An Interpreter in Vienna | Author's Foreword

Where is this novel coming from? A look at my relationship with the themes and intertextual connections.

Marie Thibaut is a new interpreter for the French government in Vienna. Despite strange locals and diplomats alike, she is enamored by the promise of the utopian city. But Marie’s life is complicated when she attempts to be someone important and encounters the city’s strange historical web. She enters the Viennese spy world and becomes disoriented in cultural exchanges and uncanny experiences.

Will Marie’s mind succumb to phobias, layered meanings, and isolation or will she persevere and find the right allies with whom she may do good in the world? Marie tells this tale as a long letter to her employer, Grégoire Lefebvre, and his wife Julie in an attempt to clear her name in the hours before mysterious Josef arrives at her door…at the threshold where she believes one of them will die.

An Interpreter in Vienna is a response to Graham Greene's The Third Man and a psychological thriller serialized on The Matterhorn each Saturday.

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Author’s Foreword

A lot of my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, comes from my encounters with places and their complexities — culture(s), history, natural landscape, spaces (i.e. homes, restaurants, government institutions, streets…), politics, and the arts that reflect these places.

Living in seven countries has made me acutely aware of both the differences these elements bring out in a place and the commonalities that bind them and the people who inhabit them together. At the same time, as I gain knowledge and understanding through these experiences and related research, I am left with an awareness of how very little I know about the world. There is simply too much — one must continue to learn through curiosity and openness whilst understanding we can only ever go so far.

I lived in Vienna for four years and this story emerged in that time and space. A lot of what you’ll read in this novel comes from observations or things I learned along the way. But there will also be gaps¹. Purposeful ellipses. Because the protagonist, just like many of the other characters, is also a foreigner. And, even when one is a local inhabitant, a citizen and lifelong denizen, one will have these gaps. When I write about my original home, I am reminded that these absences continue to exist even there. Similarly, my last serialization on The Matterhorn — A Hong Kong Story — came from the eight years I lived in Hong Kong. I am a permanent resident and also researched and theorized on Hong Kong Identity during my PhD studies. But there, too, I am left with many silences to fill.

Part of the reason for these gaps is also because the world keeps changing. It adds layers to a place through culture’s movement, through historical events, through changing shapes. This novel also reflects a place that is going through current changes and one that went through great shifts during and after World War II.

Borders within and exterior to Vienna and Austria are a part of this history as well as the more present. More metaphorically, there are juxtapositions of cultures within the city creating liminal space where dichotomies coexist and we are faced with a tension that can lead to enlightened understanding and empathy or move us farther apart. But physically as well, borders have been resurrected or reinforced recently in Europe by Brexit, the pandemic, and the Russo-Ukrainian War².

In that time after World War II, Vienna was changed into a strange place — where distrust was rampant. Allied-occupied Vienna literally re-defined Austria as Hitler’s victim rather than a once-part of Nazi Germany in the Moscow Declaration. Although there was a joint occupation, the city was divided into zones: Soviet, American, British, and French as well as an interallied zone in the first district. One can imagine how further segregation of the city relating to nationality and language with checkpoints was even more complicated with the onset of the Cold War. Additionally, Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is just fifty-five kilometers away and was a part of the USSR from 1948-1989.

A series of acts including “denazification” took place during this time³. But the city was already changed. Some groups had fled or been killed by the Nazis. The cultural shape of the city had changed. Freud, of Jewish descent, fled for London. The lively gay community had been squashed⁴. Klimt paintings, in the hands of many Jewish denizens, had been seized⁵. I’ll be exploring each of these areas in the novel as well as the podcast series about layering fiction.

Interestingly, the city of Vienna website (wien.gov.at) discusses first the destruction of homes that had to be rebuilt in 1945 followed by the resurrection of democracy. All of this is true as well. There were so many complexities at play in those years and many of them outside of the control of the common-Wiener/in. How did these shape everyday life? How did they shape the culture in the decades to follow? These ideas fascinated me. I witnessed remarkable tracings of shame and tension. For example, a production of The Sound of Music at the school I worked had to greatly adapt to leave out words and symbols relating to Nazis, some due to laws and others due to the anticipated response from the audience.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man, written by Graham Greene, explored post-war Vienna in its early days. With a release in 1949, Vienna was still at the height of these tensions and efforts to both physically rebuild and metaphorically rebuild its reputation. The film still runs continuously in Vienna three times a week at Burg Kino and there are many themed tours one can take in the city, most popularly the city’s sewer tour (where the film climaxes).

