The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  I cannot understand why it should have been important for me to inspect this document. I try to make a suitable comment, agreeing that their title to the property seems beyond question, when once again I am interrupted. No, I do not understand, I am told. Not a penny had changed hands; the undisclosed sum was a legal fiction—the property had been ‘sold’ because my parents were (and he finds it almost impossible to pronounce the word) Jews. Do I not see, he continues with a curious mixture of embarrassment and bitterness, that anything might happen; at present there is no talk of restitution for property seized before 1948, but who knows what retrospective legislation will be passed in the future. And then, to my considerable distress, both brothers begin to plead with me: they have lived here all their lives; their father had rebuilt the house after half of it had caved in; it’s the only security either of them has.

  I interrupt them with more vehemence than politeness tolerates. I tell them that I have not the slightest wish to reclaim this house, or indeed to have anything to do with Hungary after I leave for home in a couple of weeks’ time. I grow agitated too. I stress and stress again that this world means nothing to me, that when my parents and I left it forty-five years ago, we severed whatever connection there had been between us and this place where so many of my relatives had met a terrible death. I tell them that my home, the world where I belong, is there, in Australia, a place where we had discovered safe harbour after leaving this contaminated world. I assure them that I came here merely out of perhaps misplaced sentimentality, to finish a piece of emotional business, but certainly not one connected with real estate. I hear myself thanking them for their hospitality, assuring them once more of my good intentions. Yet, as I set out for the station and as they are standing in the garden, safe behind their fence, waving, I begin to wonder guiltily what future fears and alarms I have sown in the minds of these people who have lived for a very long time in a house where I spent no more than three or four years of childhood.

  ICONOSTASIS

  We are standing before a screen of icons in a small Serbian Orthodox church; in front of us prophets and saints are frozen in eternal mystery. My cousin’s daughter, a currently unemployed teacher of English, looks around at the decrepit late eighteenth-century building, a typical example of Austrian baroque, which had been constructed, in all probability, on a shoestring budget. She fixes her gaze on the cracks in the elaborately plastered dome. She wonders, she says, whether the authorities will manage to get around to fixing the building before it collapses. The saints and prophets look on unconcerned, their minds set on more important matters. Outside in the bright autumn sunshine, after exchanging a few words with the elderly woman seated by the church door who is selling postcards and devotional objects, my young cousin remarks on how few antiquities there are in Hungary.

  On our way to this small town called Szentendre, an artists’ village and tourist trap on the outskirts of Budapest, we drove past a few Roman columns and brick foundations beside the busy road, remnants of the Roman settlement of Aquincum. Behind us rose a vista of identical-looking multi-storey blocks of flats—‘socialist flats’ as they are called by the inhabitants of the city. Those depressing buildings, a source of anger and contempt for the citizens of a newly ‘liberated’ Hungary, are nevertheless not much different from the architectural standards achieved here in former times. You would not come to Hungary to admire the architectural excellence of its antiquities. There are, admittedly, a few medieval castles (or in most cases their ruins) scattered around the country. There is also a handful of old churches, most of them ‘modernised’ during the eighteenth century. Here and there you may come upon remnants of the Turkish occupation five hundred years ago. But mostly this is a country with only paltry monuments of the past.

  In Budapest, where my young cousin lives in what is the only old part of the town—a series of medieval streets around the fortifications of the long-since demolished fortress, composed mostly of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century houses—most of the buildings date from the turn of the century, a period when many large cities, Sydney and Melbourne for instance, received their present-day aspect. The two cathedrals in Sydney are older than the pompous neo-baroque basilica in Budapest. Most people in this city live in houses or apartment blocks built since the 1880s. Budapest is, in other words, a relatively new place.

