The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  The paradox of contemporary Austria is that it has been obliged to transfer that imperial dream, its conviction that it is the leader of peoples and nations, into an entirely non-political sphere, or at least into a dubious political and cultural idealism. The people strolling around the immaculately swept streets of this theme park are, in a way, just as much displaced persons, exiled from their birthright, as those former citizens who were driven to the farthest corners of the world by fear, enmity and hate, people who elaborated a mythology of this golden world in countless cafés and espresso bars in Sydney and Melbourne, in Buenos Aires and Rio, in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

  Vienna is wholly immersed in its past. The repertoire of the Vienna State Opera, that glamorous and prestigious establishment, is the most conservative in the world, with almost no departure from standard Italian and German works. Even in the visual arts, ‘modern’ in Vienna means Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka, artists firmly embedded in the culture of the fin-de-siècle. Concert-goers still consider Mahler a difficult modern composer. In no other city of Europe, not even in the architecturally richer cities of Italy, is the tendency to conserve, that is, to live in history, so evident as it is here. The extraordinary number of dwellings Mozart occupied—generally because of his difficulties in paying rent—in the last ten years of his life are meticulously marked throughout the inner city. You may stay in this pension, where he wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio, or take coffee on the ground floor of a building where the G minor symphony was composed. Meanwhile the living culture of the German-speaking people is conducted elsewhere, in the cities of the newly reunified Germany, the world that Habsburg pride used to regard with undisguised contempt. To the citizens of Munich or to the inhabitants of the newly reunited Berlin (half glitz, half grot) Vienna is a cultural mausoleum dedicated to the old and hopelessly outdated fantasy of Kakania.

  As you walk around the streets of Vienna, that world—the world of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert—seems to be a living reality. In the narrow passages of the old city the baroque palaces look down on the bustling world below with seemingly timeless serenity. Here is a sense of continuity, of the intimate and life-sustaining connections between the past and the present. A moment’s reflection should remind us, nevertheless, of the lessons of the theme park. Vienna was almost wholly obliterated during the Second World War. Most of the city’s famous landmarks were lovingly restored during the 1950s and the 1960s. My first memory of this city—for I do not remember the times I was taken there in my infancy to visit relatives or to spend a few days among the woody hills of the Wienerwald—is of the early winter of 1946, when my parents and I were making our way to our new life in Australia.

  We spent those weeks of anticipation in a small hotel in the inner city. The three of us slept in one room, which was cast into a constant gloom throughout the dark winter days and nights. No glass remained in the handsome windows that looked, or should have looked, down on the thoroughfare below. They were boarded up with plywood, with one small rectangle of glass set into one of the panels. The only other source of light was provided by a naked low-watt bulb hanging from the ornate ceiling. At night it illuminated the heavy furniture and the great tiled stove—entirely useless because of the lack of fuel—with the exaggerated lighting effects of an expressionist film. Some years later I encountered those images again, in the old Regent Theatre in George Street, in Carol Reed’s homage to the German expressionists, The Third Man.

  The scene outside the hotel—fragments of which you could glimpse through the small piece of glass in the window—revealed the characteristic images of defeat. The shabby citizens of Vienna shuffled up and down the cobbled street, avoiding the piles of rubble that lay everywhere. Some were carrying shapeless bundles, others pushed carts filled with torn mattresses, pieces of an iron bedstead and other curious items. The occupying forces, chiefly Russians with their mouths filled with gold teeth, looked on with contempt. An air of utter despair hung over the city.

  My parents pointed out two vast ruins at opposite ends of the central part of the Kärtnerstrasse. At one end only a few fragments of the elaborately patterned roof of the cathedral remained. At the other the great Opera House was an empty shell. Catholic Austria, the Habsburg patrimony that made Vienna the most violently antisemitic of European cities, and the chief monument of its culture (which so many Jews fostered and patronised) had both fallen victim to a dubious vengeance. Today the crowds milling around the church admire a building steeped in history. Visitors from the new world, especially the newest of the new, are visibly impressed by something so ancient, a monument that seems to have lasted so long, withstanding the ravages of time. Yet both the cathedral and the theatre have been rebuilt after their almost total destruction. These monuments of Austria’s pride and achievement—both spiritual and cultural—may be regarded as gigantic essays in trompe l’oeil, an elaborate attempt to deceive, to gloss over a reality that no-one wants to remember, just as in a theme park you may find intricate reconstructions of days gone by or of worlds to come.

  Contemporary Austria displays, in this sense, the folly of a sentimental education. The past has been sanitised, disinfected and altered to conform to a sentimental view of a culture or a heritage which no longer resides in reality but engages with images of fantasy. There remain, it is true, apparently substantial monuments—in both the material and the metaphoric sense—of the reality that shapes such nostalgia. Yet this city has, as the work of restoration on many an eighteenth-century palais reveals, an all too obvious sense of make-believe. As in all good theme parks the past is spruced up to appeal to the sensation-seeking tourist. In the great ‘art’ cities of contemporary Austria—Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck—no buildings may be erected that are out of harmony with their historical heritage.

