The White Horses of Vienna

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The White Horses of Vienna

Kay Boyle 1935

Author Biography

Kay Boyle was born to a wealthy family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1903. As a child, she traveled with her parents throughout the United States and Europe

and developed an early appreciation for art and literature.

She moved to New York City while she was still a teenager. There she got a job as an assistant to the editor of Broom magazine. Within a short period of time, her work began appearing in that publication as well as in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

Also that year, Boyle married a French engineer and traveled to France. Out of money and unable to return to the United States, the couple moved to Paris where her literary contacts led to her acquaintance with many American expatriate writers living in France. Soon her literary associates were asking for her contribution to new publications. She also obtained work editing a journal called This Quarter.

In 1927 several of her short stories appeared in an avant-garde magazine called transition; she published regularly in that journal for the next several years. In her fiction Boyle created startling images, experimented with syntax, and employed a stream-of-consciousness technique.

By the 1930s, Boyle ’s work was appearing frequently in numerous American magazines, including the New Yorker. The stories from this period were collected in her first American book, Short Stories. She continued to write novels and poetry, and many of her best-known novels were published in that decade. She also worked on translations, a children ’s book, and edited a short story anthology.

Her experiences in Europe in the years before World War II influenced many of the short stories she wrote during this period, such as “The White Horses of Vienna.” After the end of World War II, Boyle lived in West Germany and worked as a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker. Her short stories at this time were informed by her experiences living in the then-occupied, devastated nation.

In the 1950s Boyle was identified as a Communist sympathizer and as a result, she lost her job with the New Yorker. She returned to the United States to clear her name. At that time the Nation was one of the few magazines that would print her work.

From 1963 to 1979 Boyle taught at San Francisco State College and became a political activist, which included her arrest for protesting the Vietnam War. She died in 1992.

Plot Summary

The first part of “The White Horses of Vienna” takes place in the home of an unnamed doctor who lives with his wife and two sons at the foot of a mountain range in Austria. The doctor often climbs the mountain at night, and one night he sprains his ankle. The injury is severe enough that he will be unable to care for his patients for several weeks, so he writes to the hospital in Vienna for a studentdoctor to come to his town and take care of his patients. While bedridden, the elderly doctor makes puppets.

Three days later, Dr. Heine arrives from Vienna. Realizing that the young man is Jewish, the elderly doctor ’s wife is stunned. She is unhappy about having to share their home with a Jew, and she knows that the rest of the townspeople also do not like Jews. However, as a doctor ’s assistant she has a responsibility to her husband ’s patients and she is needed to help Dr. Heine pull a tooth shortly after his arrival. She advises him to stand behind the patient, as the doctor always does. Dr. Heine acquiesces, but as he moves position, his coat catches the flame of the sterilizing lamp.

By the time the fire is noticed and extinguished, it has burned the back of his white jacket. Dr. Heine is upset because he is afraid his carelessness will cost him his job. The doctor ’s wife tells him the accident was her fault and that she will try and fix his new jacket. Then she suddenly feels awkward, remembering he is Jewish.

The second section of the story takes place at the supper table. Dr. Heine tells a story about the royal Lippizaner horses of Vienna. A maharajah had recently seen the horses perform. He wanted to take one of the horses back to India, and the impoverished Austrian government demanded an extraordinary sum for this privilege. The maharajah agreed to the price, but only if the rider came with the horse. The government then demanded an enormous salary for the rider, which the maharajah agreed to pay.

However, the government agents had forgotten about the young groom who cared for the horse. The groom did not want the horse to be taken from Vienna, so he cut the horse on the leg to keep the horse from traveling. After the horse healed, the groom cut the horse again. This time the horse ’s blood became poisoned and the animal had to be killed.

Throughout the story, the doctor ’s wife bitterly noted how often Dr. Heine seemed to talk about money. Now she emphasizes that the maharajah ’s money could not save the horse. Dr. Heine doesn ’t understand her point and continues with the story, saying that the government had not figured out how the horse came to be injured until the groom killed himself. At that point, they figured out what happened.

The police arrive to ask the doctor about the increase of burning swastikas on the mountainside. They want to know how to get there by the quickest path, but the doctor claims that he cannot move because of his leg. After they have gone, Dr. Heine talks bitterly of how all of Austria is ruined by the current political situation and he wonders who lit the swastika fires. The doctor answers that some people light them because of their beliefs.

One evening, the doctor gives one of his famous puppet shows for his family and neighbors. The puppet show features a grasshopper and a clown. The graceful grasshopper elegantly dances through a field. Then the clown comes on stage, awkward and tripping over his sword. The clown compares poorly to the grasshopper, with his faltering voice, stupid gestures, and obsequious manner.

The grasshopper and the clown talk about the artificial flowers the clown carries. The clown says he is going to his own funeral and wants to be sure he has fresh flowers.

Everyone is enjoying the puppet show immensely, but Dr. Heine starts to realize that the grasshopper is called “The Leader” and the clown “Chancellor” for no apparent reason. He laughs less and less. The Leader and the Chancellor continue to talk about religion, but the Leader always wins their arguments. To the roars of the children ’s laughter, the clown says “I believe in independence” and then promptly falls over his sword. The Leader says that the clown is relying on the help of the heavens, but implies they may not be strong enough to support him.

The last section of the story takes place sometime later. As Dr. Heine walks outside one night, he thinks that he is growing tired of his stay here and that he wants to be with the intellectuals he left behind in Vienna. The police arrive to arrest the doctor. Dr. Heine asks them why they must come for a man in the middle of the night. They explain that Dollfuss, Austria ’s chancellor, was assassinated that afternoon and they are rounding up all those people whose political sympathies lie against the Austrian leader. As the police take the doctor away, Dr. Heine asks if there is anything he can do to help. The doctor tells him he can throw peaches and chocolates through his prison window.

Characters

The Doctor

The unnamed doctor is an elderly man and a longtime Nazi sympathizer. He believes that people should actively express their political beliefs; he works with a band of men who burn swastikas atop the mountains to show their desire for Austria ’s allegiance with Nazi Germany.

Unlike his wife and despite his political leanings, he does not openly display any prejudice against Dr. Heine. When his wife complains about having a Jewish man in her house, he reminds her that Dr. Heine comes highly recommended and seems amiable. However, his fundamental disdain for the Jew reveals itself subtly throughout the story.

Superficially, the doctor seems to be a thoughtful, worldly, and artistic man. However, he uses his charm, good reputation, and obvious intelligence to promote Nazi ideology. For instance, his puppets are used to express his political beliefs in the form of a puppet show. His political demonstrations are known by the Austrian police; he has already been arrested for his activities, and at the end of the story is arrested again.

The Doctor ’s Wife

The unnamed doctor ’s wife is a capable woman. A former nurse, she assists her husband with his patients. She is also anti-Semitic and believes that all Jews are greedy and obsessed with money. She is disturbed to have Dr. Heine in her house, yet tolerates him.

Heine

Dr. Heine is a young Jewish student-doctor from Vienna. Not a political man, he is interested primarily in intellectual and artistic matters. He does not realize that the doctor ’s wife is anti-Semitic and that the doctor is a supporter of the Nazis. However, while he commends the doctor for the artistic aspect of his puppet shows, he does not realize that the play the doctor stages represents the political situation between Austria and Nazi Germany. On a larger scale, Dr. Heine does not understand the import of the Nazi activity in Austria and how it might affect his own life.

