Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  When the accident occurred, I was on the Waldheim campaign trail in Graz and the Foreign Desk of The Times asked me in a matter-of-fact way to ‘go outdoors to see if anyone is dropping down from radioactivity’, a request which expressed well the utilitarian dynamic between Foreign Desk and correspondent. Graz was looking as beautiful as ever and a brief thunderstorm forced me to take shelter under some trees in the Stadtpark. Although I recall it being rather quiet after the rain passed, there were plenty of healthy-looking people around, not least to hear Dr Waldheim. It is hard to judge today what the after-effects of Chernobyl were in Austria, and I cannot claim any symptoms arising from the accident. Others were not so fortunate. At least three younger women of my acquaintance in Vienna, including my delightful partner at the Opera Ball, subsequently died prematurely of various cancers.

  That August, making an annual expedition to Salzburg to hear the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan, I was met off the train by a new friend, Reinhold Gayer. Reinhold was a stalwart of the Salzburg scene. Eccentric and bookish, his Spitzweg-like frame and watery eyes belied razor-sharp powers of observation and a keen sense of fairness. A few weeks earlier, the well-known German-language writer Peter Handke had criticized one of Reinhold’s colleagues in the Salzburg bookshop Höllrigl where Reinhold worked. The colleague had struggled to find a new edition of some obscure work Handke had sought. Shouting at her in stentorian tones, he had finally erupted, ‘After all, we are in Salzburg’s leading bookshop, not a shoe shop.’ From the top of a nearby ladder Reinhold had come swiftly to his colleague’s rescue and had quietly silenced the author with the words: ‘Sagen Sie das Bitte nicht. Ein Paar gute Schuhe sind immer besser als ein schlechtes Buch’ (Please don’t say that. A pair of good shoes are always better than a bad book).

  Reinhold’s finger was always on the pulse of the city’s social activities. In fact it was said that as far as Salzburg’s Erste Gesellschaft was concerned there was Kein Feier ohne Gayer (No celebration without Gayer). Reinhold was dressed in a much restored Styrian linen jacket which seemed made of a pre-1938 greenish cloth, and was accompanied by two handsome young women, both in crisp dirndls. With old-fashioned courtesy he escorted us into the magnificent Salzburg railway-station restaurant which opened into a grand dining room with red-marble fountains and high ceilings, a legacy of imperial times and the days when all the great celebrities of the Salzburg Festival arrived by train. No Austrian railway interior had survived as well preserved as this one. It immediately transported the weary traveller into a vanished world of pre-war comfort and tranquillity. Its walls were adorned with paintings from the 1920s, mostly Alpine scenes in the best Heimat style.fn9

  A delicious glass of local Stiegl beer soon revivified me. Reinhold insisted I enjoy ‘the best of Austria’ in this city, surrounded on virtually three sides by Germany but whose cultural independence from Germany is a psychological foundation of its existence. Few Salzburgers from Reinhold’s circle had crossed the frontier to Bavaria even though it was less than two miles away. They were fond of pointing out with almost Viennese irony that although the Bavarians undoubtedly had their qualities they were eine Mischung von Preussischen Charm und Oesterreischischen Gründlichkeit (a blend of Prussian charm and Austrian reliability). Bavarians spoke a different dialect, ate different cakes and lacked that Salzburg finesse. When I suggested to Reinhold and his companions that we might visit the nearby Königssee in Bavaria, it was as if I was proposing to mount an expedition to the plateaux of Tibet requiring solemn precautions and elaborate preparations.

  The one platform of the Salzburg station which was given over to German customs officials, in those pre-Schengen days, bristled with officious bureaucrats with strident voices and shiny uniforms. They may have lived less than a mile from Salzburg but, to my acquaintances, they were the dreaded Piefke who, most grating of all, spoke an ugly and unsubtle German which was dubbed Piefkinesisch.fn10

  As I was regularly reminded in Salzburg, Austrian German had 60,000 words which were not found in standard German. But the vocabulary differences were only the start. Far more compelling were the differences in sensibility and atteggiamento. I was quickly given an example of this after my first glass of beer. The direct was banished in favour of the oblique, the transparent enveloped by the opaque. Would I not like to sit down and have supper with my friends? As I quickly realized, this was not a request but a fait accompli.

