We took a bus from the airport into Schwedenplatz, alongside the Danube Canal. Round the corner is the Post Hotel on a street called Fleisch Markt, not far from the headquarters of Vienna's postal service. We checked into the Post and, up in our spacious room, read that, over the years, Mozart, Haydn, Janascek and Nietzche had all lived in houses on this site. It seemed a good spot.
On our way to meet Jacky's aunt we saw a big slogan sprayed on a wall - "Stop The War On Drugs". This was mildly puzzling. Next there was a fine example of the art of stencil graffiti in the form of a large, black, well-defined fish which we admired for a couple of minutes before continuing on our way.
Edith Elias and Fritz Gerrard were married more than sixty years ago. They lived together in the same apartment on Untereweissgerber Strasse from 1949 until March of this year, when Fritz passed away. The flat is in a typical Viennese apartment block. High ceilings, parquet floors, plenty of room for two, some serious furniture and a grand piano. They used to have a lady who cooked for them, called Frau Mitzi, whose unforgettable plum dumplings I once sampled.
Fritz has sufferred from a degenerative illness since the late 1970s, his mobility declining until, in recent years, he had to use a wheelchair and then, finally, became unable to leave the apartment. He put up with all this with great dignity and seldom complained. Fritz liked facts. He enjoyed reading popular science. He and I shared a liking for the books of Richard Dawkins.
Edith, at the age of 85, is still very much in demand at the Viennese law courts, where she is a legal translator. She usually works on asylum or drugs cases, most involving Nigerians on legal aid. She is very experienced in this work although has no legal qualifications. This does not stop her from giving advice to both highly qualified lawyer and heavy heroin dealer. "Now, you've got to understand. You're committing murder by instalment. Think about it - it's not a good way for a young man to spend his life".
We walked a couple of hundred metres along her street to the restaurant at the Hundertwasser Kunsthaus. Hundertwasser was a wonderful graphic artist who shaped this large house as a space in which to show his work. The building now contains no straight lines and has a lovely organic feel, brightly coloured ceramic tiles forming rounded shapes on walls, columns and any other handy surface. I was really impressed with Hundertwasser's work when I first saw it back in the mid 70s. Edith is a regular at the restaurant and good friends with the man who holds the lease. "He's in terrible financial trouble", she explained. "He owes a lot of money in unpaid tax". Apparently this guy spent 700,000 schillings on flowers and plants when the restaurant opened. She thinks he won't last more than a few months. She also told us that the Kunsthaus itself was sold to the Vienna Corporation for one euro after Hundertwasser died about ten years ago. This was also to do with unpaid tax. Anyway, Edith comes here often as it's just down the road and she can get her favourite food, croquet potatoes.
Edith has been reading Bruce Chatwyn's 'Songlines' and made several references to her concept of songlines over supper. Talking about the path of her long life, she said "That's my songline, you see" and, of others, "That's where their songlines crossed over". She is also very aware of the constant change that carries us through our lives and how we are different people at different times. A bit like not being able to step twice into the same river, as Heraclitus put it. She also explained that she thinks a bit like Eastern philosophers who talk about the journey being more important than the arrival. (They never flew on Ryan Air). Her perception of all this, now, is that she is more than just the journey. "I am the path", she announced as her croquet potatoes arrived.
After the meal, and further stimulating conversation, we walked back to the Hotel Post where I noticed lines of thin wire spikes sticking up from all its window ledges. No Perching.
Good Breeding
Vienna has wonderful, imposing architecture in abundance. Many of the buildings, with their double-headed imperial eagles, were, formerly, palaces because of Vienna's position as capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The emperors all came from the von Hapsburg dynasty, starting with Rudolf in 1278. The empire lasted until after the first World War. One of the reasons for this endurance was that the Hapsburgs consistently allied themselves through marriage with other powerful European families. That's good breeding.
For several centuries the Austro-Hungarian empire covered much of Europe and managed, on various occasions, to stop the Turks from moving into Europe. The Turks attacked Vienna itself in 1529 but the central part of the city, the Innere Stadt, was successfully defended. The Turks attacked again in 1683 and were again defeated.
Leopold was emperor when most of the great Baroque architecture and music was created in Vienna. Maria-Theresa (1740-80) also found time to encourage Mozart and Haydn, despite having sixteen children. In 1805, Napoleon turned up on his way to Austerlitz and was accomodated at Maria-Theresa's former palace at Schonbrun. After Napoleon had finished his warring and fighting, the Congress of Vienna took place in 1815, during which Europe was carved up into new spheres of power.
The empire prevailed. The last emperor, Franz Josef, ruled for sixty eight years from 1848 until the end of the empire in 1916. He must have suffered terrible grief in his life. His son committed suicide in Mayerling, his wife was assasinated in Geneva and his other son, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Hapsburg was famously shot in Sarajevo, the event triggering the first World War.
Expressiv! at the Albertina
Walking through the centre of Vienna I noticed some well designed skulls carved on tombstones on the front wall of the Stephansdom. We passed Kapuzin House where most of the Hapsburgs are buried. We saw fiacres, young men dressed and hairstyled like Mozart, chocolate Mozart balls and posters showing Mozart's silhouette. Poor old Mozart himself lived and died more or less a pauper. One of the greatest crimes against humanity.