Dr. Heine

See Heine

The Student-Doctor

See Heine

Themes

Prejudice

One of the main themes in “The White Horses of Vienna” is prejudice; in this case, anti-Semitism. The doctor ’s wife immediately dislikes Dr. Heine simply because he is Jewish. She views him as alien and impure, someone who will try to poison the townspeople ’s “clean, Nordic hearts.” For one moment she empathizes with him —after his jacket burns and she offers to fix it —but then immediately recognizes her mistake and steps back “as if she had remembered the evil thing that stood between them.”

She also subscribes to the stereotype that all Jews are greedy and obsessed with money. Thus when Dr. Heine tells the story of the Lippizaner horse, she attributes his interest to the exorbitant amount of money demanded by the government.

The prejudice held by the doctor ’s wife is not dissimilar to that of the townspeople. The doctor, the only character presented who is an active member of a Nazi group, shows the least amount of prejudice. The student-doctor even forges a bond with the older doctor.

Politics and Political Protest

The elderly doctor is a political activist: he protests the ruling Austrian government in favor of Nazi Germany ’s government. Apparently, he has been involved in political activities for some time. He has previously been arrested, and his willingness to go to jail for his beliefs evinces his ardent support for Nazi Germany.

In fact, the elderly doctor sustained his leg injury during one of his regular excursions up the mountaintop, presumably to light swastika fires. He is not secretive about his political beliefs and often dramatizes his political opinions through his marionette shows. Such actions show that political protest can be carried out on all levels of life —almost anything can be politicized.

The obtuse Dr. Heine points out this fact in his constant anguish over the political talk that has taken Austria. However, Dr. Heine does not recognize the extent of the elderly doctor ’s political involvement —thus, he doesn ’t recognize how prevalent the conflict is in Austria. Therefore he ignores the very real threat of Nazi ideology, especially for someone of his religious faith.

Nazism

Although not specifically mentioned by name, Nazism is a major theme in “The White Horses of Vienna.” Nazism, or the doctrines followed by the Nationalist Socialist Party, was initiated by Adolf Hitler. He outlined the main elements of the Nazi program in the 1920s with his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

Hitler was nationalistic, anticommunist, antidemocratic, and expansionist. His nationalism derived from a major belief that Germans, or “Aryans,” were a biologically superior race. He identified the Jews as Germany ’s racial and cultural

Topics for Further Study

Conduct research to find out more about Austria in the 1930s. Why did so many Austrians support Nazism? What kinds of people tended to be Nazi sympathizers? Who opposed these Austrian Nazis?
Find contemporary accounts of the political situation in Austria and Germany in the 1930s by looking in magazines, newspapers, or books. How has public perception of these events changed over the years?
The Nazis strongly believed in nationalism. Listen to a musical composition by the nationalist German composer Frederick Wagner. What is nationalism and how can it be expressed through music? What types of feelings does the composition evoke?
Dr. Heine mentions his interest in science and art. Find out about the prevailing scientific thought and modes of artistic expression in Austria in the 1930s. How does this scientific and artistic situation relate to the developing political situation?

enemy, claiming that they kept Germany from reaching its greatness. As his power grew, Hitler initiated programs to deny German Jews of any of the basic rights of citizenship. His plan for the “final solution” to the Jewish problem was their systematic extermination in concentrations camps.

Hitler also believed that Germany needed more territory as the country ’s population rapidly grew. He looked toward Eastern Europe —particularly Russia —as a means to provide the German people with thousands of square miles of needed land. He envisioned the Germans enslaving the Slavs —also thought to be an inferior people —who already lived there. Acquiring Austria was a first step in this expansion, as it gave Hitler economic and military control of the transportation systems leading into Eastern Europe.

Style

Allusion

The doctor ’s marionette show functions as a satirical allusion for the political difficulties between Germany and Austria. Satire is the use of humor, wit, or ridicule to criticize human nature and societal institutions; the indirect satire employed by the doctor in the puppet show relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point.

In the doctor ’s puppet show, the clown —called the “Chancellor” —represents Austrian leader Engelbert Dollfuss, while the grasshopper, or “The Leader,” represents German leader Adolf Hitler. The grasshopper, “a great, gleaming beauty,” is clearly the superior creature with its elegant dance and powerful voice. The grasshopper is also charismatic and has the power to reach the common people. As such, the doctor presents an accurate portrayal of Hitler, who was able to convince the majority of Germans to give him and his programs their allegiance.

In contrast, the clown is clumsy and foolish. The conversation between the two characters demonstrates the two leaders ’ beliefs and foreshadows what will come to pass —the clown is on his way to his own funeral. Towards the end of the show, the clown declares, ’ “I believe in independence,’” but then promptly trips over his sword and falls down. These actions show the doctor ’s belief that Dollfuss is on his way out and that members of the Austrian Nazi Party, men such as himself, will oust the ineffectual Dollfuss in favor of Hitler.

The satire comes into play through the sheer ridiculousness of the clown. He carries artificial flowers although the lush Austrian countryside is filled with beautiful wildflowers. He cannot manage to even walk properly, tripping constantly over his sword, which is the emblem of power.

Metaphor

Dr. Heine ’s tale about the Lippizaner horses from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna forms the central metaphor of the story. The horses are described as “still royal... without any royalty left to bow their heads to, still shouldering into the arena with spirits a man would give his soul for, bending their knees in homage to the empty, canopied loge where royalty no longer sat.” The elderly doctor is strongly identified with the horses. Like the horse purchased by the maharajah, the doctor suffers from an injured leg. Both the doctor and the horse are crippled, and both have poison running through their bodies; the horse ’s poison is on a physical level, and the doctor ’s on a symbolic level.

The doctor is further identified with the horse in his need for some kind of royalty or leader to follow. Thus he embraces Hitler and rejects the weak leadership of Dollfuss. The tale of the horses also symbolizes lost Austrian ideals and helps shed light on why so many Austrians were looking to Germany. The death of the horse can also be seen as forecasting the doctor ’s destruction, perhaps even the eventual demise of the Nazi Party.

Hero and Anti-Hero

In “The White Horses of Vienna,” readers must grapple with the question of who is a hero —or if there is even a hero in the tale. Typically, a hero is the principal sympathetic character in a literary work and usually exhibits admirable traits such as idealism, courage, and integrity. An anti-hero is a central character who lacks these traditional heroic qualities.

Dr. Heine and the Austrian doctor emerge as the central figures in the story. The doctor does demonstrate certain heroic qualities; he is self-sufficient, multitalented, and worldly. Interestingly, one of his most admirable qualities —his tolerance for Dr. Heine —is counter to his political and personal beliefs. Dr. Heine exhibits both heroic and anti-heroic qualities; as an anti-hero, he is extremely obtuse and feels alienated from the villagers. Yet neither of these men can truly be categorized in one category or the other.

Structure

“The White Horses of Vienna is divided into three parts. While these parts follow a linear order, each section presents different types of information. Part I provides pertinent information about the doctor and his wife as well as how a Jewish doctor fares in a thoroughly anti-Semitic community. Part II presents the central metaphor of the story as well as the doctor ’s puppet show. Part III includes the story of the doctor ’s arrest.

Historical Context

Austria in the 1920s

Knowledge of the political and economic situation in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s is essential to understanding “The White Horses of Vienna.” Austria greatly suffered as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I and had carved out Austria from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria faced increasing economic problems; the treaty prevented economic growth, and the new republic could not grow enough food for its people or supply its industries with adequate raw materials.

Austria also suffered from social upheaval, particularly as urban socialists and rural conservatives weakened attempts to forge a democratic government. A third of the country ’s population lived in Vienna —including Jews who contributed to the city ’s rich cultural life and rose to respected government positions. The country split into two factions: Viennese and everyone else. As different political groups set up private armies, the desire for order made authoritarian rule more appealing. The country became progressively less democratic.

