by Jan Morris
Vienna is all consequence. It stands at the far end of the Alps like a grandiloquent watchman of history. Its streets lead not just to suburbs or provincial towns, but to ancient satrapies and fields of action: the Ostautobahn strikes grandly out for Budapest and Prague, Triesterstrasse will take you, if you persevere, direct to Dalmatia, and at the end of Landstrasse, as Metternich once observed, Asia itself begins. Everything around here is designed for consequence. The Danube passes a mile or two from the Ringstrasse, crossed by strategic bridges, commanded by castles. Flatlands just made for tanks or cavalry sweep away almost from the suburbs to the marshlands of the east. The spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral, plumb in the middle of the inner city, stands as a mighty marker to guide or warn the tribes, the caravans and the warring armies.
God-made then for consequence, long ago the city came to worship it. Under the aegis of the immemorially self-important Habsburgs, the Viennese became the archetypal sychophants of history, and made of their city one vast tribute to the vulgarity of class. How could they help it? For centuries they revered as their models of behaviour men who not only called themselves, in all seriousness, Their Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesties, but also claimed to be Kings of Jerusalem, Dalmatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Croatia and Galicia, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Princely Counts of Tyrol, dukes of a score of dukedoms and lords of lordships without number. These walking Social Registers, these Grand Panjandrums of Central Europe, were the presiding spirits of this place almost into modern times, and their silly standards and superstitions linger inescapably still.
It reminds me of Beijing. Beijing too has torn down its medieval walls to make way for pompous squares and thoroughfares, it too apparently depends for its self-assurance upon childish charades of grandeur, and it also is haunted by the ghosts of dead autocrats. Franz Josef, the last of the great Habsburgs, was the Mao of nineteenth-century Austria, the Helmsman of Vienna, the Great Father, and like Mao he has left behind him a host of followers who may deny their loyalty to his ideology, but who are subject by hereditary brainwash to his values. Watch now – stand back – here come a couple of Ministers down the steps from the Council Chamber in Parliament, portly important men, deep in portly and important matters of state – and swoosh, like a rocket from his office leaps the porter, buttoning his jacket – out of his door, panting heavily, urgently smoothing his hair, down the steps two at a go, bitte, bitte! – just in time, my goodness only just in time to open the door for Their Excellencies, who acknowledge his grovel only with slight inclinations of their heads, so as not to interrupt the flow of the discourse, as they lumber out beneath the figures of Minerva and her attendant sages to their waiting limousine.
Where sundry passers-by look almost inclined to bow and curtsey themselves, to see those dignitaries so lordly! In manners as in symbolisms, Franz Josef’s convictions of hierarchy seem to colour everything in Vienna still. Though this is the capital of a republic, and a Second Republic at that, it abounds in princes and archdukes, not to mention mere counts or baronesses, glittering in restaurants with sleek golden hair and predatory half-Magyar faces, elegantly cordial at cocktail parties (‘If you’re ever in Carinthia, we happen to have a little place down there …’), or sometimes to be glimpsed, if young enough, driving around the Ringstrasse in racy Italian cars for all the world as though they should still be dressed in the shakos, plumes and dangling scabbards of White Hussars.
And below the aristocrats, the social order is marshalled still in self-perpetuating gradations of esteem and respectability. The style of the imperial bureaucracy, established to administer a dominion that extended from Switzerland to Albania, now orders the affairs of a powerless neutral republic of 7.5 million souls. People grumble constantly about the size, the slowness, the fussiness, the not unknown corruption, the ornate arcanum of it, but still one feels they are themselves oddly complicit to its survival. It is the last blur of their greatness. It is Franz Josef himself living fuzzily on, honoured still by all Vienna’s myriad ranks of social and official import, all its Excellencies and Herr Professors and Frau Doktors and guilds and orders and infinitesimal nuances of protocol – the allegiance symbolized every morning, to this day, by the awe-struck deference that attends the morning exercises of the Imperial Lipizzaner horses, cantering round and round their palatial riding school, and followed obsequiously by a functionary with a shovel to remove their noble defecations.
