The Schwarzenberg Palais was a less romantic venue than Eckartsau, but it was considered far more glamorous. Its ballroom was one of the miniature masterpieces of Viennese baroque, although it was a small space in which to dance. The magnificent garden of the Palais was also less spacious than the park at Eckartsau, but it provided ample cover for decadent scenes. The Austrian patron of the Rosenkavalier Ball was a cousin of Raimondo Torre e Tasso’s in Duino, the octogenarian Prince Willy Thurn und Taxis, who presided over the details with the eagle eye of a former head of protocol to the Imperial House. Short, erect and with a shock of black hair which belied his years, TNT, as he was called, was a figure from an earlier age. Like every Austrian grand seigneur, he had a more modest side. As the various couples he had brought together slunk off into the undergrowth of the palace gardens, he sat alone in his tail coat at an outside table, napkin tucked into his wing collar, enjoying his Schnitzel and Erdäpfel Salat with only a two-litre bottle of Blaufränkisch for company.
The Schwarzenberg Palais was usually a far less exuberant place. One part had been converted into a luxury hotel but the family still held on to much of the rest. Living in one of the outbuildings behind the main palais was a lady my friends called ‘Tante Lorie’. The aunt of the incumbent Prince (Kary) Schwarzenberg, a rather raffish figure on the Vienna night scene and later Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, Tante Lorie was intelligent, serious, austere and hugely hospitable. She was a lady for whom any possibility of bling would have been repellent. Indeed so modest was she in her appearance that a few weeks earlier, when she entered a smart shop on the Kärtnerstrasse to buy some lipstick, the officious counter staff had quickly moved to escort her out, thinking by the holes in her coat that she was a tramp. Tante Lorie held her tongue until, passing out of the shop, she thanked the lady, saying in her nasal but impeccable Schönbrunnerisch dialect, ‘Well, if you have not anything decent for a Princess Schwarzenberg, then I must find another shop.’ The crestfallen attendants realized their mistake, but by then it was too late; Tante Lorie was gliding down the street.
Tante Lorie’s only luxury appeared to be her books. She was well informed about architecture and music, and she had a sharp, incisive mind which no doubt in England would have led her down an academic path. In her disdain for worldly material comforts, she reminded me of the older dons at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her austerity was all the more marked by the fact that she had only to walk five minutes across the lawns of the Schwarzenberg garden to be in the grandest of all Vienna’s hotels.
The Rosenkavalier Ball and its imitators, such as the prestigious Theresianisten-Picknick held opposite the Schwarzenberg Palais in the Haus der Industrie, were private affairs where connections were helpful. The Theresianum, despite decades of socialism, was still Central Europe’s oldest école d’élite, and it resurrected all the weapons of the old ruling class to deter gatecrashers to the Picknick. In theory entry was possible only on presentation of identity papers checked against a formal list of graduates of the college, scrupulously administered by an octogenarian princess, but in Vienna everything had inbuilt flexibilities. Austrian passports and identity cards were somehow procured to ensure that a sizeable Anglo-Saxon contingent was present at the ball, none of whom had ever previously been inside the Theresianum.
On the whole, the so-called public balls were less rigidly policed. The exception to this was the highlight of the official social calendar, the Opera Ball, which was a vast jamboree taking over the State Opera House. All the stalls seats were unscrewed and removed to create the most lavish ballroom in Europe. Thousands of flowers were brought in to decorate the auditorium and a small casino was erected in the foyer of the grand circle.
Two tickets were the prerogative of every foreign correspondent en poste (we were barely a dozen), and as the day neared I anxiously considered whom I should take with me. This challenge revolved around my head as I attempted to organize the other essentials of the Viennese ball season: impeccable tails and a stick-up collar, the so-called Frackzwang. On these occasions fate often intervenes, and so it was that walking across the Tegetthoffplatz to buy a stiff collar from Herr Ruzička at the Zum Jockey Club outfitters, I bumped into the most radiant of the English contingent in Vienna and summoned up the courage to ask whether she would be free the following evening. I could have asked for no more engaging companion. We meandered arm in arm across the various rooms of the opera house gazing at each other rather more than at the elegant representatives of the Second Austrian Republic.
