In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  The success of that Jewish community can still be seen in the partially restored synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, once the largest Jewish house of worship in Germany, with more than three thousand seats and an illuminated dome that was more than fifty metres high and stood out sharply against Berlin's skyline. It was a triumphal building: significant is the placement of the dome, which was built close to the street, not above the Torah as usual, to make the building stand out as much as possible. The photographs of the official opening show that everyone who was anyone in the Berlin of that day was in attendance.

  Services and concerts went on in the grand synagogue without interruption, even after the Nazi takeover in 1933. The list still hangs there: on 9 February, 1935 the concert performance of Joy in Winter; on 11 November, 1935 a congregational meeting on the subject of emigration; on 20 November, 1935 a benefit concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme, featuring Ferdinand Hiller's ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem’; on 15 February, 1936 a meeting ‘To Strengthen the Cohesion of the Congregation’; on 13 March, 1938 a memorial service for the victims of the Great War; on 24 April, 1938 a performance of Händel's oratorio Saul. During the Kristallnacht in November 1938, the synagogue itself was saved by a brave policeman from the sixteenth precinct who, pistol in hand, chased the Sturmabteilung out of the already burning building. The final performance was held on 31 March, 1940: a closing concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme.

  I come across a photograph taken in 1933. The girls’ section of the Auerbachische Orphanage, a couple of little girls playing in a children's kitchen, proudly pushing their doll around in a pram, their eyes gleaming.

  ‘Peace, solidarity and cooperation are only conceivable among peoples and nations who know who they are,’ Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, wrote a lifetime later. And here he touched upon a deep human truth. ‘If I don't know who I am, who I want to be, what I want to achieve, where I begin and where I end, then my relations with the people around me and the world at large will inevitably be tense, suspicious and burdened by an inferiority complex that may go hidden behind puffed-up bravura.’

  That applies to individuals, but also to the relations between nations, and it applies even more so to those situations in which the weaknesses of nations and of individuals more or less coincide.

  On the south-eastern side of Berlin, behind the incineration plant and the cable factories, lies Köpenick. This suburb made world news in 1906 when the unemployed cobbler Wilhelm Voigt put on an old captain's uniform, ordered a group of soldiers to follow him, occupied the town hall ‘on His Majesty's orders’ and had them hand over the municipal cash box, containing 4,000 marks.

  Later, I saw a photograph of this captain from Köpenick: an extraordinary hapless character with a cap three sizes too big for him. Köpenick tells the story of a society where the officer's cap was all-powerful, no matter who wore it. In ‘his’ city, the kaiser gave officers free rein. He insisted that his army remain free of all outside coercion. Wilhelm had increased the number of officers sevenfold, but the aristocracy remained in power. The military, in other words, did not become civilised: the civilians became militarised. The captain from Köpenick, it turned out later, had never served in the army, and had arranged the whole ruse more or less on instinct. Everyone fell for it. After centuries of humiliation, of French and Austrian troops sacking and looting their way through a divided Germany, the military class had become Germany's most important mass symbol. The army represented the German nation,‘the marching forest’ as Elias Canetti called it, the ‘closed ranks’. All outsiders were no longer German.

  None of this, however, meant that Wilhelm was out to start a war. For him, the military was largely a mannerism, a way to impose order on his young nation. War was something completely different; something courageous and romantic in the eyes of his generation, but not a reality. Yet in the end the adoration for Wagner, for the Romantic movement, for the Reinheitskultur, the nostalgia for the house in the woods, Wilhelm's fairytale world, would prevail over the logical reasoning of the strategists, managers, financiers and scientists.

  ‘If one asks oneself today, with all due care, why Europe plunged itself into war in 1914, one cannot find a single sensible reason or even a cause,’ Stefan Zweig wrote later. ‘It was not about ideas, it was not even about those little areas along the border; I can find no explanation but a surplus of energy, a tragic consequence of the internal momentum that had been building up over the course of forty years.’