Vienna feeds upon its past, a fond and sustaining diet, varied with chocolate cake or boiled beef with potatoes (Franz Josef’s favourite dish), washed down with the young white wine of the Vienna Woods, digested, and re-digested, and ordered once more, over, and over, and over again … If it reminds me sometimes of Beijing, sometimes it suggests to me the sensations of apartheid in South Africa. The city is obsessed, and obsessive. Every conversation returns to its lost greatness, every reference somehow finds its way to questions of rank, or status, or historical influence. Viennese romantics still love to wallow in the tragic story of Crown Prince Rudolf and his eighteen-year-old mistress Marie Vetsera, ‘the little Baroness’, who died apparently in a suicide pact in the country house of Mayerling in 1889. The tale precisely fits the popular predilections of this city, being snobbish, nostalgic, maudlin and rather cheap. I went out one Sunday to visit the grave of the little Baroness, who was buried obscurely in a village churchyard by command of Franz Josef, and was just in time to hear a Viennese lady of a certain age explaining the affair to her American guests. ‘But in any case,’ I heard her say without a trace of irony, ‘in any case she was only the daughter of a bourgeois …’
*
I often saw that same lady waiting for a tram, for she is a familiar of Vienna. She often wears a brown tweed suit, and is rather tightly clamped around the middle, and pearled very likely, and she never seems to be encumbranced, as most of us sometimes are, with shopping bags, umbrellas or toasters she has just picked up from the electrician’s. If you smile at her she responds with a frosty stare, as though she suspects you might put ketchup on your Tafelspitz, but if you speak to her she lights up with a flowery charm. Inextricably linked with the social absurdity of Vienna is its famous Gemütlichkeit, its ordered cosiness, which is enough to make a Welsh anarchist’s flesh creep: the one goes with the other, and just as it made the people of old Vienna one and all the children of their kind father His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, still to this day it seems to fix the attitudes of this city as with a scented glue – sweetly if synthetically scented, like the flavours you sometimes taste upon licking the adhesives of American envelopes.
There is nothing tangy to this city, except perhaps the dry white wines. There is no leanness to it. Even the slinkiest of those patricians, one feels, is going to run to fat in the end, and the almost complete absence, in the city centre, of any modern architecture means that a swollen sense of inherited amplitude seems to supervise every attitude. Though Vienna is ornamented everywhere with eagles, the double-headed eagle of the Dual Monarchy, the single-headed eagle of the Austrian Republic, nowhere could be much less aquiline. Vienna an eyrie! It is more like a boudoir birdcage, and when one morning I saw a seagull circling over the pool at Schönbrunn Palace it was like seeing a wild free visitor from some other continent.
Wildness, freeness, recklessness – not in Vienna! I went to a minor police court one day, and noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings asked him if he was planning an escape. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.’ The famous Big Wheel of the Prater funfair, that beloved image of the Viennese skyline, moves with such a genteel deliberation that I felt like kicking it, or scrawling scurrilous graffiti on its benches: the Vienna Woods which are said to have inspired so many artists in their passion for the Sublime represent Nature about as elementally thrilling as a rectory rock garden.
But who would want it otherwise, in this city of the coffee-house, the white-tie Wholesalers’ Ball and the merry tavern evenin
g with accordion accompaniment? Vienna is an elderly, comfortable, old-fashioned city. If you want excitement, a student of my acquaintance told me, you must either go to Munich or work up a peace demonstration. More immediately to hand than in almost any other city, Vienna possesses all the sensations and appurtenances of metropolitan existence, the stream of the sidewalk traffic, the great green parks with ponds and cafés in them, the opulence of long-established stores, the plushy banks and crowded theatres, the consoling lights of restaurants gleaming on wet pavements, the glimpses of opera audiences spilling out for gossip and champagne in the intermission, the bookshop after bookshop down the boulevards, the hotels rich in lore and private recipes, the memorials to heroes and historical satisfactions, the newspaper kiosks selling Le Monde or Svenska Dagbladet, the grand steepled hulk of the cathedral above its square, the buskers in pedestrian precincts, the winking TV tower, the sleepless trams … Yet as no other city can, Vienna somehow mutates this glorious distillation of human energy and imagination into something irredeemably domestic and conventional.
