Feeling slightly uneasy, I pushed Mann’s book away and looked round the neat compartment. In front of me was a small table, rubbish bin underneath, on which lay a couple of papers left by the kind management for sophisticated international travellers like myself. One was a small blue rail timetable, which stated with precision and conviction the various arrival and departure times of the Salieri Express. The other was a small Austrian tabloid newspaper of no distinction, the Kurier, dated Freitag, 23 November, 1990 (the day, of course, on which I was travelling). I picked it up and began to read. Now, as I told you earlier, I don’t exactly read German, but there are times – late at night, after a drink or two, and especially when I’ve spent a couple of days in a German-speaking country – when it seems very nearly comprehensible. The headline for the day was a long one, and it read: ‘Die Eiserne Lady gibt auf: Rücktritt nach 11 Jahren. Eine Ära ist zu Ende.’
I was sharp enough to realize that, unless the world contained some more Iron Ladies that I didn’t know about, this almost certainly referred to Britain’s then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, under whose regime I had grown accustomed to live. So I tuned my intelligence and set to work on the sentence. It seemed to say: The Iron Lady Takes Off, Fed Up After Eleven Years. An Era Is at an End.’ Was this true, I asked myself, amazed; could I be interpreting the words correctly? Now what you must understand is that I myself was one of the great brood of Thatcher’s Children. I was hardly past the hard acned days of puberty when she marched into 10 Downing Street in 1979, pronouncing in her loud clear voice ‘Now there is work to be done.’ Her life and work shaped mine. The ups and downs, the highs and lows, the booms and recessions, the Big Bangs and Small Crashes of her three terms of office were nothing less than the swings and cycles of what I liked to call my adult life. With my soul and my overdraft, my professional ambitions and my mountain bike, I was spawned from the era of what the Austrian newspaper in front of me described as ‘Der Thatcherismus’ – a term that, incidentally, sounded far more impressive in German than it ever possibly could in English.
So she’d gone, stepped down, gabbed off? How could she? Was it possible, how had it happened? I turned over the pages of the tabloid; and there inside, right across a double-page spread, was the fuller story, headed ‘Des Ringen um die Nachfolge.’ This sounded just like one of the Wagner operas Lavinia had been threatening me with in Vienna; but what did it mean? The Battle of the Night Birds? And if there had been a great drama, where was the cast? I looked down the page, and there they all were, set out as if in some opera programme, with photographs and brief descriptions. There was, I saw, Michael Heseltine, der Opportunist;well, I understood that. Then there was Douglas Hurd, der alte Routinier (the old what? Truckdriver?), Sir Geoffrey Howe, der Totengraber (the Grave-snatcher?), and John Major, der Senkrechtstarter (what could that be? Kickstart?). Not quite, I found, scuffling hastily through my dictionary. The opera was The Struggle for the Succession, and the principal characters were the Opportunist, the Wise Old Hand, the Gravedigger, and the Vertical Take-Off Aircraft, who, I gathered, triumphed in the end. Add book by Martin Amis, celestial-sounding music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, oedipal dreams by Freud, a chorus or two of ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’, and Vienna’s newest musical extravaganza was plainly all ready to play.
Well, fine for them; but where, I thought, a young man in a grey-upholstered compartment, did all these dramas and denouements leave me? Just yesterday I’d been a poor youth without a history, a neophyte at the mysteries, as Professor Codicil had put it in his typically grandiloquent way. I was just another simple lad who didn’t even know why the Blue Danube had to be blue. Now, over the course of a single sleepless night (and mine, I realized, could hardly have been the only one), I had somehow acquired a little history after all. It was a modest portion, true enough – nothing compared with what had upturned Europe just a year before: the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War, the opening up of the Eastern frontier I was just about to cross. In Britain, after all, we don’t hurry at history like that; but change had come, just the same. And the Iron Lady had made history, no doubt about that. Her rise, and now her fall, had been a great performance, made of conspiracy and pride, hubris and treachery, the ideal stuff for the media’s endless narrative, some of which I had written myself. Yes, for me too, Eine Ära ist zu Ende; an era had come to an end.
