Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  At nearby Miramare Castle, a white limestone castello built by the Archduke Maximilian, who was later to become first and last Emperor of Mexico, there is a painting of a Royal Navy launch manned by British sailors. They are saluting Franz Josef and the Empress Elisabeth stepping off the boat, but the artist, Cesare Dell’Acqua, has clearly been far more captivated by the long, thin, distinguished face of the English naval officer and his handsome crew than by the Habsburgs. For Blanka’s generation, Britain indeed ruled the waves. Miramare was an hour’s stroll along the coast from Blanka’s apartment. The contrast between its white limestone walls and the blue sea and sky is another unforgettably vivid Triestine moment. The Archduke Maximilian, Franz Josef’s brother, had come ashore near here after a Bora storm had capsized his yacht and he had immediately fallen in love with the place. The construction of the castle and its gardens occupied his mind right up to his violent death in Mexico in 1867. Inveigled by Napoleon III into accepting the ‘throne’ of Mexico, Maximilian had slowly recognized the folly of French machinations, but enlightenment arrived too late. A few days before the firing squad paraded to execute him, a scene immortalized in Manet’s famous painting, the final details of this castle had filled his last waking moments: he had ordered Miramare’s garden pavilions to be filled with nightingales. The castle’s gardens include cypresses sent from Mexico as well as camellias, myrtle and laurel. Perhaps the thought of his enduring legacy at Miramare helped Maximilian face the firing squad with equanimity. The small black waistcoat he wore that day, which has survived, displays six bullet holes all close to the heart, a tribute to Mexican marksmanship and to their Emperor’s unflinching character.

  It is widely believed in Trieste, as a result of Maximilian’s tragic end, that the castle bears a curse. On more than one occasion this has apparently condemned those who have slept within its walls to a violent death far from home. The Emperor Maximilian was only the first victim. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand with his wife and the Duke of Aosta were three of the more notable twentieth-century casualties. After the Second World War, two American generals, Bryant E. Moore and B. M. McFadyen, who were accommodated within its walls, met violent deaths on foreign assignments. A third general, the New Zealander Bernard Freyberg VC, avoided staying in the castle and pitched his tent in the grounds. He died peacefully at Windsor in 1963.

  And yet to visit Miramar, as the Austrians call it, is not simply to evoke tragic events. Other, happier memories are held in its quiet pathways and woods, and on its unchanged balconies and terraces. The grotto in the gardens of the castle is a romantic spot where at least one Austrian naval officer plighted his troth to the girl he would one day marry. Countess Lanjus found romance in these picturesque paths in the brief weeks before her world ended. In her memoir, she recalled the happy days at Miramar in March 1914 with her future fiancé, Lieutenant Kastner, who had summoned up the courage to ask her to marry him in the grotto there. Describing tea the same afternoon with the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who was visiting, she remembered the bright sun shining on the white limestone of the castle, its stone balcony contrasting with the colourful uniforms of the Austrian and German imperial parties. ‘Even though it was only late March, the sun bathed us in its warmth and we needed to erect umbrellas to shelter us. Kaiser Wilhelm was so enchanted with the place that he was in the best possible humour, dispensing a beautiful watch to the Archduke’s daughter and presents for her two brothers.’ The German Kaiser’s presence also reminded Countess Lanjus of the tensions of the world she inhabited: ‘Although he was always kind to me, I could not stand him. His manner was so cold and arrogant and Prussian [comportamento prussiano].’

  This Prussian stiffness must have sat awkwardly in such a picturesque place. Until recently the glass in the castle’s upstairs windows was tinted rose to soften the bright light and romanticize the view, but the depredations of the harsh Bora wind over the last three decades have smashed almost every one of these Bohemian glass windows and only a single pane of pink glass over the staircase reminds one of the attention to detail which obsessed the doomed Emperor Maximilian during his final moments.

  Increasingly, my social life was becoming dominated by people old enough to be my grandparents. Between XXX Ottobre, the Bar Danubio, the Circolo del Bridge, the Teatro Verdi and the Caffè Tommaseo, there seemed little opportunity to meet anyone of my own age. There clearly were young people in the city, but their haunts were far from the city centre and were best reached by Vespa, a mode of transport I did not have.

