Soviet occupation of Austria

The Soviet occupation of Austria shapes both the historical atmosphere of Vienna in T. S. Garp’s life and the fictional history of his first novel, Procrastination. Its long duration helps make the city seem suspended between catastrophe and recovery: Garp encounters a place marked by missing generations and, in his account, more like a museum than a living city. In the novel he builds from that setting, occupation and political passivity recur across generations, while the eventual return to normality proves no guarantee against complacency.

Historical Setting and Vienna

The occupation is part of a broader period in which Vienna was occupied by foreign powers for seventeen years. Few Viennese were born during the years from the Nazi occupation in 1938 to the end of the war in 1945, and few wanted children until after the Russian occupation ended in 1955. Garp, born in 1943, therefore found himself in a city where people his age were unusually scarce. The historical interval was not merely background: it made his adolescence feel peculiar and, as the narration suggests, helped him grow older faster.

During a late-summer and early-fall stay in Vienna, Garp wandered the city alone, walking and riding its trolleys. He wrote to Helen that the city intensified the adolescent sense that no one nearby could understand him. He also described Vienna as “a museum housing a dead city.” The image registers his response to a place whose stillness made it possible to look closely and think; he later wrote that a more active city might not have suited him as well. His description is presented not as a condemnation of Vienna but as an account of the particular attention its postwar quiet allowed.

Occupation Recast in Procrastination

Garp’s first novel, Procrastination, turns Vienna’s political history into a family story. Its young anarchist protagonist waits for the right moment to strike against the Nazis after the Anschluss, but waits too long: he is young and cannot yet recognize the danger developing around him. During the war he works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn Zoo. As Vienna suffers severe food shortages and people raid the zoo for food, he releases the remaining animals, which are themselves starving; they kill him, and a starving crowd then kills the animals. The novel makes these outcomes part of a grim chain in which political delay and material desperation leave no clean or triumphant act of liberation.

The protagonist’s widowed mother survives the war in the Russian-occupied zone, living in the same Schwindgasse apartment shared by Garp and his mother. She had once kept apart from politics and guarded her dead husband’s money. Under Soviet occupation, repeated atrocities, especially rape, wear down her tolerance. She sees Vienna return to moderation and complacency and regrets her own earlier inertia during the Nazi rise to power. When the Russians leave in 1956, the city retreats into itself again; she continues to mourn both her son and her damaged country.

The mother’s eventual attempt to awaken Vienna is prompted by the Hungarian Revolution and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Trying to repeat her son’s act of liberation, she releases animals at Schönbrunn Zoo. But now the animals are well fed: only a few leave their enclosures, those are readily contained in the zoo grounds, and all are returned unharmed. Her gesture changes nothing. She is arrested, and a police doctor discovers that she has cancer. In her final illness she dies in luxury at Vienna’s private Rudolfinerhaus, while her imagined escape of young Asiatic black bears remains only a dream. After her death, the bear that had suffered diarrhea at the zoo also dies, closing the novel with an ironic deflation of revolutionary possibility.

Reception and Historical Meaning

The novel’s treatment of occupation and delay was praised for the accuracy of its historical research, as well as for its originality and unusual scope for a young first-time novelist. Yet Garp was frustrated when reviews focused on his identity as Jenny Fields’s son rather than the work’s merits. The critical response thus echoes one of the book’s concerns: public interpretation can divert attention from what a work actually stages. A reviewer’s description of Garp as still writing about bears also connected Procrastination to an earlier Grillparzer story, making recurrence itself part of the book’s reception.

The occupation’s significance in the novel lies not in a simple opposition between foreign rule and liberation, but in the repeated failure of people to act at the right time. The young anarchist’s delayed resistance, his mother’s regret, and her later, ineffectual release of the zoo animals place political passivity and belated action in parallel. Vienna’s return to calm after occupation is correspondingly uneasy: recovery can coexist with forgetfulness, while a gesture intended to rouse the city may arrive too late to have an effect.