THE GRAYNESS PERSISTS the next day, muting our outing to the mountains of the Salzkammergut lake district. The region—Salzkammergut means “Estate of the Salt Chamber”—stretches out to the east of Salzburg and remains one of the prettiest in the Alps. Ernst does the navigation and, to his credit, exhibits no sign of Swiss scenery chauvinism as sights of exceptional beauty pass before us. We do a loop to the south to see what is reputed be the loveliest of all, the village of Hallstatt, on the glacial lake of that name. It is stunningly situated on a narrow spit of shoreline, at the foot of the soaring Dachstein Mountains. Its colorful old houses are reflected in the clear waters of the lake. Little wonder that UNESCO classed it a World Heritage Site in 1997.
Hallstatt has been around for thousands of years. Neolithic man discovered and mined the salt in its mountains, followed by hundreds of generations up to and including the present day. It is said to have the oldest salt mine in the world. For the last few hundred years, water rather than the pickax has been used in the process. A mixture of three parts salt and seven parts water is sent to be processed at a town forty kilometers distant via a “brine pipeline” originally constructed in 1595 from thirteen thousand hollowed-out trees. So the oldest mine meets the oldest pipeline, although today the pipes are plastic.
Even more important is Hallstatt’s role in the study of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. In 1846, Johann George Ramsauer, the manager of the salt works, came across an ancient cemetery near Hallstatt containing at least a thousand burials. For the next two decades, he devoted himself to the careful exhumation of each burial, cataloguing its remains and the artifacts—swords, brooches, statuettes, etc.—interred alongside their owners. In this prephotography age, he commissioned a watercolorist to execute faithful replications of the objects found.
A whole world opened up. It became obvious to historians that even as early as 500 or 600 BCE, the miners of Hallstatt—who were Celts—had been trading their salt as far north as the Baltic Sea and as far south as the Mediterranean. Luxury goods from the Greek colony of Massilia (present-day Marseille) were found in the burials, as were Etruscan objects. These revolutionary finds resulted in the village’s giving its name to a two-hundred-year stretch of human history, the Hallstatt Culture. This classification goes from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE, the time of transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
In its current incarnation, the village is a gingerbread and pastel gem dominated by a needlelike church clock tower. The place also hosts the largest number of Chinese tourists I have seen thus far in the Alps, brandishing their selfie sticks like swords. The reason for this lies in Hallstatt’s unique status as a village that has been successfully cloned. In 2012, an exact replica of the place was opened near the large city of Huizhou, in the Guangdong province of southern China. Touring the Chinese Hallstatt, one hears the strains of The Sound of Music, on a continuous tape loop. The cloning was done in a cloak-and-dagger fashion—for years, Chinese architects and designers had extended stays in the Austrian village, taking pictures and executing painstaking drawings without telling the town’s officials what they were doing. Paid for by a Chinese mining magnate, the whole effort—costing just under a billion dollars—was intended to create a linchpin for a surrounding Western-style housing project, an upscale place of greenery and comfort where wealthy Chinese could escape the gritty cities formed around rampant industrialization. For the Austrian Hallstatt, the resulting publicity hubbub has been a boon—Chinese tourism here has increased more than a thousandfold.
When the rain closes in, we race back to the car and drive to the spa town of Bad Ischl. In the nineteenth century, the summering Habsburg royalty in Bad Ischl made the towns of the Salzkammergut places to see and be seen for the courtiers and creators of effervescent Vienna. The storybook appearance of the countryside also makes it ideal for Romantic maundering. Even a partial list of habitués of the lake towns is impressive: Gustav Klimt, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Johannes Brahms. The number of great composers besotted by the place suggests that the hills here are, indeed, alive with the sound of music.
We plop down for a coffee at a terrace in the town’s Kreuzplatz, a small square in front of what was once the Imperial and Royal Theater and is now home to a cultural center and a repertory cinema. Its small but grand colonnaded façade speaks to the town’s past distinction. On one occasion in 1897, Die Fledermaus was performed here for visiting royals from Asia, under the direction of its composer, Johann Strauss.
We take in the view of the well-maintained townhouses. Ernst, always on the lookout for the unseemly, directs my attention to a sign opposite us that says something about the summertime activities here.