One dancer, however, immediately drew our attention, a blonde woman whose hair was in elaborate Alpine plaits. She was not dressed in a ballgown but daringly in a man’s white tie. As she waltzed across the dancing floor, she cut a figure of elegance and grace. Alex, as she was called with deliberate ambiguity, was one of the more unconventional of the younger Viennese, not least in her easy contempt for the traditional mores of the day which, in Vienna, dictated that women should always look feminine and wear dirndls or dresses.
Alex had clearly learnt Blanka’s important injunction that ‘Mit einem rühigen Gesicht beherrscht man die Welt’ (With a calm face one can dominate the world). One of the more harassed representatives of the press present that night was visibly rather more stressed. Helga was a tall blonde photographer whom I had met at a press conference in the Café Landtmann a few weeks earlier. She was, she explained, in Dienst (in service), working as a photographer for the Vienna popular daily Kronen Zeitung. Dressed in a brown, almost Communist-drab dress, she was ill at ease, and she soon disappeared through the crowds. It was notable how very few of the old aristocracy were to be seen that evening. There may have been visiting royalty, and some of the German guests flashily wore the ribbons of long-extinct orders of chivalry, but of the old Austrian Erste Gesellschaft there was no sign. The event was much too middle class, arriviste and bürgerlich for their tastes, and in the class-conscious society of 1980s Vienna these things still mattered.
One serious figure of the older generation who was an exception to this rather limiting caste loyalty was the father of a close friend. Max Thurn was a direct descendant of Count Mathias Thurn who had defenestrated two imperial councillors from Prague Castle in 1618, thus precipitating the Thirty Years War which had laid waste to most of Germany. Twelve generations later, despite an infusion of Scottish blood via a Highland grandmother, Max still resembled his famous ancestor. He was immensely tall, well over 6 foot 6 inches, with a head resembling a block of carefully carved late-medieval granite. The gravity of his demeanour belied a brilliant sense of humour. To this quality was added a streak of independent thinking which illuminated any discussion in a lively and sometimes acerbic way. After the usual Austrian monastic boarding school run along near-feudal lines, his Scottish grandmother had packed him off to Queen’s College, Oxford where exposure to liberal values had left enduring legacies. When the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, Max had been working at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. The Director of the Haus der Industrie had called an emergency meeting to discuss the dramatic developments and tabled a motion to record the Chamber’s support for the Nazi occupation. Only three of the members present voted against it and refused the Nazi salute. Two of them were Jewish members of the legal department, the third was Max.
This opposition was quickly noted. At lunch in the Jockey Club a few hours later, two of the club’s members came up to warn him that his act of defiance had already been reported to the Nazi paramilitaries who would surely only wait until they had complete control of the city before pouncing on all suspected opponents of the regime. Outside, attacks on Jewish shops had already begun and Vienna was entering its darkest night. When the Gestapo arrived a day later to take him, Max had already fled. Armed with a passport stamped with his credentials as a member of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, he was saved by the counter-intuitive decision to drive towards Nazi Bavaria rather than towards Prague, like most other refugees. Max made it to Belgium, France and eventua
lly a new life in Argentina for the duration of the war. Afterwards, he returned with his handsome Argentinian wife to rebuild his life in Austria, but he soon found that while those relatively few Austrians who had avoided conscription into the Nazi war machine were welcomed by the four Allied occupying powers, the reaction of his fellow Austrians was more mixed.
Applying for a job in the fledgling Second Republic Foreign Service, Max was interviewed by a thin man with a cold sharp-eyed countenance and Prussian manner. Max’s hopes had been high: he was a scion of a great family and fluent in five languages. But the interviewer, after perusing the file for a few seconds, looked up at Max and asked, ‘Dr Thurn, tell me, in which subject do you hold a doctorate?’ Max thought this a strange question as it was plainly stated on his application form which the man had in front of him. ‘I studied economics at the Queen’s College, Oxford,’ Max replied. At that moment his interviewer abruptly stood up and said, ‘Candidates for the Austrian Foreign Service must have a doctorate in law. Good day, Dr Thurn.’ The interview had lasted barely two minutes. Max took this brusque rejection philosophically – he was fond of saying that ‘Nur Stubenmädchen sind beleidigt’ (Only chambermaids are offended). In the event, a post in the Finance Ministry proved easier to come by. Years later Max still remembered the frosty encounter, and the name of his interviewer: Dr Kurt Waldheim.