So what, then, would follow Der Thatcherismus? I looked again at the Austrian tabloid, and at once found the answer. What followed Der Thatcherismus was, of course, Der Post-Thatcherismus, the smart new epoch of which I had suddenly become a paid-up member. The thought made for strange emotions. Say what you would, the Thatcher Age had had a peculiar solidity; now the world seemed curiously indeterminate, no longer as stable and sure as it had been yesterday. I thought back again to the tour of Vienna that dear young Gerstenbacker had subjected me to the day before, when he was so desperately trying to please his master by diverting my mind from thoughts of Bazlo Criminale with the spectacles of a fin-de-siècle age. And it occurred to me now that, when centuries end, old orders do have a way of shaking and tumbling. In fact, when one considered it, there is nothing like observing a past suddenly slipping away and a great new millennium coming along for stirring the mind with troubled, if exciting, notions of change.
So, sitting there in my grey-upholstered compartment, I began to think about how different European centuries had ended. I recalled, for instance, that in 1889, one hundred years before the Berlin Wall came down, the Eiffel Tower went up. It went up because just a hundred years before that, in the turbulent ending of the previous century, the French Revolution had exploded, the world had turned upside-down, even the calendar had briefly begun anew. And so, in the same year as the Mayerling tragedy, when Vienna became so modern, and so gay, the French decided to celebrate, as the French do, by building an edifice, and turned to M. Gustave Eiffel. Why not? He was their greatest bridge-builder, and his triumphs were many. He had built an amazing span across the River Douro at Oporto, designed the locks for de Lesseps’ Suez Canal, built the Observatory at Nice, even put up a charming railway station in Budapest, into which I hoped I would shortly be stepping. He could therefore be counted on to put up some fine modern buildings for the Centennial World Fair, and maybe throw a fine iron bridge across the Seine that would give Parisians better access to their favourite cafés, boîtes, museums and artists’ studios. They gave him the commission.
What they didn’t know was that Eiffel’s thoughts had recently shifted from sideways to upwards. In a matter of months Eiffel got out his ironwork and built his tower. One morning in 1889 Parisians woke up and there, by God, it was. You couldn’t miss it; but, like a building that had a cabbage on top of it, it seemed to make no sense at all. It was fairly evidently a monument to something, but unfortunately there was nothing written on it to say what it was a monument to. It looked like the spire of a great cathedral, but the nave was missing, and there was no altar to worship at and no particular deity mentioned. It resembled the great new American business skyscrapers going up in the cities of Chicago and New York, but because there was no inside to its outside, there was not too much hope of doing any real business in it. Thirteen years earlier, to celebrate the centennial of another revolutionary war, the American War of Independence, the French had shipped across the Atlantic another great memorial. This was the Statue of Liberty, sculpture by Bartholdi interior ironwork by Gustave Eiffel. But its meaning was absolutely clear, its message, to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, perfectly plain. This time Eiffel seemed to have omitted something, in fact everything. He had given Paris the ironwork without the statue, the engineering without the sculpture, the torch without the liberty, the bones without the flesh.
Today, of course, high on our fine postmodern wisdom, we know exactly what Gustave was all about. Eiffel’s Tower was a monument to only one thing: itself. It was a spectacle, and there was nothing much to be done with it, except look
up at its head from its feet, or down at its feet from its head, or clamber up and down in it, staring at the panorama of Paris it opened up and controlled on every side. So of course it annoyed the classicists, affronted the romantics, angered the realists, infuriated the naturalists, and offended almost everyone, with the exception of the Douanier Rousseau. Leading writers hated it, including Guy de Maupassant, who always dined afterwards in its restaurant, because it was the only place in Paris you couldn’t see the tower from. The shopkeepers demanded that the tower be pulled down before it fell on them – a familiar fate of monuments to something, or indeed, in this case, nothing. And when, a couple of years later, Eiffel, in some complicated and very French financial scandal, was accused of picking the locks on the Suez Canal, and nearly went to prison, most people thought it served him more or less right.
