Hungarian Revolution of 1956

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is the historical crisis that prompts an elderly Viennese woman to repeat her dead son’s attempt to liberate the animals at Schönbrunn Zoo. The parallel exposes how much circumstances have changed: what became a lethal catastrophe during wartime is reduced, in a prosperous and complacent postwar city, to a futile gesture and the death of one bear.

Vienna Before the Uprising

The woman’s decision follows years of regret and mourning. Her son, a young anarchist who had worked as a zookeeper through the war, died after freeing animals who were themselves starving; a hungry crowd then killed the animals for food. After the war, his mother lived in the Russian zone of occupation, in the apartment on Schwindgasse that her son had shared with his mother. She witnessed atrocities under Soviet rule and later watched Vienna return to moderation and complacency, regretting her own earlier inertia during the Nazi rise to power.

When Soviet forces leave in 1956, the woman continues to remember her son and the damaged country. She visits the partially rebuilt, healthy zoo every weekend, recalling her secret visits to him during the war. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of new refugees following the Hungarian Revolution turns those memories into a renewed demand for action: she fears the city will once again sit back and watch events unfold.

The Attempt at Schönbrunn Zoo

Seeking to awaken Vienna, the woman releases the zoo animals as her son had done. The changed conditions undo the wartime parallel. These animals are well fed and content; only a few can be persuaded to leave their cages, and the animals that do wander out are readily confined in the zoo’s paths and gardens before being returned unharmed.

The failed release has only one lasting consequence for the animals: an elderly bear suffers a bout of violent diarrhea. The woman is arrested, and a police doctor examining her discovers that she has cancer. Her gesture of liberation has not moved the city or altered events; the diagnosis instead makes her own impending death immediate.

The Revolution’s Unfulfilled Ending

The woman’s hoarded money finally serves her, allowing her to die in luxury at Vienna’s only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. In her death dream, she imagines that two young Asiatic Black Bears escape from the zoo, survive, and multiply until they are known as a new species in the Danube valley. The imagined escape supplies the consequence the real release could not achieve, but it remains only a dream.

After the woman’s death, the novel returns to the zoo and confirms that the elderly bear has died. A reviewer’s verdict, “So much for revolution in modern times,” gives the episode its bitter final counterpoint and describes Procrastination as “an anti-Marxist novel.” The sequence makes the 1956 uprising less a direct account of events in Hungary than the trigger for a failed act of protest in Vienna: the woman’s attempt to break the city’s passivity produces no revolution, while the dream briefly grants her animals the freedom reality withheld.