Introduction to a Life

Abstract

André Gorz was born in Vienna in February 1923, the second child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918, both Robert and Maria had emigrated from Moravia with their families to settle in the grim, overcrowded and impoverished capital of the newly proclaimed republic. Neither of them possessed a strong sense of national or religious identity. Robert, who was working for his brother-in-law as a timber merchant, remained a typical citizen of Kaiser Franz Josef’s ‘multinational empire’ in which loyalty to the Emperor prevailed over the spirit of modern nationalism. Maria was the younger daughter of a Czech opera singer and director. With the peripatetic nature of her father’s work, Maria had spent a good part of her childhood and adolescence in Germany. To help her father, who was struggling to establish himself as an impresario in Vienna, she took a secretarial job in the small firm that Robert was running. A modest, soft-spoken, unimaginative man, he fell in love with his attractive and confident secretary, and asked her to marry him. Though he was 15 years her senior and a Jew, she consented, clashing with her father who, like practically all non-Jewish central Europeans, considered Jewishness to be an incorrigible defect.