by Jan Morris
So Poland moved me still, and Warsaw especially. It remained the least superficial of Europe’s capitals, the least suited to all our glitz and trendiness, still sullenly ablaze, guns among the flower-beds, with its memories of cruelty, love, courage, hope, despair and sacrifice. ‘Nice car,’ I remarked to the man who drove me to the airport in his big new Volvo. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a dry smile. I knew what he meant. ‘Well no,’ I added in afterthought, ‘I suppose it’s not Chopin’: and he knew what I meant, too.
60 An ad-hoc State
How anomalous that Belgium should have become the administrative centre of the European Union, my generation’s attempt to make a unity of the continent! Belgium is certainly not a Power. It is decidedly not a nation, split as it is between two peoples, the Flemings and the Walloons, each with their own language, loyalty, history and territory. It has been a State only since the 1830s, and even when there was a Belgian Empire in Africa the Congo was no more than a personal fief of the King. It still seems to me a kind of ad-hoc entity. One day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, which is a sort of distillation of all the royal palaces that ever were, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged through its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the King of the Belgians (the sixth to hold that title since its invention). A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cock-eyed bearskins, as in musical comedies or fancy dress, included some sceptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road-sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horse-shit. Its driver told me he spent his days doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it–and, sure enough, as he spoke the horsepersons, having disappeared around the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.
61 Nothing to lose but their dividends
The Belgians endure as many unkind jokes in Europe as the Poles used to in the United States, or the Irish and Welsh in England, and I hate to bait them; but I have to say that even the very heart of this kingdom, the Grand’ Place in Brussels, which is frequently touted as The Most Beautiful Square in the World, has always seemed to me pretentiously unsatisfying. There is no grace to it, except when its flower-market blossoms, or they turn part of it into a Christmas skating-rink. Its centrepiece is the gloomily Gothic Hôtel de Ville, and all around it are pompous gabled mansions of old trade guilds. They are covered with gilding and curlicues, with statues and symbols representing Grain, Prospects, Abundance, Agriculture, Slaughter (for the Butchers’ Guild), sea-gods (for the river-boatmen), quivers (for the Guild of Archers), St Nicholas (patron saint of haberdashers), Bishop Aubert (patron saint of bakers), St Barbe (patron saint of tailors), together with weather-vanes and ogee windows and bobbles and baubles and initials and elaborate gilded dates. Nothing, to my mind, can make them seem elegant. They are heavy aldermanic houses, rich, chain-of-office houses, and the only touch of irony to them is the fact that in one of the grandest, No. 9, Marx and Engels collaborated in 1847 on the Communist Manifesto – ‘Workers of the world unite!’ Nowadays the Grand’ Place and the streets that run into it are chiefly devoted to Belgium’s pre-eminent activity, eating, and the house where Marx and Engels worked is La Maison du Cygne (four red spoons and forks in Michelin).
62 Where are the barricades?
By contrast with Belgium the Netherlands (Holland as the world wrongly insists upon calling the country) is very much the real thing. Ninety-six percent of its people are Dutch, which makes it decidedly a nation; nobody can dispute its potent Statehood; and in its time it has been a great imperial Power. It is an economic Power still. Dutch corporations ring the world: stores, bus companies, publishing houses, shipping lines in many countries are Dutch-owned; Japanese and American firms by the dozen prefer to base their European activities in the Netherlands, where things work well, people are reliable, and the meaning of hard cash is properly understood (I once saw a suburban house in Delft named ‘Time is Money’ …). In my time, nevertheless, the popular image of the Netherlands has been pre-eminently one of progressive if not outrageous tolerance, of a country where anything goes. In the 1960s a visit to Amsterdam, undisputed capital of the Alternative Culture, was one of the thrills of Europe. The whole world was variously fascinated and appalled by the allure of the place then, and almost anyone with a taste for anarchy made the paradoxical pilgrimage to this country of mellow colours, gentle façades and commonsensical businessmen.
