Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  The traveller can appreciate Ghega’s talents to this day: the beauty of the viaducts and tunnels he constructed to help the railway navigate the ascent from Gloggnitz to the Semmering is breathtaking. These viaducts, with their ever-changing vistas, are one of the wonders of railway history. While the journey time between Graz and Vienna is undoubtedly not a quick one, no one of sensibility who has encountered the Südbahn would wish to replace them.fn1

  Beyond Payerbach, the railway cuts down into the pine-forested plain to the south of Vienna whose distant spires are glimpsed for a few moments on a clear day just before the train begins its descent. This plain is a dry and monotonous space in the late summer heat. Pines of the Italian rather than the Alpine variety are planted in regimented rows on a sandy soil. From there to Vienna, the train meanders through the suburbs before arriving at the Südbahn station, virtually opposite the Belvedere Palace.

  Like so many in Austria, this once great station was bombed during the war and rebuilt in the 1950s in an austere, unadorned style. Its six platforms correspond to Vienna’s principal routes to the southern lands of its former empire, but in the 1980s the station was usually empty for the simple reason that 30 miles in most directions stood the Iron Curtain.

  The train decanted its few passengers and I made my way through an empty ticket hall on to the road where the copper-green roof of the Belvedere Palace beckoned me towards its gardens and the path down to the Schwarzenbergplatz and the centre of Vienna. In the dusk, the streetlights were illuminated but there was little traffic. In contrast to Trieste and Zagreb, the trams moved at a glacial pace. From the Schwarzenbergplatz, my old Baedeker guide pointed me in the direction of the towering Cathedral of St Stephen, from where I would find the small Spiegelgasse and, halfway up on the right, the Pension Alt-Wien.

  There were far fewer cars in the centre of Vienna than I had become accustomed to in Trieste and even in ‘Communist’ Ljubljana. A silence hung over everything around the cathedral. At about 8 p.m., I entered the pension through a small wooden door cut into a much larger neo-baroque gateway: the main entrance to this dritte rococo palais. After climbing a few steps I found myself in a marbled hall from which a grand staircase ascended to a landing. Here a small door opened on to a room which seemed to function as a porter’s lodge.

  As I approached the steps, I saw a compact leather suitcase, distressed by age but with a gleaming patina, marooned in the middle of the hall. A female voice echoed from the porter’s lodge, and I immediately offered to carry the suitcase up the stairs. But the voice coolly replied that it would not be necessary: die Fürstin (Princess) would be along presently. A short, thin but erect lady with white hair and a tweed skirt emerged and walked past me, throwing that ‘easy smile’ which had so captivated Edward Crankshaw writing about the Viennese before the war. Such charming politesse, as Crankshaw had noted, did not denote the falling away of archaic social barricades. Rather it ‘created a barrier which was as impenetrable as any Prussian fortress’. Behind her in the small ‘lodge’, a lady of similar vintage was neatly and painstakingly folding into four a large piece of cream-coloured paper on which die Fürstin’s expenses were noted in an immaculate copperplate hand.

  The Pension Alt-Wien was indeed a Fürstenpension, a term which today might suggest material wealth but had a very different meaning then. Today, when dukes have the windows of their houses coated in gold leaf, and Alpine princes insist on painting their escutcheons on the lanterns hanging on the façades of their palaces, it is hard to imagine that so recently the material wealth of this class had been almost obliterated by war and its aftermath. Thirty-five years ago the term Fürstenpension evoked an aristocratic poverty bordering on destitution, the result of twenty-five years of Austro-Marxism following hard on the heels of a decade of Soviet occupation.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ said the lady drily, still slowly folding the copy of the bill of the departing guest with the help of a bladed letter-opener. ‘Grüss Gott,’ I replied, adding that I wondered if they might have a room for a week and that I had just been staying in Graz with Frau Höhnel. It was an early indication of the Viennese insularity I was to come to know so well that these references to places and people beyond the boundaries of Vienna evinced complete indifference.

  The lady finished her folding and leant towards me with an unemotional expression offering a key. ‘Zimmer 36. Dritten Stock. Etagenbad’ (Room 36. Third floor. Bath on the corridor). Without waiting she returned to her paperwork. After the expansiveness of Styrian hospitality, this seemed a poor introduction to the legendary city of Milde und Munifizenz.