Austria in the 1930s

Austria ’s economy was further devastated by the Great Depression. In 1931 the leading Austrian bank, which had loaned money to nations throughout Europe, went bankrupt. This bank collapse contributed to the spread of the depression in Europe and resulted in further difficulties to Austria, already struggling with massive unemployment and rampant inflation. By the mid-1930s, an entire

Compare & Contrast

1930s: Austria ’s government is ruled by a series of dictators: first Engelbert Dollfuss, then Kurt von Schuschnigg, and after the Anschluss —Germany ’s annexation of Austria —the German leader Adolf Hitler. By 1938, Austria has become part of the new German empire and no longer exists as an independent, sovereign nature.
Today: Austria is a federal republic with an executive government made up of a chief of state, the president, and a chancellor who serves as the head of government. The president, who is elected by the Austrian voters to a six-year term, selects the chancellor. The chancellor, in turn, helps the president select a cabinet.
1930s: Austria faces increasing economic hardship. Many people live in poverty, jobs are scarce, manufacturing is low, and inflation is high. The Austrian government is virtually bankrupt and can no longer provide necessities for all of its people.
Today: Austria has a well-developed market economy, and its people enjoy a high standard of living. A member of the European Union (EU) since 1995, Austria ’s economy is linked to the economies of other EU member countries, especially with Germany ’s. Since joining the EU, Austria has attracted a number of foreign investors eager to gain access to the European market.
1930s: By the beginning of the 1930s, Germany ’s Nazi Party has 180,000 members. Such support gives the Nazi Party a majority in Germany ’s government in 1933. Throughout the decade, the Nazis pass several discriminatory measures against Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, liberals, socialists, Communists, and other “undesirable” members of society.
Today: The 1990s have seen a resurgence of Nazi ideology. Neo-Nazis can be found around the world, including Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Neo-Nazi and right-wing extremist behavior has increased in Germany since the reunification of West and East Germany. In 1997 official figures showed a national rise of fourteen percent in “extreme right-wing” offenses. In that year, the neo-Nazis who actively participated in demonstrations and other activities numbered 47,000 in East Germany alone.

generation of Austrians had grown up in poverty with little opportunity to better their economic circumstances.

The political strife deepened. By the 1930s Austria was led by the so-called Christian dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss. His government was made up of right-wing political and military supporters; in addition, it was anti-socialist and opposed the Nazi power growing in Germany. Dollfuss ’s government tried to curtail the German presence along its borders, but as Austrians grew more discontent, many believed Dollfuss to be incapable of leading the country out of its problems.

Many Austrians favored a union with Germany. A greater numbers of Austrians, some of whom had been members of Austria ’s Nazi party since the late 1920s, took part in pro-German groups and activities. In July 1934, Dollfuss was assassinated; a new dictatorship, led by Kurt von Schuschnigg, took over the government.

Unfortunately, this new government shared many of the same weaknesses as the old one. Increasingly, more and more Austrians looked to Germany and Adolf Hitler to solve their problems. Around this time, the Austrian Nazi party began demanding the union of Austria and Germany. By 1938 Hitler had forced the Austrian government to include Nazi members in its cabinet.

Austria ’s government was in favor of an Anschlusss, or union, with Germany. Austria ’s leaders, however, regretted the agreement and suggested the Anschluss be put to a vote to the Austrian people. Hitler refused to allow this. He wanted to control Austria ’s resources and he believed that controlling Austria would put Germany in a better position to expand in southeastern Europe. The chancellor resigned, and on the Austrian Nazi party took over the government, allowing the German army to march into Austria unopposed. In March 1938, Hitler proclaimed Austria to be part of Germany.

Hitler ’s Rise to Power and Nazi Germany

Germany also suffered greatly as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. The Kaiser had abdicated in 1918, and Germany ’s new democratic government faced both political and economic crises. Germany had difficulties implementing a stable, effective government, and inflation ran rampant until the mid-1920s.

Adolf Hitler first came to national prominence for the leadership role he played in a failed uprising in Munich in 1923. While in prison, he wrote Mein Kampf(My Struggle). In this book, he outlined the major philosophies of the National Socialist, or Nazi, movement. The Nazis were rabidly nationalistic, anticommunist, and anti-Semitic.

Hitler captivated the disillusioned German people, many of whom felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler ’s promises to restore German lands and power also appealed to many Germans.

The Nazis had few followers until the Great Depression led to increasing economic difficulties. By 1930 tens of thousands of German voters supported the Nazi Party. Nazism, with its anti-Communistic stance, strongly appealed to German conservatives. In 1933, Germany ’s leader appointed Hitler chancellor of the republic. Within a month, using the Nazis ’ private army, Hitler had effectively turned himself into a German dictator, outlawing opposing political parties.

The Nazi government increased spending programs, which helped Germany emerge from the depression; created a system of social and cultural education to train the German people in Nazi doctrine; and developed a brutal program of anti-Semitism, under which Jews lost their citizenship. Hitler also broke with the Treaty of Versailles in his rearmament of Germany and his recapturing of lost territory. In 1938, Germany attacked Poland, an action that led to the beginning of World War II.

Critical Overview

“The White Horses of Vienna” was initially published in Harper ’s magazine in 1935. It garnered much critical recognition when it won the O. Henry Award for best short story that year. In 1936 it became the title story for her short story collection. Altogether ten of the eighteen stories in The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories attracted positive critical commentary, and Boyle ’s work consistently appeared on lists of the year ’s best stories throughout the decade.

Criticism

Rena Korb

Korb has a master ’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explores the different facets of Nazism and compares the protagonists in “The White Horses of Vienna.”

In 1935, two years after she first moved to Austria, Kay Boyle told a friend about her experience listening to an illegal radio broadcast of an Adolf Hitler speech. She spoke of his “moving appeal” to Austrians to “return to the Fatherland,” or unite with Germany. “I prefer the emotional thing,” she wrote, “and the Germans have got it in Hitler anyway.”

By that time, Boyle had come to grasp the economic and political woes that had plagued Austria since the end of World War I and had seen the serious ramifications they had on an entire generations of Austrians. She also became acquainted with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers —including her children ’s nurse, who described the swastikas fires blazing in the mountainsides and admitted to lighting them herself several nights a week. While Boyle stood against fascism herself —she lived in the only anti-Nazi hotel in her town —she also recognized the that the situation had literary potential.

When Boyle met a young doctor who was won over by Hitler ’s promises of bringing an economic revival to Austria, she used him as inspiration for the Nazi sympathizer she so keenly portrayed in

What Do I Read Next?

Hugh Ford’s Four Lives in Paris chronicles the lives of four American expatriates who lived in Paris in the 1920s: Boyle, the composer George Antheil, social and political critic Harold Stearns, and New York editor Margaret Anderson.
Boyle’s 1936 novel Death of a Man explores the love affair between an American woman and a Tyrolean doctor. The doctor is a Nazi who is torn between his love for the woman and his devotion to his cause.
Mein Kampf (My Struggle) (American translation, 1943), written by Adolf Hitler while he was in prison for his role in an uprising against the government, outlines his Nazi program and plans for Germany.
Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi’s 1994 novel, explores the rise of Nazism through the story of a young girl growing up in a small German town. The novel, told from the viewpoint of a dwarf, deftly portrays the effect Hitler’s policies had on Jewish families and examines the results of Hitler’s actions on German culture and society.