It was curious to return to Amsterdam thirty years later. It was not like going back to Prague when the Communists had gone, but it was a sort of culture shock nonetheless. This was not the Amsterdam we had known and loved! Where was the shock of it? Where the barricades? There was hardly a drug pedlar or a squatter to be seen, not a protest procession, not a broken bottle, not a whiff of tear-gas, no heady suggestion of libertarianism or ungovernable youth. The triple-trams went smoothly by. The glass-topped tourist launches slid around the waterways. A hundred thousand bicycles sensibly came and went. The traffic was orderly. The noise was not excessive. Dear God, it was a different city when we were young!
Of course there were still echoes of Alternative Amsterdam. There was a Sex Museum. You could drift the waterways on a Smoke Boat Cruise (wink wink, as its organizers said), or sample a choice of cannabis in cafés. In the red-light quarter, down by the Oude Kerk, the whores still displayed themselves in pink and silken déshabillé behind their windows, and after dark there were plenty of men on street corners whom I assumed to be pimps, drug dealers or at least honest-to-goodness deviants. But then so what? By then you could find these things anywhere in Europe. By then pornography was all the rage in Albania! In the Amsterdam of the fin de siècle there was not much to disconcert your grandmother from the country; but then grandmothers were not what they used to be, either.
63 The nature of modernity
Besides, the Netherlands was a particularly modern country. Its 1960s-style permissiveness was very modern in its time, but over the decades it became a little passé. Thirty years on, Europe as a whole, astonishingly varied though it remained, was undeniably more ordinary than it used to be. It was the nature of modernity, and the Dutch were in the van of it. As an old seafaring and imperial people, they always had cosmopolitan sympathies, and now they easily accepted the gradual homogenization of Europe. Rotterdam was really as much a German as a Dutch port. Young and indistinguishable rentiers from a dozen countries emerged from the offices of Amsterdam at lunch-time. No need to speak the national language here: I once saw a man riding along on his bicycle with his baby daughter on the pillion behind, and as they passed I was not in the least surprised (nor was the baby) to hear him talking on his mobile telephone in the lingua franca of all Europe, English. Another day I met a man so allegorically Dutch that I deliberately engaged him in what I hoped would be allegorically Dutch conversation. He was a tall man with military moustaches, deep-blue eyes and a proper burgher’s paunch, but he did not talk about Rembrandt, tulips, dykes, Queen Beatrix, the new season’s herrings, Admiral de Ruyter or what the Concertgebouw was playing that night. No. He talked about unemployment, too many Asian immigrants, keeping his weight down, and his hopes, earlier in life, of being a professional footballer. He was a citizen of The Netherlands, but I have met him all over western Europe, and that’s what he always talks about.
64 Where they signed the treaty
It is only proper then that Maastricht, an emblematic Dutch town, should have given its name (whose emphasis should be on the tricht, by the way, not on the Maas) to one of the seminal European treaties, the 1991 agreement which gave a new structure to the European Union. It lies in the confusing territo
ry where The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and France very nearly meet. Sometimes Aachen is spelt Aken on the road signs around there. Luik and Luttich are both Liège. The very Maas of Maastricht is only the familiar Meuse. Brussels, Dortmund, Koblenz, Lille, Eindhoven are somewhere near, one way or the other, and are thundered between by ceaseless thousands of trucks from every corner of Christendom. When I woke up on my own first morning in Maastricht, and looked out of my bedroom window through the mist, this is what I saw: a pair of early (or possibly late) lovers embracing at the river’s edge, a few bicyclists rattling over the cobbles, and a long black barge throbbing downstream towards Rotterdam; it carried a load of coal, a car was parked high behind its wheel-house, and inside its bright-lit cabin a woman in a flowered pinafore bustled about with a coffee-pot in her hand.