When I first arrived in Vienna, several of my literary colleagues bombarded me with the film, telling me I had to see it if I were “to understand Vienna.” I had no idea what they meant. It was August, and all I had seen was the banks of the beautiful Danube where I went running or rollerblading and the interiors of the art museums in Museums Quartier — MQ. I had tasted Turkish delights in Brunnenmarkt and exquisitely crafted coffee at Jonas Rendl. I had quickly come to love a glass of Grüner Veltliner or Weißer Spritzer at the trendy Tel Aviv Beach or a classic Heuriger near the vineyards.

Perhaps due to the way we learned about history in American high schools in the 90s, I knew very little about Vienna’s past. After watching The Third Man in the cinema, I was originally confused, then enthralled. I wanted to know more about why this British-made film was so iconic in this layered city that held so much culture of its own.

The film was originally the idea of “the prolific producer Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré and head of London Films” in 1947. He had worked with Reed and Greene on The Fallen Idol (1948) and had ideas based on the setting as well as personal connections to the area. After working as a filmmaker in Hungary and then being arrested during The White Terror, he left to work in Vienna and Berlin before working in Hollywood, France, and, finally, London.

Greene conducted onsite research with journalist and citizen acquaintances, giving the film a close relation to the real and later spent time with Reed in Vienna, hashing out scenes late at night in a hotel room. He first wrote a novella, later published under the same name with a foreword by Greene, and worked it into a screenplay with the input of Reed. To give you an idea of these layers, Thomas Riegler writes in The Journal of Austrian-American History:

In the case of The Third Man, the underlying historical references are difficult to decode. In 2017 the Belgian author Jean-Luc Fromental explored its allusions and puzzles in his graphic novel The Prague Coup. He recounted the “creation” of the movie as a partly fictional spy thriller that was nevertheless closely aligned to real occurrences: In this story Greene arrives in Vienna in early 1948 to conduct research for the screenplay, but is in fact on a mission. He tries to uncover evidence that there is a dangerous mole in the SIS. In the finale, it is revealed that the culprit is a former colleague and personal friend of Greene's, for whom he covers: Kim Philby. Fromental argues very convincingly that Greene's novel and the movie contain innumerable subliminal messages that refer to this real case of espionage—as though Greene were through this medium sending a coded message to Philby: “I saw you, I won't inform on you, but now you know that I know.”

Let me be clear: I’m not writing about any real espionage or coded messages!⁶ However, I did know people involved at the UN and in other diplomatic positions that informed some of what I wrote. I also attempted to get to know as many Viennese as I could, which was not always easy, but rewarding when it worked⁷.

Many know of Vienna as “the best place to live,” according to several surveys and expat magazines. Otherwise, they might think of the beautiful architecture, from Gothic to Baroque to Art Nouveau. These, too, are layers of the city. But there are still spies as well. In fact, I’ve heard reliable sources say it is the city with the most spies⁸. Unremarkably, it’s difficult to find research to prove this. However, it makes sense when you consider the UN’s work there, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the cross-roads of the Cold War and its aftermath, and Austria’s commitment to neutrality as a non-NATO yet EU country.

There have been intriguing political exchanges in Austria in the last decade, sometimes at odd with Vienna. There has been scandal, progressive politics, conflicts with the Catholic church, demonstrations by the FPÖ, terrorism, and tensions over refugees. All the while, the Viennese, many of which come from elsewhere, carry on with their lives in a place that many still say is the best place to live.

I’m interested in how cultures and histories encounter each other⁹. How subcultures exist and how politics reinforce or deny the existence of groups of people. This book plays with stereotypes and subversions. It’s about disorientation of oneself via immersion and constantly navigating these tensions that are a whole web of matrixes. It’s about characters, including the protagonist, also getting it wrong — both what Vienna is and who the denizens are. One can become fixated on certain elements of society that feel foreign or strange to them. One can also be enamored of elements of people so different from themselves that they can’t begin to understand them.

So this book is also about pushing into and beyond these tensions. It’s a psychological thriller, so don’t expect the utopian world that also exists to take center stage¹⁰. I, too, enjoyed many elements of that existence! While nearly half my teaching salary went to the state, I benefitted from the health care, maternity leave, public transport, grand gardens, and much more. The Kafkaesque bureaucracy that all foreigners faced eventually allowed us full entry into that world. My weekends were spent gazing at Klimt, listening to the Wiener Philharmoniker, writing at grand or hipster cafés¹¹, and ski days filled with schnapps and après DJs.