  I was not in the least tired. Although I had planned to stay in my favourite hotel, the kaisergelb Oesterreichischer Hof, it was immediately indicated that I should consider other alternatives on offer. Reinhold had organized an entire three-day programme of events and it allowed little time for solitude or reflection. Would I not prefer to stay with his female companions in Nonntal, behind the Festung (Fortress) where there was going to be such a jolly dinner that evening at the Merans’? I gave up my reservation at the Oesterreischischer Hof and resigned myself to my itinerary being out of my hands and so I was taken to Nonntal where a beautiful seventeenth-century pebble-dashed villa with high oval-shaped windows awaited us. The rooms were cavernous with fine vaulted ceilings. A long staircase led through an old oak door into my bedroom which overlooked a garden full of venerable trees and, beyond, the glowering mass of the Untersberg and its neighbouring mountains. As I surveyed the view, the humidity was palpable. Battleship-grey clouds in the distance promised a storm.

  At dinner the women were all in dirndls. Corks were dipped in candle flames and a flirtatious scene of mutual face-painting ensued. We stayed up until two in the morning when the distant rumble of thunder persuaded us to retire for the night. The storm, which broke half an hour later, brought a steady and noisy downpour.

  The wind howled outside my window and the rain rattled the panes. I was about to switch off my light when there was a knock on the door. One of my companions from earlier tiptoed in and, resting herself on the edge of my bed, asked with a voice of sweet enquiry whether I was familiar with Goethe’s ‘Walpurgisnacht’ which, with great solemnity, she proceeded to read to me. All the while, the lightning was illuminating the room in flickering bursts until a nearby strike cut the current and we were suddenly plunged into total darkness. Yet the words continued:

  Wie seltsam glimmert durch die Gründe

  Ein morgenrötlich trüber Schein!

  (How rarely flickers

  A dawn-red darkness!)

  This combination of nocturnal Goethe and a beautiful young woman set against sublime natural events was novel. A candle was lit. Like a figure in an early romantic painting, the apparition in white with a thin blue ribbon in her hair appeared more tangible as my eyes became accustomed to the dark. She continued reciting with the rich vowels and soothing consonants that perhaps only the German language spoken by an Austrian woman of her background can ever provide. Joseph Roth in his magnificent novel Radetzky Marsch described this ‘Austrian German’ as recalling ‘distant guitars in the night and the last delicate notes of a pealing bell’. ‘Es war eine sanfte aber auch präzise Sprache, zärtlich und boshaft zugleich’ (It was a gentle but also precise language, delicate and mischievous at the same time). It was Stendhal, a regular visitor to Salzburg, who best expressed its effects in his excellent analysis of ‘seconde cristallisation’ in the nearby saltmines: ‘La cristallisation ne cesse presque jamais en amour …’ (Crystallization continues almost without a break during love …).fn11

  At breakfast, the sun was shining again and the grass had dried, so we all sat outside, the women once again in dirndls and with ribbons in their hair. At about 11.00, as we were still enjoying our Kipfel and Kaffee, a number of our hosts’ nieces and cousins appeared, nearly all dressed in the uniforms and red-lined cloaks of nurses of the Order of Malta Volunteers. Some had their hair in long plaits. All were rosy-cheeked and attentive. The older ones smoked cigarettes drawn from elegant blue and white boxes.

  After my experiences of the Erste Gesellschaft in Vienna, the Merans were refreshingly informal and ha
d elevated the unconventional almost to an art form. They were descended from the romantic and brilliant nineteenth-century Archduke Johann and his wife Anna Plöchl, an Alpine postmaster’s daughter from Aussee in the Styrian Salzkammergut. As the bride was a commoner and her consort the brother of the Emperor, the title of counts of Meran was created to bless this socially progressive union. The strong, characterful brow and enquiring eyes captured in so many of the Archduke’s portraits were apparent in some of the breakfast guests, and the conversation was lively and amusing. Reinhold, who joined us still wearing his venerable Tracht, explained that Salzburg was really a city with a ‘very thin upper crust’ and that I could only understand it anthropologically if I thought of its surroundings in terms of ‘agrarische demi-monde’. Humboldt, he insisted, had recognized these traits when he had visited Salzburg and described it as having, along with Constantinople and Naples, the most ravishing situation of any city he had seen.

