Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  Out-of-the-way

  Rififi, open twenty-four hours a day for the younger generation of Berliners to spend their spare time with juke-box and jive. The dancing is not for visitors unless they are expert too, but it is worth seeing once, on a visit. The customers (and the busty proprietress) could have come out of the film Rififi, but visitors are treated kindly and otherwise ignored.

  10

  VIENNA

  AFTER BERLIN IT was good to be back in the car again and to be hammering out the miles across the German heartland, bright with spring. Driving a fast car abroad is one of my keenest pleasures – the eight o’clock departure with some distant luncheon stop as target, the intermediate pause for ‘elevenses’ on the shady terrace or under the fruit trees of a Gasthaus, the good moment when the target is reached and luncheon comes with a schnapps and a beer to wash it down. And then the shorter run in the afternoon to the chosen hotel, the walk round the village or town, dinner and a deep sleep after planning the next day. What is so pleasant is that, combined with the delicious, always new sights and smells of ‘abroad’, there is a sense of achievement, of a task completed, when each target is reached without accident, on time and with the car still running sweetly. There is the illusion that one has done a hard and meritorious day’s work (few women understand this – perhaps, poor beasts, because they have been only passengers). Every touring motorist knows these sensations and I expect, for all of us islanders, from the first cobbled kilometres at Calais, Boulogne, Ostend, to the sad day when you re-embark as the lucky ones’ cars are being unloaded, Continental touring is one of the most delightful experiences in our lives.

  I drive a Thunderbird. I make no apologies. I bought my first, the lovely two-seater, four years ago and it did 50,000 fast miles without so much as a bulb fusing. So I bought another, the four-seater, and it had only done 1,000 miles when I started from Ostend. Blithely I had ordered all the gimmicks – automatic gears, power steering, power brakes – and at first I hated and feared these devices which seemed to give the car power over the driver instead of the other way round. But by now I was already used to them, and I had regained authority over the fifty-horse-power, seven-litre engine, and could almost – you never quite can with these damnable ‘aids’ – make the car do what I wanted. Of course it is a marvellous car for fast touring – very comfortable, roomy, and as quick as hell. Ninety miles an hour with a reserve of thirty was a comfortable touring speed on the autobahns, and the kilometres clicked by like the leaves of a book until one could gratefully drift off into the winding side roads of the countryside chosen for luncheon or the night. For that is the way to treat the autobahn – as the quickest way between beautiful places off the beaten track. That day I did Hamburg to Kassel for luncheon and then slipped off on to the ‘romantic’ road from Bad Herzfeld to Würzburg, Rothenburg, Dinkelsbtihl and Augsburg, staying the night in the heart of this beautiful region.

  It was here, after leaving the autobahn, that one met with the things dear to the lover of Germany and Austria – the vast dandelion meadows, the delicious smell of dung and sound of sawmills in the little villages, and the dreaming spires of small churches. The spring had been wonderful at home, but how fortunate to be able to pursue it northwards and catch all the fruit trees in bright bloom again! It crossed my mind that one day one should start with the spring in southern Spain and drive slowly northwards, perhaps even as far as Moscow, living with it all the way.

  But then the next day one was on the autobahn again, flying on to Munich and Salzburg, engaged simply in covering the kilometres in order to be in Vienna by the evening.

  Driving six hundred miles in a couple of days, which my programme demanded, one gets to think a good deal about the actual business of driving a motor-car. The Germans are the most dangerous motorists in the world. The year before, 13,500 Germans had been killed on the road and just under half a million injured. These are terrible figures among a population of fifty-two million, and nobody knows what to do about it. It is no good building 100 m.p.h. roads and putting a 50 m.p.h. speed limit on them, and anyway the German statistics showed that the majority of accidents were caused at speeds between 30 and 50 m.p.h. Germanic tension and hysteria, plus that basic inferiority complex which makes every German insist that only he has the right of way, lie somewhere behind these tragic statistics, but here, and along the autobahns of Italy, I had some autobahn thoughts which may be worth passing on.

