by Bill Bryson
The main square in Salzburg, the Mozartplatz, was quite astonishingly ugly for a city that prides itself on its beauty – a big expanse of asphalt, as charming as a Tesco car park, one extraordinarily begrimed statue of the great man, and a few half-broken benches, around every one of which was crowded a noisy cluster of thirteen-year-old Italians in whom the hormonal imbalances of adolescence were clearly having a deleterious effect. It was awful.
What surprised me was that I remembered Salzburg as being a beautiful place. It was in Salzburg that Katz and I met Gerhard and Thomas, in a bar around the corner from the Mozartplatz, and it was such a thrill to have someone to dilute Katz’s company that I think my enthusiasm may have coloured my memory of the city. In any case, I could find nothing now in the old town but these wretched souvenir shops and restaurants and bars whose trade was overwhelmingly non-local and thus offered about as much charm and local colour as a Pizza Hut on Carnaby Street.
When I crossed the river to the more modern right bank, I found I liked Salzburg much better. A long, quiet street of big houses stood overlooking the Salzach and the views across to the old town were splendid: the ancient roofs, the three domed spires of the cathedral and the vast, immensely heavy-looking Hohensalzburg fortress sinking into the low mountain-top at its back. The shopping streets of the modern town were to my mind much more interesting and appealing and certainly more real than their historic counterparts across the river. I had a coffee in a Konditorei on Linzer Gasse, where every entering customer got a hearty ‘Grüss Gott!’ from every member of the staff. It was like on Cheers when Norm comes in, only they did it for everybody, including me, which I thought was wonderful. Afterwards I had a good dinner, a couple of beers and a long evening walk along the river and felt that Salzburg wasn’t such a bad place at all. But it wasn’t the Salzburg that most people come to see.
Vienna is a little under 200 miles east of Salzburg and it took all morning and half the afternoon to get there. There is this curiously durable myth that European trains are wonderfully swift and smooth and a dream to travel on. The trains in Europe are in fact often tediously slow and for the most part the railways persist in the antiquated system of dividing the carriages into compartments. I used to think this was rather jolly and friendly, but you soon discover that it is like spending seven hours in a waiting-room waiting for a doctor who never arrives. You are forced into an awkward intimacy with strangers, which I always find unsettling. If you do anything at all – take something from your pocket, stifle a yawn, rummage in your rucksack – everyone looks over to see what you’re up to. There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind – the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer short that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s cornflake that is teasingly and unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril. It was the cornflake that I ached to get at. The itch was all-consuming. I longed to thrust a finger so far up my nose that it would look as if I were scratching the top of my head from the inside, but of course I was as powerless to deal with it as a man with no arms.
You even have to watch your thoughts. For no reason I can explain, except perhaps that I was inordinately preoccupied with bodily matters, I began to think of a sub-editor I used to work with on the business section of The Times. I shall call him Edward, since that was his name. Edward was crazy as fuck, which in those palmy pre-Murdoch days was no impediment to employment, or even promotion to high office, on the paper, and he had a number of striking peculiarities, but the one I particularly remember was that late at night, after the New York markets had shut and there was nothing much to do, he would straighten out half a dozen paper clips and probe his ears with them. And I don’t mean delicate little scratchings. He would really jam those paper clips home and then twirl them between two fingers, as if tuning in a radio station. It looked excruciating, but Edward seemed to derive immense satisfaction from it. Sometimes his eyes would roll up into his head and he would make ecstatic little gurgling noises. I suppose he thought no one was watching, but we all sat there fascinated. Once, during a particularly intensive session, when the paper clip went deeper and deeper and looked as if it might be stuck, John Price, the chief sub-editor, called out, ‘Would it help, Edward, if one of us pulled from the other side?’
I thought of this as we went tracketa-tracketa across the endless Austrian countryside and I laughed out loud – a sudden lunatic guffaw that startled me as much as my three companions. I covered my mouth with my hand, but more laughter – embarrassed, helpless – came leaking out. The other passengers looked at me as if I had just been sick down my shirt. It was only by staring out of the window and concentrating very hard for twenty minutes that I was able to compose myself and return once again to the more serious torments of the cornflake in my nostril.
At Vienna’s huge Westbahnhof I paid to have a room found for me, then walked to the city centre along the long and ugly Mariahilfer Strasse, wondering if I had been misled about the glories of Vienna. For a mile and a half, from the station to the Ringstrasse, the street was lined with seedy-looking discount stores – the sort of places that sell goods straight out of their cardboard boxes – and customers to match. It was awful, but then near the Hofburg palace I passed into the charmed circle of the Ringstrasse and it was like the sun breaking out from behind clouds. Everything was lovely and golden.