When Waldheim began to be mentioned as a possible candidate for election to the Austrian presidency about two years into my time in Vienna, it was clear that the election would be bitterly contested. Waldheim’s record between 1939 and 1945 did not label him a war criminal, but his reluctance to admit that he had been liaison officer in Salonika where Jews were being deported en masse was an error of judgement which, along with his other piccoli difetti, should have disqualified him from standing as a candidate. But as lack of self-awareness was one of these defects, it was perhaps hardly surprising that he continued to fight a campaign which sharply polarized his country.
As a result of Max’s experience with Dr Waldheim, I had already been sceptical of his candidature. A year earlier, the President of the Republic, Dr Kirchschläger, had told me during a formal interview that as Ambassador in Prague in 1968 he had been instructed by Waldheim, then Austrian Foreign Minister, to withhold visas from Czechs seeking to flee the Warsaw Pact invasion. Kirchschläger had ignored this instruction on humanitarian grounds. As a piece of damning gossip from a head of state to the correspondent of a foreign newspaper this was unexpected.fn7
Irrespective of his wartime record, Waldheim was therefore a man with a history of faulty judgement. The world press tried in vain to find a smoking gun which would pin some Nazi atrocity on him, but it was clear from the beginning that such a discovery would prove elusive. Those who opposed him would have been better deployed focusing on his character faults rather than on his war record, which showed little sign of distinction in any field. Six years of war without advancing beyond the rank of lieutenant summed it up all too clearly.
As the spring of 1986 wore on, the campaign for and against Waldheim was on everyone’s lips, creating bitter divisions even among the best of friends. For the small Jewish population of Vienna, a mere handful compared to their numbers before the war, the debate reignited Vienna’s anti-Semitic traditions, and when the Waldheim camp began to put the old slogan ‘Jetzt erst recht!’ (Now more than ever!) on their posters, my friend Georg Eisler lamented that anti-Semitism had returned to Austrian political campaigning for the first time since the Anschluss of 1938. Eisler, the son of the composer (and Brecht’s collaborator) Hanns Eisler, had one of the most original minds in Vienna. As well as being an accomplished artist – he had studied under Oskar Kokoschka – he was remarkably well informed and scathingly critical of his country’s psychological and moral shortcomings. At the same time it would have been hard to find a more patriotic Austrian. Georg loved the best of Austria and surely would have agreed with Wittgenstein that ‘the good things of Austria – Lenau, Bruckner, Grillparzer – are more subtle and difficult to understand than anything else’.fn8
During the Waldheim crisis, Georg and I met regularly in the Café Prückel where, among the dusty pot-plants and 1950s furniture, my knowledge of Austrian history was constantly updated between snippets of political gossip. He knew perhaps better than most that the case against Waldheim was not one which would stop conservative Austrians voting for him. They all saw it as a socialist plot to keep the presidency in left-wing hands. But it horrified him that his fellow Austrians could resort to wartime sentiments and resurrect the old phrases of Karl Lueger and Georg Schönerer, two notable Viennese anti-Semites from the turn of the nineteenth century. These repellent traditions certainly entered the campaign. There were also occasional examples of mild social anti-Semitism. One intellectually challenged Hungarian count thought he had unravelled the secret of the links between the press and ‘international Jewry’ when he seriously insisted that the London press was irrationally hostile to the Viennese. ‘Think what the name of your paper means when spelt backwards.’
On the whole, however, most of the aristocracy was not hostile to the Jews and I rarely heard an anti-Semitic remark escape their lips. One exception was an absurd old Margrave, another Hungarian, whose palace had featured prominently in The Third Man movie. One afternoon, in the late summer of 1986, he invited me and a British diplomat en poste in Budapest to tea. When my companion asked whether the grand staircase with its magnificent tapestries was ever open to the public, our host replied gruffly that he did not open his rooms to the public ‘as I do not want a crowd of New York Jews gawping at my possessions’. Tea did not last very long.
