The Habsburg Cafe Read online

  LANDING MUSIC

  The screen is blank, the golden images have faded. All that remains are the strains of sentimental Viennese music piped through the aircraft’s sound system. We are obviously falling towards the source and origin of these sugary melodies. I try as hard as I am able to control my growing anxiety. Even though this 747 seems to be gliding down through the morning air with the ease and assurance of a powerfully muscled bird, ingrained misgivings, disciplined though not tamed by years of exposure to the perils of flight, assert themselves as the two realms, the celestial and the terrestrial, begin to come into conjunction.

  In the night, above India, I could almost persuade myself that we were not suspended thousands of metres above the earth in a fragile metal cylinder. At that time we seemed to be in another existence, astral beings, safe, powerful and beyond harm, observing with indifference the faint pools of light floating in a sea of darkness. But when the ground looms large and menacing all around, as it is doing now, when you can see the miniature dots of cars scurrying along a busy highway, then anxiety becomes inescapably insistent.

  My thoughts turn, therefore, towards that other aeroplane, and to that winter flight from Vienna and from the brutality this world had experienced, into the perpetual darkness of the northern night. I remember with an almost intolerable immediacy the lone, stark chimneystack that floated past every few minutes as the plane circled the town of Hartford in Connecticut, marking with clocklike insistence our approach to the seemingly inevitable death that awaited us below in the snowy whiteness. I recall too the terrible shudder and thud with which the plane, its malfunctioning undercarriage frozen and icebound, plopped into the soft thick snow, and how the young airhostess, who had maintained her regulation smile throughout the many hours of the emergency, fainted the instant all that creaking and jangling of metal had been silenced and we knew that we had been saved.

  I am returning to the airport where that ill-fated journey began, and I am returning in a more general sense to my origins, in order to bring to it little bits of the Australia which I have come to know, and to explore again those two related worlds, Austria and Hungary, where, for me, life began. Does this palindrome-like trajectory demand, therefore, that this lumbering machine should fall to earth near some small town—perhaps Sopron, that quaint Habsburg town on the border of the two realms, where my mother grew up, which is situated a short distance from the airfield towards which we are rushing with complicated manoeuvres of diving and banking?

  Commonsense insists, even at these moments of alarm, that such neat symmetry is appropriate only to the contrived world of fiction. But experience also tells me that life may at times be even more crudely and melodramatically contrived than the cheapest romance. Ancient fears know nothing of commonsense. They tell me with irresistible clarity and conviction that I should never have trusted my life to the guardians of this screaming and shuddering contraption, that I should have stayed at home and never considered going ‘home’ to the world that is no longer home for me.

  It is much too late for regrets. We, even the flight attendants, are strapped into our seats. This clumsy machine is screeching towards disaster. We hit the ground with a roar of reverse-thrust and (miracle of miracles) the plane slows to a relatively sedate hurtle along the runway. It loses speed again just before turning towards the terminal. The landing music has been switched off. In its place an anodyne voice welcomes us to Vienna, reminds us to remove all personal articles from seat pockets and overhead lockers, and advises us to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary. With a slight hissing sound the plane comes to rest, and at that moment, on a utilitarian, rather dingy building, indistinguishable from air-terminals elsewhere in the world, I catch sight of the cursory but myth-laden identification: WIEN.

  CITY OF DREAMS

  MOZARTBALLS

  Vienna, in this suave autumn of 1991, is obviously Mozart’s city. One of the first sights to greet you in the arrival hall of the airport is a large likeness of the composer leering at you with a coquettish Mona Lisa smile. It is an advertisement for Mozartkugeln, a spherical chocolate confection with a soft nutty centre. I cannot help wondering whether ‘Mozartballs’ has the same connotations in German as in English. That may be the explanation for the enigmatic smile. It is a joke, moreover, that Mozart, who was not a little interested in all manner of obscenity and scatology, would have probably enjoyed greatly.

