Where a smile masks a city’s sorrow
Vienna,
Unknown artist – © Newspapers.com, reproduced with permission
This a Tale from the Vienna Woods. A Tale told on a spring morning when, from the white cafe tables perched high on the Kahlenberg, the Danube really is blue and Vienna, spread out below, looks like a girl going to a ball in her grandmother’s gown…
A thousand years ago it seems a prince called Frederick the Quarrelsome ruled in Vienna. An eccentric character this Duke Frederick, might have served as a prototype for Don Quixote himself.
It was this same Frederick who, when all Europe lay in mortal fear of half a million Mongols, seized the fortified castles of Western Hungary with a handful of men and held them until the Tartar tide receded.
Some of his experiments took an even more romantic form. It was Frederick who invented the Feast of the Violets, an annual frolic when the Viennese would stream out from the city’s narrow streets into the country. And the man who found the first violet would throw his hat over it and run to tell the Duke and be rewarded with the privilege of choosing the loveliest lady of the court as his dancing partner all year.
So the Viennese are proud of their Duke Frederick Babenberg, who, with the enemy almost perpetually on his doorstep, could find time to go chasing off to look at the first violet of spring.
And to show how much they admire that charming spirit, which they seem to have inherited from him, they wear a tiny bunch of violets in his honour.
I even saw a frivolous young thing pin a bunch of violets on the tunic of a blushing Russian infantryman as they swayed together on a tramcar. And if that is not the height of cheerful audacity, I don’t know what is.
They told me in Berlin, a front-line city enduring its eighth year of cold war, that I could expect surprises in Vienna.
For Vienna too is a front-line city. This is Journeys End for the West and All Change for the Iron Curtain. Like Berlin it is a jigsaw puzzle of zones and sectors. But there is a remarkable difference between the two cities.
In Berlin you get the impression that the situation is always serious but never critical. In Vienna the situation is always critical but never serious.
And for this you must thank the amazing resilience of the Viennese and their heaven-sent sense of the ridiculous.
They can, for instance, appreciate the humour of American civil servants having to work from an address in the Stalin Platz.
They enjoy the sight of British businessmen clutching their passports tightly as they bump and bounce deeper and deeper inside the Iron Curtain to reach the British Airport at Schwechat, a corner of a Soviet field that is for ever England
But a million Austrian schillings — which is what it is costing the Viennese each year to accommodate the occupation forces of four Great Powers who can’t decide what they are doing there anyway — is a high price to pay for a sense of humour.
If you spend more than half a day in Vienna you are almost certain to run across Franz. You will find him at half-past nine every morning, rain or shine, waiting outside the Opera House with a motor coach to take you on the “Grand City Tour” which starts among the 142 dead-and-gone Habsburgs each lapped in lead and stored away in the Imperial Crypt beneath the Kapuziner Gruft, and ends with a lightning chase through the Palace of Schonbrunn (43 state apartments in 40 minutes).
For this daily feat of endurance Franz Mahler — graduate of Prague, Heidelberg, and the Sorbonne, master of languages — receives a wage, with tips, slightly less than a British bus conductor.
With his wife Elsa and his small son Joachim he lives in a three-room apartment in a tall, mouldering tenement, still pitted and scarred from German rifle-fire, in the Rembrandtstrasse, which is in the Russian sector.
Elsa has done her gallant best, with some hand-painted plates and a sparkling bit of brass and a canary called Hansi, to make it look like home. But it is a wretched place at best, an ice-box in winter and an oven in summer.
There are many homes like the Mahlers’ in Vienna. All too many of them are to be found on the east bank of the Danube Canal, which before the war was a pleasant working-class district but is now a decaying slum.
On the other side of the canal, in the British and American sectors, stand the great blocks of workers’ flats, the Karl Marx House and the rest of them, which can still hold their own with the best in the world. Here for less than a pound a month a working-class family can rent three rooms and a kitchenette and share a communal bathroom. Their children can play in safety on grass among trees.
Before 1936 60,000 Viennese were living in flats like these. The war and Adolf Hitler, who played around here as a boy, altered all that.
Every day of his life Franz Mahler passes the Karl Marx House with his coachload of tourists and wonders whether the time will ever come when he will be able to cross over the canal and live like that, in a three-roomed council house, which means more to him than all the 200 rooms in Schonbrunn.
Never, he knows, while an occupation force is kicking its heels in Vienna, while the Foreign Ministers’ deputies of four Great Powers interminably meet and meet and disagree…
But it is Sunday in Vienna. And even down here among the battered bricks and mortar of the Ninth District you can smell the scent of pines on the mountains 50 miles away.
So Elsa packs bread and cheese and cake and hard-boiled eggs in young Joachim’s rucksack. And Franz puts on his one good suit — the jacket with the green facings and the broad green stripe down the seam of the trousers. He sticks a bristle of chamois beard in his hat and kisses Elsa and feels twenty again.
I went with them on the tram as far as Grinzing, past the church where Haydn sang in the choir, past Schubert’s birthplace, and the house where Mozart died.
Outside the little white-washed villa where the deaf Beethoven wrote his glorious “Fifth” but never heard a note of it I took my leave of them.
I stood for a long time watching them climb the hill that would take them up and up to the Kahlenberg and the brown rustling carpet of the Wienerwald. Franz had his shabby old greatcoat slung over his shoulder and one arm was round Elsa’s waist. And little Joachim marched in front, his small fists beating an imaginary drum…
The words of the song they were singing drifted back to me. A song that was old when Old Vienna was young. A song they will be singing in Vienna when the armies here march away and the monstrous five-pointed Red Star in the Heldenplaz and its rival, the giant Stars and Stripes winking in neon from the American barracks, have long since disappeared…
“There where we twain have sat together,
Under the linden on the wold,
Canst thou yet plain see where forever,
The flowers are crushed in grassy mould.
Hard by a forest, in a broad vale, tandaradei!
Sweetly sang the nightingale…”
Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com
Note: The song that the Mahlers were singing is Under der Linden –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_der_linden
Jerry F 2024