“The White Horses of Vienna.” “It was his character,” she wrote, “and his political problems, which constituted a large part of my eagerness to write [about him].”

In 1935, “The White Horses of Vienna” was awarded the O. Henry prize for best short story of the year. This honor won the author $300 as well as the widespread critical recognition that had so far alluded her throughout her ten-year career as a writer. The following year, the story was chosen to title Boyle’s fourth volume of short fiction.

Despite these honors, the story was criticized; reviewers from the 1930s expressed disappointment in the story, for they did not understand the political situation arising in post World-War I Europe and thus confused her message. Even more telling, one of the O. Henry judges disagreed with the rest of the panel, objecting to the story because it presented a sympathetic Nazi character.

What this judge and other readers could not comprehend, writes Sandra Whipple Spanier in Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist, was that although Boyle might admire “fervent commitment to a cause, she did not embrace that cause itself.” Boyle herself believed that “the true artist presents; he does not judge.” She countered critics: “In writing ’The White Horses of Vienna’ ... I was seeking to find out, on a human level, what the almost inexplicable fascination of Hitler was.”

Boyle’s attempt to integrate her emotional perceptions with the social and political situation in Austria, however, is considered successful by most contemporary critics. As Mary Loweffelholz writes in Experimental Lives, “the story does not demonize Nazi sympathizers; it instead grounds the evils of Nazism in particular and complicated social conditions.”

“The White Horses of Vienna” chronicles the story of an Austrian doctor who is a Nazi sympathizer and his encounter with a young Jewish student-doctor. This unlikely pair meets after the older doctor, who has injured his leg setting swastika fires in the mountains, sends to Vienna for a replacement. The anti-Semitism of the doctor’s town is revealed through the doctor’s wife; cleverly, Boyle keeps hidden the doctor’s own political agenda.

The major conflict in the story arises from the relationship between the older doctor and the student-doctor. From the onset, Boyle sets up the contrast between the two men. The older doctor is a “savagely clean man” with “well-scrubbed skin.” He is a quintessentially blond Nordic, right down to the “pure white plaster wall” in his home. Dr. Heine, however, is introduced after climbing up

“The emotional backbone of the story derives from such missed communications as well as Boyle’s multidimensional characters. No one is all good or all bad; rather, characters manifest elements of each.”

from the village on foot. He has a “long, dark, alien face” and an “arch” to his nose. He is also dirty— his forehead is covered with sweat and his shoes are “foul with the soft mud of the mountainside.”

However, the two men are dissimilar in more ways than the physical. The older doctor is a Nazi sympathizer who actively works with a group intent on promoting Nazi ideology; the student-doctor is a Jew who actively resents the way politics and political talk has overtaken Austria. As such, both men represent polar ways of dealing with difficult political and social situations: activism or avoidance. While Dr. Heine willfully ignores the significance of the events surrounding him, the older doctor takes his stand; yet, it is hard to commend him for supporting a racist dictator.

Despite this fact, the older doctor is depicted as an intelligent, tolerant man. In the first part of the story, Boyle develops the doctor’s character aside from his political beliefs: he has built his own house; he makes puppets; he paints and draws; he has traveled throughout Europe. Boyle lulls the reader into appreciating the man for his talents before revealing his darker side.

By the end of the story, however, his political beliefs have overshadowed his accomplishments. Through his puppet show he displays his arrogance in his disrespect of the Austrian chancellor. He also ridicules Dr. Heine when he tells the younger man to throw peaches and chocolates at his prison window—he relies on the fact that Dr. Heine, who is so removed from the debilitating economic situation, will not know that it is virtually impossible to get such luxury items in stricken Austria. In this instance, the doctor’s disdain for Dr. Heine is particularly cutting as the younger man acts out of a genuine desire to help.

The most interesting exploration of the doctor’s Nazism, however, is through his attitude toward Dr. Heine. Despite supporting Hitler—an icon of obscene racism—he never expresses any dislike for Dr. Heine based on his religious background. When the doctor’s wife complains about having a Jew in their house, the doctor seems to be on Dr. Heine’s side. It could even be suggested that the doctor’s disdain for Dr. Heine arises, not because of his Jewishness, but because of his utter ignorance at the economic turmoil that grips Austria. A man as politically active as the doctor certainly would not respect someone like Dr. Heine, who deliberately avoids such a difficult situation.

In comparison, the younger doctor is so obtuse that it is difficult to empathize with him, although he is the victim of prejudice. He never comprehends the older doctor’s political activities or his true sympathies, despite witnessing the police officers questioning the doctor about the swastika fires and watching the blatantly political puppet show. The student-doctor, instead, frets about the fact that Austria “is ruined by the situation... Everything is politics now.” He doesn’t question what devastating events would bring about such a condition.

Dr. Heine further demonstrates his lack of awareness in believing that the older doctor also avoids the political situation, basing this assumption solely on the doctor’s interest in making puppets and staging marionette shows. Dr. Heine sees only the surface of things, never delving beyond the superficial.

Dr. Heine does understand on a general level how Germans and Austrians perceive Jews. He sees the swastika fires as “inexplicable signals given from one mountain to another in some secret gathering of power that cast him and his people out, for ever upon the waters of despair.” Yet he cannot make the crucial leap from the general to the specific. He prefers to hide in his card games and in his longing for the old days, when he and his friends discussed art and other intellectual matters.

The two central literary devices in the story— the older doctor’s puppet show and Dr. Heine’s tale of the Lippizaner horses—both function to more fully develop the two men’s characters and their ideals and show their relationship to the current events unfolding in Austria. The doctor, earlier described as hopping and resembling a “great, golden, wounded bird,” is allied with the grasshop-per of his show, “a great, gleaming beauty.” As the grasshopper represents Hitler, the doctor’s alliance with the Nazis is at last made apparent.

The doctor uses the puppet show as a vehicle to further his own cause and to spread Nazi propaganda. The “monstrously handsome” grasshopper is charismatic, possessing a voice that has a “wild and stirring power that sent the cold of wonder up and down one’s spine.” According to the doctor’s script, the grasshopper, also called “The Leader,” has the ability to reach the common people and to understand their needs. The Leader, perfectly at ease in an Austrian field of daisies, is presented as part of the natural order of things.

The foolish, “faltering” clown—also called “Chancellor”—represents the Austrian leader, Engelbert Dollfuss. The puppet show demonstrates the doctor’s disgust for this clown who is “ridiculous in his stupidity.” It also foreshadows the fall of the chancellor—which occurs at the end of the story through his assassination. Where the clown puts his faith in the church, a human-constructed entity, the grasshopper recognizes that “the country is full of God.” That the doctor shows his preference for the grasshopper cannot be denied; even Dr. Heine recognizes that the clown is “quite the fool of the piece.”

The chasm between the two doctors widens as it becomes apparent that the obtuse clown shares characteristics with Dr. Heine. Like the clown, Dr. Heine is uncomfortable in a natural setting and prefers to ignore what is going on around him. Hindsight shows that the Jews were already in great danger as Germans embraced Hitler, but even analyzing the story in its own time frame would lead to a similar conclusion. As early as the 1920s, Hitler had outlined his racial beliefs in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and by the mid-1930s, his Nazis had already initiated harsh and discriminatory measures against German Jews.

Dr. Heine’s story of the Lippizaner horses provides another vehicle for comparison and examination. The doctor is identified with the injured horse from Dr. Heine’s story—both the horse and the doctor suffer leg injuries and both have been poisoned, the horse physically and the doctor with Nazi rhetoric.

