Nazi occupation of Vienna

Nazi occupation of Vienna, from 1938 to 1945, is both a historical rupture in the novel’s account of the city and the defining past of T. S. Garp’s first novel, Procrastination. The occupation’s consequences persist beyond the war: successive foreign occupations shape who is born in Vienna and when, while the city’s damaged political memory becomes the setting for a story about delayed resistance, complicity, hunger, and belated regret.

Historical Setting and Aftermath

The occupation left a marked generational gap. Few Viennese were born in 1943, and few were born between the start of Nazi occupation in 1938 and the war’s end in 1945. Although many babies were born as a result of rape, Viennese generally did not want children until after 1955, when the Russian occupation ended. The city had been occupied by foreigners for seventeen years; for many residents, those years did not seem a wise or hopeful time to begin families.

Garp, born in 1943, encounters this history as a young man walking and riding trolleys through Vienna. He feels conspicuous at eighteen in a city with so few people his age, an experience the narrative connects to his sense of having grown older quickly. The postwar city seems to him less alive than suspended: in a letter to Helen, he calls it “more of ‘a museum housing a dead city’” than a living place. He does not mean this as a criticism. Vienna’s stillness suits his solitary looking and thinking; unlike a living city, it seems to hold still long enough to be noticed.

Procrastination and the Occupation

Garp’s first novel, Procrastination, is set in Vienna from 1938 through 1945 and the period of Russian occupation that followed. Its young anarchist protagonist is forced into hiding after the Anschluss, waiting for the right moment to strike against the Nazis. He waits too long. Too young to recognize what is happening, and unable to be certain of the right action, he misses the chance to act before the Nazi takeover. The protagonist’s delay turns the novel’s title into a political as well as personal condition: hesitation becomes consequential when history is moving toward catastrophe.

The protagonist works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn Zoo during the war. As Vienna’s population begins to starve and midnight raids on the zoo become a common way to steal food, he decides to free the remaining animals, which are innocent of the country’s procrastination and acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But the animals are starving too. They eat him when he releases them, and a starving mob soon slaughters the animals as it searches for food ahead of the Russian forces. The novel’s repeated judgment that these events are “only natural” refuses an easy separation between political failure and bodily survival: the animals’ hunger and the crowd’s hunger make the consequences brutally material.

Occupation, Memory, and the Novel’s Ending

The protagonist’s widowed mother survives the war in the Russian zone of occupation. Garp gives her the same apartment he and his mother share on Schwindgasse. Initially apolitical and protective of her private life, she hoards her dead husband’s money; after witnessing Soviet atrocities, especially rape, she remembers with regret her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power. The parallel between her earlier passivity and her later recognition gives the novel’s political delay an intimate, domestic dimension.

After the Russians leave in 1956, Vienna retreats into itself again. The mother mourns her son and her damaged country, and visits the partly rebuilt, recovered zoo each weekend, recalling her secret visits to him during the war. The Hungarian Revolution brings hundreds of thousands of refugees to Vienna and prompts her final action. Her hoarded money at last serves a purpose: she dies in luxury at the Rudolfinerhaus, the city’s only private hospital. In her death dream, two young Asiatic black bears escape from the zoo, survive, and multiply into a celebrated new species in the Danube valley. The dream proves only imagination; after her death, the novel ends instead with the death of the diarrhetic bear at Schönbrunn. A reviewer’s verdict, “So much for revolution in modern times,” draws the ending’s bitterly compressed connection between revolutionary hope, historical recurrence, and the vulnerable animals who bear its costs.

Reception and Historical Art

The historical research in Procrastination was praised for its accuracy, and reviewers also noted the novel’s originality and unusual scope for a first book by a young author. Garp himself had little interest in praise for research. Nor was he pleased that reviewers repeatedly framed him as the famous feminist Jenny Fields’s son, despite John Wolf’s agreement not to advertise that connection on the jacket flap. The attention redirected discussion from the novel’s own artistic merits toward its author’s identity and family history.

That reception echoes a tension at the center of Garp’s writing: the occupation is not merely background to a historical novel, but material shaped into a narrative about the cost of waiting to act. Procrastination’s starving animals, the anarchist’s missed opportunity, and his mother’s eventual regret make political history legible through private loss and bodily consequence. Its reception, however, shows how easily the public can turn a work away from the questions it poses and toward a story about the writer himself.