The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  Thinking harder about my family’s seemingly innocent infatuation with Wagner’s music (especially The Ring, my father’s favourite) than I ever have in my life, the possibility seems inescapable that these people were to a large extent accomplices to their own destruction. Their blood may have also been stirred by these heady images of a primitive life, one far removed from the stuffy proprieties of their well-upholstered world. They too may have yearned for the cleansing and the new beginning, and for the twilight of their own gods. Perhaps they imagined that they had become so assimilated into the ‘Aryan’ world of Central Europe that they did not recognise themselves as the enemy—those threatening forces swarming in the east. I am ashamed to remember, at this time of preparation, of transitions, when I am preoccupied by the prospect of travelling to Hungary in a day or two, that my family regarded with utter contempt those barbaric people, especially Orthodox Jews with their long sidelocks, who lived to the east of their tight little world.

  Perhaps my father, the great Wagner enthusiast, escaped my grandmother’s cluttered apartment, with its tasteful furniture, exquisite bibelots (except for that vulgar Ferris wheel), the ceremonies of bourgeois life, to liberate himself to the irrational, the antithesis of that cosy world, as he succumbed to the magic of The Ring, of Tristan and Isolde and even Lohengrin. Like so many people in that world he may have persuaded himself that he was a fully integrated citizen of what was still—despite the rearrangement of the political deckchairs at Versailles—old Kakania, where rivalries and differences were contained in an harmonious realm, where the various ethnic, political and religious forces politely agreed to respect each other’s differences. He did not realise, it seems to me, that those enthralling music dramas challenged his very right to exist, let alone his right to spend many nights in these theatres as he fell under the sway of the Master’s magic. He believed in all sincerity, perhaps even without giving it a conscious thought, that the world which sustained and protected him was an orderly bringing together of all levels of society, without in the least transgressing boundaries and divisions as in the great opera houses of Kakania where stalls and gallery, boxes and standing places were decorously ranged around the royal box, the node and centre as well as the guarantee of that life.

  A SEASON IN HELL

  She is sitting on a low wooden bench, arms spread out to support her as she leans back, looking at the infernal triptych before her. This picture gallery tucked into a corner of the Academy of Fine Arts contains the usual collection of respectable masterpieces—melancholy landscapes, a regulation Madonna with Child or two, several still lifes with fruit, loaves of bread and slaughtered hares—appropriate paintings for the young ladies and gentlemen studying in this imperial academy to admire and emulate. One exhibit is, however, entirely out of key with all this propriety: it speaks of another world, a terrible and obscene vision of suffering and torture. It is a large triptych of the Last Judgement, almost certainly the work of Hieronymus Bosch.

  The gallery is all but deserted. The woman on the low bench is the only occupant of the room dominated by Bosch’s sadistic fantasia. From the doorway, as I am struck by my first encounter with that hideously compelling vision, I become aware of her immobility. She is dressed in the autumn uniform of the Viennese middle classes, a well-cut ‘English’ raincoat, a silk scarf around her neck, an expensive-looking skin handbag placed on the bench beside her. She sits there, enthralled it seems by that terrible image, immobile, absorbed, apparently unaware that there is anyone else in this dusty room with creaking floorboards. I approach the painting, and so catch sight of her face, her colouring and the cast of her features—all of these suggest that this lady is one of the few Jews of Vienna.

  Europe’s churches and galleries are filled with depictions of the Last Judgement. Most are grandiose affairs: important billows of smoke and flame; millions of the damned swarming obediently to the imposing portals of hell; Christ and his angels seated in their full judicial dignity. Such a judgement is delivered in no petty court; this is the ultimate tribunal—malefactors might well feel some pride in having come under its jurisdiction. Those canvases and frescoes seem to be saying: if you have to be condemned, this is a good way to go. Bosch knew otherwise. There is no glamour in death, cruelty and torture, only obscenity. His Last Judgement is a carnival of horror, a sadistic Disneyland filled with squawking imps and with devils relishing the most ingeniously homely tortures.