I walked one day into the Karlskirche, the most spectacular of Vienna’s baroque churches, which has a dome like St Peter’s, a couple of triumphal columns dressed up as minarets, and two subsidiary towers roofed in the Chinese manner. Inside I found a wedding in progress. It was magnificent. The great church seemed all ablaze with light and gilding, rococo saints floated everywhere, the bride and groom knelt side by side before the high altar, and flooding through the building came the strains of a Haydn string quartet, marvellously played and amplified to a crisp and vibrant splendour. Yet all that glory was subtly plumpened or buttoned by Vienna, for when I looked at the faces of the congregation I saw no exaltation there, only a familial complacency, satisfaction with the decorum of the arrangements only slightly tinged by the thought that dear Father would have played that adagio with a little more finesse.
For yes, if there is one art that has the power to make Gemütlichkinder of them all, it is the inescapably Viennese art of music. To Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Liszt, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and any number of Strausses the Viennese feel a cousinly and possessive relationship. ‘I hate going to concerts,’ I rashly announced to a Viennese companion over dinner one evening, and our rapport was never quite the same again: and ah! how I grew to dread the quivering pause in the garden of the Kursalon-conductor with bow and violin raised above his head, orchestra poised expectant over their strings, audience frozen with their spoons half in, half out of their ice-creams – that preceded, twenty or thirty times a day, the fruity melody and relentless beat of the Viennese waltz!
I made a pilgrimage, all the same, to the grave of Beethoven in the Grove of Honour, at the central cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. Mozart is commemorated there too, if only retrospectively, his body having unfortunately been dumped in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and Johann Strauss the Elder is lapped by cherubim near by, and Hugo Wolf the Lieder writer, than whom no single human being has ever plunged me into profounder despondency, is among the shrubberies round the corner. Beethoven’s tomb was easy enough to find because it had so many wreaths upon it, including one laid that morning, with visiting card attached, by Professor Hisako Kocho, President of the Folk Opera Society of Oita Prefecture (telephone Oita 5386). Yet even this grand sanctuary did not make my heart race, or inspire me to heroic yearnings: for with the gilded lyre upon its headstone, its Old German lettering and its generally metronomic or Edition Peters manner, it reminded me horribly of piano practice.
* * *
At night, however, lights are reflected in the overhead wires of the tramcars, and seem to slide eerily around the Ringstrasse of their own accord, like beings in a separate field of animation, lighter, faster, airier, more sly, than any No. 2 to Franz-Josefs Kai. Perhaps that well-known Viennese Herr Professor Freud used to contemplate them, as he strode on his long meditative walks: certainly it was from the generic psyche of Vienna that he drew his definition of the subconscious – that part of every human, every city, which lies concealed beneath the personality, or is revealed only by shimmering glints on street-car wires.
The most celebrated contemporary citizen of Vienna is not an analyst of trauma, but a scourer. Policeman lounging feet-up on the stairs outside, files of data stacked macabre around him, Simon Wiesenthal the Nazi-hunter sits in his office above Salztorstrasse, close to the old Jewish quarter and the Gestapo HQ, endlessly considering the darkest categories of angst. Around him are framed testimonials from grateful institutions – he is an award-winning Nazi-hunter – but few of them come from societies in Vienna. Hundreds of the most virulent Nazis, he says, still live unscathed in these parts – one much-respected builder of churches not only constructed the Auschwitz gas chambers, but repaired them, too. Dr Wiesenthal is by no means sufficiently gemütlich for the Viennese. There was an attempt on his life not long ago, and the city authorities very much wish, he tells me, that he would go somewhere else: in the meantime they put that slovenly policeman on his door, and another one, toting an automatic rifle, stands just in case outside the Synagogue in Seitenstettengasse.
