysis. The whole idea of immigration is crossing borders– creating a transnational link between one individual and two countries.
When I was thinking about defining a transnational actor, I came up with a very apt analogy. A transnational actor, like our grandparents from Eastern Europe, are like sponges, sucking up the different cultures, languages, mentalities, and customs of the places they have lived/are living. I think it aids the discipline of transnational history to have such a wide scope of transnational actors. Grandparents, professors, artists, doctors, and politicians can all stand as transnational actors, making the field relevant to everyone not just us sitting in MO3351.
Due to the fact that so many people qualify as transnational actors, it would be really beneficial to conduct a survey asking people three questions:
How would you define transnationalism?
What is a transnational actor?
Do you qualify as a transnational actor?
It would surprise many to see that the definition and study of transnational history includes such a wide range of people. If this survey was conducted, more people would understand the discipline of transnationalism. Many people understand the concept of spreading ideas, people, and cultures across borders, but do not connect this concept to the term “transnationalism.” If the term was clarified, and connected to said surveyed people, a greater interest in the field would evolve. My rationale is people are interested in things that affect them. Being a transnational actor, and understanding one’s role in the process, the discipline is humanised and brought to the top of the list.
What do you think Lucius? I doubt if we did not take this class, we would jump to the automatic conclusion that our grandparents are transnational actors. Maybe if people were surveyed and began to understand what the term ‘transnational’ truly means, they would connect their life and identify their story as a transnational one.
Overall, thank you so much for sharing your story. I’m sure cleaning your grandfather’s house was very memorable and powerful and I loved reading about it.
I really relate to both your stories. My ancestry is also European jewish and it would be a lie to say that, that it did not contribute to pushing me towards transnational history.
Three of my grandparents were born in the United States all in largely immigrant areas in New York. My grandmother on my father’s side was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She came from a higher economic and social background than my other grandparents, but because of where and when she was born she had the most difficult early life. Her father and grandfather were doctors. Her father went to the university of Heidelberg, he got duelling scars while he was there. My great grandmother once showed my mother a photography of a lovely courtyard with a fountain in Karlsruhe, my mother asked where it was, and my great grandmother explained that it had been there house. I’ve also been told that they had a maid. What happened next would be shocking, if you didn’t all already know that circa 1940 was not a good time to be a German Jew.
My great grandfather escaped during crystal nacht. Someone yelled up to their house “Doctor, leave immediately, they are coming to arrest you in the morning.” Then he either got in his car or escaped on the back of a milk truck (historical narratives become hazy far too quickly). He escaped to England and eventually to America with the help of the Quakers (a group I just realised could use to be examined from a transnational perspective).
My grandmother her mother and sister travelled separately through Switzerland and Italy. They had visas to the US because some distant relatives had agreed to sponsor them. My grandmother was seven when the journey began and eight when it ended. To this day she really does not like to talk about this stuff, but I interviewed her for a school project when I was 15. I’m writing this part of the blog post largely off that interview. I’m really glad to have that record now, even though I do wonder why 15 year old me asked if she did anything for her 8th birthday, unsurprisingly she didn’t.
My great grandfather took some time to get certified to practice medicine in the US so my great grandmother did some piece work in a hat factory. She must have been good because she ended up doing a lot of the original hats for the broadway production of the “The King and I”. That’s an interesting little transnational tidbits, at least some of the original costumes in an American play about an Indian born English governess in Siam were made by a German Jew.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the interview with my grandmother is that she described going back to Germany for work multiple times. She said she didn’t mind it because she knew the people she was working with there prior to visiting. I think for her those personal and professional connections were more important than any feelings she had towards the country. She even describes having one colleague who has stayed in her house whose father was probably in the SS, but she says that he sort of understood her experience because he had grown up in East Germany.
What I find sort of strange is that my mother’s parents who were both born in the US won’t set foot in Germany or buy German cars. I think maybe this is partially down to the fact that my father’s mother is more transnational. Perhaps she doesn’t think so much in terms of nations, so she doesn’t choose to avoid Germany in the same way. It is certainly not that she is more generally forgiving as a person.
She has also said that she has not faced discrimination in the US due to her background. I used to think that my family was finally safe now that we’re in America, but after every anti-semitic event that’s happened since 2016 my mother mentions that photo she saw of the courtyard in Karlsruhe. She worries that if they could be that comfortable and established that seemingly accepted, and still have what happened to them happen, that maybe just maybe we aren’t safe either.
I actually think the fact that jewish identity and culture is transnational is one of the reasons why the right in America is experiencing an uptick in anti-semitism correlated to and perhaps largely caused by increasing nationalism. Many on the american right are very supportive of Israel, but that is not the same thing as not being anti-semitic. I think some people want everyone to just fit neatly into little ethnostates, not to be transnational. That’s why some people can espouse conspiracy theories about globalists (often a dog whistle for jews) and still support Israel. Some people are also just innocently confused by a transnational culture, I’ve actually had people assume I’m Israeli just because I’m jewish.
I don’t think being jewish makes you transnational, but I do think it is interesting that this is the highest concentration of other jews I’ve had in any of my history classes here. I think perhaps for all of us our family histories influence the way we study history, and for jewish people, that may push us towards transnational and global history.
In answer to Zoe’s questions:
I would describe transnationalism as thinking and analysis that does not treat the nation as an isolated specimen alone in a petri dish
I would describe a transnational actor as someone who crosses international boarders in a way that fundamentally impacts their life.
I think I do qualify as a transnational actor, because who I am is fundamentally shaped by experiences I’ve had outside my home country.