Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  As the train renewed its journey alongside the Danube, the great monastery of Melk suddenly rose up in the evening twilight to announce the approaches to Vienna. Is it here that one crosses an invisible frontier between Western and Central Europe? In the 1980s, it certainly seemed so. Today, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vienna has become a more Western city and the contrast with Salzburg appears less marked. In any event, thanks to recent tunnelling designed to shorten the journey by fifteen minutes, this wonderful visual coup de théâtre is no longer granted to the traveller between Salzburg and Vienna.

  From the Westbahnhof in Vienna to the city centre is a brisk fifteen-minute walk along the Mariahilferstrasse. In the 1980s, this thoroughfare was notable for the imposing palais housing the war archives and, on the opposite side of the road, the baroque Church of Mariahilf. High above one of the side altars is the most historic and striking paintings of the Madonna and Child still to be found in the city. A copy of Lucas Cranach’s celebrated painting in Innsbruck, it was publicly displayed during the Great Siege of Vienna in 1683 when its miraculous powers were summoned in the defence of Christendom. Brought within the inner fortification walls, it was ‘exposed’ close to the present Kohlmarkt in order to grant comfort and solace to the beleaguered garrison’s soldiers who daily faced their own possible annihilation with fortitude and equanimity, inspired in part by this simple canvas.

  It is exemplary of the international traditions of the Habsburgs that opposite this church is a Jewish hat factory dating from the 1850s where the headdresses of the Spanish Riding School are manufactured. The present owner is the fifth generation of his family to make them. An orthodox Jew, Herr Szaszi refused, as many had advised him to do, to transfer his workshop out of Austria, despite all the horrors of the Anschluss. His presence underlines the trust in a future in Vienna that many Jews still share. Those who lost their families in the unique bestiality of the Holocaust are making a powerful gesture of confidence and reconciliation by returning to the scene of so much cruelty to their race

  As autumn gave way to yet another winter, the cloudy grey days in Vienna were made bearable only by the never-ending sequence of invitations to parties, and the variety of cafés and Conditorei which offered consolation when the leaden winter skies cloaked all activities. Of these, the Café Eiles in the Josefstadt and the Café Prückel on the Karl Lueger Platz offered retreats where one could be alone and yet never feel solitary. Most of these cafés were relatively modest establishments, but at the centre of Vienna was the most opulent of them all, Demel’s. Lunch at Demel’s on Sunday with friends became a regular event, even though in those days the food was only a cold buffet and everything was generously wrapped in aspic. At that time, most of the cakes were made on the premises in quite primitive conditions and a heavy odour of cooking chocolate pervaded the air. A door at the rear of the ground floor revealed a group of aproned Demelinerinnen (as the waitresses immaculately attired in black silk were called) struggling with huge brass pots of chocolate, all smoking away while they carefully stacked trays of fragile Spanische Windbäckerei (meringues).

  The Demelinerinnen were described by the pre-war Austrian writer Anton Kuh as the embodiment of the ‘old Austria’. They united, in Kuh’s phrase, ‘die Allüre der Burgtheater-Grossmutter … mit der stillhuschenden Devotion einer Logenschliesserin’ (the allure of a Burgtheater grandmother with the silent devotion of the keeper of the keys to an opera box).

  Kuh continued: ‘Sie tragen auf ihren schwarzen Blusen unsichtbare Erinnerungsmedaillions an Altoesterreich’ (They bear on their black blouses the invisible decorations recalling old Austria). ‘They were accustomed to the sight of hand-kisses (the most spontaneous and unassailable recognition of the old regime) and the so-called “Demel-Prosa”, the aristocratic intonation of German where the simple question “Schon da?” (Already there?) was languidly pronounced “Chaudeau?” ’

  One Sunday, a group of us were tucking into some cold roast beef (in aspic) when the unmistakable thud of a distant explosion ripped through the air, and for a moment I thought the Cold War might be turning hot. Then at the rear of the saloon the door swung open to reveal extravagant scenes of disorder in the kitchen. One Demelinerin appeared to have fainted while another two emerged with their faces covered in chocolate and fragments of meringue stuck in their hair. Evidently, a brass pot promising a future chocolate soufflé had been neglected on the fire with pyrotechnic results, showering the hapless Demelinerinnen with all the sweet shrapnel of Viennese confectionery.