As the campaign came to its climax, the Dalai Lama, of all people, arrived on a visit to Vienna. In front of the entire political elite of the country he was to give a semi-public lecture on the fate of Tibetan monasteries under Chinese rule, and Dr Waldheim was to introduce him. The event was memorable as an indication of the breadth of Waldheim’s following. Sitting between the representatives of two well-known wealthy Austrian Jewish families, I was struck by how supportive they were of Waldheim and how his war record seemed irrelevant to them. ‘He is already our president,’ insisted the glamorous red-haired lady on my right, summoning up the mood of the room.
The Dalai Lama’s presence in Vienna that summer might have caused diplomats to scratch their heads over protocol, but within days of His Holiness’s departure a new diplomatic challenge arose when the British embassy announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales were about to descend on the Austrian capital for a visit, long planned by the ever-energetic Michael Alexander. The programme for the visit involved several dicey moments for the protocol departments. Both Dr Waldheim and the Prince were to attend the same concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus and it would require all the skill and discretion of the diplomatists to ensure that the two did not meet.
In the event they sat opposite each other in boxes divided by the wide expanse of the Parterre below, whose seats were filled with journalists eagerly craning their necks to see any telltale sign of some visual greeting. To the disappointment of the assembled press corps, the Prince of Wales showed not a flicker of acknowledgement, despite Waldheim’s insistence on staring at him throughout the performance. The orchestra played Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the movement depicting a rustic thunderstorm appearing to express convincingly the tension inside the concert hall. As if this visit was not enough to keep the finest brains in the Metternichgasse occupied, a few days later Harold Pinter appeared at a performance of his The Birthday Party, in the English theatre in the Josefstadt. At the reception afterwards, who should appear yet again but Dr Waldheim. One could only be amazed by the tenacity of his efforts to greet the playwright, and by the consummate skill with which Pinter avoided the encounter, always showing his back to Waldheim as he approached.
As the election date in June neared, the media circus grew to an unprecedented size with hundreds of foreign journalists flocking to Vienn
a. Very few of these had any knowledge of Austrian conditions or indeed the Austrian mentality, so much of what appeared in the press was inaccurate and prejudiced. As a result, the voters closed ranks against what they considered to be external interference in their political affairs. When it came, the vote in favour of Waldheim was resounding but the victory struck many of us as pyrrhic. Even Waldheim’s supporters began to wonder whether a president who was persona non grata in so many countries, including the USA, would really be a suitable figurehead for a small neutral country on the front line of the Cold War.
That evening, at the party celebrating Waldheim’s victory in the headquarters of the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) on the Ringstrasse, I had my third encounter with Helga, the blonde photographer from the Café Landtmann. This time her plain dress from the Opera Ball was nowhere to be seen. It appeared that tonight under her short green-grey raincoat she was completely naked save for a bra, black leather gloves and stockings. In the heady atmosphere of raucous celebration, Helga homed in on one senior personality of the Austrian People’s Party after another, all of whom she appeared to know. Yet again I attempted to make small talk and asked her where she was from. ‘Czechoslovakia,’ she answered, which I said surprised me for someone of such Germanic beauty. She icily shrugged off my comment with ‘Where I come from, we all look like this’ and glided into the crowd again. We had spoken long enough for me to discover that Helga’s sense of humour was as dry as she was enigmatic.
The Waldheim campaign had obscured the other major event which occurred that spring, one whose repercussions I was reminded of a few weekends later when staying in the Wurmbrands’ beautiful castle at Steyersberg, in the magical landscape south of Vienna known as the Bücklige Welt. As we sat at breakfast in front of a magnificent spread of different jams and fruits, we complimented the young housekeeper. She sighed and said, ‘Of course next year this will not be possible.’ This was a reminder that the pollution produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl had made its way across eastern Austria just a few miles to the south of where we were and it was assumed that all garden produce would be contaminated by radioactivity for years to come.
Last Days in Old Europe Page 10