However, a deeper meaning can be construed from the metaphor. The doctor, like the horses, needs a powerful leader. Austria’s dysfunctional governmental system has only provided the ineffectual Dollfuss, who has failed to solve the country’s many social and economic problems. The doctor must find a strong leader—Hitler. The horses further represent all the Austrians who sharply feel their country’s loss of prestige and glory.

By the end of the story, Dr. Heine is beginning to feel uncomfortable in his situation. He shows such signs during the puppet show, when he suddenly “found he was not laughing as loudly as before.” The night the Heimwehr police officers arrive to arrest the doctor, Dr. Heine is walking outside the house, “lost in this wilderness of cold” despite the heat of the summer. He longs to be “indoors, with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking.” Dr. Heine’s feelings of alienation would seem to indicate a growing awareness of his anti-Semitic surroundings, yet when he sees the officers approach, his first instinct is to alert the doctor, whom he mistakenly perceives as his friend.

The emotional backbone of the story derives from such missed communications as well as Boyle’s multidimensional characters. No one is all good or all bad; rather, characters manifest elements of each. The Nazi doctor swiftly shifts from feeling sorry for Dr. Heine to mocking him. Dr. Heine, who seems impervious to the problems of those around him, makes a real effort to help someone in need. Even the doctor’s wife helps extinguish the flames when Dr. Heine’s coat catches fire and offers to fix it. Spanier finds in such actions an expression of hope: “even in the face of divisive social forces, the basic connections of compassion between individuals might survive.”

In “The White Horses of Vienna” Boyle presents diametrically opposed characters, both of whom represent ways of dealing with an uncomfortable situation. While many critics do not agree on all the story’s symbolism, a number of them do find evidence of Boyle’s humanism—a notable exception is Ray B. West, Jr., who asserted in The Short Story in America that the story is a “study in decadence.” These contemporary dissenting views mirror those that accompanied the story when it was first published.

It clearly is a story that defies easy categorization. The critics’ quandaries mirror the complexity within the story itself. One thing is certain, however: the story demonstrates both Boyle’s keen understanding of the chaotic world unraveling around her as well as her ability to forecast a grim future. With this story, Boyle opens the doors on the experience of Europe in the 1930s.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

Liz Brent

Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in cinema studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in American cinema. In the following essay, Brent discusses the conflict between personal relationships and political perspectives in Boyle’s short story.

Critics have long debated whether or not Kay Boyle’s short story, “The White Horses of Vienna,” is sympathetic to the Nazi-activist family with which the young Jewish doctor comes to stay. In the following essay, I examine the characters of the wife of the Nazi-activist doctor and Heine, the Jewish student-doctor, in order to discuss the relationship of each character to the political context in which the story takes place. I will first discuss the nature of the wife’s anti-Semitic prejudice against Heine, and then discuss Heine’s own response to the anti-Semitic sentiment which surrounds him. Through these characters, Boyle’s story can be read as a successful portrait of the dilemmas created by each character’s attempt to reconcile her or his political perspective with personal relationships.

Heine, the Jewish student-doctor, sent to stay with the Doctor and his family, represents an alien intrusion into their home and community in two senses: he is Jewish, and he is from the city. The wife’s prejudice against the young Jewish doctor is intertwined with her perception of him as a “man from the city,” and an outsider to their country life and peasant heritage. That the Jewish student-doctor is a fish out of water in the home of the Nazi-activist country doctor is indicated immediately upon his arrival by his city ways. Thinking of Heine’s face, with its Jewish features, as “dark” and “alien,” the wife first notices the inappropriateness of his city dress to the mountain setting: “his city shoes were foul with the soft mud of the mountainside after the rain, and the sweat was standing out on his brow because he was not accustomed to the climb.” When Heine greets the doctor and his wife, even his speech marks him as a man of the city, not the country: ‘“Good day,’ he said, as city people said it.” His status as a man from the city, and outsider to the doctor’s country milieu is also indicated by his inability to recognize the pet fox as a fox: “’Is this a dog or a cat?”’ he asks. Like her description of the young student-doctor’s muddy shoes, the wife equates the city with that which is dirty, “foul” and alien, and the country with that which is clean and pure and familiar; her anti-Semitism thus causes her to view the young doctor’s Jewishness in similar terms: “So much had she heard about Jews that the joints of his tall, elegant frame seemed oiled with some special, suave lubricant that was evil, as a thing come out of the Orient, to their clean, Nordic hearts.”

The wife’s disdain for Heine as both a Jew and a man from the city is further expressed through her internal response to the story he tells the family that evening over supper. She associates his Jewishness with a lack of attachment to any land, which she regards as an affront to the ways of her family’s country peasant heritage, by which identity is strongly tied to land: “.. .the young wife sat giving quick, unwilling glances at this man who could have no blood or knowledge of the land behind him; for what was he but a wanderer whose people had wandered from country to country and whose sons must wander, having no land to return to in the end?”

The wife’s internal response to Heine’s story is completely colored by the anti-Semitic stereotypes she holds, whereby she expects the young Jewish man to be greedy and money-grubbing. As part of Heine’s story concerns payment for a white horse, the wife thinks: “Oh, yes.. .you would speak about money, you would come here and climb our mountain and poison my sons with the poison of money and greed!” When Heine’s story includes an uneven business exchange, the wife imagines that “their shrewdness pleased his soul.” And again, her anti-Semitism against Heine is associated with her own identity as a peasant of the country; she views his urban sophistication as alien to the simplicity of country people, and an affront to their heritage and way of life: “The whole family was listening, but the mother was filled with outrage. These things are foreign to us, she was thinking. They belong to more sophisticated people, we do not need them here. The Spanish Riding School, the gentlemen of Vienna, they were as alien as places in another country, and the things they cherished could never be the same.”

The wife’s bitter prejudice against the young Jewish man seems additionally born of an awareness of the economic hardship of her own peasant community, against which she pits Heine’s urbane interest in “art and science.” When Heine expresses to the wife his admiration for the doctor’s artistic projects, the wife interprets this as further reason for prejudice against Heine, as if his Jewishness and urbanity were to blame for the economic plight of the nation: “’Yes,’ said the doctor’s wife, saying the words slowly and bitterly. ’Yes. Art and science. What about people being hungry, what about this generation of young men who have never had work in their lives because the factories have never opened since the war? Where do they come in?’”

Only once does the wife’s natural sense of human warmth and compassion momentarily override her seething bitterness toward the young Jewish man. When Heine’s jacket is accidentally caught on fire, the wife’s unthinking response is to save him, as she “picked up the strip of rug from the floor and flung it about him.” This act leads to a moment of physical proximity between the wife and Heine, in which the wife spontaneously holds his body with a human warmth which seems almost affectionate, even bordering on the intimate. Upon flinging the rug around Heine to put out the fire burning his jacket, “She held it tightly around him with her bare, strong arms...” In this embrace-like gesture, the wife continues “holding him fast still in her arms,” and begins to “beat his back softly with the palm of her hand.” She then offers to patch the jacket, “touching the good cloth that was left”— meaning the part of the jacket still attached to Heine’s body. But, when she becomes aware of her own warmth and kindness toward him, her prejudice causes her to again regard him as evil and repellant: “And then she bit her lip suddenly and stood back, as if she had remembered the evil thing that stood between them.” The impulse to bite her lip implies a sense of shame or embarrassment at her own expression of affection toward the Jewish man.