  My cousin is fully aware of this. When she remarked that even the iconostasis in the church we had visited wasn’t particularly old, she began to speak about the sense of deprivation she felt in Hungary. There is, she said not for the first time, so little that is old, so few things to put you in touch with real civilisation, to give you a sense of being in contact with the past, with continuity and with things that really mattered. She spoke wistfully of the fortnight in the early 1980s, it was still ‘socialism’ then, of course, when she and her husband, an economist, managed to obtain permission to ‘go out’. They went to Italy; they didn’t get as far as Rome, but were able at least to drive around Tuscany and Lombardy. Her eyes began to sparkle as she recalled that wonderful time. Now, of course, they were free to go anywhere, but they didn’t have enough money—and besides the girls were growing up, costing a great deal to keep. The most they can manage to do is to go to Vienna for the weekend to stay with friends and stand through a performance at the opera on the Saturday night. Vienna is much better than Budapest, she remarked, it has, after all, something of a past, but really she felt that she would have to get to Italy or Greece or the south of France soon, otherwise she would dry up.

  The three of us—her husband, who had gone off to look at leather jackets in one of the craft shops that line the main square, has by this time joined us—pick our way down a steep flight of stone steps into a flagged courtyard where a particularly grubby individual is selling the Hungarian version of damper. As we stand around a rickety counter, trying not to get garlicky grease on our clothes, both my cousin and her husband point out that the courtyard and the steps were probably laid out in the fifteenth century. They tell me that the Catholic church above the courtyard is also a very old foundation, but it was reconstructed in about 1810. Why couldn’t it have been left as it was? they ask. There’s precious little gothic left in Hungary. It’s the fault of those wretched Austrians, of course, imposing their showy baroque on every land they conquered.

  Then my cousin’s daughter turns to me and begins to say what I had been expecting her to say all day. How can I live in Australia? How can I do without the past? Doesn’t such a life lead to spiritual desiccation? Not that she is religious, she hastens to add, almost embarrassed, but there are things of the spirit … She must admit that there is a spiritual dimension to life; she had always thought so, even at school when, naturally, she was taught that there was no such thing as the soul, only chemistry and electricity running round your body. I could call that sense whatever I liked, but how is it possible to live without those spiritual things in such a new place, such a raw place, as Australia must be?

  An autumn afternoon in a crowded tourist resort filled with noisy Germans loudly converting Hungarian forints into marks or schillings is not an ideal place to conduct a typically intense Central-European conversation about culture. Nevertheless, on the short drive back to Budapest in an efficient little Fiat which had recently replaced (I was told) a rattling socialist deathtrap, my relatives come back to that question. How can I bear to live in Australia? How could anyone who has made culture and literature his occupation do without the past, without that contact with continuity, all those things capable of enriching life, that you can’t find in Hungary, admittedly, but are not far away, in Italy, in Greece, in the south of France? Don’t I feel spiritually deprived, denied those things which sustain the only real life there is?

  In the back of the Fiat I begin to consider what reply I might make. I mention the ancient and complex culture of the original Australians, their art, their rich store of myth, legend and belief. But no, my relatives cannot accept that—no doub
t it is a rich culture, they wouldn’t deny that, they had indeed seen photographs somewhere. But it isn’t our culture, is it?—and they begin to rattle off the familiar string of names in Europe’s pantheon of high culture. They too, I realise, have their own iconostasis, their saints, heroes and prophets in front of whom they worship and whose shrines—in Florence, Athens, Nîmes and Avignon—they hope to visit for spiritual replenishment. I am about to say something about the way that culture is internal, how it doesn’t ultimately depend on secular pilgrimages, and I am also going to raise the possibility that we in Australia may be more fortunate because we are assisting in the birth of a culture, rather than observing one already formed, as a series of exhibits in a museum, inside a mausoleum or on a screen of icons. The opportunity does not, however, arise. The first of the phalanx of socialist apartment blocks comes into sight. The traffic increases and my young cousin and her husband settle down to a noisy argument about the best way of avoiding the weekend congestion, and whether it is wise for him to be doing 100 in an 80 kph zone.