  Although by 1979 Trieste had ceased to be a significant port, there were still a few ships passing through the harbour. One morning, a couple of months after I had arrived, walking along the Riva on the way to Tommaseo’s I saw a giant poster announcing a day-trip from Trieste to Venice on the small 1950s Italian liner Ausonia. Tickets were sold from an office which announced itself in giant capitals as the Ufficio Triestino Azienda Turistico (UTAT). There, an elegant, dark-haired woman with chestnut eyes sold me a ticket. After a few minutes’ conversation, she introduced herself as Graziella. She was quietly confident and appeared to be almost my age.

  Ruskin and many others after him have written of the unforgettable joy of approaching Venice in winter from the sea. After barely two hours, the Ausonia entered the system of lagoons. In the overcast early-afternoon light, a hundred excursionists gathered on deck for our first glimpse of La Serenissima. A silence reigned as we stood stretching our eyes for a first view of land. Suddenly there was a faint gasp. Through the grey-white horizon appeared first one, then two, then a dozen thin vertical lines of pencil grey which, as the ship steamed on, gradually took the form of campaniles. As we drew closer, the campaniles became connected to the buildings below them until, after ten more minutes, the entire architecture of the city lay before us. Absorbed in this magical transition from Whistler to Canaletto, I was awoken by a soft brown hand on my arm. ‘What do you say now?’ Graziella asked slowly in English. As I later came to discover, she was Venetian to her core. She may have worked and lived in Trieste, but it was the spirit of the Doge’s world and the rural calm of the shimmering Venetian plain which invested her character. The cosmopolitan ways of Trieste were remote from her conservative Catholic upbringing in the villages to the east of Venice clustered around the mouth of the Piave river, the Fiume Sacro della Patria where in 1917 the Italian line broken by the Austrians at Caporetto had almost miraculously held. After a few hours guiding me through some of the more obscure calli, she left me near the Church of the Miracoli to thread her way through the crowds back to her relations on terra firma. I would return to Trieste that evening happy to have made a new friend.

  In those days, ships from Trieste did not just sail to the West. I also found in an obscure corner of the Piazza Unità a poster announcing the weekly times of the one remaining passenger ship of the Lloyd Triestino line, the Dionea, the unarmed civilian equivalent of a small gunboat and, it turned out, serving a similar purpose. As part of the 1954 London agreements governing the ceding of Istria to Yugoslavia after the Second World War, Italy reserved the right to a near-daily maritime communication between Trieste and the Istrian peninsula whose coastal cities had for centuries boasted an Italian population. As the numbers using the route reduced, the vehicles of the line became increasingly modest until, by 1979, the Dionea was all that was left, her crew of fifteen generally outnumbering the passengers two to one. Every day at 8 a.m., the Dionea plied a picturesque route to Koper (Capo d’Istria) and the Venetian town of Pirano (Piran), continued to Rovigno (Rovinj) before ending at Pula (Pola), whose spectacular amphitheatre rivalled that of Verona. From Pula the Quarnero beckoned and the romantic resort of Opatija (Abbazia) with its villas in the Austrian Riviera style. Thanks to this little boat all these places could be visited without the inconvenience of long frontier delays.

  This was certainly the quickest way to cross the difficult frontier between Trieste and Yugoslavia, which was in those days a barrier between two worlds – e
ven though Yugoslavia was a more open Communist country than Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania. Nevertheless, as the scrupulous customs and police inspection always demonstrated, those who went behind the Iron Curtain were never sure that they would be able to continue their journey until they reached the other side. An atmosphere of unabated suspicion often permeated the frontier officials of both countries. Those who have read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday will recall that a hundred years ago passports were unnecessary for travellers on mainland Europe, a generous arrangement the Schengen Agreement has striven to revive in our own times. In the 1970s, however, such freedom was a remote dream.