“This is what this town is all about,” he says triumphantly. The sign reads:
DR. MARTIN FUCHSBAUER
DERMATOLOGIE
VENEROLOGIE
AESTHETIC CHIRURGIE
ENTRANCE IN BACK OF THE BUILDING
I do not want to hazard a guess as to why the good doctor’s patients have to go in by the back door.
Then again, Bad Ischl has long had an association with Venus and her etymological offspring, the venereal. In the early nineteenth century, an archduchess of Austria, despairing of her fertility, came to the spa town to take the waters and receive treatment. In the fullness of time, she gave birth to three sons whom she called her “Salt Princes.” One of these boys grew up to become Emperor Franz Josef, the longest reigning Habsburg monarch and an obedient servant of Venus. When the time came for him to mate, the in-breeder’s digest was consulted and his Bavarian aunt arrived in Bad Ischl to present him her marriageable daughter, Helene. Unwisely, the well-meaning aunt also included her younger daughter, fifteen-year-old Elisabeth of Bavaria, in her traveling entourage. When Franz Josef first beheld his beautiful first cousin, he fell madly in love. Poor Helene was shoved aside and five days later Elisabeth found herself engaged to be married. This Elisabeth is the famed Sisi, whose statue on the shore of Lake Geneva I admired at the outset of this journey. I crossed many passes and language barriers—French to Italian to German to Italian, then back to German—before arriving here in Bad Ischl, where Sisi is still celebrated. I’m intrigued to see how her life is remembered here, rather than her death, as in Geneva.
As we walk into the town center, I muse on Sisi’s unfortunate end.
Ernst cuts me off. “Her assassin did her a favor,” he says. “She led her life as a work of art. What’s more artful than a dramatic death?”
“So you’re saying she wanted to be assassinated?”
“No, of course not,” Ernst replies.
We continue through the streets in silence.
At last Ernst examines me through his round glasses and says, “Why do you think she is remembered?”
“Because of her beauty.”
“No, no, no! It’s because her death was seen as the end of an era.”
I’m about to dispute this when the Café Sissy comes into view to silence me. It is near a grand hotel that welcomed all the important visitors to Bad Ischl on their visits to the emperor and empress. A stone plaque on its façade lists their names with martinet precision. First come the names of the monarchs of Europe, then those of Austro-Hungarian nobility, followed by a roll call of commoners. The last name etched on this third list is Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
We peruse the menu posted on the wall. The choices that jump out at me are Sissy’s Secret (mixed grill for one), Sissy’s Special (mixed grill for two), Chef-Toast Sissy (turkey fillet on toast with cocktail sauce, onion rings, tomatoes, and salt), and Kaiser Franz-Josef Teller (fillets of pork in mushroom sauce).
“We are not eating here,” Ernst says with a certain finality. I hate to say it, but I agree with him.
Instead we wander through the ornate lobbies of the hotel. There are little medallions bearing the letters K.u.K. on the walls, the same type of medallion I noticed on Bad Ischl’s lamp stan
dards. But the real attractions are the portraits and busts of Sisi, showing her to be a fair creature with dark, deep-set eyes and a cascade of long, flowing chestnut hair. This leads us to a discussion on the correct spelling of her nickname. Ernst favors the frilly Sissy, which is only to be expected, given his proven disdain for the woman, while I opt for the simpler Sisi, the one adopted by most histories of the period.
Just as Mozart is the mascot of Salzburg, Sisi appears to play the same role in Bad Ischl—which is curious, since she loathed the place. Within a few years of her wedding, she stayed away as much as she could, traveling the Mediterranean, Hungary (which she loved), and western Europe—anywhere she could escape the constraints of Habsburg formality. She had been brought up in a freewheeling manner by her eccentric parents—she also spent a lot of time with her cousin Ludwig, the Bavarian dreamer of Neuschwanstein—and was totally unprepared for the rigid discipline demanded of her. Her powerful mother-in-law despised her and tried to keep her in her place, and her husband, though impetuous at the outset of his lightning courtship of her, proved to have the spontaneity of a rock. Sisi did her dynastic duties by producing a few children early on, but her sole son, Crown Prince Rudolf, eventually ended up killing himself in a shocking murder–suicide pact with his mistress at Mayerling, a hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods. Sisi donned mourning clothes and never took them off. Franz Josef got the message. He took up with a Viennese actress named Katharina Schratt, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sisi in her youth. The empress, perhaps relieved that her husband had turned his attentions elsewhere, helped set up Schratt in a villa in Bad Ischl.