I was interested in the way the tensions of the past and current political situations played out on the streets. Even the simpler tension of traditions vs. change is a strong component of life in Vienna. Classical arts are ubiquitous here but so there are also many new kinds of artists working in the city. I lived in Neubau (“the new area”), which one might say is at odds with the first district (bezirk¹²) and its old grandness. But I found a harmony in their coexistence and took longer to get to work by walking through this area almost every day before hopping on a metro (U-Bahn).

Photo by Rodrigo Curi on Unsplash

Even the Austrians from the country and the city dwellers of Vienna held tensions, as do many city/country people¹³. Friends I met from elsewhere in the country often told me they either couldn’t understand the Viennese dialect or were shunned for the outsider-language. Despite the traditional nature of the city, some elements are more progressive than the rest of the country when it comes to politics. One way this is demonstrated is the gay traffic lights in the city (of different varieties), perhaps at odds with the dominance of Catholicism¹⁴, although slightly less so since the church’s stance on LGBTQ+ people and issues has begun shifting slowly.

I am no expert on Vienna or Viennese history. Perhaps I wished to remain thus in writing this novel as an outsider. I did some research, yes, about details of churches or paintings or history, but a fog of foreignness pervades. The book is not merely about Vienna in this sense but all foreign places for each of us as well as the way home can become strange — unheimlich or uncanny, but literally unhomely¹⁵.

I leave you to interpret the meaning in these chapters and always welcome your feedback. I’ll be serializing a chapter per week over the next seven months and considering changes along the way before publication as a book sometime before the new year. I’m also considering turning this into a series with a shifting setting. At the same time, I’m writing other fiction set in Maine and Paris, delivering sketch⬩text posts and subscriber discussions once a month, and considering new topics for the podcast or tweaks of the format. If you’re new, you can listen to my podcasts about the layers of fiction here. I’m open to all your feedback or ideas here as well.

I’ll investigate some of these topic further on the next installment of my podcast about layering fiction this summer (preview in the Table of Contents). I’ve also made a related reading booklist on my Bookshop.org affiliate page. Please let me know if you’d like to add something to the list as well as your ideas about culture, history, politics, and the arts along the way. Thanks so much for your interest and feedback!

Screenshot from the booklist on Bookshop.org

1. You can listen to my podcast on ‘Nothingness in Fiction’ (this is the one that also discusses Vienna at the end).

2. I’m extremely interested in the concept of the border, something I have devoted research and thought to. Three articles in this publication deal with this subject: Borders, Cultural Differences at the (Permeable) Border, and Imagining a Borderless Future (in interview with Jorge Palinhos).

3. Read more about the details of denazification here on Auschwitz.at.

4. Guardian article outlining dates of legality for homosexuality in Vienna. Before WWII, Vienna had “about a dozen gay cafes, clubs, and bookstores.”

5. While Klimt was atheist, most of his clients were in the wealthy Jewish community. An interesting article here from NPR explains. The film Woman in Gold also deals with the subject of one of these seized paintings. There is still an ongoing battle with some of this artwork in Vienna. I get into this a bit in the novel!

6. Or am I?

7. Rewarding for the friendship or common understanding rather than the writing material!

8. I was also inspired by this FT article: The secret lives of M16’s top female spies

9. See “After the Race,” in Dubliners by James Joyce (as well as the whole text).

10. I love Vienna. But here, I’m exploring many nuances and a darker side, which any city has. The protagonist’s views of the city and culture can’t always be trusted; they likewise change over the story. I hope you’ll see my love for Vienna by the end and that I do it justice!

Claudia Befu

feel free to add your take on the city you call home. Perhaps I can add non-fiction explorations like I suggest in the footnote below to round out our understanding of the place.

11. Those are two of my favorites on either end of the spectrum. At this moment of writing, I’m thinking I should do a special essay on the cafes of Vienna…but after a trip to see friends and re-experience them. Ja?

12. I’m also giving you the start of a Viennese lexicon to take with you on this reading journey.

13. Consider Kafka’s “Before the Law” as well as the many literary and scholarly works in this article from The Guardian.

14. The majority of Austrians pay a voluntary church tax. If you want to pay it, then great, but foreigners must be careful when they are ticking boxes with HR in new jobs not to tick the box if they want to opt out!

15. See Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919)