Everything, in short, paradigmatical. It was like Europe in filmic terms: the cobbles, the lovers, the bicycles, the mist, the great river, the barge, the lady with the coffee-pot, the towers, steeples and battlements of the old town. Behind the quays too, I discovered when I got up, Europeanness was everywhere. My hotel, an exhibition of Dutch charm and efficiency, turned out to be British-owned, and in a brief walk down the exquisitely Low Country street behind it, ornamented with the hoary signs of crafts and guilds, I found the Cottage Café, the Nuance dress shop, something called Prima Vista, a graffito declaring ‘FASCISME IS OVERAL – ANTIFASCISME IS IN’, and a car tantalizingly advertising Fair Play Perfect Amusement. I looked in at the Basilica of Our Beloved Lady, expecting a calm display of northern Catholicism; what should I find but the blaze of a thousand candles before an image of the Star of the Sea, glittering with such devotional bravura that I might have been in Sicily. But I wasn’t – I was in Eurotown, The Netherlands!
65 On the terrace
A brief moment now in Bratislava (formerly Pressburg, a.k.a. Pozsony), the capital of Slovakia, still in convalescence after the long malaise of Communist rule. On the terrace of the Parliament building there, one day in 1995, a plump and youngish Government Minister presides over a little luncheon party in the sunshine. The Danube flows below; the castle stands behind; the terrace parasols advertise Coca-Cola. The Minister’s principal guests are a visiting pony-tailed artist of some kind, perhaps a Slovakian rock star, and an entrepreneurial whiz-kid complete with mobile telephone, each accompanied by a svelte, minimally skirted, heavily made-up and virtually indistinguishable woman. A few attentive bureaucrats sit lower down the table. My, how the party swings! Once or twice the wunderkind’s telephone rings, and he turns away from the table to talk urgently into it; otherwise the Minister is in absolute genial command. He is the image of your post-Communist democrat – shiny, popular, easy. Sometimes a pair of shirtsleeved security men look out of a door, to see he is all right, and he exchanges a few jocular words with them, as a modern politician should. He is full of stories, full of generous bonhomie. How the bureaucrats laugh at his sallies! The two women say very little, but laugh more than anyone. The star guests contrive to be at once languid and respectful. Across the terrace I am eating mushrooms and potatoes, with white Slovakian wine, and once His Excellency, in mid-joke, raises his glass to me.
66 Two Austrian princesses
I first went to Austria in 1946, travelling there by train through the Brenner Pass, when my regiment was stationed in the Po valley of Italy. Vienna was then occupied by four armies: the American, the British, the French and the Soviet Russian (‘four elephants in a canoe,’ said Karl Renner, the Austrian head of State). It was an agreeable place for a few days’ leave. As it happened one of my fellow officers, German by origin, had two aunts in the city, elderly Austrian princesses, he said, of gamy instincts. I never met them, and they may have been half-mythical, but they did allow us to use an agreeable apartment in the heart of the city.
Vienna had not been too disastrously damaged in the war, although the Staatsoper was wrecked and the cathedral was roofless, but the atmosphere was curiously ambiguous. The victorious Powers had decided, in 1943, that when the war was won Austria would be treated as a victim of Nazi Germany rather than an ally. This was a fortunate decision for the Austrians, who had given the Nazi cause some of its most fervent supporters, and was not very convincing to us: one of the leading figures in Vienna at that time, Cardinal-Archbishop Theodore Innitzer, had not only celebrated a thanksgiving mass for Germany’s surrender in the previous year, but had enthusiastically welcomed Hitler to Vienna when Austria became united to Nazi Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. I am a child of my times, and I have had mixed feelings about Austria and the Austrians ever since.
In 1946 one of the capital’s most famous hotels, the Sacher, had been requisitioned as a British officers’ club, and it was there that I first developed a distaste for the snobbery and pretensions of the country. In the hotel’s lobby we were often greeted by a grande dame in a wide picture hat and many pearls, whom I always took to be Madame Sacher herself, until I discovered forty-nine years later that the latter had died before the war. This lady was frightfully grand anyway, and has remained my presiding Austrian image; for although she was always welcoming and courteous, one had the nagging feeling that she might be more courteous still to a titled colonel of the Coldstream Guards, say, or for that matter a Wehrmacht officer with the right aristocratic introductions; just as our old princesses (who were alleged sometimes to peep through the bathroom keyhole, to see the young Britons at their ablutions) were doubtless relieved to know not only that we were recommended by their dear Otto, but that we came from a decent enough armoured cavalry regiment.