  HUNTING PARTY

  Upstream from the town of icons stands the fortress of Visegrád. This is the Danube Bend where the river, as in the famous Wachau region of Austria, passes through a gorge flanked by high hills. In times past the hills and promontories around here controlled the fate of nations and kingdoms. Today Visegrád looks over towards Czechoslovakia, until recently a sister socialist republic, otherwise a Soviet puppet-state (depending, as always in this world, on your point of view). Boatloads of sightseers from Budapest arrive every Sunday to marvel at ancient stones and fortifications, and also to consume rich food at the restaurant conveniently situated adjacent to the wharf. The climb to the fortress is strenuous; corpulent elderly women puff and wheeze their way along the cobbled path to a rough-hewn, square keep where they pay a token admission fee for the privilege of climbing more steps to inspect this monument of Hungary’s ancient glory.

  The ancient glory, as it turns out and as I might have suspected, is a trifle contingent. Visegrád was the court of a great monarchy until the vicissitudes of history swept it away. For centuries the fortress was a little more than heap of rubble—the few houses of the small village nestled around it are said to have been built from its stones and timbers. The keep rose again early this century, in the wake of that nostalgic search for a national past that swept across this country after the disintegration of the Habsburg world. Here is, in other words, another theme park, another sentimental reconstruction of a fantasy, a past both picturesque and stirring, like the ‘medieval’ castle in the municipal gardens of Budapest built from scraps of ruined buildings brought to the capital from all over the country. The puffed visitors marvelling at the splendid interior of this ancient monument are lost in admiration of the theatrical skill of twentieth-century architects.

  The interior reveals, surprisingly and not a little disconcertingly, an entirely different essay in nostalgia. Having walked respectfully past the few bits and pieces of the original fortress embedded in the walls of the new construction, you come upon a well-lit chamber on one of the upper levels of the keep. This great space contains a number of large boards displaying a series of much magnified photographs. A photographic exhibition is itself enough of an incongruity in a place dedicated to (and reconstructed for the celebration of) an ancient glory of the long distant past, before the age of technology which produced both the photograph and those political and mechanical structures that saw to the extinction of Hungarian independence. Its subject matter is even more curious. Visegrád is a nostalgic monument to a time of independence, a time when the kings of Hungary could hold their heads high and survey, from this hilltop, their proud domains. The photographs represent, on the other hand, a collateral branch of the House of Habsburg, that hated tribe of Austrian overlords, inventors and maintainers of the dream of Kakania, who kept the gallant Hungarian race in utter subjection—or at least did so according to the propaganda of the age of revolution in the nineteenth century.

  These photographs depict intimate scenes of family life among the ‘Hungarian’ Habsburgs. Many were taken by the Archduchess Isabella, the wife of the Archduke Friedrich, nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef, on the family’s estate near Pozsony, the Slovakian city of Bratislava which Friedrich and Isabella would have known by its Kakanian name of Pressburg. They show the archducal family at rest and at play. A cosy family scene depicts someone playing a cornet, accompanied by a demure lady at the piano, while other members of the family pursue various pastimes. Another series depicts the young Albrecht, Friedrich’s heir, now standing on the back of a pony, now dressed in miniature imperial uniform. Other photographs are concerned with those enormous gatherings of European royalty which show only too clearly the dangers of inbreeding—everyone is obviously everyone else’s cousin. In some the Archduchess poses with embarrassed members of the local peasantry dressed in their embroidered national costumes, while pigs and pig troughs are clearly visible in the background. The photograph was intended no doubt to indicate Isabella’s dedication to the well-being of her consort’s people.

