The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  The story of Archduke Rudolf and Baroness Marie Vetsera is well known. The bored heir to the Habsburg throne, between bouts of drinking and whoring, the usual pursuits of unemployed royalty in the old Europe, met and fell in love with the barely seventeen-year-old Baroness Vetsera. Their meetings were brief and clandestine. According to Claudio Magris they were confined to the time it took to perform one of Wagner’s operas, which the Baroness’s mother always attended whenever they were performed at the Imperial Opera. That would have given the lovers at best five or six hours—though if Marie’s mother’s taste did not extend beyond the earlier and less demanding of the Master’s works, their time would have been even shorter. Despite their precautions, the affair—as was inevitable—came to the attention of the court. What threats, ultimatums, cajolements or bribes were offered is not precisely known. Nor are the details of the events at the hunting lodge on the night of 29 January 1889 quite clear. What is known, however, is that the next morning, the young Baroness’s body was discovered in her bed, while nearby in a pool of blood lay the body of the Archduke.

  These events make up a sordid tale: an impressionable girl, a dissolute prince of the blood, intrigues, spying and treachery. It has been transformed nevertheless into a romantic myth: Marie and Rudolf, at least for Austrians, have joined Héloïse and Abélard, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde as martyrs of tragically doomed true love. And so their story reappears, prettified, disinfected and sentimentalised, on the covers of these cheap little romances in the bookshops of Mariahilferstrasse. Marie is always depicted as the epitome of angelic sweetness, fragility and dedication to love. Rudolf, who inherited the squat, almost peasant-like physique of the male members of his family, is pictured (of course) in dashingly Byronic guises. As always, the ugly, the brutal and the dissolute are transformed into the noble, the sentimental and the heroic by the strong drug of nostalgia.

  The pulp industry that fills these bookshops is no different from the merchants of escapist romances elsewhere in the world. The difference lies in the curious though very strong sense of location that colours these books ranked neatly on their imperial shelves. This is your history, they seem to be saying to the dumpy ladies who are standing in front of these shelves pondering their choice. Perhaps the Viennese have been persuaded that their history, their glorious past, is not the familiar story of brutality, chicanery and hypocrisy that seems to be the fate of all people and all régimes. History has been converted for them into romance. Nostalgia has transformed a brutal past into a seductive dream. Everything is dedicated to feeling, sensation and sentiment. Mayerling happened only a little over a hundred years ago. You may easily visit the place and shed a sentimental tear over Marie and Rudolf. The Habsburgs are gone—though perhaps one day they may come back—but the ’Burg is still there. Romance and passion may be found beneath the surface of a dull world—you only have to search for it, these little books seem to be saying.

  An intangible yet obviously strong bond appears to bind this world to its fantasy past. The citizens of the theme park appear to have accepted these illusions as reality. Sentiment, nostalgia and the allure of the relatively recent past, even where it led to suffering, defeat and death, define for these people the essence of being Austrian. To the east the former Soviet Empire is disintegrating just as their own Empire—one that had ruled over most of those territories and people—disintegrated when the Elisabeths, Rudolfs, and Ferdinands were felled by their own hands or by the assassins’ bullets. But why concern yourself with the horror and brutality in what is still called (in this year of the palindrome) Yugoslavia? Why should you be be distressed by the fate of the orphans of Romania? The real life is here, in the eternally fascinating story of Sissy on her horse, Marie in the arms of her Rudolf, and Maximilian, eyes clear with courage and defiance, standing before the firing squad.

  HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  The Volksoper is a dull-looking building near a clattering and clanging tramway viaduct. It is, as its name suggests, a theatre for the masses. In the past its repertoire was devoted almost exclusively to that peculiar genre, Viennese operetta, which was (and remains) a vehicle for conveying the most outrageous fantasies of Kakania. To the accompaniment of catchy tunes and rousing choruses, these absurdly escapist musical plays celebrate a fantasy in which no-one dies in a hunting lodge or falls victim to the anarchist’s bullet, but lives happily ever after.