  At the top of the central panel Christ and his kneeling apostles, Mary, Joseph and God the Father look down on the scene of torture below them. They are indifferent, isolated and remote, surrounded by a sunny glow of light. The damned and the tortured, their tormentors and executioners are equally oblivious of the majesty revealed above them: they are wholly absorbed in their task of killing, maiming, suffering, screaming and dying. A huge nicked knife, wielded by toad-like and apefaced monsters is bearing down on a group of naked wretches writhing on the ground. Above them three of their comrades are impaled on the bare branches of a tree—one, a soldier still wearing his helmet, is attached by a branch driven through his testicles. In the background another is impaled on a long drill, a thin shaft protrudes from his anus. Below him a huge metal-plated war-machine, a sixteenth-century Sherman tank, advances with a sharply-pointed serrated knife protruding like a metal phallus. The head of a sinner is just visible below the rim of a barrel filled with an evil-looking toad-infested liquid. A reptilian devil, clutching at the knife that has been driven through its neck, breathes fire and smoke at the almost submerged wretch.

  Seated in front of a small fire of twigs, a web-footed she-devil with a headcloth, her face indistinguishable from Tenniel’s Red Queen’s, is frying a sinner in a large skillet. Two eggs lie on the ground beside her—her own offspring, or ingredients for an omelette au pécheur. Below her a duck-billed creature, a platypus with human legs, is carrying a malefactor trussed on a spit. On a stony ledge a group of blacksmith-devils are nailing horseshoes to the feet of the condemned, hammering them on anvils and tempering them in a furnace. Beside them, through a fissure in a rocky outcrop, a drawbridge is being lowered. Toad-faced devils are about to push a naked figure down the sharply inclined plank towards a row of spikes. Another figure is already impaled on the spiked wheel placed beneath this horrible slippery-dip.

  Dominating the panel, behind a sinner fastened to a gigantic lance, an arrow piercing him through his navel, two large machines serve as instruments of mass-torture. Here is the triumph of technology, a celebration of the efficiency of mechanised torment. One of them resembles a diving-bell. The wretch trapped behind an oval lattice of steel works a spiked treadmill with bare feet. Two armed fiends are holding another naked sinner by his legs over the rim of a metal bowl placed on top of the machine. His task is to pull on the heavy chain tied to the neck of the sufferer on the treadmill, thus forcing him to continue with his labours. Behind this contraption two of the condemned are working a spiked disc—one seems more fortunate than his companion: he wears heavy, knee-high boots. The spiked disc is attached by gears to a heavy millstone. Arms and legs of about-to-be-pulverised wretches are in the process of being dragged under it.

  In the background, receding towards the horizon, towards the shining sky where an indifferent deity looks upon this scene of retribution, more mundane images of torment are faintly visible where the glow of volcanic fires illuminates images of hanging, drawing and quartering, of garrotting and evisceration, of beheading and breaking on the wheel, of being shot to death with arrows. On the margin of the earth, where its blackness meets eternal light, the horrors are no longer visible, being represented by sinister blobs and lines as the strange images of death depicted on the panel recede into infinity.

  Such a carnival of torture requires a large, busy workforce to ensure its efficient operation—just as the theme park of Vienna needs all those strollers, café-patrons, spruikers and windowshoppers, dogs and blue-uniformed attendants (like those guarding this gallery) to keep th
e show on the road day after day, year after year. The worker-devils in this painting come in all shapes and sizes—skeletons, monkeys with the heads of toads, a pot on legs, dragons and lizards with human hands, a hooded head without trunk or limbs, propelled on two large, well-shaped feet. Another wearing a bulbous hat has the face of a sage elder; he is supported on two frogs’ legs growing out of his ears. Some are busy plying their trade, even though many should be writhing in agony, having had spears and knives stuck through their bodies. Others are hurrying towards their next task, or perhaps they are on their way to clock off—as with the egg-monster, lizard head visible through a crack in the shell, two muscular booted legs in hose also breaking through, an arrow piercing the carapace. A cross between a chicken and a hippopotamus is leading her young past the torment and the carnage. A long-billed demon is labouring on crutches, bearing on his back an unfortunate stuffed into a wicker basket. On the roof of the brothel an ape-fiend strums on a lute held over his head, worn like a piece of fashionable headgear.