The next morning, as we walk up a tree-lined drive to the Kaiservilla, Franz Josef’s hunting lodge, I see them again, the letters K.u.K., on a gateway. I ask Ernst about the mysterious abbreviation. He explains that it was the moniker for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a stand-in universally used, somewhat like present-day USA and UK. Kaiserlich und Königlich (Imperial and Royal) signified that Franz Josef was kaiser (or emperor) of Austria and king of Hungary and several other places in his sprawling multiethnic domain. The “und” was often removed—especially in the eastern, more restive parts of the empire—leaving K.K., which is pronounced “caca” and means exactly the same thing to children of many languages. In the 1930s, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, in his Man Without Qualities, has fun with the vanished state, calling it Kakania, which I leave to resourceful readers to translate for themselves.
The Kaiservilla is a yellow Italianate palace set on a large estate gardened in the English style. On entering, it becomes obvious that it was not just a hunting lodge in name only. The walls are hung with hundreds and hundreds of chamois horns, all bagged by the kaiser on his daily hunts. Each horn is labeled to show where the kill took place and on what date. Since the dogged Franz Josef spent sixty consecutive summers as emperor in Bad Ischl, that accounts for a lot of chamois. About forty-five thousand in total, we learn from a tour guide later on. She hastens to add that he shared the meat with the local population, a generosity not exhibited by Franz Ferdinand, his nephew, who became next in the line of succession after the Mayerling incident. The archduke did not share his kills, which, according to our guide, amounted to 270,000 animals in his lifetime. Famously, he himself was shot to death in Sarajevo, in 1914.
Only a part of the sprawling villa is open to public inspection, as the wing Sisi intermittently inhabited is now occupied by her great-grandson, Magister Markus Salvator Habsburg-Lothringen, and his family, who presumably do not want smartphones stuck in their faces all day long. Hence the obligatory guided tour, to keep us lowlifes from wandering into rooms and disturbing their highnesses. The hunting trophies overwhelm the corridors leading from one exquisite room to the next. The Red Salon, where Franz Josef received heads of state (including President Ulysses S. Grant, Prince Otto von Bismarck, and a whole raft of kings and tsars), is modest in size, fitting for the emperor’s austere way of life—with the exception of his hunting obsession, of course. He was at his desk every morning at 4:15 a.m., conducting affairs of state. Dawn was time for the hunt. As he had no other hobbies, it is rumored that his reverence for routine led him to set a specific time for having sex with his wife, as a sort of Bureaucrat of the Bed. As for the bed he slept in every night, it was a simple iron army cot.
Sisi is remembered in a sitting room. The walls are covered with landscape paintings of her native Bavaria. A glass display shows the costly gifts showered on her by the crowned heads of Europe. Against one wall is a rather unbelievable sideboard, made of thirty types of wood, fashioned for eleven years by a hobbyist from Carinthia. Near it stands a gift from her beloved Magyars, a drinking horn, made from a Hungarian ox, that can hold eight liters of wine.
Not that Sisi would have indulged. Our tour guide tells us that she was a dietary control freak, to the point of anorexia, sometimes eating just one potato a day. At this point, Ernst shoots me an annoying I-told-you-so look. Sisi’s exercise regimens were rigorous—she wore out her ladies-in-waiting with vigorous hikes in voluminous skirts up the mountains of the Salzkammergut. When not in full-blown depression, fits of vomiting and fever plagued her. Obsessed by her image in a pre-Photoshop age, she never sat for a photograph after her thirty-second birthday.