  As if these events were part of the everyday routine of a former Imperial and Royal Hofconditor, a tall and striking blonde Demelinerin in a tight black dress confidently and calmly strode to the front of the interior salon where we were sitting and firmly drew the velvet curtains behind her. ‘Just a little upset,’ she smiled, as she walked purposefully on to marshal her staff. Within a minute, the Demelinerinnen had recovered their composure and were serving us again with brisk efficiency as though nothing untoward had happened. The Austrians could clearly be as cool under fire as the Prussians, although it needed a crisis to unleash their full reserves of discipline.

  I thanked the tall blonde, whom I now finally looked in the eye and recognized. ‘Helga?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Ssssssh. Here I am called … Eleonore,’ she purred.

  I should have recognized ‘Eleonore’ immediately but her figure had been rather compressed by the elegant lines of the black and white Demel uniform. A few days later I returned to Demel’s with a colleague from the Daily Telegraph, keen to share with him the qualities of the establishment and see whether ‘Eleonore’ was still working there. Indeed she was and with a brisk and detached manner she left to find the owner, the notorious Udo Proksch.

  Proksch had a reputation in Vienna as a wild card. He was partnered with the Countess ‘Kik’ Salm, a handsome aristocrat in whose family the ownership of Demel’s had long resided. But far from imitating the mannerisms of the high born, Proksch enjoyed provoking friends and acquaintances with sudden displays of bravado, including pulling a revolver from his tweed jacket.

  In his limitless contacts with the Viennese beau monde, Georg Eisler had come across Proksch quite frequently. ‘Unfortunately, you can never tell what is going to happen … and by the way, my friend, I remember from my school days in England during the war that a gun … is always loaded.’

  That afternoon in the tranquil surroundings of Demel’s, Proksch, attired in hunting tweeds, appeared, unarmed as far as one could tell. He shook our hands warmly and, after whispering something into Eleonore’s ear, smiled radiantly at us and withdrew. We did not have to wait long to know what he had said. Within minutes we were being offered cognac, Dobostorte and even cigars by a brace of Demelinerinnen. This all seemed very amusing, but then we noticed that Eleonore had reappeared with a camera and was taking photographs of us from the corner of the room.

  ‘Eleonore, my dear, why are you taking photographs of us?’ I asked.

  ‘It is for a very prestigious Italian magazine … who are doing an article about Demel’s,’ the husky voice whispered soothingly as the camera continued to click.

  ‘Which magazine?’ my colleague from the Telegraph asked sceptically. He had served his paper for many years in Moscow and was a hardened professional who had seen this sort of stuff before. But even he was nonplussed by Eleonore’s reply.

  ‘Il Meglio … The Best,’ she replied confidently, adding, ‘Some more cognac, gentlemen?’ The word ‘cognac’ was pronounced slowly and deliberately from deep within her throat as if it was an arcane sexual rite rather than an alcoholic drink.

  As it happened, my Telegraph colleague was in Venice the following weekend, and he looked in vain for Il Meglio. Of course it had never existed. We could only speculate as to why Eleonore would want to record two Western correspondents enjoying the hospitality of the house.

  The top floor of Demel’s was organized as a private political club along the lines of
the Josephinian Enlightenment: Austrian cabinet meetings took place here, and many members of the Viennese political class spent their time in the 45 Club, so called because its membership was limited to that number, although it was rumoured by wilder imaginations that there might also have been an occult numerological significance to it.

  It would be some months before Proksch’s reputation and that of the 45 Club began to unravel. In 1986, he was arrested for sabotaging a ship nearly a decade earlier in the Indian Ocean and claiming the insurance. Inconveniently for him, several members of the crew had survived the explosion and the claim had been vigorously contested. Proksch was tried and imprisoned. Then, a few years later, it emerged that Demel’s had been a front for operations run by East German intelligence. In retrospect the clues had been there: it had been noticeable how many of the Demelinerinnen spoke with strong East German accents. Eleonore’s intonation was far more Sudetenland than Vienna. With Proksch’s incarceration, she, like many of the Demelinerinnen, simply vanished and I never saw her again.