  As I scan the faces of the people strolling around the pedestrian malls of this meticulously reconstructed city, I do not discern any sense of the confusion that has been a traditional affliction or preoccupation in this world, the angst and scepticism that drove those trenchant critics of Kakania into their searing indictments of vanity and hypocrisy at a time when Kakania was still a reality, not merely a dream. In 1991 I see only contentment around me. Yet it seems a curiously shallow contentment, or so I persuade myself. But then one wouldn’t expect to encounter misery in a theme park—the inhabitants of such places must always look clean, attractive and satisfied. And they must look as if they believe in the myths and dreams such places seek to promote. Why else would you bother paying the admission price—the outrageous cost of hotel rooms, of largely indigestible meals and cups of watery coffee? And Vienna is certainly a spotlessly clean city.

  THE ETERNAL STORY

  The bookshops of the inner city are sumptuously elegant. To those of us whose eyes are accustomed to garish dump-bins and promotional posters, lurid dustjackets and psychedelic paperback covers, these discreet temples of the printed word speak of restraint and ceremony. Solidly constructed and handsomely polished shelves and counters are almost overburdened with novels and volumes of verse, essays and philosophical tracts, works on oriental art and Indo-European linguistics. There is nothing frivolous or vulgar here: this world seems to treat books with a respect which we, from the raw new world, may only regard with envy.

  Scattered among these sober and chastely serious volumes are a number of somewhat more colourful books. Their dustjackets often show sepia photographs of portly gentlemen in severe military uniform, their faces all but covered by billowing beards and whiskers, monocles glinting in the sunlight or reflecting the flash of a magnesium flare. Bustled ladies step daintily from graceful carriages or stand ramrod-straight in imperial ermine. Here and there a panoramic photograph depicts a procession winding its way through the imposing portal of the Hofburg—cavalry, infantry, a military band, and in their midst, no more than blobs in these faded images, the rulers of the realm acknowledging the plaudits of the crowd who must have been standing in their
serried ranks beyond the margins of the photograph, kept out of range of the commemorating camera.

  These books are concerned with the illustrious House of Habsburg. Some recount its origins in the mountains of Switzerland. Others tell of its fortunes in the eighteenth century—the epoch of Maria Theresia and the expansion of the Empire. Most, however, concentrate on the seventy-odd years leading up to the gunshot at Sarajevo that marked the beginning of its end. Here is a myth world that gives substance to the nostalgia visible in the theme park outside the immaculately polished glass doors. These sober and scholarly volumes deal with the political, social and military difficulties of the last decades of the Empire. They analyse the stirrings of nationalism in North Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and elsewhere in a realm that stretched to the borders of the empire of the Russian tsars. The intellectual ferment of Vienna—and of Prague and Budapest—in the closing years of the nineteenth century is discussed here with judicious restraint. Flicking through these volumes reveals many footnotes.

  It seems that what attracts readers to these solid historical discourses is the other face of the ubiquitous yearning for that golden past, a time when Austria was the proud heart of an empire, when Vienna’s grandeur was justified because it was, after all, a great imperial capital. That face is the pathetic and scandalous life of the last Habsburgs, a tale ready-made for television epics and mini-series photographed in the places where these dramas were played out, and embellished with much swirling and twirling to the Strausses’ innumerable waltzes, polkas and galops. All the ingredients of those sagas are contained in these handsome volumes—frustrated love, sexual rage, political intrigue, violent death. The cultivated citizens of this elegant city may enjoy all within the covers of these sumptuously produced tomes.

  The border of the theme park is marked by the great semicircle of boulevards, the Ring, which replaced the old fortifications during the reign of Franz Josef, the Emperor of Peace. Here lies a different Vienna. Here live the scene shifters, the machinists, the set constructors and costume makers who keep the show functioning year in and year out. It may well be that the men, women, children and dogs who appear in the streets and squares of the park repair to this part of the city once they have clocked off duty, having spent the requisite number of hours eating cream cakes, strolling arm-in-arm down the Graben or the Kärtnerstrasse, not running around or making too much noise; sitting and heeling obediently, and certainly not straining at the leash; or else leafing through liberally illustrated historical volumes.

  For me this is a much more familiar world. A long, wide street, the Mariahilferstrasse, running from the limes to the large open space (permanently in the process of being dug up, it seems) in front of one of the railway stations, is lined by shops, department stores, cinemas and pinball parlours of the sort you may see in almost every large city. Stiff shop dummies display the latest clothes—manufactured in Taiwan, Korea and even in the last remaining People’s Republics—all designed to disintegrate after two seasons, by which time they will have come to seem as quaintly old-fashioned as the crinoline and the swallow-tail coat. An abundance of video equipment beckons consumers from shop windows heavily barred with lattice-work of iron. Through the plate-glass doors of the supermarkets you can glimpse shelves upon shelves of detergent powder and disposable nappies.