  There was no lift so I walked the three storeys up to Room 36. Entering it, nothing appeared to have changed since the 1920s. It was furnished with a single Biedermeier bed with four enormous pillows, crisp and white. A large jug of iced water stood on a marble-topped table. A folding card-table with a green baize surface and a chaise longue occupied the rest of the room. The view from the window was across the back of the Spiegelgasse towards the huge copper dome of the entrance to the Hofburg. I was in the heart of a once great imperial capital, but I heard nothing. Even after opening the double windows, I could barely detect a sound. The air wafted in, a cool breeze, a faint scent of stone and ice. Was I alone in this pension, in this street, in Vienna?

  The following day being Sunday, I was woken by church bells. Outside the temperature was autumnal, the light strangely diffused by dust. Walking up to the end of the Spiegelgasse I soon found myself opposite the Augustinian Church. A door opened into an empty interior. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I found myself opposite the white marble pyramid which is Antonio Canova’s funerary masterpiece, the magnificent memorial to Archduchess Marie-Christine and one of the wonders of the neo-classical age. The ephemeral quality of the winged Victory, the intense grief of the lion, the sombre cortège of the Virtues: I was mesmerized by the sheer scale and power of the composition. This quiet reflection of the early morning was rudely interrupted by a roll of timpani. The electric lights were switched on to reveal an orchestra about to begin rehearsing Mozart’s Coronation Mass. A man in a dark grey and green suit approached me with a look of chagrin and spoke at me in voluble dialect. I could not understand most of what he said but I gleaned that I was not where I was supposed to be. The church was closed until half an hour before the 10.00 mass, and I had to leave.

  Outside, the giant caryatids of the Palais Pallavicini, participants in a memorable scene in The Third Man, were soon disgorging on to the square a group of impeccably dressed young men and women. The men wore brown houndstooth tweed while the women sported pearls and Hermès scarves. As they walked towards the main entrance of the Augustinian Church, they were joined by other young couples, similarly attired. The men seemed to enjoy waving at each other with foppish grins as if it were part of a well-tried ritual. One, spotting my tweed coat, even waved at me until, struck by my failure to respond, he realized it was a case of mistaken identity. I later came to know many of these people well, but at this stage I had only a dim awareness that I had somehow stumbled across one of the weekly gatherings of what passed during Cold War Vienna for jeunesse dorée. These were neither the focused young, financial men and watercolourist women I had left behind me in London nor the relaxed, hospitable but intellectually questioning friends I had made in Graz and Trieste. Here was a new caste with an unfamiliar sensibility, one that in time I would grow to appreciate but which in its early manifestations confirmed all Blanka’s strictures on the effervescent superficiality of the Viennese. ‘Nur nicht die Sache Ernst nehmen’ (Never take matters seriously) had been one of her mantras for warding off the disappointments of unrequited romance and other forms of melancholy. As I surveyed this giggling crowd before me, catching fragments of meaningless courtesies, it was hard not to conclude that this was an unhappy example of taking such advice to extremes.

  I was tempted to wait the fifteen minutes until the Augustinian Church opened and then follow them in, but I s
uddenly felt weary of the formality such an experience appeared to demand. Instead, I determined to seek an assignation at the Neue Galerie with the one woman I knew was always waiting for me in Vienna. Her brown eyes, slightly reddish hair, tightly drawn rosy cheeks and noble brow spoke of intelligence, vulnerability and carefully concealed passion.

  Sonja Knips had been painted by Klimt in 1898. The painting has never enjoyed the blockbuster appeal of the portraits of his ‘golden’ period, notably the coolly sensual Emilie Louise Flöge (1902) or the celebrated Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), and yet it has something absent in the others. In the early 1980s, the portrait was ingeniously hung in an upper room of the Belvedere Palace. You ascended a rather simple and undecorated flight of stairs, turned a corner and there, without warning, were brought up short by the sight of this ravishing woman in pink. Her gaze seemed to be fixed upon you, the new arrival in her salon. The nervous suppressed excitement she is obviously feeling, and which Klimt captures so skilfully, seemed to race across the room and for a brief moment you might even imagine yourself the cause of her mood.fn2

  Her passion is subjected to a studious control. There is formality, especially the firm line of her jaw and high ruff of her dress, and yet accessibility is also suggested. Her intelligent face seems to long for mental stimulation. In her right hand she holds a small red notebook and the pose and the dress capture the contradictions of her life. She is the daughter of an aristocratic but impoverished imperial officer and she rejoices in a name redolent of the great victories of the War of the Spanish Succession. But Baroness Sonja Potier des Echelles was born in Lemberg in Galicia where the intellectual poverty of garrison life, evoked with much feeling by Joseph Roth in his novel Radetzky Marsch, deprived her of the stimuli of a more metropolitan existence.