I have to say that for a few hours after visiting Dr Wiesenthal I saw the face of Eichmann all around me – that peaked but ordinary face which I remember so exactly from the courtroom at Jerusalem years ago, and which Hannah Arendt characterized for ever as expressing ‘the banality of evil’. Nothing could be more unfair, I know, to the people of Vienna. Half of them are too young to remember Nazidom anyway, and the others, though if we are to believe Dr Wiesenthal they include a far higher proportion of war criminals than survive in any German city, were doubtless the victims above all of their genii loci. It was the presence of Vienna, after all, that first incited Adolf Hitler himself to his grandiose dreams of sovereignty – like an enchantment out of the Arabian Nights, he thought the vainglorious horror of the Ringstrasse.
But even if I dismiss from my mind the image of that lady in the brown suit, braided and blonde in those days, greeting the storm troopers with rose petals from the pockets of her dirndl, still I cannot dispel the feeling, as I walk these streets, that I am promenading one great conglomeration of neurosis. The reasons for it are not hard to conjecture – the crippling social legacies of the monarchy, the relentless pressures of Gemütlichkeit, historical humiliation, geographical exposure – drive down Metternich’s Landstrasse now, and in an hour you are on the frontiers of Czechoslovakia or of Hungary, where the sentinels of the Eastern world, weapons over their shoulders, stand with the great steppes at their backs.
No wonder this is a Freudian city in every sense. Not only is Freud’s house in Berggasse maintained as a shrine, where you may buy mounted photographs of his original Couch, or fancy yourself summoning dreams for interpretation in the very room where the Oedipus complex was first isolated. Not only that, but everywhere in the city you feel around you the ideas, the idioms and the subject matter of Freud’s vision: Father Figures tower in royal and apostolic statuary, libidos search for discos or Prater prostitutes, repressions wander arm-in-arm on Sunday afternoons down the beckoning avenues of Zentralfriedhof. It is as though at heart this whole famous metropolis, through its bows, smiles and proprieties, would like nothing so much as to flop down on a sofa in tearful revelation – in the presence, of course, of a properly gemütlich and well-qualified Herr Dr Professor.
And the last and most marvellous flowering of the Viennese genius, that surge of styles, ideas and mannerisms which orchestrated the decay and collapse of the Habsburgs, was itself a distinctly neurotic blossoming. No lyric joy of liberation seems to have inspired the new artistic forms by which the architects, the painters and the composers of this city rebelled against the old order of things. The temple of their revolution was the art gallery called the Secession House, built by the architect Josef Olbrich in 1898 and still as good as new: but it was officially opened by the Emperor anyway, and with its squat hunched form and its dome of gilded laurel-leaves looks rather like a mausoleum fro
m that Grove of Honour (though I dare say the Secessionists themselves, whose text was Ver Sacrum, Sacred Spring, thought it looked like a pump room). There was not, it seems, much fine careless rapture to this renaissance, to the venomous furies and gold-encased women of its paintings, to the alternate swirls and severities of its ever more loveless architecture.
But it did have a daemonic fire to it, and this strain of tormented or inverted genius lingers today like a reflected glow of the city’s inner conflicts. I find it more haunting, if less dazzling, than the excesses of Ringstrasse, for it shows itself more obliquely, in art as in life: a sudden tangle of decoration, a blank façade of concrete, the sunken eye of a man in the subway, a woman’s twisted face – wrenched by stroke? by bitterness? – as she sits alone over her coffee. For all its comfort, for all its beauty, for all its wealth and self-esteem, Vienna does not feel to me a happy city. Its citizens seem to be still working out, in their various ways, the very same doubts and frustrations which those artists expressed with such disturbing power in the last days of the old regime. They often fail. The suicide rate has always been high in Vienna. ‘He died like a tailor’, is supposed to have been Franz Josef’s odious comment on the fate of his son and heir at Mayerling, and so he acknowledged how commonplace, how workaday, was the self-destructive urge among his children the citizens at large. Death is a born Viennese, and nowhere is he more gemütlich, as it happens, than in the crypt of the Church of the Capuchins, where the corpses of the Habsburgs themselves are stored: for there is a small workshop down there too, for the restoration of imperial sarcophagi, and if you look through its window you may see a gigantic casket emptied of its contents, having its lid repaired perhaps, or its supporting angels re-capitated, and looking for all the world like a car in for its 6,000-mile service, or a lawnmower parked among the buckets and hose-pipes of the garden shed.