Not until 1993 did Austria’s President Thomas Klestil express ‘dismay’ that the Austrians had participated in the Nazi persecution of the Jews and had failed to oppose the Anschluss (i.e. had supported it by a popular vote of 99.75 per cent, Jews having no franchise).
67 Dying like a tailor
It is the sycophancy of older Austrians that I most dislike. It stems no doubt from the days of the Habsburg monarchs, who called themselves in all seriousness Their Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesties, and received obsequious flattery from all classes. Almost every Austrian gesture, it sometimes seems to me, is a salute to hierarchy; almost every conversation, among people of a certain age, finds its way to matters of rank or status. The tragic story of Crown Prince Rudolf and his seventeen-year-old mistress Baroness Maria Vetsera, who died in 1884 apparently in a suicide pact, is repeatedly told in Austria to this day, and it precisely suits the place, being snobbish, romantic, nostalgic, maudlin and rather cheap. The Emperor Franz Josef, informed of his only son’s fate, said that the young man ‘had died like a tailor’, and ordered that the little Baroness should be buried obscurely in a village graveyard far from her lover. I visited her grave once, and was just in time to hear a Viennese lady of a certain age explaining the circumstances to some American guests. ‘In any case,’ I heard her say, without a trace of irony, ‘she was only the daughter of a bourgeois …’
Mind you, it works in many ways. It helps to make of Austria a kind of national family – the Emperor used to be called the Father of his People – and the love of hierarchy means that, if the Austrians fawn to their superiors within the family, they cherish their inferiors. E. M. Forster suggested ‘Only connect’ as a text for living: the Austrians would say ‘Only belong.’ I was walking up Kohlmarkt in Vienna one morning when there stalked beneath the carriage arch of the Hofburg a well-known local eccentric. He was extremely thin, spectral almost. Dressed all in white, as in a toga, he wore an imperial laurel around his brow, and he carried a long staff to which streaming banners were attached. As he walked he shouted high-pitched slogans, slip-slopping in his sandals out of the great archway into the sun. Nobody seemed surprised. A policeman chaffed him, a youth on a bicycle slowed down to pat him affectionately on the shoulder. He was one of their own, with his own slot in the pattern.
A crank is a crank; a cop is a cop; a Professor is decidedly a Professor. In 1977 the Viennese erec
ted a monument to Sigmund Freud, with the following inscription: ‘Here, on 24 July 1895, the secret of dreams revealed itself to Dr Sigm. Freud.’ Revealed itself to a Jew, one notes, but at least revealed itself to a Dr.
68 Blue Danube
At a ball in Vienna Brahms autographed a lady’s fan with a few bars of ‘The Blue Danube’ and the inscription ‘Not, alas, by Johannes Brahms.’ I can hardly believe that Brahms really wished he had written that tiresome waltz, but there is something about Austrianness which affects almost everyone. The Austrians are the most incorrigible of the Europeans, but still one’s feet tap blithely to their melodies, and even for me there are few conditions more agreeable than to be revising a typescript on a sunny day of early summer in a Viennese pavement café.
Sometimes on such a morning I still see that lady from the Sacher, figuratively as it were. She wears a brown tweed suit, without the hat but with the pearls. If I smile at her she responds at first with a frosty stare, as if to remind me that we have not been introduced, but if I engage her in conversation she lights up with a flowery charm. Inextricably linked with the preposterous social consciousness of the Austrians is their famous Gemütlichkeit, their ordered cosiness, and though this can sometimes be enough to make a Welsh anarchist’s flesh creep, at other times it is most endearing. In those coffee-shops I welcome it when the people at the next table smile or flutter their greetings at me and wish me well with my writing. I am touched despite myself by the Austrian ability to reduce the grandest expressions of art, especially music, to a domestic scale – the conviction, for example, so often revealed in the faces of elderly concert-goers, that Father would have played that adagio with rather more finesse. At the grave of Beethoven, in Vienna’s central cemetery, I even found myself becoming by osmosis a little Austrian myself: for the gilded lyre upon its headstone, its Old German lettering and its generally metronomic or Edition Peters manner only made me think of piano practice.