  These riches she subsequently acquired by dint of marriage to a wealthy industrialist, Anton Knips, a move that cannot have been straightforward for the daughter of a military caste notoriously dismissive of trade and commerce. Yet this union offered an escape. Klimt’s genius captures all this, as well as the paradox of her fragile femininity side by side with her clear strength of character. In doing so he immortalized a type that I was to come across often during the next five years in Vienna: beautiful, often aristocratic, intellectually curious, passionate and neurotic but at the same time stiffly conservative in externals. This was a heady mixture. After ten minutes or so I left her reluctantly and moved on to look at other paintings which also, over time, became wonderfully familiar: a beautifully proportioned Anton Faistauer nude, Anton Romako’s Admiral Tegetthoff on the bridge of his flagship at the height of the battle of Lissa, and of course Frau Adele Bloch-Bauer, now in New York.

  That evening I sat at the English Stammtisch in the Café Hawelka whose proprietor, the redoubtable Frau Hawelka, I now met for the first time. She was lively, short and grey-haired with a piercing gaze. She seemed to take one look at my tweed coat and pushed me towards two unknown but similarly attired young men who were playing cards. Gradually I came to know this group of young English exiles, who regularly descended on the café on Sunday evenings and enjoyed their own reserved table. Frau Hawelka and her immaculately bow-tied but more somnolent husband Leopold had preserved the café as a link with the bohemian 1920s. Soft, faded lighting and still more faded red velvet armchairs and marble tables made an elaborate choreography across a single room whose dark panelling and Jugendstil motifs interrupted the space at asymmetrical moments. It was intimate yet anonymous, formal yet undeniably demi-monde.

  Frau Hawelka was ably assisted by a brace of dinner-jacketed waiters of what would now be called the ‘traditional Viennese school’, men of the working-class suburbs with slicked-back black hair who spoke with the working-class district Meidling ‘L’ which gave their language a honky-tonk intonation. Their effortless obsequiousness tinged with hauteur constantly hovered on the cusp of insolence.

  I came to realize that these weapons of words and manners, honed over centuries of imperial unpredictability and court caprice, were an essential part of Viennese café life. Irritating though they were at first, they expressed a level of almost baroque sophistication, allowing insults to be transmitted without any erosion of temper. A kind of theatrical banter was permanently on offer. Only when my knowledge of Viennese patois and nuance had been sufficiently developed could I meet this barrage head-on and join this unending tableau vivant during which insults could be hurled without the slightest risk of any descent to violence.

  The Stammtisch cemented lifelong friendships and – by no means a given at that time in Vienna – had the added benefit of including women among its clientele. One of them promptly invited me to the Wednesday Club, a luncheon society organized by Renée Nebehay, the English wife of an art collector and gallery owner, Christian Nebehay. I had walked past his impressive gallery in the Annagasse earlier that day and gazed at the fine lithographs in the window.

  Like the Hawelka Stammtisch, the Wednesday Club offered an unceasing carousel of young English people, although in this case mostly women. They were passing through Vienna, either as part of their university degree courses or as a result of some mysterious unrequited romance in England of which their parents had sufficiently disapproved to exile their daughters to Vienna for six months. One of these, the former head-girl of an illustrious school near Windsor, had only just been rescued from the clutches of a ‘highly unsuitable cornet’ in the Dragoon Guards by her mother who had speedily packed her off on the Ostend–Vienna express a few days before our meeting. Another was the studious daughter of a well-known aristocratic Northumbrian family, with a keen intellectual appetite and a fine retroussé nose. She was promptly given by the more philistine men present the nickname ‘Ethel’.