We are led at last into Franz Josef’s study. On his desk is a bust of the teenage Sisi, devastatingly lovely. It was at this desk on 28 July 1914 that the emperor declared war on Serbia, setting off the falling dominoes that would lead to the cataclysm of the Great War. He signed three declarations—in German, French, and Latin. Occupying the desk now is a declaration issued the same day, entitled “To My Peoples!” This document had German, Hungarian, and Czech versions. It attempts to explain the decision to go to war, beginning:
To my peoples! It was my fervent wish to consecrate the years which, by the grace of God, still remain to me, to the works of peace and to protect my peoples from the heavy sacrifices and burdens of war. Providence, in its wisdom, has otherwise decreed. The intrigues of a malevolent opponent compel me, in the defense of the honor of my Monarchy, for the protection of its dignity and its position as a power, for the security of its possessions, to grasp the sword after long years of peace.
His peoples and those of other countries eventually became disillusioned. By war’s end, the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Ottomans had been consigned to the trash heap of history. If the events at Bad Wiessee can be said, arguably, to signal the end of Romanticism, then the signature at the Kaiservilla marks the end of the nineteenth century, with its princes, dukes, and kings engaging in hothouse diplomacy while their countries outgrew them.
Outside again, Ernst points out a statue of a foppish young man with his ear cocked. There are two hunting dogs at his feet. Although entitled The Eavesdropper, the artwork is clearly a tribute to the beaters that scared thousands of chamois into Franz Josef’s gun sight. Ernst, the sage of St. Gallen, declares that this is clearly a homoerotic statue evoking the raunchy Viennese partying that took place in Bad Ischl for many summers. When I, who have read the documentation in the gift shop, inform him that the work was a gift to Sisi from Queen Victoria, he utters a loud Swiss “a-HA!” and walks off, his suspicions confirmed.
Our destination is a teahouse far into the estate, built for Sisi by Franz Josef so that she could moon about her misfortunes far from the duties of court. It is an English teahouse, now converted into a museum of photography. Much of it is an overly thorough presentation of early daguerreotype technology, but there is one room that attracts my attention. This features photographs of the royal family. One portrait shows an intelligent, troubled young woman looking into the camera. She is beautiful, complex. How could anyone handle being thrust into an arcane, codified world at the age of sixteen? Sisi stares out at the visitor.
TODAY WE WILL take the salz in Salzkammergut seriously. Time to visit a salt mine. We drive southeast of Bad Ischl through the thickly wooded mountains where the report of Franz Josef’s
hunting rifle once echoed. Due to bad planning, our route lies past Hallstatt once again, but neither of us really regrets seeing for a second time its church steeple and colorful houses reflected in the serene waters of the lake. We round the south shore and head for the village of Obertraun, a quiet, quaint place undisturbed, seemingly, by mass tourism. From there we will take the road upward to the Koppen Pass, a prospect that does not daunt me, as its elevation is less than a thousand meters.
This is when I learn that it is wise never to become overconfident in the Alps. Although the Koppen is a low pass, the road builders seem to have thought that crossing it should be done as quickly as possible. There is only one hairpin; the rest is a steep, steep climb. Beyond a place called Südanfahrt, there is a long stretch of narrow roadway with a ridiculous 23 percent gradient. Perspiration beads on my brow, as I can barely see over the hood of the car. Ernst laughs nervously, then starts when we are overtaken by a daredevil schnitzel of Austrian bikers. The Koppen Pass is at last reached, and we seem to have entered an area of pure wilderness, conifers and rockfaces and a river, the Traun, rushing far far below. But no, this is genteel Austria. A short descent and we arrive at the spa town of Bad Aussee, yet another summertime haunt of Vienna’s brilliant fin-de-siècle luminaries. The town is said to be the geographical midpoint of Austria, a distinction dubiously commemorated in 2005 by the construction of the Mercedes Bridge at the confluence of two footbridges spanning twin tributaries of the River Traun. The Mercedes of the bridge is indeed Mercedes-Benz, and a gigantic three-pointed-star logo of the car company stretches a whopping twenty-seven meters horizontally over the river. The corporate intrusion is made all the more incongruous because the inhabitants of this town of sixteenth-century houses remain among the few Austrians to wear unaffectedly the Tracht—that is, traditional Austrian dress. Unlike the exhausted suburban Salzburgers fleeing the tourist make-believe, many women of Bad Aussee proudly wear the tight bodices and full skirts of the dirndl as they stroll the town doing errands.
The Alps Page 20