Village of the damned
I have often turned over in my mind the idea of writing a book about zoo architecture. This neglected form of building is so rich and so peculiar and it has never really had its due. It is an amalgam of shop-window display, storage facility and prison and its most direct clients (the animals) are unable to notice it, whereas its more casual clients (the visitors) treat it as an almost invisible frame. The buildings tend to be very solid so that their inhabitants do not get out and kill everyone. Their robustness therefore accidentally preserves them, unlike the trappings of many other areas of entertainment, circuses, say, or fairgrounds. This longevity gives a visitor today a surprising link to the popular atmosphere of the past – the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s when zoos stood at the apex of ‘a day out’, the populist direct descendants of the cabinet of curiosities.
One of the oldest and most marvellous is the Budapest Zoo. So often when meant to be en route to some more up-scale cultural highlight I have found myself instead wandering off to admire its demented entrance gate, decorated with art nouveau mandrills, bears and elephants in perhaps the single most fun sculptural commission ever tendered for. Much of the zoo found its current form in the years of urban joy before 1914, with several of the same Hungarian eclecticists who did so much to heroically decorate buildings across the capital let loose to do pretty much what they liked. Chief hero is probably Kornél Neuschloss-Knüsli, who conjured up not only the great entrance gate, but also the scarcely credible Elephant House – a fantasy on Central Asian mosque architecture with blue-tiled roofs, a minaret and somewhat un-Koranic decorative hippo-rhino-hippo-rhino head decorations around the guttering. The elephants themselves merely chomp away, oblivious to their odd double-relocation – first to Hungary itself, and then to a faux-Tamerlane backdrop also very remote from their true home. Indeed, the Elephant House is possibly the maddest of all Hungarian ‘Turanian’ fantasies about national origins in some vague but grand part of Central Asia, with the unique displacement activity of also granting the nation’s elephants a shared Hungarian ancestry. During the period of the First World War, when the Hungarians found themselves, untypically, in alliance with the Ottomans, the smart new Elephant House caused great offence as it was effectively a mosque being used to harbour beasts, so the minaret had to be taken down for a while.
The wonders of Budapest Zoo are almost infinite. Not least there is the Aquarium underneath the Palm House. Here the fish seem to have been chosen – parrot- and lion-fish, clouds of tangs – so that they match the beautiful mosaics and even a creature as sinister as a moray eel becomes ennobled, the shimmering gold of its flanks making it seem like a Klimt escapee. Indeed of all such places in the world (and I have been to a lot) this is the one where your head is most clearly plunged into the glass-harmonica planet of Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium. Drenched in drifting colours, floating in the spirit of the fin de siècle, it is shocking to come out into mere standard-issue daylight and distant car and playground noises.
All zoos are palimpsests created by bouts of director activism, changing styles, a sudden influx of funds. The Budapest Zoo had a grim interlude in its existence as collateral damage during the 1944–45 city siege. Most of the animals were killed and the buildings devastated – so what we see now, as in so much of Budapest, is the result of many years of dedicated reconstruction work. In the general nightmare of those months people had other things to think about than the zoo. At one point a lion escaped into the Underground and came up to scavenge dead horses for a while before a squad of Soviet troops was sent, in one of the war’s more unusual missions, to finish him off. Almost the only survivors were some hippos who, when electrical power was lost and most other animals froze, wallowed happily in a pool of the warm artesian water which wells up all over Budapest. There were two hippos trapped in Trieste harbour during the 1866 War – the delicate process of unloading them from their ship’s special tanks trumped by tiresome military priorities – but to my frustration I have been unable to find out if these are linked in some way to the 1945 Budapest hippos, with the possibility this would create of a parallel history of Central Europe seen through the endurance of one brave African artiodactyl family.
The whole place is in a sense a tease for its central work of genius. The one area of zoos I typically tend to avoid is the children’s petting zone, where a handful of demonic white goats blankly chew, and an abject sheep, patted until its wool only exists in patches, shivers in a corner. But the Budapest Zoo is quite different. At its heart lies a work of extreme satirical savagery: the Guinea-Pig Village. This genuinely frightening, brilliant piece of work consists of an enclosure filled with small, simplified wooden models of a typical Central European provincial town, with its town hall, school, pompous bourgeois homes (for the doctor, the lawyer), a church and rows of cheaper houses. But, of course, it is filled not with people but with guinea-pigs. I have had a short clip of the village in action loaded onto my phone now for four years and the main reason I refuse to upgrade that phone is fear of losing it. To add to the febrile atmosphere, the clip has the happy accident of a police siren going on in the background, and the lucky viewer can see dozens of guinea-pigs racing through the main square to gorge on a bucket of carrots that has just been thrown into their community. As a piece of conceptual art the Guinea-Pig Village has a genuine sneering ferocity that can never lose its power to shock. As the animals rush from their respective parts of the enclosure they really do appear to be small, box-shaped, wiry-haired versions of town councillors, shopkeepers and local professionals, all in meaningless pursuit of carrots. It would not work with any other small creature, but there is a stuffy self-sufficiency about guinea-pigs that anyway makes them look as though they are off to some grim, patriotic gala dinner, even without the wooden town hall to help the effect. There are even little wooden cars, in one of which a guinea-pig had stayed sitting, immune to the appeal of the carrots because he was clearly dying – but with none of his friends noticing or caring. Fortunately we do not need to choose, but weighed in the artistic scales: how many stories by Kafka or essays by Kraus would be needed to balance the power of the Guinea-Pig Village?