Heine is caught between his desire to deny the significance of “politics” to his personal relationships, and his increasing awareness that he is defenseless against the intrusion of “politics” into his life. In the beginning of the story, Heine’s character chooses to be oblivious to both the political turmoil around him and the prejudice which inflects his relationship to the Doctor’s family. Heine’s behavior toward the family is amiable and friendly, and he seems not to notice the various indications of the wife’s prejudice against him. Heine prefers to retreat into a realm of “art” and “science,” the aesthetic and the intellectual. As the story progresses, however, Heine becomes aware of the personal implications of his position as a Jew amidst a family and community of Nazi sympathizers.

“As the doctor’s wife equates Heine’s Jewishness with his origins in the ’city,’ Heine begins to equate the forces of anti-Semitism with the ’wilderness’ of the mountain community to which he is an alien.”

Heine’s obliviousness to the wife’s prejudice against him seems due to his naturally amiable nature, as well as his desire to deny the significance of politics to his own life and personal relationships. As he tells the tale of the white horses of Vienna, he does not notice when the wife gives him a “look of fury.” Even when she misinterprets the point of the story in terms of the stereotype she holds of Jews as greedy, as she comments “bitterly” that ‘ “Even the money couldn’t save him, could it?’” Heine is merely “perplexed” by her meaning. Heine wishes to deny the significance of “politics” to his life, preferring to retreat into the realms of “art and science.” He also wishes to regard his relationships with other people as unsullied by the intrusion of “politics.” His admiration for the doctor, and guileless amiability toward the family indicate his complete disregard for the implications of the fact that this is a family of Nazi sympathizers and that he is a lone Jewish man in a community of Nazi sympathizers.

Heine resents the intrusion of politics upon his interest in aesthetics and intellectual pursuits, as well as upon his personal relationships. ‘“The whole country is ruined by the situation,’ said the student-doctor. . .’Everything is politics now. One can’t meet people, have friends on any other basis. It’s impossible to have casual conversations or abstract discussions any more...’” Expressing his disdain for “politics,” Heine prefers a retreat into the artistic and the social: ‘“Politics, politics,’ said the student-doctor, ’and one party as bad as another. You’re much wiser to make your puppets, Herr Doktor. It takes one’s mind off things, just as playing cards does. In Vienna we play cards, always play cards, no matter what is happening.’”

Yet, while Heine admires the doctor for his artistic pursuits, the doctor, in contrast to Heine, is a pro-Nazi political activist who makes use of his hobby of creating puppets and putting on puppet shows for his community as a means of conveying a political message. The doctor’s political activism as a Nazi-sympathizer, however, highlights Heine’s political apathy as a Jew whose people are threatened by Nazi activities: ‘“There was a time for cards,’ said the doctor, working quietly with the grasshopper’s wings. ’I used to play cards in Siberia, waiting to be free. We were always waiting for things to finish with and be over,’ he said. ’There was nothing to do, so we did that. But now there is something to do.’” Heine’s desire to deny the significance of politics to his own life, however, seems in part born of a sense of helplessness—that, as a Jew in the face of Hitler’s Nazi sympathizers, there may in fact be “nothing to do.”

As Heine stays on with the doctor’s family, however, he develops a growing awareness of the plight of his people—and his own inability to escape the forces of “politics” all around him. When he sees the swastikas of fire burning on the mountain, he feels hopeless and powerless against the anti-Semitic forces which surround him: “He felt himself sitting defenseless there by the window, surrounded by these strong long-burning fires of disaster. They were all about him, inexplicable signals given from one mountain to another in some secret gathering of power that cast him and his people out, forever out upon the waters of despair.”

Heine’s growing awareness of the menace of the “politics” which surround his presence in the mountain community of Nazi-sympathizers causes a change in his response to the doctor during the puppet show. While Heine at first admired what he took to be the Doctor’s retreat into “art” in the face of political turmoil, he comes to realize, during the puppet show, that the doctor’s efforts at entertaining his guests are in fact in the service of expressing political views which pose a threat to the young Jewish man. As this realization dawns on the student-doctor, he “found he was not laughing as loudly as before” at the antics of the Doctor’s puppets.

Through his growing inability to deny the impact of “politics” upon his life and personal relationships, Heine begins to equate the mountains which surround him with the menace of anti-Semitism which resides in the mountain community of Nazi-sympathizers. As the doctor’s wife equates Heine’s Jewishness with his origins in the “city,” Heine begins to equate the forces of anti-Semitism with the “wilderness” of the mountain community to which he is an alien. The coldness of the mountains becomes for him a metaphor for the coldness of these peasant Nazi sympathizers toward “his own people.” “He was lost in this wilderness of cold, lost in a warm month, and the thought turned his blood to ice. He wanted to be indoors, with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking. He had had enough of the bare, northern speech of these others...”

Yet, even when the Heimwehr men come to arrest the Doctor for his pro-Nazi activism, Heine’s personal affection for the man and his family overrides his awareness of the political implications of the Doctor’s activities. At this point, his disdain for “politics” is based on his compassion for the Doctor. ‘“Ah, politics, politics again!’ cried Dr. Heine, and he was wringing his hands like a woman about to cry.” And, although Heine begs the doctor to tell him what he can do to help, even these efforts signify how defenseless he is against the forces of “politics,” which surround him in all their enormity, for “his own voice sounded small and senseless in the enormous night.”

The presence of the young Jewish student-doctor creates in the older doctor’s wife a conflict between her personal impulse to compassion for other human beings and her deeply held prejudice against Jews; meanwhile, Heine’s stay with the family of Nazi-sympathizers forces him to realize that the forces of “politics” have an undeniable impact on his personal relationships, his own life, and the lives of his fellow Jews. Boyle’s characterization of the wife clearly represents the woman’s anti-Semitism both without excusing it and devoid of any sentimentality indicating that Heine’s presence has in any way caused her to question her prejudices. Her characterization of Heine, meanwhile, in a story written amidst the gathering storm of Nazism which lead to the Holocaust, comes across as an alarmist concern for the growing plight of Jews in a political context which posed an increasingly powerful threat to Jewish people.

Source: Liz Brent, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

Elizabeth S. Bell

In the following excerpt, Bell describes Austria’s situation at the time Boyle wrote “The White Horses of Vienna” and shows how the story, “perhapsmore cogently and certainly more humanly than news reports of the day, outlines the forces at work in Europe in the decade preceding World War II.”

While most reviewers complimented the topical nature of “The White Horses of Vienna,” some did not understand the events in Europe that provided the backdrop for the story. For example, Sylvia Pass of the Christian Century finds the story obscure, but she mistakenly sets the story in Switzerland instead of Austria and—because she does not realize that the story grows from the particular situation brewing in Austria—naturally grumbles that the central piece of satire, the doctor’s marionette show, fails to communicate. Howard Baker, writing for Southern Review, dismisses this central episode as well, failing to realize that it provides the underlying explanation for the story itself. Pass’s and Baker’s confusion points out a central feature of Boyle’s relationship to her reader: she expects her reader to know the shape of world events; she refuses to mar her stories with explanations of events the reader jolly well should already know.

Briefly stated, Austria—and indeed most of Europe—suffered from massive unemployment and crushing inflation during the 1930s. Part of the problem, of course, was the worldwide Depression that began in the United States in 1929 and spread with some rapidity to Europe. Yet another element of the problem grew from the stringent treaties that ended World War I, designed to stifle economic growth for Germany and its allies. As Boyle points out in several of her stories, an entire generation of young people had grown up in poverty, with no opportunity to find productive employment in a moribund economy. By the 1930s, people found that ways of life that had sustained them for generations no longer worked. Most of the vanquished European countries developed strong nationalistic movements as a result of what they considered the humiliating conditions of the World War I treaties. These nationalistic movements flourished because they reestablished a sense of pride and worthiness that World War I had shaken, and they promised hope for rebuilding the prosperity of the land.

