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Fruits of the Fire
CAST
Elias Canetti
Heimito von Doderer
Gusti Hasterlik
Veza Canetti
Iris Murdoch
A brief montage of riot sounds: running feet, cries of panic, sirens, horses' hooves, vehicles, gunshots. Flames, initially barely perceptible, grow to an inferno, swamping all else. Fade. Lights up.
Gusti Hasterlik: I saw it all. The 15th of July was a Friday. The heat was intense, the sun blazing down from early morning. I remember coming out of my flat in the suburbs and being almost blinded by the glare. I remember walking to the tram stop to catch a tram into the centre of the city. It took a while before I realised everywhere was unnaturally quiet. There was a man already at the tram stop and he told me he'd been waiting nearly half an hour. It was very unusual. Then someone else went past and said we might be there all day. The electricity workers had gone on strike at 8 o'clock that morning to take part in a protest march. There'd been ugly scenes already, and the stand-off might turn nasty at any moment.
Doderer: I too was there, trying to understand. It went back to an episode at the start of the year. Over by the Hungarian border, at a nondescript place called Schattendorf. Clashes between left and right. One lot provoked the other and two people were killed: a member of the Republican Brigade, and a child.
Iris Murdoch : I wasn't there, I was in London. But I read their names in the paper. They were human beings after all, like you and me. The man was Matthias Csmarits, who'd already lost an eye in the First World War. The boy was his nephew Pepi Grössing, who'd come with some of his friends to watch the marchers. Pepi was 8 years old.
Canetti: I followed the Schattendorf trial closely. There were three accused: right-wing vigilantes. The verdict was a shock: they were all acquitted. It was a jury trial. Everyone thought the jury had been rigged. In fact it was split. 7 for guilty, 5 for not guilty. But it needed a two-thirds majority. That's why the three men were acquitted and released. It had been very close. But the Vienna electricity workers were not to know that.
Veza Canetti: I too was in Vienna early that morning, and saw the protests on the streets. Provoked at least in part by an inflammatory leader in the Workers' Paper : I read it over breakfast. People swarmed in from the suburbs to join the marchers. By 9 o'clock there was a sizeable crowd outside the Parliament building. The policemen on duty were quite outnumbered. Reinforcements arrived. Mounted police, with drawn sabres. Someone clearly thought the revolution had started!
Canetti: I could see the Palace of Justice from the Parliament building. It was the next best target especially if you thought the judicial system was loaded against you. It was virtually unprotected and I watched people entering unimpeded. In the windows they held up portraits of the old Emperor they'd found still hanging in the offices – this was a Republic, remember. So then they began throwing out files from the Land Registry: a lot of Austria was still feudal. And then dousing them in petrol, lighting them, and throwing them back in. The first signs of the fire that destroyed the Palace of Justice were seen at 12.28.
(...)
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