  Viennese operetta reached its apogee in the years between the gunshot at Mayerling and that of Sarajevo—though examples of this essentially imperial entertainment for the masses continued to be composed beyond the years of the Great War, into the 1920s, and indeed almost until the grim days of Vienna’s fiery death in 1945. Their plots—if they may be graced with such a term—almost always end with the triumph of love. Whatever the complications, misunderstandings, or obstacles that keep the lovers apart for an hour or two, all is well by the time the rousing finale is reached. With much swirling, clinking of glasses, rushing around the stage and with as high a note as the singers of these confections are capable of reaching, a typical Viennese operetta ends with marriage, happiness and celebration.

  It would be difficult to see any connection between these trivial and escapist fancies and the world of experience. Operettas may be set in Paris or Peking, Vienna or St Petersburg, but their true location is always a never-never-land where any occasion will do for singing and dancing. Many of them reflect, nevertheless, the fantasies of Kakanian amity and benevolence, and seem to subscribe to the fiction that this troubled world was, when all is said and done, one big happy family, an idea assiduously promoted by its rulers even at a time when that fiction could no longer be sustained anywhere but in the theatre. There at least the pretence could be continued.

  Until the approaching war made travel between Budapest and the provinces difficult if not impossible, my parents spent each Easter with my mother’s family in Sopron, a picturesque border town some fifty or sixty kilometres to the east of Vienna. Sopron remained an essentially Austrian town even after the partition of that part of the world at Versailles caused it to become—to the dismay of many of its inhabitants—the westernmost city in the newly independent state of Hungary. During our last visit, my parents took me to the little municipal theatre to a performance of The Gypsy Baron.

  I remember almost nothing about that performance. My sole memory is of a scene in a forest clearing—crudely painted flats and backcloth—with a group of gypsies seated around an obviously fake campfire. In their midst stood a black-haired figure, with a large gold earring in one ear, a short jacket with elaborate frogging slung casually over his shoulders. He sang a lusty song—with many refrains I remember—in which the chorus of gypsies participated enthusiastically.

  The Gypsy Baron was first performed in Vienna in 1885. It seems obvious that by that time the Habsburg propaganda about the essential unity and harmony of the Empire had appealed to the promoters of popular entertainment, who could see solid profits flowing from its promulgation. The Gypsy Baron, like many subsequent examples of the genre, seeks to transcend the national, ethnic or tribal rivalries that have always tormented this world. Hungary was the most troublesome territory of the Empire, not necessarily because the Hungarians were more fervently patriotic and more gallant than their neighbours—though they liked to think that they were—but because they were the most numerous. Gypsies, according to Viennese mythology or prejudice, were a particularly Hungarian phenomenon—another cause of dissatisfaction to Hungarians who were convinced, of course, that gypsies belong properly to that more easterly part of the continent which we now call Romania. Barons were, on the other hand, one of the high (though not too exalted) ranks of the Kakanian nobility. A gypsy baron, a contradiction in terms according to many Austrians, represents a reconciliation of the two most important and influential territories of this Empire. If a gypsy may become a baron, even if only on the operetta stage, Austrians and Hungarians, Bohemians and Slovaks, Serbs and Croats may also live
peacefully under the aegis of the double-headed eagle.

  In these entertainments the impossible idealism of this world—an idealism that probably no-one took seriously by 1914—was given a spurious validity. Their titles reveal all. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman, composer of a series of phenomenally successful Viennese operettas, seems to have had a particular gift for finding subjects and titles to promote that dream. One of his operettas, still in the repertoire of companies all over the world is usually known in English as The Gypsy Princess. The German title, Die Csardasfürstin, yoking together the csardas, the most popular of Hungarian dances, with an exalted rank of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, is particularly eloquent, speaking of those pious fantasies that these trivial entertainments embody.