  It is difficult to escape him anywhere in the inner city in this year marking the two hundredth anniversary of his death. Advertisements for all sorts of ‘Mozart’ comestibles stare from walls and shop windows. Souvenir shops are crammed with tee-shirts, mugs, beer-coasters, wallets, pouches, shoulder-bags and a hundred other items, all of them with his image painted, embossed, etched or engraved on them. Various tourist organisations entice visitors in fractured English to savour his ‘immortal musik’ as performed by players in eighteenth-century costume. This carnival of vulgarity almost drowns the serious and scholarly exhibitions, recitals and opera performances which are mounted to mark the bicentenary with appropriate solemnity and dedication.

  The Viennese have obviously discovered a goldmine in these ‘celebrations’. Never mind that two hundred years ago they probably hastened Mozart’s death by deciding that they didn’t care all that much for his music. Now in 1991 everybody is jumping on the bandwagon—the music shop crammed with compact discs of every note of music he wrote (and probably quite a few he didn’t) is cheek-by-jowl with a confectioner’s whose display honours him in all conceivable variations on chocolate, nougat, fondant, cream and custard. The city cannibalises its (for the moment) favourite citizen in order to extract even more dollars, marks and yen from the pockets of impressed and awed tourists.

  The sensitive and the cultivated are naturally outraged by this undisguised commercialism, this blatant betrayal for thirty pieces of silver of one of the pinnacles of European culture. Yet Mozart himself may be held largely responsible for having become just another commercial commodity, something to be promoted and marketed like any other product. In 1781, just ten years before his untimely death in his thirty-sixth year, he finally broke with his employer, the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, and embarked on a career as an independent musical entrepreneur in the imperial capital, the most important centre of music in Europe—except perhaps for Paris, which continued until well into the nineteenth century to occupy a position of barely challenged pre-eminence.

  For a while the campaign worked. Mozart’s subscription concerts were well attended; he attracted some pupils from the upper echelons of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Important pieces in the plan of battle refused, nevertheless, to fall in place. Despite the succès d’estime et de scandale of The Marriage of Figaro, neither a position at court nor any further commission for the court theatre materialised. The public wearied after a year or two of Herr Mozart’s concerts where he performed his elaborate concertos in which he made sure that at the end each included a catchy tune derived from the dance music and popular songs of the melody-obsessed Viennese. They began demanding precisely what he had provided for them a year or so earlier: novelty. He was, therefore, the agent of his own destruction. He broke free of the demeaning world of servitude, a world where aristocratic patrons might not have cared very much for the music of their Kapellmeister, but didn’t give a fig either for what the audience—their guests at suppers, soirees and fetes—thought of it. Mozart had thrown himself on the mercies of the public and suffered the penalties of its fickleness and thirst for novelty.

  His was, in truth, a sad fate. The public showed remarkably poor discrimination in scorning him and lionising the nonentities who became their darlings in 1790 and 1791. Yet it acted true to form—Mozart had appealed to those market-forces which are now being touted all over the countries to the east of Austria as representing a natural and desirable economic philosophy. He took his music into the market place, he sought the patronage of the public rather than the court or the nobleman’s estate
. The public sent him to his pauper’s grave just as it is still capable of consigning to penury a former pop star or fallen movie idol.

  Two centuries later Mozart is once again a highly lucrative commercial commodity. Salzburg has been raking in the profits of Mozart-mania for decades, despite the interruption of the odd war or two. Now it is Vienna’s turn. Here marketing ranges from the boorish to the sophisticated. The bicentenary productions of the great operas are as much directed by the spirit of the cash register as the Mozart mugs, badges and pillowcases crowding the souvenir shops and street stalls.

  Looking at all this tawdry merchandise with jet-lagged eyes on this bright autumn morning, I begin to wonder whether, as the last quarter of the Mozart Year approaches, the great public will once more grow weary of him, his music and his image. In 1992 it is Rossini’s turn: will Vienna try to milk that anniversary too? Whatever the case, Vienna seems to have become a trifle more crass and vulgar as it celebrates the most elegant and fastidious of composers.

