Anschluss

The Anschluss—the Nazi takeover of Austria—forms the political turning point in the historical fiction of T. S. Garp’s first novel, Procrastination. Its young anarchist protagonist waits for the right moment to strike against the Nazis, only to find that the decisive moment has passed: he is too young to understand what is happening, and his hesitation leaves him acting within a catastrophe already underway. The episode gives the novel’s title a political meaning, making delay not merely a personal failing but a condition in which passivity can enable historical violence.

The Anschluss in Procrastination

Garp’s novel is set in Vienna from 1938 to 1945 and continues through the period of Russian occupation. After the Anschluss, its young anarchist lies low while waiting for an opportunity to deliver a blow against the Nazis. The narration’s central irony is that he waits too long. In retrospect, he should have struck before the Nazi takeover; at the time, however, he cannot be sure what action to take and is too young to recognize the danger clearly. The Anschluss thus marks the point at which uncertainty and delay become consequential: the opportunity for resistance is imagined as something that might arrive later, but the political transformation has already made that later moment different.

The protagonist’s private circumstances sharpen the contrast between political crisis and withdrawal. His widowed mother is unconcerned with politics and hoards her dead husband’s money, cherishing her private life while events reshape the city around her. Her detachment and her son’s indecision are distinct responses to the historical moment, but both place personal hesitation beside the growing force of public events.

From Occupation to Catastrophe

During the war, the anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn Zoo. As Vienna’s population begins to starve, midnight raids on the zoo become a common way to obtain food. He eventually decides to free the remaining animals, which are innocent of Austria’s procrastination and acquiescence to Nazi Germany. Yet his act of liberation comes after deprivation has made the animals themselves desperate: they eat him. Garp’s narration calls this “only natural,” making the phrase an expression of grim inevitability rather than an absolution of the conditions that brought the scene about.

The animals’ fate extends the novel’s account of consequences beyond the anarchist’s death. A starving mob roaming Vienna ahead of the Russian forces easily slaughters them. That outcome, too, is described as “only natural.” The repetition links the delayed political response to a chain of brutal outcomes in which hunger and violence overwhelm intentions that might once have seemed humane or heroic.

Aftermath and the Meaning of Delay

The anarchist’s mother survives the war in the Russian zone of occupation. Garp gives her the same apartment that he and his own mother shared on Schwindgasse. Repeated atrocities under Soviet occupation, especially rape, eventually exhaust her tolerance. As Vienna returns to moderation and complacency, she remembers her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power with regret. The Anschluss therefore remains present in the postwar story not only as the start of occupation, but as a past failure whose meaning changes when the survivor looks back on it.

After the Russians leave, in 1956, Vienna again retreats into itself. The old woman mourns both her son and her damaged country, and every weekend she walks through the partially rebuilt, once-again-healthy Schönbrunn Zoo, recalling her secret visits to her son during the war. The Hungarian Revolution prompts her final action as hundreds of thousands of new refugees arrive in Vienna. Her accumulated money, hoarded through the upheavals, at last serves her: she dies in luxury at the Rudolfinerhaus, Vienna’s only private hospital.

In her death dream, two young Asiatic Black Bears escape the zoo, survive, and multiply until they become a famous new species in the Danube valley. The novel then makes the distinction between imagined escape and material outcome explicit: the bears’ survival is only the old woman’s imagination, and after her death the diarrhetic bear at Schönbrunn dies. A reviewer’s line, “So much for revolution in modern times,” compresses the book’s bleak collision of revolutionary hope, historical passivity, and mortality.

Publication and Reception

Procrastination was praised for the accuracy of its historical research, though Garp had little interest in that aspect of its reception. Reviewers also praised its originality and the unusual scope of a first novel by a young author. Yet attention to Garp’s identity repeatedly displaced discussion of the work: despite John Wolf’s agreement not to advertise him as the son of Jenny Fields, reviewers often emphasized that connection, and some treated the novel’s recurring bears as evidence that Garp had not yet matured as a writer.

The later reception of Garp’s fiction shows how easily political and biographical frames could overtake the books themselves. Second Wind of the Cuckold undersold Procrastination by a few thousand copies and left Garp feeling, for the first time, that he had failed. Years later, The World According to Bensenhaver sold widely and remained controversial; a review helped establish the rumor that it was a feminist novel. Eventually, college courses paired Jenny Fields’s autobiography with Garp’s three novels and Stewart Percy’s history of the academy, inviting students to search the books for clues to Garp’s life. Across these changing responses, Procrastination’s account of the Anschluss stands within a larger pattern: readers, like its protagonist, can mistake the story they expect to find for the history actually taking place.