In Vienna, Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, the Tischherr of the English Stammtisch (regulars’ table) in Hawelka’s, played over several decades a much underestimated role in bringing Austrians and English travellers abroad together. In Trieste, Mietta Shamblin discharged the same duty, while in Prague, Victoria Reilly-Spičkova and her husband Daniel generously put their handsome villa at the disposal of many other equally fulfilled incontri. I am also grateful to Frank Giles, one of the Sunday Times’s most distinguished editors, for reminding me of the circumstances in which a Times foreign correspondent was expected to operate nearly half a century ago. These parameters formed part of an unspoken tradition dutifully and conscientiously discharged by an ever-courteous Times Foreign Desk, then under the capable leadership of Ivan Barnes, a prince among foreign editors.
Given that it was proficiency in playing the French horn which allowed me to first live in and develop my knowledge of Central Europe, it gives me great pleasure to thank here the three horn teachers of my youth: first and foremost, Dr William Salaman, but also his occasional, inspiring successors, Jeffrey Bryant and Timothy Brown. Fifty years later, I have become convinced that much professional achievement, academic or literary, is easily dwarfed by the discipline and diligence needed for the mastery of a musical instrument.
During the early 1980s I was fortunate to enjoy the company in Central Europe of Caroline Mauduit, a gifted watercolourist who frequently reminded me that the visual can complement the literary. In Cambridge I must mention my High Table colleague and friend Michael Perlman, an Honorary Fellow of Christ’s College. I am indebted to him for his help in tracing in his native Brazil the remarkable story of HM Consul-General Robert Smallbones, whose name I first encountered in Trieste in 1979.
I owe a particular debt to Stuart Proffitt, for encouraging me to attempt to describe the eccentricities of life in Cold War Europe for a generation unfamiliar with that world and bringing his forensic skills to bear on the text. He and his colleagues, including Donald Futers and Ben Sinyor, have polished my prose, removing with tact and precision innumerable infelicities of style and content.
Part of the first section of this book first saw the light of day as a Christmas essay, ‘Trieste ’79’, published privately by John Sandoe Books for their customers in 2013. A year later, translated by Ada Cerne, it was published also in Italian by the Umberto Saba bookshop of Trieste. I am therefore indebted to Johnny and Boojum de Falbe and Mario Cerne for acting as publishing midwives to this entire project.
Finally I should thank my wife, Emma-Louise, and our children Edmund and Beatrice, who have at times bravely entered the alternative cosmos which was (and is) life in Mitteleuropa.
Salzburg, 18 June 2018
THE BEGINNING
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ALLEN LANE
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2019
Copyright © Richard Bassett, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration by Ignacia Ruiz
ISBN: 978-0-241-01487-5
THE VIEW FROM THE MOLO AUDACE
fn1 Imperial and Royal: from 1867 the Dual Monarchy of the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary.
fn2 Dal Belvedere di Vienna a Sarajevo, ed. Eugenio Bucciol (Trieste, 2015).
fn3 In the spring of 2017, on visiting the Vienna Military Museum (HGM) I was astonished to see a smaller copy of this picture forty years after I had first seen the original. At the time of writing it is exhibited in the first room to the right of the main entrance.
fn4 These details would become more widely known a few months later when Zita confided her version of the story to Erich Feigl, a Viennese writer working on a biography of the Emperor Charles.
THE CHARM OF OLD AUSTRIA
fn1 Unfortunately, as I write, the Austrian railways’ obsession with saving thirty minutes’ journey time has resulted in the beginnings of a vast tunnel under the Semmering. It is not yet clear if this will spell the end of regular travel along the oldest and most spectacular transalpine railway.
fn2 Today (2019) inexplicably Sonja Knips alas hangs in a dark corner of a gloomy room, remote from any possible Begegnung (encounter) with her admirers, old and new.
fn3 Verleumdung = calunnia = calumny.
fn4 Kakanian: Musil’s reduction of the ubiquitous k.(u.)k. – kaiserlich und königlich (lit. Imperial and Royal).
fn5 Bill Deakin (1913–2005), research assistant to Winston Churchill before the Second World War and first Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Fitzroy Maclean’s predecessor as Churchill’s liaison officer with Marshal Tito’s partisans and during the 1950s a regular contributing Eastern European affairs expert to The Times.
fn6 Cypherenes: Cold War patois for female cipher clerks.
fn7 I have always felt that my not using a tape-recorder or taking any notes (thanks to memory techniques honed a decade earlier in supervisions at Cambridge when generally it was considered bad form to distract the rilassar flow of ‘conversation’ by writing anything down) partly encouraged this expansive indiscretion, although it cannot be excluded that Dr Kirchschläger was also preparing the ground for a future campaign against Dr Waldheim.
fn8 ‘Ich glaube dass beste von Oesterreich (Lenau, Bruckner, Grillparzer) ist viel schwieriger zu verstehen als alles andere’ (quoted in Count Anton Wengersky’s commonplace book, Elkhofen, 1985).
fn9 It was demolished in 2012.
fn10 Herr Piefke was a fictitious Prussian bandmaster of unimaginative, pedantic mindset. Piefkinesisch (lit. Prussianese) is a derogatory Austrian term still much en vogue in Austria for north German brogue.
fn11 Stendhal, De l’amour (1822), ch. VI.
fn12 For example, this from a Keller broadcast in 1971: ‘Of course the Mendelssohn violin concerto is the greatest violin concerto ever written: I see some of you raise your eyebrows at this claim; but just ask any violinist which concerto they prefer playing.’
fn13 Now on permanent display in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
fn14 The monastery had a special significance for the Habsburgs, the heirs to the crown of St Stephen. When the last Habsburg heir to have been born into the empire, Crown Prince Otto, died in 2011, he left instructions for his heart to be taken and interred in Pannonhalma.
THE END OF THE ANCIEN RÉGIME
fn1 Schiller, Xenien (1797).
fn2 Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1996).
AFTERWORD
fn1 Duino Elegies (Leipzig, 1923).
fn2 Meditations, Book VII, 9 (trans. Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Classics, 1964).
Last Days in Old Europe Page 24