  The formalities encountered at the port of Koper nonetheless were nothing in comparison to the indignities visited on passengers of trains attempting to cross the frontier. For two to three hours all trains crossing into Eastern Europe from Trieste were subject to systematic searches. However, this did not prevent Trieste Centrale, as the old Südbahn station was called, running ten international expresses a day to Paris, Milan, Vienna and Basel in one direction, Moscow, Budapest, Athens and Belgrade in another. Today, even though the frontiers are open, not a single international train any longer passes through Trieste. The city which played such a crucial role in linking the Alpine and Adriatic worlds finds itself more isolated from its hinterland in the twenty-first century than at any time in the last 150 years, at least by rail. Most of the blame for this must be ascribed to the government in Rome which is terrified that the city that cost Italy so much blood and treasure during the First World War will, simply by dint of its geography and self-interest, break away to resume its centuries-old links with ‘Middle Europe’.

  This severance of the city from the other great commercial centres and capitals of Central Europe is all the more curious when one considers the wealth once created by the three railway lines connecting Trieste with the heart of the continent. It was a wealth which supported (and still supports to this day) several of Trieste’s most commercially successful families. If the brandy of the empire was largely distilled in the Stock factory beyond the station, most of Central Europe’s coffee was imported along the railways from Trieste. Illy and Hausbrandt, household names eternally associated with the coffee bean, trace their origin to the oligarchy of Trieste. In the 1970s, Trieste could claim more millionaires per capita than any other city in Italy apart from Rome and Milan. Most of this was ‘old money’ and as a result the city enjoyed a relatively easy relationship with wealth, as it does to this day. But the ostentation of other cities is conspicuously absent here. The luxury brands which have erupted selling the same wares in every Italian (and, indeed, European) city have yet to discover Trieste, where older names, mostly unknown a few miles beyond its confines, still have precedence.

  The casual visitor benefits from this in a variety of ways. First, because wealth is discreet, there is no aggressive suspicion and social tension, or hint of any blatant inequality distorting the social consensus. Second, the standard of cuisine in Trieste is higher even than in most other Italian cities, and can be compared particularly favourably with Venice. A discerning clientele is here accustomed to eating excellent food served with some of the finest though most inexpensive wines in Europe. Third, the borghesia alta is generally well educated: there is no shortage of bookshops. In Venice and many other Italian cities of comparable size, one looks in vain for a libreria of the character and quality of the Umberto Saba bookshop in Via San Nicolò or the Libreria Achille in Piazza Vecchia.

  Predictably, as an ‘old Austrian’, Blanka knew many people living across the border. One sister, Greta, had been buried in Rijeka (Fiume), close to Opatija (Abbazia). Another, Christa Špun-Strižić, still lived in Zagreb, close to the former palace of their Feldmarschalleutnant grandfather. Blanka often visited Christa at short notice. Over breakfast of rolls and butter and Turkish coffee Blanka would suddenly playfully announce as if she was in her second rather than her ninth decade, ‘Abfahrt [Departure] … Today I am off … ich verschwind mich gern … Sie auch? [I enjoy disappearing … You too?].’

  After several months, I was allowed to accompany Blanka to Zagreb to visit her sister. As we approached the imposing pre-Great War block of flats with its giant half-columns rising across three storeys, Blanka gave me some last pieces of advice, as if we were about to have an audience with a nineteenth-century sovereign. ‘Kiss her hand. Do not say Küss die Hand and do not use the third person singular. I went to school with sixteen Prinzessin at Pressbaum and no one ever used this archaic formula.’

  As we entered the imposing hall of Vlaška Ulica 5, we were met by an irresistible smell of grilled meat and onions. The small café near by sold some of the best ćevapi in the Balkans. The smell, so redolent of Sarajevo and the old Habsburg Military Frontier, brought back happy memories of the world beyond the demi-monde opulence of Zagreb.