  If this was Cold War espionage à la Vienne, it seemed to involve as much comedy as tragedy, but can there ever have been a sweeter cover for a 1980s Mata Hari than that of the efficient, discreet and beautiful Demelinerin? Eleonore’s techniques were certainly old school. Her English targets were first lured into a false sense of security by the Union Flag pin she wore in the lapel of her long black coat. Then, once back in her rooms near the Theresianum, they were further lulled by a gramophone record playing a rather crackly version of Vera Lynn’s ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, a strange accompaniment to the pursuits of the evening but one her victims no doubt found reassuring.

  Even today, Vienna is a city where both East and West have rights. The Austrian State Treaty was signed in 1955 by Macmillan and Dulles but also by Molotov and Pinay. Russia and America have respected the fact that Vienna cannot become too much of a battleground without both sides losing; far better to continue the tradition whereby the Austrians tolerate Great Power espionage activities as long as no one really notices. Espionage is in one way simply a barometer of the relations between powers; spying scandals often illuminate the geopolitical landscape like forks of lightning before a thunderstorm.

  No doubt the British played their role in such adventures in the 1980s and no doubt some people were being suborned, but little seemed to leak out. Occasionally one saw traces of the ‘lightning’ but it was distant. One Friday morning as I was walking past a bank near the Michaelerkirche, the revolving door spun out a British diplomat with a name well known even to Stalin’s secret police. He emerged somewhat sheepishly with a rather heavy black attaché case. Was it stuffed full of banknotes to pay off some shadowy agent? Feigning even more habitual nonchalance than usual, he simply enquired after my plans for the weekend.

  At the more exotic embassy receptions and Balkan national days it became apparent that we were inhabiting some sort of comfortable no man’s land where temptations were being dangled by both sides. At one reception, a Romanian diplomat came up to me and asked if I would be interested in visiting his country and spending a few days in Bucharest. I thought nothing more of this until a week later, sitting in the Café Eiles, I read in the local newspaper that he had been fatally defenestrated in the suburb of Favoriten. ‘Last seen alive talking to you,’ quipped the diplomat from the bank at a reception the next day in honour of the Albanian National Day celebrations.

  Predictably, the CIA presence in Vienna had a rather higher and more conventional profile. The Agency occupied an enormous building in the Josefstadt, a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. Very occasionally, the press was invited to solitary briefings there. These were usually memorable because senior US officials indicated their reluctance to speak too loudly on sensitive topics and played a gramophone record which they were confident would obscure the conversation. These elaborate precautions appeared to confirm that Vienna was not as friendly to US interests as other Western European cities. Years later, courtesy of Wikileaks, we would read the US Ambassador to Vienna lamenting in a classified telegram that ‘I have sadly no leverage here as there is nothing the Austrians seem to need from the US.’

  The younger American diplomats and journalists conformed absolutely to type. At Cambridge in the 1970s, we had noted the presence of transatlantic ‘scholars’, clean-limbed and enthusiastic, who the colleges accepted to top up revenue. In Vienna similar young men displayed a touching faith in first appearances. One dressed in blazer and preppy tie reeled off irrelevant and mind-numbing statistics before he looked at a file and solemnly drawled, ‘I see from your résumé that you also represent Country Life here in Vienna. Is that true?’ When I admitted that I had from time to time written for that illustrious magazine, the attaché’s eyes lit up so vividly I wondered whether some obscure indiscretion had been detected in my past. He gravely intoned: ‘You know the entire Reagan administration is really big into Country Life.’

  On the whole, movements and communications were not especially closely watched in Vienna. The technology still betrayed itself by telltale pings, what Graham Greene affectionately called ‘tinkerbell’. One could usually discern when taps were deployed. Compared to the ‘blanket coverage’ of the twenty-first century which almost guarantees intelligence failure through its very non-selectivity, the warriors of the Cold War in Vienna usually focused their resources on each other.