On the move
The urban contempt for small-town life encapsulated in Budapest’s petting zoo is an only slightly wonky segue into discussion of the huge changes that racked the Empire in its final decades. Everywhere, people were flooding out of their guinea-pig villages and filling up the big cities. There was a push and a pull about what happened. In the early nineteenth century in many areas of the Empire money was only used intermittently. Communities remained self-sufficient and based around barter, with regular visits from itinerants, particularly Gypsies, who could supply missing items from the outside world, but wherever a railway protruded there would be a fresh and irresistible bridgehead for the cash economy. One Ruhr factory could turn out in a day all the little metal objects, better made and cheaper, needed for entire regions. New necessities such as sugar, tobacco and more interesting alcohol poured in a chaotic flood across the continent. Nowhere was ever completely cut off except seasonally, but the sheer effort of horse transport had made objects from the outside world relatively rare and expensive. Now people were showered in marvellous things, often quite modest but with profound impacts: hairclips, mirrors, screws, needles, make-up, cooking oil – objects partly transformed by cheapness and partly by their disposability. The flood of machine-made clothing had as deep an effect on Central Europe as it did on India.
Just as railways injected extraordinary things into places previously hidden by distance, climate or mountains, so they also allowed for far larger populations to be reliably fed and housed in cities of unparalleled size. Between around 1870 and 1910 places such as Lviv, Graz, Brno and Trieste doubled in size, Prague grew by four hundred thousand inhabitants, Budapest by five hundred thousand, Vienna by twelve hundred thousand. There was no precedent for this astounding flood of people. They swamped all existing soc
ial structures, reshaped landscapes and created a new sense of excitement or of dread, according to taste.
Incidentally, it is generally around here that anybody writing about the Habsburg Empire is obliged to have a section on people like the Empress Elisabeth and her son Crown Prince Rudolf, but really if these people are of interest you should probably just look them up on Wikipedia, which has excellent entries. In Britain there is a cruel and entertaining system of classification for films, where each movie is given an age approval rating with a little sentence to follow up, most helpfully something like: Contains strong sex and language. I once saw a poster for a French film with a man and a woman in hats smiling at each across a table in the countryside and the clearly bored film censor had given it a rating followed by: Contains scenes of mild emotional involvement. I find it really hard to think about Elisabeth and Rudolf for even a moment without this phrase coming to mind. There she is drifting around Europe, glumly riding her horse, being a wistful soul-sister to the hopeless Ludwig II; there he is being vaguely liberal, binge-drinking, miserable and unable to cope. She has the ignominy of finally being stabbed to death by an anarchist who had hoped to kill somebody else, but on being disappointed by his victim’s no-show fell back on her. Rudolf ends up with an odd-looking teenage girl in a double-suicide – but perhaps they were murdered? Or not. These scandals of yesteryear definitely contain scenes of mild emotional involvement. It is perfect that Elisabeth and Rudolf have ended up as the stars of the Imperial Furnishings Warehouse Museum in Vienna, which contains Rudolf’s desk and a hilarious exhibition showing all the old palace bits and pieces used as props in the trilogy of films about Elisabeth from the 1950s starring Romy Schneider (Part 3: Sissi: Fateful Years of an Empress – Contains scenes of crushing lack of interest). Their lives seem to map perfectly onto the rooms of the museum, filled with old hat stands, flimsy posh chairs, fire-screens and so on. Franz Joseph himself often has an air of being actually constructed out of these objects, as he trundles back and forth for decades, almost immune to why his Empire was interesting, diligently signing things, hunting, shuttling to the Imperial Villa in Bad Ischl with its special pathway to his mistress’s house. I don’t think anyone needs even to be particularly on the political left to feel that in this period interesting life is elsewhere.
The one great value that Franz Joseph does bring to the extraordinarily churning landscape of his Empire is something approaching blindness to nationalisms. If the Empire was to have any point then it had to struggle against overt racism. A political entity which had been a plurality of family lands brought together by accident, which had gone on to become a military machine and a Catholic bastion, became in its final decades somewhat by default an island of, if not tolerance, then certainly of relative restraint – much to the growing anger of many of its inhabitants.
The village identity of the hundreds of thousands of new migrants to the city had been shaped by tradition and by religious practice. The villagers of Galicia, for example, identified themselves simply as Jewish or Catholic or Uniate or Orthodox. Many had no idea what language they spoke – it was just the dialect of the village. The spread of trains, of education and of books and newspapers changed this, redefining how people felt about themselves even before they moved to the cities and had to ‘choose’. This choice (just as in the United States) could within two generations represent a total jump, whereby in the Empire’s case a Slovak, Romanian or Jew, say, could become Hungarian, changing language, dress, diet, profession. So the village couple from the Banat arriving in Budapest in the 1870s could have Magyarized adult children by the 1890s and have themselves long changed their own tastes and behaviours almost beyond recognition. Mass rallies, religious affiliation, occupation would shape a nationalism for people who had proved to be formidably flexible before donning a specific and final costume.