Austria in the 1930s was ruled by a so-called Christian dictatorship headed by Engelbert Dollfuss, made up of right-wing political and military supporters. Rabidly antisocialist, the government also fought to counter the growing German presence on its border, yet economic conditions throughout Austria became more and more desperate. A growing

“Boyle objectively presents the perspectives of both: through the old doctor she suggests the desperation of a people crushed by economic instability and political humiliation, grasping at any promise, especially a political movement promising salvation. Through Dr. Heine she shows the deadly nature of the solution being promised and a naive reliance on the intellect as a saving power.”

number of Austrians saw Dollfuss as incapable of providing the leadership they needed. In July 1934 Dullfuss was assassinated, and a new dictatorship headed by Kurt von Schuschnigg took charge. However, the new government shared many of the same weaknesses that marked the old one, and many Austrians began to look more favorably at what appeared to be a stronger, more promising government in Germany. Indeed, the Austrian Nazi party began demanding the union of Austria and Germany. This situation prevailed as Boyle wrote and published the stories she collected in The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories, just after Dollfuss’s assassination and during the four years’ respite before Germany marched into Austria and made the Austrian nationalistic movement a moot issue.

“The White Horses of Vienna,” set in Austria immediately before Dollfuss’s assassination, develops the interplay between political movements and personal lives amid the confusion of a rapidly changing international situation. Its three parts are chronologically and narratively related, but intentionally offer different kinds of information about the people and situations of the central story. Part I provides the personal context of the story, the reason the fastidious doctor and his wife must deal with the young Jewish doctor whom the wife, at least, detests. Boyle mentions that in World War I, the older doctor was a prisoner of war in Siberia. He has studied throughout Europe, but has returned to the Tyrol as a kind of haven, a land that provides him with the distance from people and the vistas of mountains he craves. An injury to his knee occurring on one of his frequent nighttime trips into the mountains, where mysterious swastika fires burn, necessitates his calling for a student doctor to come help him in his practice until the knee heals. Boyle highlights the physical contrast between the two doctors, describing the older one as immaculate in white clothing and somewhat neurotically concerned with cleanliness, while young Dr. Heine is dark and alien, appearing on the doctor’s property with mud on his shoes and sweat pouring from him.

The doctor’s wife provides a barometer for the anti-Semitism of the community, first through her own distress at the doctor’s obvious Jewish looks: she begins recoiling from him at first sight. She mentions that the community will feel the same way. The doctor agrees, but does not overtly join in his wife’s distress. This section of the story ends with a scene between Dr. Heine and the older doctor’s wife, as she offers to mend his coat for him, then realizes she has offered to help a Jew. With this episode, Boyle contrasts the nature of relationships forged between people responding to each other as individuals with those broken or truncated relationships that sometimes exist between groups of people.

Part 2 of the story deals with a more metaphorical kind of information. Boyle has both doctors present an analogue for reality as they see it. Dr. Heine tells of the royal Lippizaner horses of Vienna, still performing as if for a royalty that no longer exists. An incredibly wealthy Indian maharajah, seeing the horses, decides he must have the best for himself. The state, in chronic need of money, sells the horse to him, but on the day of the scheduled departure for India, the horse develops a mysterious cut on its hoof. The groom who has loved the horse from its birth cannot bear to see it leave Austria and has taken measures to delay the process. After the first cut heals, he makes another, this time causing blood poisoning. The horse must be destroyed; the groom commits suicide. Both have died senselessly for a way of life no longer possible.

The doctor’s wife, accepting the stereotypical image of Jewish people, assumes Dr. Heine tells the story from his appreciation of the sharp deal the state made or of the marahajah’s incredible wealth. She gloats on the moral she attaches to the story: money can’t buy everything. But Dr. Heine recognizes the irony of the Lippizaner’s training to please a royalty that will never exist again. He and the doctor’s wife continue their mismatched conversation, with the young doctor asserting his belief in art and science, while the doctor’s wife interjects her own disdain for art and her concerns for the people starving and unable to find productive work. The two speak on different planes, for although Dr. Heine is virtually apolitical, the doctor’s wife is unable to view life on any terms except the political.

Austrian authorities come to ask the old doctor about the swastika fires and reveal he has been arrested previously for his pro-Nazi activities. In the face of his refusal to cooperate, they leave, indicating they always feel better when the doctor is safely behind bars. This exchange troubles Dr. Heine, but he fails to connect the doctor’s political activities with anything that could possibly affect his own life.

The old doctor then presents his analogue with a marionette show, peopled by puppets he has made. He provides a thinly disguised satire of the ineffective Dollfuss, portrayed as a clown called “Chancellor” and a magnificent Hitler, embodied as an elegant grasshopper referred to as “The Leader.” The clown bears artificial flowers in a setting of Austrian wildflowers, contributing to his ludicrous and lifeless character. The grasshopper, however, belongs in the setting and appears to uphold the natural order of things. While Boyle refers neither to Dollfuss nor Hitler by name, their characters are unmistakable. Dr. Heine, distinctly uncomfortable during the presentation, realizes that even the playfulness of the doctor is political.

This section of the story illustrates metaphorically the underlying philosophical conflict between the two doctors. Boyle objectively presents the perspectives of both: through the old doctor she suggests the desperation of a people crushed by economic instability and political humiliation, grasping at any promise, especially a political movement promising salvation. Through Dr. Heine she shows the deadly nature of the solution being promised and a naive reliance on the intellect as a saving power. She portrays his gentleness and his sensitivity, his love of art and learning, but also his virtual indifference to the political storm gathering around him. Both men, taken individually, have valid human concerns. Their choices, however, are mutually exclusive.

The third part of the story occurs on an evening in July, the evening after Dollfuss’s assassination. The Austrian authorities come to arrest the old doctor. Dr. Heine asks what he can do to help the doctor, who responds with ironic humor that Dr. Heine can throw peaches and chocolates to him through the prison’s window bars. Last time, he says, his wife was such a poor shot he could not catch all the oranges she threw to him. For that biting edge of irony, Boyle plays on the reader’s knowledge of contemporary reality in Europe, for in the economic disaster of Europe, peaches, chocolates, and oranges are unobtainable luxuries. As the authorities carry away the doctor, Dr. Heine thinks in anguish of those Lippizaner horses and their bond to a way of life gone forever.

Both doctors use their analogues to shape their own choices, believing them to be true and accurate. The old doctor’s worldview leads him to action that counters his personal experience, for as prisoner of war he has seen political movements fail; the young doctor’s leads him to no action at all, but merely a philosophical musing on the conditions of the world. In 1935, at the time Boyle wrote this story, the full horror of Hitler’s Reich was still incomprehensible. She accurately portrays the human concerns and frustrations rapidly coming to boil in central Europe and delves into the mind-sets that allowed Nazism to come to power. “The White Horses of Vienna,” perhaps more cogently and certainly more humanly than news reports of the day, outlines the forces at work in Europe in the decade preceding World War II. . . .

Source: Elizabeth S. Bell, “Chronicling the Changing Age: The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories,” in Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 29–43.

Morris Renek

In the essay below, Renek praises the depth and power of Boyle’s storytelling in “The White Horses of Vienna.”

An entire culture is collapsed into the rich few pages of “The White Horses of Vienna.” The faint of mind might wish they had never read it. The story’s powerful kernel is a psychological truth that is both open ended, thus haunting, and a denial of received wisdom so that you do not want to know the truth, this truth behind “The White Horses of Vienna. ” You do not want to speculate on it, nonetheless be faced by it. The story goes deeply into the woods with a biblical simplicity.