  In the end, the captain from Köpenick was arrested. During his imprisonment he became so popular that, after two and half years, the kaiser granted him a pardon. His story was filmed, recorded on wax, made into a play by Carl Zuckmayer and told on countless occasions to the people of Berlin, who loved laughing at their own freak show. One of the wax records with the voice of cobbler Voigt has been preserved at the Heimatmuseum in Köpenick. I wanted to experience that magic for myself.

  On my way there I found myself in a crowd of several dozen elderly people, who had gathered in a rainy park to commemorate Köpenick's ‘Week of Blood’. The mayor read the names of the twenty-four Jews, socialists and communists who, in January 1933, had been kicked to death by the SA in this same, respectable Köpenick. Another eighty people were beaten until crippled.

  After the ceremony was over, I spent a little time talking to an elderly lady who had been with the Dutch resistance as a girl, who had fallen in love with her liaison officer in the German communist underground and followed him here after the war was over. Together they had hoped to help build the new, promised non-fascist DDR. ‘I spent my whole life here among the common people, sharing their lives,’ she said. ‘Because the fact of the matter is, the Devil cut us from the same piece of cloth, and it's cloth from the bargain basement at that.’ Her name was An de Lange. In Köpenick she had become old and wrinkled. She told me her story, then disappeared.

  By the time I got to the Heimatmuseum, it was closed. I never heard the captain's crackly voice.

  Chapter FIVE

  Vienna

  ?THURSDAY, 28 JANUARY. THE BERLIN PRAGUE VIENNA EXPRESS. outside it has started snowing. Dark grey clouds are hanging on the horizon. The Czech buffet car smells of soup and hot apple pie. For the first few hours, I am the only customer. The cook stands in the kitchen wearing his big white hat, doing nothing. As the waiter's attitude turns to one of melancholy devotion, we rumble alongside frozen rivers, past a world of rusty iron, road workers with noses reddened by the cold, past bonfires beside the tracks and villages where the blue smoke rolls sleepily from the chimneys, and everywhere the snow is falling.

  We pass a river, an electrical plant with steaming stacks, an ochrecoloured station with a dirty banner and an old man pushing a pram full of oranges. The conductor has started looking like a wise, old professor.

  After Prague the snowflakes begin to whip and drift, the wind howls, the locomotive hoots in the distance. We stop and wait at a nameless station. There is light coming from a kitchen window. A woman is standing at the counter. She is bathing a child, who is standing naked in the sink. Then both of them slip away. A little while later we are in Vienna.

  ‘The merry apocalypse’ was what they once called this city, this odd mixture of creativity, middle-class normality, human suffering, power, complicity and schizophrenia. Around 1914 it was the power base for a huge empire that suffered from one major flaw: it no longer had a function, other than to amplify its own hum.

  In the centuries that went before, the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy had played a crucial role in Central and Eastern Europe. The Habsburg emperors had brought the southern German peoples back into the fold. They had driven the Ottoman Turks from the gates of Vienna. They had made it possible for Germans, Hungarians, Rumanians, Italians, Rhaetians, Serbs, Croatians, Poles, Slovenes, Slovaks, Czechs, Jews and Gypsies to live together in peace. Furthermore, they had launched a cultural counter-offensive in the near-oriental regions of the Balkans.
There too, a Western administration and a workable system of law was imposed.

  After that the empire gradually creaked to a halt, it became a crazy quilt of nationalities bound together by an elderly emperor, Franz Josef I. ‘The emperor was an old man. He was the oldest emperor in the world,’ wrote Joseph Roth in The Radetzky March, his classic tale of that world's decline. ‘Death walked around him, in a circle, in a circle, and mowed and mowed. The field was already empty, only the emperor still stood there, waiting, like a forgotten silver haulm.’

  In the early twentieth century the empire was still seen as a super-power. With almost fifty million inhabitants in 1910, it was second in size only to Germany (sixty-five million). After that came Great Britain (forty-five million) and France (almost forty million). From just over 230,000 in 1801, the population of Vienna had increased to more than two million in 1910. Aristocrats from all over the empire gathered there with all the coachmen, maids, carpenters, whores and lackeys they needed for a comfortable life. Impoverished farmers also came pouring into the imperial capital, dreaming of a little prosperity and happiness. And to them were added tens of thousands of impoverished Jews, driven west by the pogroms in Russia, Poland and Galicia.