Then, a decade or so later, the French suddenly discovered what the Eiffel Tower was really for. It made the perfect radio transmitter, and this meant it was a perfect act of prescience on Gustave’s part, because radio hadn’t even been invented when he put it up. Instead of putting him in prison, Eiffel was feted and given the Légion d’Honneur, and the Tower, far from meaning nothing, came to mean everything, became the symbol of modern, future-hungry Paris itself. And so, a hundred years on, in 1989, when it once again came time for end-of-the-century celebration, the Bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution also became the Centennial celebrations of the Eiffel Tower. The much-hated, monument of modernity was now lovingly restored (by, I believe, the firm of Eiffel, which survives). Of course the French also celebrated, as the French do, by putting up an edifice. They therefore went to a postmodern Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, ours being a multi-cultural age. Pei’s thoughts were moving neither sideways nor upwards. He looked downwards, into the labyrinths and catacombs of the Louvre, exposed foundations and dungeons, the theme-park of old history, and then capped the lot with a small crystal pyramid of latticed precision.
And why not? Don’t we live now not in modern but postmodern times, the age of pluristyle, form as parody, art as quotation, the era of culture as world fair? In Berlin Honecker’s wall was coming down and turning into art-work, everywhere politics and culture were becoming spectacle. So, that July, lit by lasers and beamed worldwide (courtesy the transmission facilities of the Eiffel Tower), an international soprano sang the Marseillaise, and in the Champs-Elysées Egyptian belly-dancers gyrated with Caribbean limbo dancers, gays danced with, lesbians, Structuralist philosophers bunny-hopped with feminist gynocritics, Hungarian security men tangoed with French riot cops, in a great multiplication of images and styles and cultures and genders, so that everything was everything and nothing at the same time. And I know this, because this time I was there myself, writing some smart Deconstructive piece about it for my Serious Sunday. Great changes, great changes; we had learned how to live in the age of virtual reality, or so I said in my piece. And great changes need new philosophies, I observed also, mentioning the names of various new pioneers of thought: Lacan and Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, and – it now all came back to me – Bazlo Criminale i himself.
But even the thought that new times needed new thoughts was not itself all that new. For example, I remembered, when Gustave was pushing up his great phallic tower over Paris in 1889, a young philosopher named Henri Bergson was publishing his book Time and Free Will, which argued that the inner life of human consciousness had its own strange clock, quite different from that of daily historical time – a very modern notion which was found very appealing by his relative, by marriage, the even younger Marcel Proust. Meanwhile back in Vienna, which was becoming so modern and so gay, the young Doktor Sigmund Freud was having rather similar thoughts. He was not yet a great professor, he had not yet moved to his famous consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, which I had so conspicuously been trying to avoid in my last night’s dream-work, and the secret of dreams had not yet revealed itself to him as he bicycled through the Vienna Woods. But in 1889 he had already put out his plate, and was already trying out the method of free association – later to be known as the talking cure – on the contorted mental interior and labyrinthine psychic dungeons of a certain Frau Emmy von N.
But such things were happening everywhere in 1889. On that other great European river, the Rhine, in the Swiss city of Basel, another great professor, Professor Doktor Friedrich Nietzsche, had devoted himself to bringing the modern about. It had not been an easy job, and in fact in 1889 he started to go mad from rather too much of it. He began singing and grimacing uncontrollably in the streets, was found embracing carthorses, and he took to predicting, not very accurately, various plagues, earthquakes, droughts, global warmings, world wars and other millennial things. He sent letters to the Pope and other world notables, signed ‘Nietzsche Caesar’, suggesting that various people and some entire races should be shot. It was his divine and imperial mission to bring the fatality of the modern into existence, as he explained to various fellow academics (‘Dear Professor, in the end I would much have preferred being a Basel professor to being God. But I did not care to carry my personal egotism so far that for its sake I should fail to complete the creation of the world’). They got the great philosopher to the doctor at last. He conducted an examination, noting in his report: ‘Claims he is a famous man and asks for women all the time.’ Well, why not; he was, after all, a Herr Doktor Professor, the maker of the modern, and surely deserved his fair share of kindly human attention.