  The hall was unlit and it was only when we were a foot away from the ornate iron grille of the lift that I noticed a gaunt figure leaning motionless on two sticks. We were punctual – Blanka had reiterated as we had walked across Zagreb’s main square that ‘Bei uns sind die Leute erschossen wegen der Pünktlichkeit’ (With us, people are shot on account of issues of punctuality). But, although we were absolutely on time, there was tension in the air. The two sisters greeted each other unemotionally and I was formally introduced. Christa abruptly cut short my opening courtesies and peremptorily ordered me to press the button for the lift. She had summed up my character in a split second, her sharp eye having digested stature, expression and clothes. ‘Blanka! Man kann nicht herumlaufen mit Löcher im Pullover!’ (One cannot run about with holes in one’s pullover!), she muttered, ignoring me. The two sisters faced each other like scowling gladiators as I obediently closed the doors of the lift behind me.

  As the lift rose it was clear that the dynamic between these two remarkable women had been set nearly eighty years earlier when Blanka, the youngest of the four sisters, had perhaps been appreciated by her parents more than by her eldest sibling. Stepping out of the lift as soon as I could, I saw the double doors to Christa’s apartment opened by a female servant who noiselessly led us to the salon where tea had been laid for three.

  Despite the social and political constraints of the Tito regime, Christa resided in considerable splendour. Her apartments on the Vlaška Ulica were imposing, with interconnecting doors and life-size portraits of Austrian ancestors including one of her grandfather, Feldmarschalleutnant Emmanuel, Ritter von Korwin, with a blue tunic and waxed moustaches. The family resemblance was unmistakable: Blanka shared the tightly drawn features and slightly whimsical expression of her grandfather.fn3

  Christa managed to preserve these privileges through a combination of razor-sharp intelligence and fearless determination. With time, it became clear to me that this faded setting was not considered anything especially unusual in 1970s Zagreb, where a certain society had survived two world wars and the imposition of Communism with its aristocratic values still intact. Everything in Vlaška Ulica was spotless and expressive of a disciplined household, far removed from Blanka’s more bohemian quarters in Trieste. But, as Blanka was fond of pointing out, her elder sister was ‘eine grosse Nummer’ (quite a number) and ran her rooms much as their father, the naval captain, might have run the officers’ quarters of a Dreadnought.

  In the salon an Edwardian silver teapot gleamed in the centre of a Biedermeier table. Around it, several cups, with a blue Meissen pattern which over the coming years I came to recognize throughout Central Europe, had been carefully arranged next to a larger plate with ‘creckers’, as Christa called them, covered in various pastes. As we took our allotted seats on the carefully arranged chairs, Blanka spotted a copy of Paris Match on a small table, picked it up almost absent-mindedly and settled down to turning its pages while the Dienstbotin began to pour tea.

  With siblings one can rarely tell what is deliberate provocation and what is simply studied indifference. I had never seen Blanka so absorbed b
y any magazine before and I naively assumed that she was feeling at home in her sister’s spacious, comfortable rooms. But of course she could find Paris Match in Trieste and she must have sensed what was coming. Christa, seated on the highest and most ornate of the chairs, looked across the table with an expression worthy of one who had been through two world wars, revolution, the assassination of at least one king and one archduke, massive social dislocation and long spells of persecution, but had rarely allowed any of these events to interfere with her daily routine of bridge, tea and the smoking of fifty cigarettes. ‘Blanka!’ she barked in her gravelly voice. The younger sister glanced up with a look of seraphic enquiry. Christa snapped, ‘Man liesst nicht Zeitungen in Gesellschaft!’ (One does not read newspapers in company). Then, casting a rather theatrical smile in my direction for a split second, she added almost seductively, ‘Schaust Du den Richard an. Er liest keine Zeitungen’ (Look at Richard. He is not reading any newspapers).

  Christa clearly said nothing unknowingly. After so much formality, her fleeting bestowal of praise on someone she had met only a few moments earlier confused me. At the same time it drove a wedge between her two visitors, reinforcing one at the expense of the other and underlining her status as sovereign in her own drawing room. Divide et Impera had been a Habsburg motto and Christa must have digested its lessons at a very early age. Without saying a word Blanka petulantly put the magazine down on the table, folded her arms and assumed an expression of studied indifference, but the attitude of juvenile truculence which I had not seen before in an eighty-year-old had not entirely disappeared.