  The Wednesday Club offered delicious Austrian food and wine, and our hosts clearly enjoyed the interaction it allowed them with a younger generation. We gathered at 12.30 sharp in the Nebehay salon, above the gallery, for a glass of Veltliner before we were summoned up a further floor to a dining room furnished in the ubiquitous Biedermeier style. At the end of the meal, after coffee and chocolates, the conversation turned to art and we were all asked to name our favourite painting in Vienna. I mentioned to Christian, a stalwart of the Wiener Bürgertum, invariably immaculately attired in bow tie and dark pinstripe suit, that I had been much taken by Klimt’s portrait of Sonja Knips and felt almost a chemistry with its striking subject.

  ‘Have you looked carefully at the painting?’ he drawled, with an expression of benign amusement on his lips. Wondering what might be coming next, I replied that I had.

  ‘Did you notice that she was holding something in her hand?’ He walked over to a glass cabinet and bade me follow. Taking a key from his waistcoat pocket, he solemnly opened the door to the cabinet, took a small red suede notebook from a shelf and handed it to me. I felt its soft cover and realized that it was identical to the one Sonja was holding in the painting.

  ‘It is her notebook; the very one she is holding in the painting. Now you have established another bond with her. You see how small our world is.’

  As an early lesson in Viennese ‘magic’, this struck me then (and still does today more than thirty-five years later) as another remarkable coincidence. I held the booklet reverently for a few more seconds enjoying the softness of the suede against my thumb and finger and then handed it back to Christian who carefully returned it to the glass cabinet, relishing the sense of wonder it had generated in me. Vienna had demonstrated early its capacity to surprise and stimulate.

  Thanks to these welcoming events, the period of settling into Vienna proved short and free from the bureaucratic and other obstacles which Italy and Poland would inflict on me a few years later. Nevertheless, certain formalities had to be endured, including registering for a special visa which the Austrians called a Sichtvermerk. This enabled me to reside in Vienna, and to make use of the Press Club situated in an imposing palais on the Bankgasse near the Hungarian embassy.

  My pr
edecessor on The Times, David Blow, was leaving Vienna to take up a post with the BBC in Berlin, and was full of useful tips. Over lunch in the Café Landtmann, this tall, well-spoken former pupil of the great Stoic historian William McElwee explained some of the advantages of my new ‘position’. It became apparent that the prestige of certain English newspapers still rode high in Vienna. As long as I wrote one opera review at some stage during my stay in Vienna, I would be able to avail myself on most days of two free stalls tickets for any performance at the Vienna Staatsoper. Then there was free first-class travel on any of the country’s railways and, of course, the usual discounts for entry to museums and exhibitions. In fact the perks were sufficient to ensure one would never starve or be bored or even be forced to stay in Vienna longer than one wished. After the previous two years of mildly impoverished life as a musician, this all sounded like a windfall.

  Today, aspiring foreign correspondents are probably expected to have ‘proper journalistic experience’ before they contemplate the inky profession and have to learn a great deal which is no doubt professionally relevant and useful. But in those days neither I nor my predecessor, who had been a notable historian of ancient Persia, had any journalistic background. Neither of us had ever written for student magazines or posed as literary hacks in our university days. Other colleagues also failed to conform to type. One had been a clergyman, while another, like me, had worked in an opera house, though in his case as a tenor in a Hungarian chorus.

  Such diverse qualifications appeared to be generally accepted as standard for being a foreign correspondent. ‘How very Times, a bit of academia and a bit of music,’ observed the aged Director of the British Council into whom I bumped one afternoon in the Bankgasse. ‘Oh to be in your twenties and Times correspondent in Vienna,’ he enthused wistfully.

  Certainly the theatrical calibre of my colleagues in the Foreign Press Club was very high. An émigré Hungarian who worked for a provincial American newspaper and dictated his copy in a fortissimo voice came to my assistance when I was puzzled by the meaning of a German word that was appearing a lot in the Austrian papers: Verleumdung. I had never encountered the term before in Graz or Trieste, but every Austrian politician appeared to be using it freely in response to journalists’ questions. When I asked my Hungarian colleague its meaning, he immediately stopped what he was doing, stood up, fixed his eye on the middle distance and struck a solemn operatic pose. After a five-second silence, he took a deep breath and raising his arms slowly skywards began singing ‘La calunnia’ from Rossini’s Barber of Seville.fn3