  Vienna was considered the Arcadia of the middle class, and authors such as Roth and Zweig would write about it later with profound nostalgia. But for those who did not belong to the moneyed classes, life was hard there. The housing shortage in Vienna was worse than anywhere else in Europe. In 1910, barely one per cent of all Viennese families had their own home, only seven per cent of the houses had a bathroom, and fewer than twenty-five per cent of them a toilet. There were many Bettgeher, people who rented, not a room, but merely a bed to sleep in. Countless citizens of Vienna spent their days coughing and nauseous, with tuberculosis and intestinal ailments from the city's filthy drinking water.

  ‘Today, long after the great storm has destroyed it, we know that that world of security was merely a castle in the air,’ Stefan Zweig wrote many years later. ‘Yet still, my parents inhabited it as though it were a house of stone.’ For him, as for most of his contemporaries, the sudden collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 was a disconcerting experience. Almost every Viennese writer has since puzzled over the question. How could it have been? How could the Germans have been so willing to bid farewell to the Hohenzollerns in 1918? How could life in Great Britain and France go on as usual? Why was it only in Austria that everything fell apart? And then Vienna: how could this symbol of the illustrious empire suddenly have become a monstrous fish floundering on a dry seabed?

  Along the Ringbahn, the entire history of European architecture is tipped out over unsuspecting passers-by. This was the ‘via triumphalis’ of Emperor Franz Josef and the liberal moneyed classes, the eternal Ring along which every self-respecting flâneur took his daily steps between the Kärntnerstrasse and the Schwarzenbergplatz, and along which today old ladies show off their fur coats as the trams go crawling past.

  The Ring was built around medieval Vienna in 1865, in the space freed when the city's old fortifications were torn down. A space 500 metres wide and 4 kilometres long was created and filled with hotels, the palaces of both old and new wealth, expensive apartments for the rich and huge public buildings: the parliament (neo-Hellenistic), the town hall (neo-Gothic) and the Burg theatre, the Royal Opera, the stock exchange and the university (neo-Renaissance).

  Here the old city was not torn down, as it was in Paris and Brussels, but set like a gem in a broad corona of new construction. Musty medieval Vienna, long immured in its city walls, was suddenly thrown open. The Ring served as an area of transition to the suburbs and the working-class neighbourhoods that lay beyond. And, just as in Paris, the broad arterial had an important military function as well: in the event of rioting, troops could be brought in quickly everywhere. Barracks were built at strategic locations, as well as an impressive arsenal complex.

  Alongside Berlin, Vienna was the fastest-growing metropolis on the continent. But at the same time it was a city stuck in the past. Telephones and elevators were a rarity, most clothing was still sewn by hand and, until 1918, typewriters were banned from government offices. Around the turn of the century more than half the population lived from the proceeds of their small businesses, which they bitterly defended against outside competition. Until 1900, department stores were banned in Vienna.

  Unlike Berlin, Vienna had always been a city of conspicuous consumption, a hub where the aristocrats lived lavishly from the revenues of their estates and other holdings. Surrounding them was an enormous network of services: tailors, cobblers, doormen, architects, doctors, psychiatrists, artists and, lest we forget, musicians, actors and the Süsse Madel. But Vienna, unlike London or Berlin, never became a dynamic industrial or financial centre.

  Here too arose a city with a great internal contradiction: due to the great dependency on the power of the emperor and the aristocracy, the atmosphere was, on the one hand, very conservative and formal; on the other hand, rationality and intellect reigned supreme, for this was also the locus of all the empire's talent.

  The city's structure was just as ambiguous as all other facets of Viennese life. It did its utmost to generate awe for the emperor's power, and more than that: the layout of the city's streets actually formed a direct reflection of imperial order. At the same time, for many young Viennese, the Ring was the symbol of theatrical falsehood, a Potemkin project full of obscurantism and counterfeit history, the product of stage designers who wanted everyone to think that Vienna was populated only by nobility, and by no one else.