  Nevertheless there was a contrast in diplomatic styles. The Soviet embassy appeared to bristle with activity compared to its calm British neighbour in the Metternichgasse. Even its chancery seemed to be humming with uniformed staff rushing in various directions, files in hand. With the arrival of Gorbachev at the Kremlin in 1985, the younger diplomats who appeared in the Soviet embassies had ceased to be drawn from the stiff nomenklatura caste usually evident at Soviet diplomatic parties. Their press correspondents suddenly were no longer old, harassed and weary but dashing, handsome and young. They were all assumed to be ‘spies’. No doubt they thought the same of us.

  The Soviet Union’s relationship with Vienna was symbolized by the imposing monument to the Soviet soldiery who had liberated Vienna from the Nazis in the spring of 1945. In the best traditions of Soviet realism, it blocked the view of the Schwarzenberg Palais from the Ringstrasse and, in the grey days of winter, appeared to sum up Vienna’s proximity to the drab Eastern Europe of Soviet satellite states. Because no state can remain indifferent to the memory of its fallen, monuments to foreign military dead are among the more sensitive objects in international relations. Those who desecrate or seek to move them are virtually declaring war on the country whose soldiers are commemorated. After the Cold War, the Baltic states sought to remove several Soviet era monuments and found themselves facing trade sanctions and cyber-war reprisals – indeed in 2007 Estonia’s entire banking system almost collapsed thanks to electronic viruses after it moved the Soviet-era ‘Bronze Soldier of Tallinn’. It was therefore wise of the Viennese authorities to resist in the months following the end of the Cold War the popular clamour for the removal from the square of this period piece. Instead, by lavishing huge amounts of gold leaf on it, they improved an impressive reminder of more difficult times, now as much a part of the Vienna cityscape as the baroque palaces it interrupts. Perhaps the city planners recalled the old Emperor Francis I whose summer palace at Schönbrunn had been decorated during Napoleon’s occupation with French eagles on the gateposts. When after Napoleon’s defeat courtiers advised the Emperor to pull the eagles down, Francis turned to them saying, ‘Auch das gehört zu unserer Geschichte’ (That too belongs to our history).

  Both the State Opera and the Musikverein offered civilized venues for spies to exchange messages in crowded rooms. At least one venerable intelligence officer has confessed in his memoirs to spending as much of his time in Vienna as possible in the State Opera House, not least because he could sit in the Chancellor’s box with diplomats from ‘the other side’.

  As a political correspondent, I was not expec
ted to review operas very often, but the great Vienna State Opera House soon demonstrated its ability to generate controversy over issues which went beyond simple musical standards. Shortly after I arrived in the city, the State Opera appointed the conductor Lorin Maazel as Director. At first it was difficult to gauge the Viennese response to this undoubtedly accomplished musician, but it was not long before a number of incidents suggested all was not well in the temple of Austrian opera. The truculent claque which felt itself the sole arbiter of good taste took to booing singers whom Maazel had engaged and who were new to the house, some of them Jews from New York. The claque could move from ecstatic applause to vociferous barracking as if at the flick of a switch. The scenes became increasingly ugly. There were rumours that the new Director wanted to dismantle the old repertory system by which the house played up to twenty different works a month and was closed only on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and the night of the Opera Ball. Most opera houses enjoy a season of six or eight productions, but Vienna remained committed to the old system. On the one hand this certainly allowed for a rapid acquaintance with the repertoire; on the other, its critics felt it was a sausage factory of performances that were often dull and lifeless. Maazel understandably wanted to bring the house into line with other European houses, but the repertory system, like so many institutions in Vienna in those days, as in Ljubljana, was underpinned by a long-established consensus between artists, bureaucrats and trade unions, and these forces were against him.

  Maazel’s fate began to fill the pages of the local press. Having failed to organize an interview with the maestro through his secretary, I had resigned myself to this when the ever-dutiful Herr Magoni, who supplied the correspondents’ tickets, politely took me aside. He said, ‘You really should not put up with this. After all,’ he added, glancing at my mid-twenties frame, ‘you are hardly an insignificant boy.’ This was a typically Viennese ploy, calculated to flatter and provoke a reaction from the unsuspecting foreigner. It worked. I sat down and with pen and paper embossed with the Sovereign’s coat of arms (the old Times notepaper still carried the Reynolds Stone masthead) vented my frustration in a personal appeal to the conductor.