  One of the side panels, placed on the left hand of the indifferent Christ, shows us hell itself. Here the tormented are crowded into narrow spaces, the fiends are not merely the toy-figures of the central panel—though there are many of those present—but also huge creatures, menacing heads looming over the carnage. Near the entrance to hell, an archway decorated with a frieze of frogs, a turbaned figure with horn-rimmed spectacles—inspector or scientific researcher—observes the busy traffic. A huge, kneeling demon has all manner of creatures crawling over his body.

  Above the entrance to hell, supported by its massive masonry, a pavilion is filled with a sea of naked, writhing humanity. A curious pot or lantern on top of this tent-like structure has flames and smoke spewing from arched vents. A demon kneeling on this furnace has a long trumpet sticking out of his backside on which he plays, no doubt, merry farting tunes. The pavilion, scholars of Bosch’s iconography tell us, is a bath-house. This is a place of torment for adulterers, fornicators, dealers in flesh. Bath-houses in Bosch’s time were, like modern massage parlours, places where sexual practices and fantasies had free rein. The sinners boiling in this infernal bath-pavilion are accompanied by a female devil wearing the characteristic headdress of prostitutes, by musicians, by devil-bawds and demon-procurers.

  For me, and I suspect for the raincoat-clad woman who is still sitting on the low bench, transfixed by this vividly coloured, comic-strip vision of hell, that bath-pavilion suggests another, though more recent, infernal iconography. Most of the sufferers, the tormented humanity depicted in this obscene vision, have the same expression. The creature being fried by the Red Queen in her pan, the one suspended by his testicles, the face floating in the barrel of toads, the operators of the treadmill and the crowd jammed into this pavilion are all frail, naked and expressionless. They seem beyond pain, beyond the cry of protest, beyond offering any resistance. Few of the crowd flowing towards the pavilion, driven by demon-guards, seem to be trying to escape in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. Only the woman standing at the front of the boiling bath, her hands covering her eyes, mouth torn with a scream, seems capable still of registering outrage and fear. The rest are passive, resigned, or at best are content to extend their arms in supplication.

  Eyewitnesses have remarked on the docile way the condemned shuffled to the shower blocks of the Nazi extermination camps, leaving their clothes in neat piles in the designated places before entering the narrow chambers. They knew where they were going. Few believed the anodyne fiction that the filth and grime of their long journey in cattle-trucks was about to be washed off by cleansing water before they embarked on their new life of work and freedom. Yet few raised any protest, only one or two tore at their guards or battered on the heavy iron doors as they were bolted shut on those masses of writhing flesh. Neither desperation nor heroic defiance characterised the large majority of people who had been tormented, humiliated and murdered in the most savage ways in those camps or elsewhere throughout the long and continuing history of human cruelty.

  Bosch’s triptych tells the truth about cruelty and barbarity: they are not grand, spectacular or theatrical. They are, on the contrary, mean, grotesque, even comic. The painting is filled with bizarre demons—several, like the platypus in tails, may even strike some as cute. Torment and extermination require efficiency and co-ordination—the processing of people at Auschwitz and Treblinka was decades ahead of its time in the application of management techniques. Factories of death, just as other factories, depend on the collaboration of all concerned. Bosch knew that truth as well as the supervisors of the twentieth-century death camps knew it. Some of them may, indeed, have learnt a thing or two from this painting in a gallery dedicated to Europe’s great heritage of art, when—perhaps as uniformed or sailor-suited children on a cultural excursion—they were conducted through these rooms steeped in Kakania’s traditional respect for culture, for the finer things of life.