There are famous Jewish examples: Mahler’s father was an inn-keeper from central Bohemia, his grandmother a pedlar; Kafka’s grandfather was a ritual slaughterer from southern Bohemia. Not all this great movement resulted in a Habsburg destination. I am so in the midst here of my personal heroes that it is impossible even to type this without feeling deeply moved, as though the opening of Mahler’s Second Symphony were playing in the background (which it is, in fact) – but here are two further: Billy Wilder’s epic (although also quite common) journey from Galicia to Germany and then to America to fulfil his destiny and make some of the greatest Hollywood movies; the grandparents of Philip Roth leaving Galicia and therefore making possible my favourite writer – who in turn has done so much to bring Central European writing to an English-speaking readership.
The Jewish example is particularly clear as the process of travel by earlier traditionalist Jewish standards was unacceptable – leaving behind communities could only result in behavioural disasters and engagement with ‘the abomination of the land’. But by all kinds of measures this was true for countless non-Jews too, who had to discard a welter of ancestral shibboleths and learn entirely new ways of behaving in the huge new cities. From the top of the Petřín Hill in Prague you can see the rough outline of the much older built-up areas, all gnarled and tangled up around the river, but then there is a totally rebuilt late-nineteenth-century Josefov with its extravagant, indeed peculiar, apartment blocks, the great monuments in the New Town to Czech nationalism from the same period – and then beyond that a sea of housing in every direction for the countless new workers from the countryside.
As the villagers arrived in the cities it was very unclear to them exactly who their new masters were. The aristocracy may have made money from land deals for the new housing, but were irrelevant to most of these new inhabitants. Any surviving sense of deference had been shaken off with the move. Confronted with a tangle of trams, newspapers, sermons, political parties, schools, there were crucial decisions that needed to be made about assimilation, diet, acceptable habits. As good an example as any is the Bohemian town of Plzeň. Until the later nineteenth century this was very clearly a German place called Pilsen, part of a broad framework of German-speaking places whose inhabitants viewed Czech as the rural language or as that of their servants. Its famous beer was created by a Bavarian, Joseph Groll, and lager was viewed as an entirely German drink (as was the case too in the predominantly German town of Budweis, now České Budějovice). The Plzeň beer works is still here, but is now simply an enormous computer-controlled hangar, in which green bottles whip by, supervised by the handful of surviving workers whose main job is to clean up occasional smashed glass. The whole place smells eerily soapy and is a long way from the world of twinkle-eyed old men in leather aprons and funny moustaches it was clear that everyone on the tour had been looking forward to. As merely one of many holdings in the depressing SABMiller multinational’s portfolio, Pilsner Urquell is at this point just a brand meant to convey a vague sense of Central European pub chumminess – a good fellowship cruelly mocked both by the factory and its ownership and grimly remote from the old ideals of the Velvet Revolution.
The German oligarchs who had always run Pilsen found themselves completely adrift within a few years of the railway coming through. Pilsen was a major hub and an enormous repair shop sprang up, employing thousands of (mainly) Czechs. Even worse, in 1866 Emil Škoda was made chief engineer of Count Waldstein’s weapons factory in the town. Within three years Škoda bought out Waldstein, and then become one of that extraordinary group of capitalist inventors who presided over the vast explosion in things involving metal and electricity. It is good that this is a mere passive book I am writing, or I would now be excitedly getting out and bringing over to you one of my favourite possessions, 150 Years of Škoda in Photographs and Documents. The photos form a uniquely eloquent and hair-raising meditation on late-Habsburg life, with dwarfed men next to ship’s turbines, naval guns and a giant steel-geared wheel with 30,000 kg helpfully written on it. Here was a temple to the precision manipulation of metals on a monstrous scale, with sprawling floors crammed with se
mi-assembled weapons, cases of rivets, pails of grease and chains swinging from gantries. What is the right political dispensation for such a transformative Pandaemonium: for its owners, for its Czech ex-peasant workers, for its products? Austria-Hungary was never remotely an industrial power on the scale of Germany or Britain but it still made astounding things of a kind that would have been viewed as forms of black magic by an earlier generation. It is in the spirit of the age that figures such as Bruckner and Mahler should start producing music that matches the endeavours of the Škoda Works. Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet seems a very long way away.
Pilsen in the space of a few years therefore became Plzeň. Czechs poured in from the countryside and the issue of who had allegiance to whom and why became critical. The spread of mass political parties, literacy and money created a new public space which quite rapidly ran out of control. Forms of nationalism are very easy for an outsider to deride. They are obviously poisonous, depressing and end in catastrophe for everybody. There was always a Habsburg argument that nationalism could be restricted to forms of the picturesque (costumes, foods, parades – not unlike in the United States). There was a socialist argument that nationalism was a demagogic sham and a trap for the workers. There was also a liberal argument for the dangers of hating someone simply because they spoke a different language or attended a different church.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 42