Decades before the Nazis, Austria-Hungary Jews were murdered, beaten, segregated for being German. The German Nazis killed them for being Jews.

“The White Horses of Vienna” can be taken as a hymn to people breaking through barriers to see the good in others, or a horror story of innocence. The story is harrowing, insightful, prophetic as a horror story: “... books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune ... as though we had been banished to the woods. ...”

An injured doctor writes from his mountain home to Vienna for a student doctor replacement while he recovers. The doctor is a savagely clean man, determined, compassionate and with a strong, humble pride in himself. He was a prisoner in Siberia for a year. His young, beautiful wife condemns Jews for looking amiable. Into their home comes an amiable young Jew from Vienna, Dr. Heine.

The young doctor is animated with the culture of Vienna: books, art, music, especially the “royal, white horses of Vienna, still royal.. . without any royalty left to bow their heads to, still shouldering into the arena with spirits a man would give his soul for, bending their knees in homage to the empty, canopied loge where royalty no longer sat.” Applause opens their nostrils wide as if a wind were blowing: “... these perfect stallions who knew to a breath the beauty of even their mockery of fright.”

It is Dr. Heine’s good-hearted intelligence that makes his cultural innocence so terrifying. His friendly, affirming nature is quite capable of surmounting the evil around him, if only blindly. His zest for living making him incapable of seeing.

The wife, nevertheless, sees the student doctor as an unclean thing oiled by an evil lubricant. But when Dr. Heine and the wife are working close together over a patient, his coat is accidentally set aflame. She instinctively puts out the fire by holding him in her strong arms.

What escapes Kay Boyle’s eye is not worth mentioning. The burnt coat is “scalloped black to his shoulders.” The wife takes the blame for the accident, volunteers to redo the coat while holding him around. “And then she bit her lip suddenly and

“The White Horses of Vienna’ can be taken as a hymn to people breaking through barriers to see the good in others, or a horror story of innocence.”

stood back, as if she had remembered the evil thing that stood between them.”

Heimwehr arrive to ask the injured doctor to show them the way to the men burning a swastika fire on the mountain. They are convinced the doctor was injured coming down the mountain from a similar fire.

The young doctor said nothing after they had gone, but he sat quiet by the window, watching the fires burning on the mountains in the dark. They were blooming now on all the black, invisible crests, mar-velously living flowers of fire springing out of the arid darkness, seemingly higher than any other things could grow. He felt himself sitting defenseless there by the window, surrounded by these strong, long-burning fires of disaster. They were all about him; inexplicable signals given from one mountain to another in some secret gathering of power that cast him and his people out, forever out upon the waters of despair.

After Dollfuss is assassinated the Heimwehr return. Dr. Heine defends the doctor’s character and protests his arrest in the night and cries out against politics. He comforts the injured doctor, presses his hand, asks how he can help. He stands in the night watching the doctor being carried down the mountain on a stretcher.

Before the Heimwehr arrive the young doctor was looking out on this scene with longings to be “indoors with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking.” Dr. Heine was saying within himself at the sight of little lights moving up from the valley that he took for beacons of hope, but were the Heimwehr coming for the doctor, “Come to me, come to me. I am a young man alone on a mountain. I am a young man alone, as my race is alone, lost here amongst them all.”

Calling after the injured doctor being carried away, Dr. Heine promises help. He thinks in “anguish of the snow-white horses, the Lippizaners, the relics of pride, the still unbroken vestiges of beauty bending their knees to the empty loge of royalty where there was no royalty any more.”

The end.

But is it? No. What rises from the story is unbearable. Dr. Heine’s cultural affirmation disconnecting him from the brutal reality closing around him. Caught up in the grandeur of Vienna he becomes hopelessly defenseless. Dr. Heine himself becomes a white horse of Vienna, only with a far worse fate in store.

The end?

No. There is no end to a story where the ending keeps following you about, and makes you live with it.

I suspect that people call Kay Boyle distinguished to acknowledge her worth and keep themselves from grappling with what she sees. An invaluable recognition has come from where it counts the most—the younger generation of poets who face the world they live in. A recent collection, American Poetry Since 1970: UP Late, chose Kay Boyle as “an embodiment of courage. . . our link in the spirit of previous avant-gardes” and wisely reprinted her memorable and classic poem Poets to begin their anthology.

It is one kind of Kay Boyle victory over the frozen sea to describe how an age was lived and a rarer victory to locate the pain of that age and give human endurance a moving, unforgettable voice, lean as time itself, to a pain all but unutterable.

Source: Morris Renek, “Kay Boyle’s Victory over the Frozen Sea,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall, 1988, pp. 294–98.

Ray B. West, Jr.

In the following excerpt, West briefly examines the characters of the two doctors in “The White Horses of Vienna,” finding the older one a leader-less elitist, comparable to the Lipizzaner horses Heine so admires, and judging Heine a pitiable but nonetheless admirable romantic.

A good example, and also an example of Miss Boyle at her best, is her short story “The White Horses of Vienna,” which won the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1935. The surface events of the story are slight, involving little more than the visit of a young Jewish doctor to the isolated office of an Austrian Nazi, to substitute while the Nazi doctor is incapacitated by an injured leg. The Nazi doctor presents a puppet show which betrays his political sympathies at a time prior to the German-Austrian Anschluss and which also portrays his own attitude toward his young medical colleague. The young Jew betrays his own attitude by relating the story of the white Lippizaner horses of Vienna. Although the story is anti-Nazi in theme, the treatment is so far from being propagandistic that Clifton Fadiman, one of the O. Henry judges, wrote that he considered the Austrian doctor “much too heroic for his role.” Actually, this character is not heroic at all. He is competent and cocksure. One does not pity him or even feel sympathy for him. Like the white horses of the vanished Austrian royalty, he arouses the admiration of the young Jewish doctor. In speaking of the horses, the young doctor indicates Miss Boyle’s attitude toward his Nazi employer: ‘“Still royal,’ he said, ’without any royalty left to bow their heads to, still shouldering into the arena with spirits a man would give his soul for, bending their knees in homage to the empty, canopied loges where royalty no longer sat!’” This is, in fact, a description of the Nazi doctor, a man of spirit who considers himself elite in a world which has no “leader” to pay homage to. One can admire his skill and his talents, but one is frightened by the sheer power they represent. In contrast, the young Jew is awkward and romantic, not a man to be feared certainly. He is like the clown in the Nazi doctor’s puppet show, putting his faith in clouds, not in the realities which the doctor recognizes. But the young Jew is a man to be pitied because he is a human being. He is, as Miss Boyle suggests, “the Chancellor” compared to “der Fuhrer.” He may die because he is too full of admiration and trust, and this is impractical; but it is admirable, and his spirit will survive.

Nazism, then, is seen by Miss Boyle as the survival of the elite in a world where it can no longer function except as a show of spirit and force. Her short story is a study in decadence, not heroism, and, except for its political subject matter, it is not too dissimilar from comparable studies by James and Faulkner. There is something to be admired in a past grandeur, the story seems to say, but such admiration must not lead us to mistake the past for the present. An easy romanticism may lead us to make this mistake, with serious political or social consequences. In the case of Miss Boyle’s story, the consequences follow two directions: the easy persecution of one who puts too much faith in pure beauty disassociated from its function, or the arrogance of him who sets himself above others for the practice of pure power without regard for its human aims....

Source: Ray B. West, Jr., “Fiction and Reality: The Traditionalists,” in The Short Story in America 1900-1950, Henry Regnery Company, 1952, pp. 59–84.