  I was invited to many houses over the following days. I was struck by the entirely different atmosphere of Salzburg compared to Graz or Vienna, both of which appeared to have their foundations in a culture more influenced by the east. Reinhold, however, personified the mentality of the sophisticated ‘old Austrian’. He was accustomed to passing judgements with that obliquity and nuance inherited from centuries of living under various forms of ecclesiastical or monarchical enlightened despotism. One carefully pronounced word could sum up a person’s character with an almost Counter-Reformation finality of judgement. Countess W was – the word purred from his lips – discret. Baroness F, on the other hand, was penetrant. The syllables grated like sandpaper. Countess W was also – here a beatific sigh – verlässlich, a word which was then repeated with Jesuitical solemnity. It denoted a quality rare in many parts of Central Europe but virtually unheard of during the endless rounds of festivities in Salzburg: total reliability.

  There were several opportunities over the next few days to follow Osbert Lancaster’s advice and enjoy the Café Bazar where, on sunny, early-autumn mornings, the view from the terrace epitomized the phrase douceur de vivre. The autumn light in Salzburg is much sharper than that which the city enjoys during its rather hotter and wetter summers. Reinhold with his usual pithiness summed up the relationship between the Bazar and Salzburg by saying, ‘Salzburg ist ein Dorf und das Bazar ist der Dorfplatz’ (Salzburg is a village and the Bazar is the village square). As one ate bread rolls with freshly grated horseradish and enjoyed the attentions of the Tortenprinzessin with her tray of cakes and strudels, one glimpsed many of those one knew as they threaded their daily routes unhurriedly across the city. In that pre-digital age, anyone trying to get in touch instinctively knew that the surest guarantee of success was to put a call through to the Bazar and leave a message.

  There were of course other haunts which Salisbourg profonde valued as proof of discernment. By patronizing these one immediately demonstrated one’s indifference to the regular invasion of (mostly German) tourists whose tastes were catered for by a host of other shops. These were excellent places, too, but they were not where the locals went. They reserved their attentions for the very fine Schatz Conditor (patisseur), with its magnificent Traunkirchnertorte and Erdbeerroulade (strawberry roulade), all displayed under fourteenth-century vaults. There was the impossibly grand outfitter Dschulnigg with photographs of its royal clientele and the more homely Trachtenatelier Jahn-Markl, both adept at making the authentic Styrian jacket, rather than its more gaudy imitations. These were the places to which the first families of Salzburg traditionally repaired, grumbling about the prices but never about the service or quality. As in all provincial societies, fastidiousness mattered, and its finer points were impressed upon the stranger.

  On the penultimate afternoon of my stay, my nocturnal visitor of a few mornings earlier drove me from Salzburg to nearby Bad Ischl, some 35 miles east towards the Styrian Salzkammergut or Ausseerland. In July 1914, the imperial villa in this little town had been the scene of the Austrian Emperor’s signing of the declaration of war. The Minister of War had turned as he was about to leave the imperial study and saw a pained expression on the Emperor’s face. As the minister hesitated, Franz Josef said, ‘Geh jetzt … ich kann nicht anders’ (Go now … I can’t do anything else).

  The great discovery of Ischl that afternoon was not the Kaiservilla, splendid as it is, but a more modest establishment called Zauner’s. Given that Franz Josef spent his summers here, it is not surprising that Ischl has some fine buildings, but it is surely remarkable that a small town of barely 15,000 inhabitants can boast a Conditorei of world class. Zauner’s can hold its own with any establishment in Paris, or even Vienna, and its survival in the globalized twenty-first century is testament to the Austrians’ devotion to the cult of the Mehlspeis (pudding) and their great powers of improvisation. Every town in Austria has a Conditorei, but the mirrored interior of Zauner’s is the ultimate refuge from the rain and wind which plague the Salzkammergut, even in summer. Gracing its elegant rooms are trays of Carlsbad wafers, Ischler florentines and, perhaps most mouth-wateringly of all, the unique Zaunerschnitten, a concoction of crushed almonds and hazelnuts encased in the finest dark chocolate.