  INSCRIPTIONS

  I

  On monuments and buildings; on the bases of statues and above ceremonial gateways; inside the cupolas of churches and the foyers of the great theatres; in the extraordinary reading room of the National Library, a baroque fantasy with trumpeting angels and learned emperors carried aloft by the muses; on shopsigns above the establishments of the great merchants of the city: pastrycooks, purveyors of hunting perquisites, gentlemen’s outfitters, silversmiths, bootmakers; on blocks of stone or marble set among the cobblestones of squares and streets, Vienna is a city of inscriptions. In flowing Latin or pompous German they commemorate a proud history. This chiselled chronicle of cultural and military greatness perpetuates the memory of all who had ruled over this centre of a great realm. Their statues and memorials gaze upon the imperial city with pride, arrogance and satisfaction. They made this world great, and its greatness, even in the age of Reeboks and McDonald’s, is confirmed by the indestructibility of chiselled stone. The greater glory of the Franzes and Josefs, the Ferdinands and Karls, the Eugenes and Ottos, of Maria Theresia, the double-chinned matriarch, and also of God, is guaranteed for generations to come.

  II

  The Gloriette is an elaborate folly, a type of Brandenburg Gate, on a grassy knoll above the royal palace of Schönbrunn. Formerly the summer residence of the Habsburgs, built, the guide book tells us, by Maria Theresia with a particularly feminine sensibility when compared with the baroque extravagance of ‘male’ Vienna, Schönbrunn is now a suburb of the city, easily reached by the plebeian Underground. Once it used to be in the countryside, away from the hurly-burly, the noise, the foul odours and the intrigues of the capital. Even today though, the place has something of a rural atmosphere. One side of the Gloriette looks upon the formal gardens leading to the palace below. From the other side a carefully contrived wilderness seems to stretch for miles, but probably only as far as a busy suburban highway discreetly screened by lush trees. The Viennese have brought the art of illusion, of façadeism, to high perfection. For what amounts to a few cents, visitors may purchase a ticket from a booth carved out of the side of the Gloriette, allowing them access to the top of the structure. It is a good place from which to view, and better still to photograph, Maria Theresia’s yellow summer palace—the colour scheme of which gave identity to the architecture of the Habsburg world in cities as far away as Milan and Bucharest—and the gardens in front of it. The top of the winding staircase is secured by a heavy painted metal door, now bolted open with a sturdy chain and padlock. Its surface records the dreams of immortality carved by the Lisls and Rudis, by the Giannas and Giacomos, by the Brads and Leannes who have come here. And in the middle of the door, writ large in bold lettering as befits the pride of place, the royal centre, that to which all must pay homage: AUSTRALIA RULES.

  III

  Just inside one of the entrances to the Westbahnhof, where you have to catch most eastbound trains, including those for Budapest, a plaque surrounded by vending machines and advertisements for Mozartkugeln records that from th
is station hundreds of thousands of people were conveyed eastward, to death.

  RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  HISTORY ACCORDING TO KARL MARX

  When history repeats itself, Marx said, it turns into farce. This is the second time in a year that I have set out for Budapest from this railway station in Vienna where a modest plaque commemorates the infamous eastward migration. The earlier occasion was high drama. I was about to approach the forbidden land, that city and country which I had avoided for the best part of fifty years, not daring to go back, partly because of the grave political risks I would have encountered during the Cold War and in the years of the Berlin Wall, but also, and much more importantly, because I did not want to come face to face with memories, attitudes, a personal and a communal history which I had swept under the carpet, or pretended to myself had never existed.

  With the pathetic fallacy beloved by neoclassical theorists of tragedy, that journey was undertaken beneath gloomy winter skies, in the gathering dusk of a December afternoon. The platform resembled one of those classic scenes of flight and panic that are etched on the imagination of the twentieth century. A sealed Russian wagon was filled with impassive but alarmed faces staring through the grimy windows. The carriage in which I had reserved a seat was already full to bursting—a good half-hour before departure time—by sullen or excited swarthy people surrounded by cardboard boxes.