  First of all, your driving mirror (surely not ‘looking-glass’ in this context, Miss Mitford!) is almost as important as your windscreen, and the slower your car the more you must watch what is coming up behind you. Flashing headlights, which I hope British manufacturers will soon fit, with a button on the tip of the indicator arm, are far more effective than horn-blowing, for so many small cars on the autobahns drive with the windows nearly closed to keep out the windhowl. Above all, it is wise to assume that people will behave oddly at the Ausfahrts and Einfahrts where there are joining roads. Personally, among the Herrenvolk – the Herren in their Mercedes or Opels, the Volk in their Wagens – I found road-discipline excellent, and I only saw one accident, a Volkswagen crumpled like a paper bag being craned out of a hedge-row by the rescue service; but everywhere on the cement surface there are those terrible graffiti of the skid-marks, where, on a perfectly straight stretch of road, something has gone terribly wrong for someone.

  As one drives along, one muses about automobile design and one wonders why certain minor refinements are not universally adopted. If America, for instance, fits all her cars with double headlights side by side, are they perhaps better than English and Continental single headlights? Is France right to insist on yellow headlights? If not, why do they do it? Does a hanging chain behind really help car sickness? If the chain, for reasons of insulation, is compulsory on petrol lorries in Austria, why not in other countries? Why in England do we have bend and corner signs with ‘bend’ and ‘corner’ written underneath, when the rest of the world seems to manage without these childish explanations? Why do we not adopt the international sign for a skidding road? Why do the A.A. routes remain so stuffy and old-fashioned, and confine their comments to ‘fast, undulating road’, ‘well-wooded countryside’, and interminable lists of churches? Fortunately nowadays every motorist abroad picks up, from Shell, B.P. or Esso, the excellent free maps and regional guides whenever he fills up with petrol, but it is surely time for the A.A. to apply some of their overflowing revenue to hiring a small team of first-class travel writers to improve the content and style of their touring routes!

  By far the most impressive car on the autobahns was the Volkswagen. These miracle cars seem to thrive on speed, and they hammer along at a steady 80 m.p.h. with, according to all accounts, astonishingly little driver fatigue. It is extraordinary to think that England was offered the Volkswagen business as part of reparations. A delegation (one can see them!) was sent out by the British motor industry, lavishly entertained, and, after a cursory glance over the main factory, agreed that cars with engines at the back had, in the eyes of Coventry, no future, and went home. Out of pity for this ugly duckling, and to provide employment, the British occupation authorities placed an order for 20,000 cars to put the business on its feet again. Today (1959) they are turning out nearly 4,000 vehicles every twenty-four hours, and last year they exported 404 thousand. The business has just been turned into a public company with a capital of £50 million, and the break-up value of the concern and its assets are estimated by the Deutsche Industrie Kreditinstitut at £125 million. Credit for the basic design belongs to Dr Porsche, father of the present head of the Porsche sports-car business. To eliminate any ‘bugs’ in his design he had the original prototypes tested to destruction in the Austrian Alps by relays of S.S. men. He was, incidentally, like the inventor of the first automobile, an Austrian. I wonder what the British motorcar delegation think of his invention today!

  Whenever possible I follow great rivers on the wrong side. I keep, for instance, to the
west of the Rhône and off the fast, murderous N7. So, with the Danube, I crossed over at Linz and, after a short patch of attractive though dangerously narrow minor road, got on, at Grein, to the beautiful ‘wine road’ that hugs the north shore of the Danube more or less all the way into Vienna.

  I had not been to Vienna, seriously, for thirty years. It is not one of my favourite cities. I learned German in the Tyrol from Mr Ernan Forbes Denis, husband of the famous novelist Phyllis Bottome, and then honorary Vice-Consul for the Tyrol, based on Kitzbühel. They were both ardent students of the great psychologist Alfred Adler – Phyllis Bottome wrote Adler’s life – and I learned far more about life from Ernan than from all my schooling put together. But living in the Tyrol for so long made me such a devoted lover of the Tyrolese that I took against the brittle and, it seemed to me, artificial gaiety of the Viennese and their much vaunted Gemütlichkeit which I translated, and still translate, into a mixture of shallowness, cynicism and untidiness. (I have been back to the Tyrol countless times since those early days and I am confirmed in the opinion that they are my favourite people in the world.)