  My companion was keen to show me the Ausseerland and its dark, modest museum where a strange seventeenth-century painting depicts the characteristics of the then known races of the world. Did I conform to the qualities which the Englisch were supposed to enjoy? These were ‘cautious, intelligent and stubborn’. This had a faint whiff of a 1930s analysis of the characteristics of the Aryan race, a discredited approach to nationality in the 1980s. The Ausseerland is the ultimate redoubt of the Styrian Alps and the Alpenvorland is a conservative place. It was perhaps unsurprising to encounter old-fashioned views even among the youngest and brightest of minds.

  However, the Ausseerland has also long been a favourite haunt of many Viennese families, such as the Franckensteins, whose record of opposition to the Nazis was exemplary. Baron Georg Franckenstein was minister in the Austrian legation in Belgrave Square when the German Nazis took over Austria in 1938. The day after the Anschluss he loaded the secret archive of the legation into sacks and drove to Chelsea Bridge where he proceeded to hurl each sack into the Thames rather than allow a single document to be read by the Germans. He then instructed the chancery butler to lock every door in the legation and throw away the key.

  The beauty of the landscape and clarity of the air here draw the eye upwards towards a glimpse of the distant Dachstein with its imposing glacier. Time and again these remote fastnesses have hidden the treasures of Central Europe. In 1945, many of Europe’s greatest paintings were secured here while the Third Reich crumbled before the Soviet and Allied armies. Thanks to the local inhabitants, the paintings were not destroyed at the end of the war as per Hitler’s orders. A local Austrian officer’s disobedience similarly preserved Salzburg’s heritage at about the same time. Despite repeated directives from a nearby Nazi general to defend Salzburg to the last brick, Hans Lepperdinger ordered the telephone lines to his German commanders to be cut while he made his way to the American lines to negotiate the city’s peaceful surrender, narrowly avoiding the clutches of the SS on the way.

  Nowhere is the mysterious beauty of the Ausseerland more potent than at the end of the path running along the foot of the Totesgebirge to the little Toplitz lake, known in local dialect as the Dauplitzsee. A solitary inn, the Fischerhuette, stands at one end. Inside, a small exhibition of Second World War German nautical experiments on the lake fills a glass cabinet, together with forged Bank of England notes found in submerged caskets. Undoubtedly, the Toplitzsee has many secrets. The gold for years thought to be hidden in its depths, and which even featured in the James Bond film Goldfinger, has never been found. As recently as the late 1990s, an Israeli mini-submarine was granted permission to look for submerged items, but nothing of interest emerged.

  Back in Salzburg I was taken to a concert in the Grosses Festspielhaus, part of the complex of buil
dings associated with the Festival set up by the Austrian producer and director Max Reinhardt after the First World War. In contrast to most London concert halls, the Grosses Festspielhaus, designed by Clemens Holzmeister, has an acoustic remarkable not only for the richness of the orchestral sound it produces but also because it enables those in the highest seats in the gallery to enjoy a sound which is immediate and convincing, never remote or muddy. This alone is sufficient to ensure that Holzmeister is remembered as one of the great concert-hall architects of the twentieth century.

  The concert was traditional, but instead of Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic we heard a memorable performance of Schubert performed by an Austrian quartet. I was reminded of a conversation I had once had with Ernst Gombrich in the Warburg Institute a few years earlier. He had suggested that music-making expressed national linguistic characteristics and claimed that he could usually tell whether an Austrian or German string quartet was playing a piece of Schubert or Mozart because the Viennese dialect somehow transposed itself into the Austrian quartet’s phrasing. For Gombrich, Austria always had to be contrasted with Germany – sometimes negatively, sometimes positively. The two mentalities, cultures and ways of using the language were entirely different and he could be impatient with pupils who failed to take these nuances into account.

  On the train journey back to Vienna, distracted perhaps after the excitements of Salzburg, I missed the connection at Linz and took refuge in the station restaurant, less elegant than that in Salzburg but with a monumental neo-classical saloon in the style of Troost or Speer, complete with a dramatic staircase and niches filled with 1930s sculpture (it was demolished in 2010).