  Despite this hard-headed commercialism, the city looks enchanting, in an amiably dotty way. One end of the Graben, a pedestrian thoroughfare devoted to plush cafés and murderously expensive shops, has taken on a fleeting resemblance to Palermo—due entirely to the grove of fully-grown palm trees in large tubs lining either side of the street. Vines and creepers luxuriating on the trellises of outdoor restaurants in the sidestreets transform this sophisticated city into a rural idyll. And there is kitsch everywhere: everything is both cosmopolitan and gemütlich, grandiose yet homely. There are cartloads of carved wooden objects for sale—smiling putti coyly presenting their rosy buttocks to general view; sweet-faced Madonnas cradling irresistibly cute infant Christs; assorted saints looking pious; reindeer, chamois, bears, cows with miniature cowbells around their necks: a sentimental Austrian menagerie. One shop displays a large china figurine of Julie Andrews in the act of climbing every mountain. Even the fast-food joints are a riot of heart-shaped carvings, blonde waitresses in dirndls and long-limbed youths poured into their lederhosen. A bewigged, satin-breeched young man is ready to conduct you on a walking tour of the places Mozart inhabited during his years in Vienna—and anyone familiar with those ten years of the composer’s life remembers that he moved house with depressing frequency.

  It is difficult to determine where the real life of Vienna goes on in the midst of this carefully stage-managed spectacle designed to relieve the hordes of tourists of their money. There are, it is true, apparently genuine Viennese people sitting in the outdoor cafés, many of them with mastiff-sized dogs unlikely pets in a city where most people live in small cramped, apartments. You begin to wonder whether these people are real. Obviously they are not waxwork models, like the dummy of Peter Altenberg that greets you as you walk into the Café Central, which is firmly closed this morning because a camera crew is busy filming a scene for what is, probably, a nostalgic costume drama. I conclude uncharitably that they are probably extras, walk-on players hired to populate a theme park. Perhaps it is only jet lag, as I wander around these streets, surprised that it is still only ten in the morning, that gives the place such a striking sense of unreality. And I suspect that that sense will increase throughout the next two hours until I am able at last to occupy the room in a modest but comfortable pension which has been reserved for me, except that—as the charming proprietor pointed out with a gesture that I last saw many years ago when I watched Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the Marschallin—rooms in Vienna are not available for occupation before noon.

  It seems futile merely to stroll in the sunshine or to sit in a café waiting for the time to come when I shall be able at last to get some sleep. How better to spend two hours than by joining a serpentine queue for opera tickets? It is well after twelve when I reach its head. By then The Marriage of Figaro is sold out; I have to be content with La Bohème and Lohengrin. Back at the pension, light-headed with exhaustion, I notice a sign that hadn’t been there last year. It announces in several languages IN THIS HOUSE MOZART COMPOSED THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO.

  THEME PARK

  Sunday morning. The window of my room, overlooking one of the great thoroughfares of the old city, provides an ideal vantage point from which to view this fantasia of sentimentality, nostalgia and displacement. All day the leaden late September sky (a remarkable contrast to yesterday’s sunshine) has throbbed with the equally heavy-sounding bells of the nearby churches: the Michaelkirche just around the corner, the somewhat more distant Kirche am Hof, not to mention the cathedral itself, a stone’s throw away in the other direction. Immaculately clad citizens flock to hear mass in these and in many other churches throughout the inner city—though whether it is religion or the music (mostly by Mozart, it goes without saying) that attracts them is hard to determine. Elsewhere symbols of imperial greatness loom in the autumn mists. Occasionally a ray of sunlight breaks through, illuminating, impartially, it seems, both the monument to Maria Theresia, the double-chinned Empress, and the nearby statue of the poet Schiller. Posters announce performances at the two opera houses, the three state-supported theatres, seemingly innumerable privately owned places of entertainment, various concert halls and churches. Early in the morning, just as on the morning of my arrival, queues form at the box office of the national theatres, where patrons eagerly inspect large notices advertising the availability of tickets for these attractions.