  Returning to Vienna after so many years’ absence, I found two great changes for the worse: the appalling congestion and noise that have hit all the capital cities (they have a good name for the motor-scooter – Schlurfrakete – Spivrocket), and the collapse of the pulsating intellectual life that was one of the great delights of Vienna before Hitler marched in.

  I remember, in those days before the war, reading, thanks to the encouragement of the Forbes Denises, the works of Kafka, Musil, the Zweigs, Arthur Schnitzler, Werfel, Rilke, von Hofmannstal, and of those bizarre psychologists Weininger and Groddeck – let alone the writings of Adler and Freud – and buying first editions (I used to collect them) illustrated by Kokoschka and Kubin. As I remember it, all these and many others made of Vienna a kind of Central-European Left Bank into whose fringes it was delightful to penetrate. In those days there seemed to be countless small satirical cabarets frequented by these people where, for a few Shillings, one could boast of having rubbed shoulders with genius. All this has utterly gone (though the Simplizissimus cabaret still has some of the sharp, destructive Austrian wit); and what has come musically out of Vienna, the city of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Schubert, Strauss and Lehar, in the last twenty years?

  The intellectual demise of Vienna must, as must that of Munich and Berlin, be put down to the wholesale departure of 200,000 Jews who, whatever else their failings – and the race is generally considered to have shown itself in poor colours at this confluence of Slav and Central-European Jewry – create an atmosphere in which the intellect appears to flourish astonishingly.

  I doubt if Vienna will ever regain her Bohemian atmosphere. With the total absence of an aristocracy or of any other elite (except for the ski champions), the Austrian bureaucrat, who is essentially a small man waiting for his pension, has complete control of the country. There is not a single Austrian millionaire, and not even a nouveau riche clique to provide artistic patronage. Moreover, neutrality does not create a stimulating atmosphere, and there are no tax benefits in Austria as there are in Switzerland to attract the modern intellectual exile. Nor does Vienna seem to regret her abdication from the world of the spirit. Although she has produced two Nobel Peace Prize winners and twelve Nobel Prize winners in medicine, physics and chemistry, how many of these people worked or received encouragement within their own national frontiers? It was an Austrian who constructed the first typewriter, another who invented the sewing-machine, another who constructed the first automobile, and another the first incandescent gas-mantle, to say nothing of the Kaplan turbine and the slow-motion camera. But who developed these things? Certainly not the Austrians. The truth is that the Austrian of the cities is a wonderful shrugger of shoulders, a witty denigrator, a man who really means it when he says, ‘What does it matter?’ ‘Who cares?’ And basically he hates all modern inventions and ‘progress’ for the simple reason that Franz Joseph hated them.

  It is of course in this splendidly frivolous attitude to life that lies the real ‘charm’ of Austria for the visitor, and the despair of governments. By comparison with Italy, France and Switzerland, for instance, how wonderful it is to be in a beautiful country whose inhabitants are so incompetent at extracting money from tourists, who make it a matter of personal pride not to cross the streets by the zebra crossings, and who mock at every effort by the government to make Austria into a great nation again!

  I had an interesting talk with the Chancellor and Leader of the People’s Party, Dr Julius Raab, on this point. He was justifiably proud that Austria had now overhauled Switzerland and was third after France and Italy in the European tourist stakes. At the same time he and the Foreign Minister, Dr Kreisky, who also kindly received me, were inclined to be portentous about Austria’s place in the world and the seriousness of her ‘mission’. I suggested that, apart from the low cost of living, it was the beauty and frivolity of Austria that visitors enjoyed, and that perhaps the pursuit of a higher political and strategic status for Austria might be of less importance to the well-being of her people than more hotel bedrooms and the completion of the Vienna–Salzburg autobahn, then being lethargically stitched together like some Irish road project. My un-statesmanlike suggestions were greeted with polite but noncommittal nods and, in the case of Dr Kreisky, a man of great intelligence and with an outstanding record of resistance to National Socialism, with a switch of the conversation to the possibility of the Atomic Control Commission making its headquarters in Vienna alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is now housed there. Fortunately, in a country where the state subsidy for the Opera House is rather more than the entire budget for the Foreign Service, we tourists have not much to fear from the consequences of such leaden prospects.