  There are a few bookshops here squeezed between supermarkets and clothing emporia along the expanse of this noisy, traffic-choked street. Most of them have that depressingly temporary look familiar from the streets of Australian cities and towns, where a bankrupt shop is often cleared then filled with long trestle tables groaning with remaindered cookbooks, blockbuster novels that didn’t make the big league, sex manuals and histories of Chinese traders in the thirteenth century or of the coalfields of Wales. Because this is Vienna, these establishments are a little less chaotic, perhaps even more permanent looking; their wares are, nevertheless, similar to the sort of stuff you may purchase in such places in Sydney or Adelaide, London or Manchester.

  Prominently displayed near the entrance—according, no doubt, to the dictates of a marketing scheme concocted on Madison Avenue—are the ranks of lurid pulp trade paperbacks. If you have nothing better to do, you may amuse yourself by trying to work out the English titles of these Sidney Sheldons, Stephen Kings, Colleen McCulloughs, and Danielle Steeles. Nearby may be found less bulky but no less colourful volumes, obviously parts of a series, the covers of which depict sentimental pictures of sweet-faced young women wearing glittering tiaras and handsome young men in the dashing uniform of the Imperial Hussars. The likes of these books will not be found outside Central Europe. They are Austria’s answer to Mills and Boon: Kakanian romances, Habsburg follies, chronicling the lives and loves of those glorious creatures who waltzed their way into oblivion in the Great War.

  The last Habsburgs provide ideal material for the daydreams of cheap romance. Their stories form one of those complex epics, with twisted branches and sub-branches, so much loved by medieval compilers of tales of love and high adventure. The trunk, the mainstay, he who supports the great weight of all these stories of tragic and doomed love, is the old Franz Josef, the Emperor himself. Not much can be made of the sober and serious life of this monarch who preferred a camp bed to the downy pillows of his many palaces, castles and residences. His dalliance with a discreet and respectful lady suggests domestic rather than erotic desires. The frustrated life and tragic death of his Empress provide, however, material for a succession of stories, sufficient in themselves to form a family of epic tales.

  It is pleasing to find that in one of these bookshops—reflecting the tidiness of mind for which the Germanic people are renowned—the ill-fated Empress has a corner reserved for her, decorously separating her from her equally hapless relatives. Most of the titles, or if not the titles then the blurbs, set in large, florid type, manage to mention her pet-name, Sissy, much more charming and interesting, of course, than the icily formal Elisabeth. The illustrations on the covers of these little books—few of them exceed 150 pages—give sufficient indication of what the reader may find inside. On one, Sissy, in full riding habit, is seated on a fiery charger. A snow-covered plain stretches to the horizon. A sled, pulled by four prancing steeds, is hurrying towards her, conveying a lonely figure clad in black. This, as anyone familiar with Visconti’s film will know, is the meeting between Sissy and her cousin, Ludwig of Bavaria, the Wagner-obsessed madman (or visionary) for whom she is supposed to have entertained an undying and unrequited passion.

  Another image depicts her in the arms of one of those monocled or moustachioed warriors who appear on the covers of several books displayed on these shelves under the harsh glare of fluorescent strips. Elsewhere she is seen seated among a group of adoring and respectful peasants—probably the Hungarians she is said to have loved so much—while her gaze travels over their heads towards a small castle or hunting lodge in the background, the site, no doubt, of yet another hopeless amour. She is depicted in imperial regalia at a splendid ball, or sitting by a window at twilight, a leather-bound volume open on her lap. And then there is the most evocative of these images: Sissy leaning decoratively on the railing of a steamer on a placid lake. Snow-capped mountains rise in the distance. A narrow headland is dominated by a mighty keep. Sissy, as always, gazes into the distance, dreamy, sensuous, a figure of mystery. Are we meant to see in that abstracted gaze a failure to recognise the crazed assassin who is, at that very moment, hurrying towards her?

  The saga branches out to embroider variations on the lives of other members of this unhappy family: Franz Ferdinand, who enraged the Emperor by marrying the woman he loved, only to be gunned down in Sarajevo; Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico; cousins, nieces, nephews, relatives near or distant, people who once lived or those merely invented by the romancers’ fancy have all entered into the neverending romance, the allure of which, judging by the number of books displayed in these harshly lit shops, can never pall for the citizens of Vienna. Anything, everything se
ems grist to the mill. Here Franz Ferdinand slumps in that open car in Sarajevo; there the Emperor of Mexico faces a firing squad of sombreroed anarchists. Elsewhere, young women are embraced by hussars, cavalry officers, a Cossack in one instance, beside moonlit lakes and dark forests, or against a panorama of Salzburg, Vienna or Innsbruck. The doomed family dances across the covers of these cheap, poorly printed and probably poorly written romances designed to cater for the fantasies of those who are obliged to live out their lives in poky flats overlooking gloomy courtyards or crepuscular light wells. None of this lucrative industry would be capable of surviving, however, had not one member of the imperial family taken his beloved to a small hunting lodge at a place called Mayerling to die in a suicide pact that has nourished countless romantic fantasies.