And despite all his difficulties, Nietzsche did manage to bring out a last book in that year of 1889. Called Götzendämmerung, or The Twilight of the False Gods, it was all about the age of earthquakes, apocalypse, and the coming of the modern. It was subtitled ‘How to Philosophize With a Hammer’, and this new technique in philosophy was to interest several people who came to birth in 1889. One was the child of a customs official at Braunau, up on the German-Austrian border, who attended the same school as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then went to Vienna, hoping to become a painter. He did, though only of houses. But he joined the German army, survived the great collapse of 1918, and then reappeared, philosophical hammer at the ready, as Adolf Hitler, trying to forge the new world order exactly fifty years further on, in the year of 1939, and fifty years before the Berlin Wall came down.
So when you thought about it 1889 was quite a year, right across Europe – the time of Freud and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Zola, Max Nordau and Max Weber. In fact it was the great year of Modernismus, modern thought. And in Britain that year . . . well, in Britain that year, the British, as the British do, were coming along just a little late. The book of the year (I recalled from my research for my piece) was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, and London’s newest opera, all fantastic dreams and celestial-sounding music, was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. But a dock strike produced a famous anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, George Bernard Shaw produced his Fabian Essays, and people started talking about Decadence. That year Oscar Wilde was feted, and Emile Zola’s British publisher was sent to prison for foulness. Six years later it was all changed. Emile Zola was being feted, and Oscar Wilde was being sent to prison for foulness. But nobody, not even Gustave Eiffel, ever claimed that the modern always proceeded in straight lines.
Nonetheless, it proceeded. Twenty-five years after 1889, the famous shot was fired at the Archduke in Sarajevo, somewhere to the south of me now. The Habsburg Empire fell the whole map of Europe was reshaped, and, as Gerstenbacker had so thoughtfully explained to me, the Blue Danube became even bluer. Twenty-five years after that, the age of disaster resumed. Freud died in London, James Joyce—published the finale of modernism, Finnegans Wake, in Paris, Hitler unwrapped his philosophical hammer in Poland, world war started again. Violence went crazy, modernity exploded, Europe tore up its borders and its cities, the Holocaust came, and the Blue Danube became bluer still. Twenty-five years after that was a quieter year, though some things of importance happened. The Cold War peaked, President
Kennedy had just been assassinated, Leonid Brezhnev, Harold Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson were all appointed to various top offices, and I saw the light of day. And twenty-five years after that . . . well, we all know about twenty-five years after that. In the world as graced now by my own presence, the statues of a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago, all came tumbling down. And the Hungarian border – which I just happened to be crossing at this particular moment, guards going down the train – opened up. And so did the entire eastern landscape my train now began to cross.
Which brought me back again to Bazlo Criminale, the man I was chasing once more as my train edged slowly on towards Budapest. Where did he fit in all this, where did it put him? He belonged, I reflected, just about one age back from mine: in the trough after the Modern, but before what people now call postmodern times – rightly, I suppose, because the crises, the anxieties, the hideous outrages left by the modern age have certainly not gone away. As Gerstenbacker had reminded me, he lived through the worst, as I had not: the Age of the Holocaust and the Age of Hiroshima, the times of Stalin and Eisenhower, Krushchev and Kennedy, Castro and Mao, Andropov and Khomeini, Gorbachev and Reagan. He had seen crisis follow crisis: the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution, the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Prague Spring, the Paris events of 1968 and the Watergate Crisis, the Afghanistan Crisis and the Iran Hostage Crisis – and now, stirring in the background, the Gulf Crisis. He had lived through thaw and freeze, repression and then hope and then more repression. He had lived in occupied cities, crossed dangerous borders, been overlooked by watchtowers and telephone bugs and unmarked cars and censors, menaced by gulags and all the dangers that had been hidden in the kinds of landscape I saw beyond the window. He had lived among theories and philosophies that had sought to territorialize the entire modern idea. He belonged to the age of forgetting, of avoiding, eliminating, blanking, burning, in a time of terror and error, of ideas imprisoned, books forbidden, thoughts silenced, people unpersoned, classes eliminated.
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