  Somewhere I saw a group portrait by the painter Theo Zasche, painted in 1908 and showing all of Vienna's prominent citizens on the Sirk corner of the Ring, the haunt of the elite across from the Opera – what the pamphleteer Karl Kraus called the ‘cosmic intersection’ of Vienna. I see ‘Direktor Gustav Mahler’ walking along, ‘Hofoperund Kammersängerin Selma Kurtz’ turning to look over her shoulder, ‘Erherzog Eugen’ being greeted by ‘Fürst Max Egon Fürstenberg’, ‘Baron Oton Bourgoin’ put-putting past in an automobile, and so ‘all Vienna’ passes before my eyes.

  In one corner of the watercolour is a bright advertising pillar. It is one of the kiosks which, as people claimed later, camouflaged the entrances to underground Vienna, the secret network of tunnels beneath the houses, the murky world where dozens of Kanalstrotter made a living by collecting old buttons and dropped coins. In the city above, no one even knew it was there.

  It is quiet in Vienna's U-Bahn. In early 1914, Robert Musil spoke of the Viennese tram as a ‘shimmering, rattling box … a machine in which a few hundred kilos of human beings are shaken back and forth, to make of them a future … A hundred years ago they sat in the post-chaise with just such expressions on their faces, and a hundred years from now God only knows what they will be up to, but as new people in the new machines of the future they will sit there in just this way.’

  I am in that future now, and I take a good look around me. To my right sits a chubby-cheeked lady wrapped in furs, wearing gold spectacles and a sort of brown turban by way of a hat. She looks to be in her fifties, but I can tell by her complexion that she's no older than thirty. Across from her sits her husband, grey coat, glum beard. In the seat in front of me is a man in a leather jacket and a thick woollen cap, his head bowed. This is how he averts his face to keep an eye on the world, for his twinkling eyes are sharp and observant, all the better to anticipate or ward off its blows.

  I have gone walking, taken the tram, visited the home of artist-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The Hundertwasser house looks like a brightly coloured Hobbit den, with bulging floors, trees growing out of the windows, naughty ornaments and a photograph of the architect himself in the 1960s, wild and completely naked, as befits an artist. The building is now one of the city's major tourist attractions, and the Viennese are so very proud of it: look at the things we dare!

  Seldom have I seen an exception that so proves the rule. Modern-day Vienna
is like a city of high officials with nothing more to be high about. The atmosphere is doting, the shops are stocked with perfume and cakes, every snowdrift is immediately made to toe the line. It is almost impossible to imagine that this city can still reproduce, that people still make love here, that beneath these endless hats and responsible suits there can still be bodies, pale and trembling. At least five times a day I walk up and down Kärntnerstrasse, the big shopping street between the Stephansdom and the Opera, the heart line of the city. The people walking there, young and old, nod to each other, and only two drunk tramps disturb the peace; but not really – just like Hundertwasser, they are a part of this closed system, the way a bakery drawn by Anton Pieck cannot exist without a pair of shivering waifs peering through the window.

  There is only one place in which you can take shelter from this city: in a coffee house. Without coffee houses there is no Vienna; without Vienna, there are no coffee houses.

  They still exist, these fantastic pleasure domes full of mirrors, leather sofas and brown marble walls, these roomy and intimate spaces where the glasses and cups tinkle festively all day long, where the evenings are warm as the wet snow blows against the windows, where poets, students and bookkeepers coexist, where it smells of coffee and Apfelstrudel, where you can look, talk, read or stare into your beloved's eyes.

  Vienna around the turn of the century was a typical city of the senses, and the coffee house played a central role in that. ‘Nowhere was it easier to be European,’ Stefan Zweig suggested, and explained that the coffee houses had all the major European newspapers, ‘as well as all the principal literary and cultural magazines from all over the world.’ Nothing, he felt, contributed more to the intellectual versatility of Vienna than the coffee house. Politically, everything was locked down tight, so what could one do but flee into art, into one's own soul? ‘We truly did know what was in the wind, for we lived continually with nostrils flared. We found what was new because we wanted the new, because we hungered after something that belonged to us and to us alone – and not to the world of our fathers.’