  And yet there is something jarring, rather peculiar about the obvious confidence and civilisation of this pompous but very beautiful city. What is the source of the prosperity that allows the Viennese to savour the delights of Demel’s and Sacher’s, the two fabled cafés, or to purchase the world’s most desirable luxuries at outrageous prices in the elegant boutiques of the Kärtnerstrasse or the Graben? A large part of this affluence must be a direct consequence of the thousands of tourists roaming the streets of the inner city each day, reaching plague proportions in the high season, even in this year of economic distress and political threat, with the ominous shadow of civil war spreading over nearby Croatia. The streets are a babel of all the tongues and dialects of the world—after the first hour or two you don’t register surprise at hearing a nasally Australian intonation expressing delight and astonishment or insisting that it’s not all that different after all from Melbourne.

  Vienna at the end of the twentieth century is a theme park par excellence; its citizens seem to have been carefully drilled to exhibit their culture and national characteristics (including their sneering disdain and contempt for foreigners). As recompense, it would seem, they may enjoy their traditional way of life in considerable affluence—animals in zoos are, after all, almost always well fed. Admittedly, other European cities are theme parks as well. In parts of London or Paris, Amsterdam or Rome it is often impossible to move for the waves of gawking sightseers jamming the footpaths, pedestrian malls and great civic spaces that once upon a time gave ample room for ladies and gentlemen of quality to stroll, to nod to each other in polite acknowledgment and to pursue the other civilised pleasures of the promenade. Life in those cities is obviously accompanied by the irritations of attempting to pursue an ordinary existence in the midst of the aimless wanderings of the jet-age ‘barbarians’. There are, nevertheless, some remnants of an everyday life left in those places—at times grumbling and disconsolate, it is true, when people find themselves incapable of travelling on the Metro or the Underground, yet an ordinary life, for all that. In Vienna everything and everyone seem to be elements of the decor in a gigantic, staged extravaganza.

  The place is, of course, wonderfully well maintained; in better shape, to be truthful, than Vienna’s own funfair, the Prater, which is looking decidedly grotty by comparison. The city is, nevertheless, just as much a place of illusions and even perhaps of cheap thrills, a bold pretence that this dead city is still vibrantly alive. There is no cogent reason for the existence of Vienna except as an essay in sentiment and nostalgia. In the patterns of late twentieth-century political, social and even perhaps cu
ltural life Vienna and Austria are both irrelevant, both victims of a grand predicament.

  Austria’s predicament is that it has lost its Empire. The scope and style of Vienna are ridiculously inappropriate for its population of a few million. Its grandeur may have impressed the inhabitants of Kakania, perhaps dampening their envy and restlessness by the assertion that this was their city too, a part of their proud heritage. Yet Kakania has been dead for many years—only the outward signs of its existence remain in this city as reminders of a vanished world. The result is an ever-present yearning for the past and an ugly cultural xenophobia masked by a welcoming smile. Austrian nostalgia, the pursuit of Gemütlichkeit visible in the streets of contemporary Vienna, did not exist so blatantly in the days of the Empire, when this small duchy stood at the centre of a vast and polyglot conglomerate of often unruly subject peoples. The transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into the Austro-Hungarian by the adroit House of Habsburg ensured that Austria could continue to enjoy its essential centrality, its conviction that it, and it alone, represented the essence of ‘Europe’, having successfully resisted those anarchic waves of republicanism and liberalism that flooded over many other states of the continent. The history of Austria throughout the nineteenth century reveals a striving to maintain such an insistence in the face of Prussian ambition and energy. The disintegration of the Habsburg world in the years leading up to the Great War, observed with such malicious relish by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities, was the product of that rivalry, and also of the disastrous alliance between the newly formed German Empire (always seen by Austria as something of a parvenu) and the Habsburg realm, the old centre of the European spirit—that is to say of German civilisation and language. Before 1918 ‘Austria’ was a cultural and idealistic concept that could embrace people in the most remote parts of this realm, like the people of the Bukovina commemorated by Gregor von Rezzori, or people like my grandparents, German-speaking Hungarians, Jews and Bohemians, who saw themselves as citizens of this world despite its many hatreds, rivalries and exclusions.