Dorothy Thompson

Washington Post/December 31, 1920

Dorothy Thompson Describes Once Lovely City’s Motley Mendicant Swarm

In Vienna they say politely to strangers: “Oh, have you come to study our misery?”

It has become quite a task—taking visitors to make the rounds of the great relief organizations, to see the thousands of pallid, listless children who stand every noon, cup in hand, before the palace that once housed the Austrian Emperor, and is now a food kitchen of the American relief committee, or to visit the hospitals and see the gruesome sight of children with bent legs, protruding abdomens and huge heads—the victims of “rikitts,” that horrible disease of malnutrition.

But I was not in Vienna to “study its misery.” I was only a casual visitor, and though I saw much of this wretchedness en masse under the chaperonage of the American Red Cross, the joint distribution committee and the Friends, those things which made the misery of Vienna most real to me were the small observations which one is able to make every day.

For instance, in regard to beggars, in its halcyon days Vienna was singularly free from mendicants. Coming into Austria from Italy one of the first things which one missed were the “lazzaroni,” who whine at every corner in Venice and Rome.

Beggars Everywhere

But now Vienna is crowded with beggars and street vendors, and from a study of their faces it is possible to make a very interesting observation about them. They are unquestionably the most intelligent beggars in the world. They are worth studying, for their history is one with the history of the city.

Every day on the famous Viennese promenade the Karntnerring, you may meet the wreck of what was once a man. There are great dark pockets where once his eyes looked out. Empty sleeves hang at his sides, and a dog leads him by a leash around his waist. Pitiful people who pass by drop a few kronen into his pocket. So he lives.

But his face, you will notice, wrecked and marred as it is, is no ordinary face. And if you inquire about him, perhaps you may learn his story. This is how it was told to me by the maître d’hotel where I stopped.

“Ach, yes. I know him well five years ago. Then he was a captain from a well-known family. Very handsome. He used to come here often for dinner with his pretty wife. He lost his arms and his eyes in the last year of the war. When his wife saw him in the hospital she went home and shot herself. Probably he would have gone the same way, but he had a child. His pension is only a few kronen a month. He has friends of influence, but what are they in Vienna? No one except the profiteers has money enough to help their friends. So he begs to support his child. It is well he is blind, perhaps. I should hate to have him see me—who used to take his coat in the old days.”

Once A Beau Brummel

Beside the Grand Hotel a man sits, selling newspapers. A newspaper in Vienna costs one Kronen eighty belars. If you buy from him and offer him two kronen I hope you will not take the change, because it is from that twenty belars that he manages to live. I got his story from his former coiffeur. For in the days before the war he was the Beau Brummel of Vienna. All the fashionable cafes knew him, and the young bloods copied his waistcoasts and cravates and every week he came to the coiffeur’s to have his beard dressed and his hair marcelled.

“What can one do?” asked the coiffeur. “Vienna is full of these people who used to live on their incomes, who have no profession or trade, and whose friends are as impoverished as themselves.”

The man who sells shoestrings on the opera ring was once a professor. Before you judge the sacrifice of his self-respect too harshly, recollect that an eminent Viennese scientist starved to death not so long ago.

Losing Self-Respect

I talked about these beggars to Max Winter, the vice mayor of Vienna. His eyes took fire.

“Oh, yes.” he said. “That is the most terrible tragedy of my country. We are losing our self-respect. The things which our present condition is doing to our bodies is nothing compared with what it is doing to our souls. We are finding that the best commodity which we have to offer in the world’s market is our wretchedness. So we display it for sale. Vienna is still a great centre. Every hotel is crowded, for the man from Constantinople who wants to bargain with a man from Norway, still meets him in Vienna. These men, who come to Vienna for trade and a good time do not like to see misery flaunted in their faces. They will not concern themselves with the fate of Vienna’s scientists and men of letters who are perishing, but they will hand a few kronen to a ragged man selling shoestrings.

Send Children Away

“It is so everywhere. The Viennese woman who has pretty children schemes to get them adopted by people in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Often these children send home more money and food than the mother and father could possibly earn. But what is the effect on the parents and on the attitude of the children toward them? 

“Vienna needs physical relief for her poverty, and that relief has been generously forthcoming, particularly from America. But far more than charity, she needs work and credit and a chance to live a self-respecting life and pay her own way. Otherwise we may save our bodies and lose our souls.”