Hermes Massimo was my father’s old friend. He was doctor of philosophy and had been sentenced to death in Norway during the Third Reich. His crime was looking towards Russia in Narvik, Norway, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, and telling the other soldiers: “That’s where our next war will lead us.”
This offense was considered “treason” at the time. Hermes was sentenced to death. He spent the weeks before his execution in a narrow shaft in the ground. During this agonizing time he mostly thought about mathematics. Decades later, Hermes told me that he thereby had come across a mathematical formula that describes the logical form of binomial coefficients. Sometime later, he had learned that this formula had already become known as Pascal’s Triangle.
He owed his pardon to his lieutenant general, who was impressed by his unwavering resolve and steadfastness. He offered Hermes a pardon by the Fuehrer himself, which he was to sign with “Heil Hitler.” Hermes refused, stating, “I will not sign with Heil Hitler.” The lieutenant general then signed it himself.
Hermes was transferred to a so-called “death company,” which he survived on the Eastern Front with a headshot wound and only one eye, after saving a comrade from mortal danger. At the end of the war he was in Innsbruck. There he and a small group around the later Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Gruber ensured that Tyrol was the only district of the German Reich to liberate itself before the Allies arrived.
When Hermes was invited to our house along with other family friends, he usually sat silently at the lunch table and only answered when directly asked. He always politely declined my parents’ offer to drive him home afterward, saying, “I’d rather walk.” During my university years, I visited him regularly on my own. We would sit around a small table in his tiny apartment, overflowing with books, and often talk about everything under the sun until well past midnight.
After retiring as head of the library at the Austrian Patent Office, he spent every summer in Iceland, where he played a leading role in establishing the University Library of Reykjavik still before his death. A few years ago, when I was in Iceland for the summer solstice, I visited this library and found some of the books from his former Vienna apartment in the German-language section.
Unlike Hermes, my friend Hans Marsalek didn’t believe in God. Hans was probably the most important Austrian resistance fighter against National Socialism, who even organized resistance in a concentration camp. I met him in 1994 when I began researching the KZ Mauthausen for our documentary “Autumn Walk.” Hans’s life is well-known in Austria. He is the greatest role model of my life.
The third in this series is the Austrian sculptor Karl Prantl. I met him around the turn of the millennium, after I had created the sculpture “The Colorful House” for the demonstrations against the “Black-Blue Government.” Karl Prantl was never as well-known in Austria as his colleague Alfred Hrdlicka. Unlike Hrdlicka, Prantl didn’t work figuratively, but abstractly. He had his studio in Pöttsching, Burgenland, which, along with its sculpture garden, is still open to the public.
When we were talking about his work, he once said to me: “You know, Peter, as a young man, I was at the front with my friend. Once, while we were standing together in the trench, we had to fend off a grenade attack. We huddled together on the ground until the attack was over. When I stood up, I saw my friend lying dead next to me, his brains oozing out of his head. Do you understand why I don’t work figuratively? I can’t. I do it my way.”
I think of these three again and again: Hermes Massimo, Hans Marsalek, and Karl Prantl. I remember them with great gratitude, my conversations with them, and above all, their silence. When I consider our time and our contemporaries, these three, my friends and heroes, always give me great support. And when I think of today’s Europe and its policies toward Russia, I remember Hermes’s words: “That’s where our next war will lead us.” Then I think of Hans Marsalek’s resilience and Karl Prantl’s stones. I do it my way.
—
Vienna Calling 
I am deeply touched. Thank you for sharing.
🙏