  Here at least the fond hope of the Habsburgs, that they could somehow forge a harmonious supranational community out of people who had in certain instances been enemies for a thousand years or more, received a tiny fragment of confirmation. Operetta became an astonishingly popular form of entertainment in almost every one of the Habsburg lands. In the theatre, provisionally and briefly, a Hungarian or a Ruthenian could agree with the implicit assumption that under the benevolent dispensation of the Father-Emperor (who could make barons out of gypsies) this was the best of all possible worlds. Outside the theatre, though, the fiction was much harder to maintain. As I stand in front of the Volksoper, waiting for the traffic lights to change, I begin to wonder whether operettas are still being performed in Zagreb and Sarajevo, cities where the old hatreds of this world have been given once more a new lease of life.

  THE LAST BANANA

  A tram rattling through the grey streets of the real Vienna, away from the theme park, the kitsch, the sentimental fantasies, takes you to the edge of the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, site of another set of nostalgic dreams. The woods begin at Grinzing, nowadays no more than a suburb of the metropolis, its houses displaying plaques commemorating those famous citizens of Vienna who lived along these twisting lanes. A hundred years ago Grinzing was a village surrounded by the vineyards that supplied the vine-covered taverns which purvey the local vintage throughout the late summer and the long autumn of this part of the world. In the gaps between the villas of the rich and the famous you may glimpse vine-covered hills, heavy with yet-to-be-harvested grapes.

  The taverns come to life late in the day. Throughout the balmy nights of late summer, and under the chilly skies of autumn, the people of Vienna drink, eat, sing and dance, surrounded by carefully contrived rusticity. The good life, pursued so assiduously amidst the imperial grandeur of the inner city, here takes on another colouration, a fantasy of the simple rural life, its joys and its wine, idylls of well-being and companionship—in other words, wine, women and song, and tales from the Vienna Woods. The celebration of new wine and rustic simplicity is a profoundly characteristic Viennese pursuit. No other metropolis has striven so hard as this city to evolve a fantasy of rural life amidst the marble and granite of imperial pomp. Vienna constantly conjures up images of the countryside, even in the heart of the inner city. At one corner of the great irregularly shaped space around the cathedral, an ancient piece of wood preserved behind shatter-proof glass displays hundreds of embedded rusty nails, which had been driven into the living tree by shepherds and countryfolk to commemorate their visit to the imperial city.

  Nowhere else is this sentimental amalgam of city and countryside more poignant than at Grinzing. Here town and wooded hill meet in an ordered, carefully landscaped union. Nothing here seems real: the meticulously preserved village atmosphere, the crooked lanes, the charming taverns are as contrived and decorative as the vine-clad slopes towards which most streets and lanes seem to be leading. Here is another stage set, a cunningly crafted trompe l’oeil designed to bemuse and beguile, and to remind you of the potential that exists here for a joyous marriage of country and city. In other cities the countryside intrudes, sometimes with disturbing and disconcerting effect, nowhere more so than was the case in Canberra before the lake was filled, when sheep grazed peacefully but incongruously on patches of dry grassland between buildings of monumental pretentiousness. Here, in Grinzing, it is otherwise. The little town is prettified, the fields and woods are manicured—perfumed, you are inclined to think, as were the cows in the toy-dairy of the Austrian princess who became, to her misfortune, Queen of France.

  From Grinzing you must take a bus to the hills known collectively as the Vienna Woods, an ascent both literal and symbolic into a higher level of sentiment and nostalgia. There images of conviviality are replaced by the sweet allure of fresh air, sunshine, the scent of pines and the exhilaration of physical exercise. Meticulously marked and signposted tracks indicate paths that beckon through this tamed wilderness. Here you always know where you are going; each track ends at a convenient Gasthof where food, drink and good cheer await the weary traveller. The terrors of the dark forest, where Hansel and Gretel might encounter the perils of the Gingerbread House, where bloodthirsty dragons or malevolent magicians often lurk, have been tamed and civilised. Danger and menace have been converted into playfulness. You may imagine that you are wandering through a dark wood where all sorts of dangers are to hand—but it is all pretence, like so much else in this city and forest, an elaborate illusion to provide carefully controlled thrills.

