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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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