My hotel, the Wandl, was not particularly charming or friendly, but it was reasonably cheap and quiet and it had the estimable bonus of being in almost the precise geographical centre of the city, just behind the baroque Schottenkirche and only half a block from Graben, one of the two spacious pedestrian shopping streets that dominate the heart of Vienna. The other is Kärntnerstrasse, which joins Graben at a right angle by the cathedral square. Between them, they provide Vienna with the finest pedestrian thoroughfare in Europe. Strøget may be a hair longer, others may have slightly more interesting buildings, and a few may be fractionally more elegant, but none is all of these things. I knew within minutes that I was going to like Vienna.
I went first to the cathedral. It is very grand and Gothic outside, but inside I found it oddly lifeless – the sort of place that gives you a cold shiver – and rather neglected as well. The brass was dull and unpolished, the pews were worn, the marble seemed heavy and dead, as if all the natural luminescence had been drained from it. It was a relief to step back outside.
I went to a nearby Konditorei for coffee and a 15,000-calorie slice of cake and planned my assault on the city. I had with me the Observer Guide to Vienna, which included this piece of advice: ‘In Vienna, it is best to tackle the museums one at a time.’ Well, thank you, I thought. All these years I’ve been going to museums two at a time and I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting depressed.
I decided to start at the top with the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It was fabulous – vast, grand, full of great paintings. They employ a commendable system there. In every room is a rack of cards giving histories of the paintings in that room in a choice of four languages. You wander around with a card looking at the paintings and reading the notes and then replace it in the rack before passing on to the next room where you collect another. I thought it was a great idea.
The only problem with the Kunstmuseum is that it is so enormous. Its lofty halls just run on and on, and before I was a third of the way through it I was suffering museum fatigue. In these circumstances, especially when I have paid a fortune to get in and feel that there are still a couple of hours standing between me and my money’s worth, I find myself involuntarily supplying captions to the pictures: Salome, on being presented the head of John the Baptist on a salver, saying, ‘No, I ordered a double cheeseburger,’ and an exasperated St Sebastian whining, ‘I’m warning you guys, the next person who shoots an arrow is going to get reported.’ But this time I d
id something that astonished even me. I left, deciding that I would come back for a second sweep later in the week, in spite of the cost.
Instead, for a change of pace, I went to the Tobacco Museum, not far away behind the Messepalast. This was expensive too. Most things in Vienna are. The entrance charge was twenty schillings, two-thirds as much as the Kunstmuseum, but it was hardly two-thirds as good. In two not-very-large rooms I was treated to a couple of dozen display cases packed with old pipes (including a few grotesquely anti-Semitic ones), cigars, matches, cigarettes and cigarette boxes. Around the larger of the two rooms was an elevated gallery of paintings with little artistic merit and nothing in common except that one or more of the people portrayed was smoking. Not recommended.
Nor, I have to say, is the Albertina. This was even more expensive – forty-five schillings. For that kind of money, I would expect to be allowed to take one of the drawings away with me. But I paid without a whimper because I had read that the Albertina has one of the world’s great collections of graphic art, which I just happen to like a lot, but in fact there was hardly anything on show. It was a huge building, but the public gallery was confined to eight small rooms at the back, all with creaking floors and sketching students and unmemorable drawings by mostly obscure artists.
The postcard-stand outside was full of drawings ‘from the Albertina collection’ by artists like Rubens and Dürer, but I had seen none of these. The woman running the stall didn’t speak English and when I held up a Dürer postcard and asked her where the original was, she just kept saying, with that irritableness for which the Viennese are noted, ‘Ja, ja, das ist ein postcard,’ as if I had said, ‘Pardon me, is this a postcard or is it a snack food?’ and refused to try to grasp my question until finally I had no choice but to slap her to the ground and leave.
Apart from her, however, I didn’t find the Viennese especially rude and pushy, which rather disappointed me, because I had heard many times that they are the most disagreeable people in Europe. In The Double Eagle, Stephen Brook’s excellent account of Vienna, Budapest and Prague, he notes that he met many foreign residents of the city who reported being stopped on the streets by strangers and rebuked for crossing against the lights or letting their children walk with their coats unbuttoned.
Brook also promised that at the famous Café Landtmann, on the Ringstrasse next to the Burgtheater, ‘the waiters and cloak-room attendants treat you like shit’ and in this he was certainly closer to my experience. I didn’t feel precisely like excrement, but the waiters certainly did have that studied air of superiority that you find among a certain class of European waiter. When I was younger this always cowed me, but now I just think, Well, if you’re so hot how come I’m sitting down and you’re doing the fetching? Let’s be honest, if your career consists of nothing more demanding than conveying trays of food back and forth between a kitchen and a dining-room all day, there’s not really much of anyone you are superior to, is there? Except perhaps estate agents.
On the whole, the cafés were the biggest disappointment of Vienna to me. I’ve reached the time of life where my idea of a fabulous time is to sit around for half a day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, so a city teeming with coffee houses seemed made for me. I had expected them to be more special, full of smoky charm and eccentric characters, but they were just restaurants really. The coffee was OK, but not sensational, and the service was generally slow and always unfriendly. They provide you with newspapers, but so what? I can provide newspapers.