  On this sun-drenched autumn afternoon the paths are crowded with people. Several are dressed in the required paraphernalia of such outings: in this world every activity has its appropriate costume. Lederhosen and dirndls, worn in the inner city only by purveyors of fast food, seem almost obligatory here. These strollers are playing out a domesticated, nostalgic version of a great institution of the Germanic world—the walking tour, that ritualised enactment of the great Wanderlust which took generations of young Germans on energetic, hilarious rambles over the Fatherland in commemoration of the wanderings of their ancestors through the menacing forests of Gaul. There they experienced that sense of community, the absorption of the individual into the tribe, which reveals the darkest corner of the German soul—beyond individuality, pity and compassion, driven only by the instincts of the herd and the mass.

  On Kahlenberg, the sunny summit of these woody hills, all is peace and contentment. The couples strolling arm in arm do not seem to be driven by the demons of the blood. Yet beneath the amiable holiday mood, an urban pastorale with alpenstocks embellished with plaques commemorating walks achieved and mountain peaks conquered, sinister possibilities glimmer. This world is capable of masking ugliness and brutality, converting them into nostalgia and sentiment. Mayerling is not very far from here. At that site of the sordid attempt to cover up the deaths of Rudolf and Marie, a shameful exercise was conducted which came to implicate many members of the Kakanian aristocracy. The indecency with which Marie’s body was secretly bundled out of the lodge, denying her family access to it or permission to bury it decently, was the sorriest manifestation of the edifice of hypocrisy and evasion that was erected over that pathetic death tryst.

  This world is very practised in such hypocrisy. It is only too willing to insist that black is white, that things are other than they seem. It is able, therefore, to convert the ugly, the shabby and the brutal into beauty and nobility. These days waves of visitors come to worship at the tomb of romantically frustrated love at Mayerling, and to marvel at the shrine into which that unhappy place was converted in a supremely hypocritical act of legerdemain.

  And so it is with the couples and groups walking in the autumn sunshine. The art of pretence, near neighbour of hypocrisy, has become extraordinarily refined. It is, no doubt, wonderful to pretend that you are wandering in the wild woods where spooks and monsters might be lurking—but, of course, you are merely strolling along the well-made tracks of yet another theme park, a carefully contrived illusion of unbounded nature situated at the terminus of a suburban bus route. In a similar way Austria—and indeed much of the world it once controlled with imperial pride and arrogance—insists that brutality and hatred do no
t exist here, can never have existed in such a blessed place. The great Austrian hypocrisy that burns across the pages of Schnitzler and Zweig and of Musil and Thomas Bernhard, which made Wittgenstein hate his native land with corrosive passion, manifests itself as clearly here, in this sanitised wilderness, as it does in the poisonous duplicity of Viennese, Austrian, indeed Central European social and political life. The smile that kills and the strangling embrace are fundamental attributes of this world. Cruelty and coldheartedness are masked with the smiling face of civility.

  For all that, these woods, this city and this society are alluring, presenting images that soothe, entice and constantly whisper that this is assuredly life at its very best. For me, in my inappropriately antipodean clothes, among these dedicated walkers and vacationers, that sense is particularly poignant. This is a world and an existence into which I could so easily melt, and become absorbed by its charm. Except that I know that that charm is no less treacherous now than it was on an autumn afternoon in 1937, a time I cannot remember—a time before memory—yet a time which has entered into the fabric of my life, adding, in a small way, to the network of influences that has determined what I have become.

  On that Sunday, during what was, as it turned out, my parents’ last visit to Vienna before our return to the blackened shell of the city in the freezing November of 1946, we joined the throngs of people flocking to Grinzing and Kahlenberg to catch the last bit of sun, the last whiff of fresh country air before winter closed in. My parents probably realised that the winter which was about to enfold them was to be far longer and more severe than the natural winter of God’s creation, and that it was, moreover, to be an infernal winter which would come to a fiery end. So it was here, at Kahlenberg, according to a mythology lovingly cherished through the dark years of the war, that they bought the last banana that I, an eighteen-month-old toddler in a stroller, was to enjoy, until nine years later, in 1946, on our journey to America and to that forced landing in the snows of Hartford, we saw bananas again, at a little airport in the Azores, where our plane made an unscheduled landing to ride out the storms raging over the North Atlantic.