  The exhibition room is crowded. These large black-and-white images obviously appeal to the sense of longing for a lost and glamorous past evident throughout Hungary. The people crowding around them point with approbation at details of the ladies’ elaborate clothing, at the gilt chairs and ormolu clocks of imperial apartments, at the splendid furs worn by both men and women on those stiff archducal picnics where official photographers were always in attendance. Here is a welcome contrast to the drab present. Ah, those were the days, they seem to be saying. Wasn’t life gracious then? And look at the jewellery! Now isn’t that something!

  One part of the exhibition draws particularly animated responses. It consists of a series of photographs taken on various hunting expeditions. In the foreground of most of these pictures a heap of slain animals is artistically displayed, somewhat in the manner of those mounds of fruit and vegetables indicating nature’s bounty in the produce hall of the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. Behind the slain deer, chamois and winged creatures of all kinds stand the victors. The men are carefully dressed in the correct hunting costume of the time: breeches, loden capes and feathered hats. But it is the women who attract the greatest attention. There they stand, staring fiercely into the camera, with their hunting rifles held firmly and displayed with obvious pride. They are Amazons or Valkyries, but they always wear full-skirted hunting suits, greatcoats or furs and, of course, large hats, which sometimes cover much of the upper parts of their faces, layered with baroque decorations of feathers, birds and fruit. One aristocratic lady points the toe of her fastidiously polished boot towards the heap of game; another seems to be raising her gun to pot yet another bird. In several of these photographs menials of various kinds may be seen hovering around their masters and mistresses, tending to the needs of these great hunters.

  These images are nauseating largely because of the grating incongruity between the formal elaboration of the hunt and its pathetic objects—heaps of limp-necked two- and four-footed creatures. The visitors in Visegrád do not, however, seem to find these scenes of carnage at all distasteful. Observing their interest and admiration, I recall the many shops in Vienna and Budapest which are dedicated to the art of venery. Unlike the grim and shabby gun shops to be found in the less salubrious parts of Sydney and Melbourne, they are very tasteful and dignified affairs. Their display windows are usually arranged in the manner of nineteenth-century stage sets with painted backdrops depicting mountain crags or reedy marshes. Wax dummies of the hunter and the hunted are artistically disposed in picturesque configurations reminiscent of tableaux on the stages of the opera theatres in Vienna and Budapest. These charming perspectives form a beguiling setting for the display of various implements of slaughter—in one establishment in Vienna pride of place is occupied by a horrendous crossbow of shiny metal with telescopic sight and its fan of terrible steel-tipped arrows. This, I conclude perhaps unfairly, is a cultu
re dedicated to death and killing.

  For the people crowding around these images of death in the keep at Visegrád, there seems to be no obscenity in the celebration of the noble art of the hunt. For them these are obviously emblems of a glorious past, remembered in a shabby present. It strikes me, therefore, how odd the effects of nostalgia usually are. These people frozen in seventy- or eighty-year-old black-and-white images are the oppressors, the overlords, the cruel tyrants of a nationalistic mythology. They, and their forebears, were regarded as the blood-sucking exploiters, the suppressors of the Hungarian nation. Yet here they are being remembered fondly by drab day-trippers as the representatives of a better life, just as their statues and monuments are being replaced and lovingly restored all over the capital, after the overthrow of a more recent tyrant and oppressor. I begin to wonder whether they too, like the Habsburgs before them, will one day be fondly recalled.

  As you leave the ‘medieval’ keep by the exit door, having followed one-way passages and staircases to the roof and down again, you come upon a small bookstall guarded by an intense, chain-smoking lady of advanced years. Among various publications on display I notice a blue-covered book containing reproductions of the Habsburg photographs. I enquire about the price—given the rate of exchange in this country for even a currency as dicey as the Australian dollar, the book represents a remarkable bargain. I tell the lady that I would like to purchase one, with an English text if possible. She rummages through a pile in a box which (I notice) once contained bananas from the Caribbean, and produces what she claims to be the last English-language copy—she has some Hungarian and German copies, and of course several in Russian, but nobody wants those now, she can’t imagine what would have possessed them to produce it in the first place.