Even the Café Central, where Trotsky used to hang out, sitting for long hours every day doing bugger-all, was a disappointment. It had some atmosphere – vaulted ceilings, marble tables, a pianist – but coffee was thirty-four schillings a throw and the service was indifferent. Still, I do like the story about the two Viennese who were sitting in the Central with coffees, discussing politics. One of them, just back from Moscow, predicted a revolution in Russia before long. ‘Oh, yeah?’ said the other doubtfully, and flicked his head in the direction of the ever-idle Trotsky. ‘And who’s going to lead it – him?’
The one friendly café I found was the Hawalka, around the corner from my hotel. It was an extraordinary place, musty, dishevelled and so dark that I had to feel my way to a table. Lying everywhere were newspapers on racks like carpet beaters. An old boy who was dressed more like a house painter than a waiter brought me a cup of coffee without asking if I wanted one and, upon realizing that I was an American, began gathering up copies of USA Today.
‘Oh no, please,’ I said as he presented me with half a dozen, ‘put these on the fire and bring me some newspapers.’ But I don’t think his hearing was good, and he scuttled around the room collecting even more and piling them on the table. ‘No, no,’ I protested, ‘these are for lining drawers.’ But he kept bringing them until I had a stack two feet high. He even opened one up and fixed it in front of me, so I drank my coffee and spent half an hour reading features about Vanna White, Sylvester Stallone and other great thinkers of our age.
Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen. All along the Ringstrasse colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past – the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms. They all look much the same – mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments. A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.
The one thing you soon learn to adjust to in Vienna is that the Danube is entirely incidental to the city. It is so far from the centre that it doesn’t even appear on most tourist maps. I tried walking to it one afternoon and never made it. I got as far as the Prater, the vast and famous park, which is bordered by the Danube on its far side, but the Prater is so immense that after a half-hour it seemed pointless to continue walking on aching feet just to confirm with my own eyes what I have read a hundred times: that the Danube isn’t blue at all. Instead, I plodded lengthwise through the park along the long straight avenue called Hauptallee, passing busy playing-fields, swings, a sports stadium, cafés and restaurants and eventually the amusement park with its ferris wheel – the one made famous by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man.
A sign by the ferris wheel, the famous Riesenrad, gave a history of it in German. It was built in 1896–97 by an Englishman named Walter Basset, I noted with a touch of pride on behalf of my friends and neighbours. I assume old Walter had some help because it’s a pretty good size. It cost twenty-five schillings to go up, but it wasn’t operating. The rest of the park, however, was doing brisk business, though I am hard pressed to explain why, since it seemed to be rather a dump.
Late one afternoon I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, in his old apartment on Berggasse, a mile or so to the north of the city centre. Berggasse is now a plain and rather dreary street, though the Freuds lived in some style. Their apartment had sixteen rooms, but of these only four are open to the public and they contain almost no furniture, original or otherwise, and only a few trifling personal effects of Freud’s: a hat and walking stick, his medical bag and a steamer trunk. Still, this doesn’t stop the trust that runs the museum from charging you thirty schillings to come in and look around.
The four rooms are almost entirely bare but for the walls, which are lined with 400 photographs and photocopies of letters and other documents relating to Freud’s life – though some of these, it must be said, are almost ludicrously peripheral: a picture of Michelangelo’s Moses, which Freud had admired on a trip to Italy, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, included not because Freud treated her or slept with her or even met her, but because he once saw her perform. Almost all of the personal effects Freud collected during half a century of living in this apartment – his library, his 2,500 pieces of classical statuary, his furniture, his famous consulting couch – are now in a far superior museum in Hampstead because, of course, Freud was driven
from Vienna by the Nazis two years before he died.
The wonder to me is that it took him so long to go. By well before the turn of the century Freud was one of the most celebrated figures in world medicine, and yet he wasn’t made a professor at the University of Vienna until 1902, when he was nearly fifty, simply because he was a Jew.
Before the war there were 200,000 Jews in Vienna. Now there are hardly any. As Jane Kramer notes in her book Europeans, most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are ‘physically revolted in a Jew’s presence’. I’d have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the Observer revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country’s 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population – still enjoy too much economic power and political influence.
The Germans, however unseemly their past, have made some moving attempts at atonement – viz., Willy Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizsäcker apologizing to the world for the sins of his country on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. What do the Austrians do? They elect a former Wehrmacht officer as President.
I thought about this as I was walking from the Freud museum to my hotel along the Karl-Lueger-Strasse. At a set of traffic lights, a black limousine led by a single motorcycle policeman pulled up. In the back seat, reading some papers, was – I swear to God – the famous Dr Kurt Waldheim, the aforementioned Wehrmacht officer and now President of Austria.