  Most of the delightful myths about Vienna are just myths. The town is not built on the Danube, the Danube is not blue (on inquiry, Chancellor Raab said that once in his life, under a bright blue sky, he had in fact seen it blue), and Viennese girls are not a tenth as beautiful as English girls. It is most unlikely that they would be. Vienna is a fantastic macédoine of races, with a basic stock of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Rumanians and a strong Jewish strain. This, with the possible exception of the Hungarians, is not a promising stud from which to breed beautiful women. They have been made to sound beautiful by Viennese music and song and by the faulty memories of our grandfathers. In fact, they are attractive, amusing, forthcoming and fairly chic. They also fall deeply, slavishly, in love and have a powerful weakness for young Englishmen, as Austrians have for young English girls – a very happy state of affairs between friendly nations.

  Viennese night life is not, and never has been, what it is cracked up to be. With the exception of the Heurigen wine gardens and Stuben, it is as dull and stereotyped as most night life. I have never particularly liked gipsy music being played in my ear, but you can still find a few virtuosos in Vienna, notably at the Monseigneur Bar. Anton Karas, surely one of the luckiest men in the world, continues to make a fortune out of his ‘Zum Dritten Mann’, where he ‘ziths’ energetically at his zither every night for the benefit of American tourists who often insist on having their photographs taken seated behind his instrument. At the Heurigen, life on the outskirts of Vienna amongst the vineyards continues to delight, and in May when I was there, with the lilac and fruit trees in bloom, it was as easy to drink pints of the young and dangerously acid wine under the moon, with an accordion being played in the background, as it must have been for generations. Here, in Grinzing, with the accordion or violin sobbing and the local Tauber tearing at your heart-strings with those ‘moon’ and ‘June’ themes which work so magically when they are in foreign languages, with a Paprikaschnitzel inside you and your twentieth Viertel waiting to be drunk, the dream sequence continues to unroll with a smoothness and a temporary truth that remain proof against cynicism and worldliness.

  Other material pleasures are the Ho
tel Sacher (now sold out of the Sacher family), which remains one of the best hotels in Europe, and Demels, the high temple of Viennese pastry-making. Demels recently won a court case against Sachers to allow them to manufacture the famous Sacher Torte, originally invented by a Sacher chef for Metternich. Here ‘all Vienna’ come for their ‘elevenses’, and the place is loud with ‘Küss’ die Hand’s’ in the best Viennese tradition.

  No doubt I should have visited the Opera and the picture galleries in Vienna, but I did not do so; I prefer Nature to Art, and I concentrated on the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the Spanish Riding School after a day spent visiting the Iron Curtain on the far side of the Neusiedler See, the home of strange migratory birds from all over Europe. I last visited the Iron Curtain in Macao on the other side of the world, and this section is no more inspiring – the great, empty, marshy plain of the Hungarian puszta and, across it, striding away to distant horizons, the twelve-foot, bulky, barbed-wire fence punctuated by watch towers. It all seems out of date, melancholy and rather silly-silly until one hears of the occasional Hungarian who is still found at dawn, hanging, riddled with bullets, in these wires where the searchlights have caught him, and when one remembers the 180,000-strong herd of men, women and children who came stumbling across this empty plain a few years ago. Then it becomes vastly depressing, and we scurried away to the nearby village of Bruck, where there is a stork’s nest on every chimney and a wonderful wine restaurant; and we drowned our depression to the phrenetic sobbing of one of those eternal gipsy bands.