In default of a soul

…the devil puts up with a fly / In der Not frisst der Teufel Fliegen

Vienna is the only city in the world, which had the same destiny as occupied Berlin.

Well, almost had. Austria was occupied and divided into zones of occupation exactly as Germany, Vienna was occupied and divided into zones of occupation exactly as Berlin, the Allies who occupied Austria and Vienna were exactly the same, who occupied Berlin… But. Somehow, instead of competing with each other in spy games, they ended up patrolling nocturnal Vienna altogether and taking photos of the four soldiers in one inter-allied patrol jeep laughing and hugging. Photos, that unfortunately fell into oblivion as soon as the window of opportunity closed and unrestricted discussions about the war were over.

So. Meet these exactly four soldiers from one jeep:

Richard Sonnenfeldt – a German-speaking American, who was evacuated from Germany, as he was a little kid, later fought the war in Europe and served as a simultaneous interpreter at the Nuremberg trials;

Michael Bond – a French-speaking Brit, who volunteered in the army during his last year at Oxford, when the Nazis shelled Britain in 1940, has a thing for Russian girls, behaves like an idiot, and speaks crappy self-invented French every time he meets one, because he thinks that speaking French makes him look more romantic, more attractive, more upper-class and better educated than he really is;

Théo Pichereau – a Russian-speaking French, former fighting pilot and a convinced Marxist, who dropped out from Sorbonne before the war because of the irreconcilable ideological differences with the university’s administration;

and Vasilyi Bandarliuk – an English-speaking Soviet from Odesa, who plays chess, violin, speaks such a tough Odesa dialect, that Russian-speaking Théo can’t understand him, and outweighs all three of them in philosophy, although he didn’t graduate from any university at all (and never even attended one).

Their adventures in post-war Vienna are going to include:

meeting Raphaël Lemkin – an Eastern European lawyer who invented the term and the concept of genocide and initiated the Genocide Convention (on visit from the United States);

catching in the middle of the night during the curfew Sir Hersch Lauterpacht – a founding father of human rights in the process of punching the face of Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter – an Austrian Nazi politician and a high-ranking member of the SS, with whom they studied together at the University of Vienna before the war (on visit from Great Britain);

an intensive correspondence with the Vienna Circle, a group of extraordinary philosophers, logicians, and humanities scholars, some members of which are going to come for a short visit from the United States, where they had found shelter after the Nazis occupied Austria;

trips to Berlin in order to exchange the experience with the colleagues there and being sincerely shocked by how dividing into the zones worked for Germany;

assignment trips to Nuremberg, where Richard performs as a simultaneous interpreter for the first time in human history, while Michael hits on the Soviet female interpreters, Théo helps to invent an interpreter’s booth for simultaneous interpreting that suspiciously resembles a pilot cockpit, and Vasya helps the Soviet delegation to present the first film footage of the Auschwitz, after which all four witness the effect of the film on people in the courtroom: some people openly weep, some avert their faces, some refuse to see the piles of naked dead bodies in the concentration camp. The film that we now have almost no reaction to, except for recognizing that it is from one of the Nazi concentration camps…

As said, in a brief period of time exactly after a Zeitenwende, it feels differently and it is talked about freely. And any road, after this Nuremberg assignment, our inter-allied patrol will as always come back to Vienna, which they consider their home …Fighting on the way about philosophy in four languages, hitting on Eastern European girls on any occasion, and preparing themselves for even more adventures upon arrival.