We were on our way to a beautiful art gallery in the Albertina Palace, founded in 1781 and named after Maria Theresa's son-in-law Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen. The exhibition was called Expressiv! First we had a drink in the cafe. My tea came in the form of a Darjeeling tea bag and a glass teapot containing hot water. That was a first for me, the glass teapot. We took our time, looking across at the imposing imperial buildings, roofs and eagles green with verdigris. Across to our left was a huge statue of Feldmarschall Erzherzog Albrecht von Oesterreich (1817 - 95) on horseback.
Inside the Albertina we walked through a white marble hall of mirrors, lots of Jackys everywhere. In a spacious side room, again white, classical and hyper-refined, were ten statues of the Greek Muses and an amazingly ornate candelabra. We gave the Prunkraume a miss, not liking the name very much.
The exhibition was an unusually extensive one about the artists who belonged to the Kunstlergruppe 'Die Brucke' - 'The Bridge'. It included many works from the private collection of a man called Hermann Gerlinger. The Brucke group was founded in Dresden by Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmitt-Rotluff and friends in 1905. Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde joined in the following year. The group's manifesto was refreshingly idealistic, including statements like "We intend to obtain freedom of action and of life against the well-established older forces". Still quite a good idea.
It's one of life's rare treats to have nothing to do but wander around a large art gallery on a weekday morning. I loved Schmitt-Rotluff's 'Morgen an der Elbe', Nolde's 'Boot Im Scilf' (Boat in the Reeds') and Kirchner's woodcut 'In Einem Atelier, 1905'. A couple of Kirchner's wood printing blocks were on display. He took prints from both sides of the block, presumably for reasons of economy. In German, these double-sided panels are called 'Doppelseitiger Holzstock'. One of Nolde's colour lithographs shows a group of people in a bar with a piano. It's called "Tingel-Tangel", which was translated as "Honky-Tonk". Jacky drew a thumbnail sketch of Kirchner's "Tanzarin mit Gehobenem Rock" - "Dancer with a Raised Skirt".
We enjoyed Heckel's woodcuts of figures with mask-like heads at right angles to their bodies, Kirchner's "Bathing Scene with Hanging Branches", Schmitt-Rotluff's "Woman with Open Hair" (Aufgelostren Haar). Several of the works showed influences from African tribal art and from Gauguin, like whom most of the artists here seem to have shared thoughts about freedom, noble savages and nubile young brown girls. The last room was taken by Otto Mueller, whose paintings almost exclusively depicted female nudes, euphemistically referred to as 'bathers', lolling about in Arcadian tropical paradises. This rather confirmed our suspicions that the delightful paintings we had been admiring were strongly imbued with a sort of northern European male fantasy.
"There don't seem to be any noble savage blokes", I observed.
"No", replied Jacky, "And there aren't any old people either".
Despite this, we had both found the exhibition rather beautiful and happy. I was, however, jolted out of this happy state on reading about what happened to Kirchner. After a short time in a military unit, the sensitive Kirchner was freaked out by the idea of violence and shooting guns. In 1917, the information sheet informed us, Kirchner "retired to absolute solitude, living in an alpine hut on the Stafelalp". Later, after the Nazis had become popular, Kirchner's paintings were pronounced to be "un-German". In a letter from the 1930s, he had written "War is in the air. In the museums, the culture that has been achieved with great effort over the past twenty years is now being destroyed". On the 15th of June, in 1938, Ludwig Kirchner shot himself. He had become addicted to alcohol during the First World War.
We met Edith for lunch at the Mozart cafe opposite the Albertina not far from a series of sculptures made as a 'Memorial Against War and Fascism'. I was disappointed that we arrived too late for the lunch of the day, Rindsuppe mit Champignonschoberl followed by Schweinskarreebraters im Krautermantel mit Erdapfelgratin. Instead I had a typical Viennese meal of three kinds of Austrian sausages, two jars of mustard and a pot of vicious grated horseradish.
Beschwipserl In The Judenplatz
The information board for the Memorial Against War and Fascism read 'After 12 May 1938 Jewish citizens of Vienna were forced to scrub the streets that had been smeared with slogans'. One element of the memorial is a life-size bronze figure of a crouching Jewish man, presumably scrubbing the pavement with a toothbrush. On his back are some lengths of barbed wire, suggesting to me the concentration camp. But no. "They put the barbed wire there to stop people sitting on it", Edith explained. She said sometimes when you talk about this period Viennese people say "Oh, why are you going on about that - it was a long time ago, I wasn't around when that happened". Edith usually responds something like "Well, you weren't around when Mozart was alive but you don't mind talking about him".
I glugged on my glass of red wine and Edith promptly explained that the Austrian word for tipsy is 'beschwipserl'. Makes you wobble just to say it and onomatapoeic as well. After lunch we wandered through the city, stopping for a schnapps at the Lederhof tavern. Round the corner was the Judenplatz, the heart of the former Jewish area, where two hundred Jews were burned alive in 1421. Some sort of barbecue. During this particular pogrom, the Vienna synagogue was dismantled and its stones used to build part of the university. Jews were expelled from the city for a couple of centuries until in the 1620s they were allowed to come back and settle in a ghetto on marshland by the Danube in Leopoldstadt.
1938 was the annus horribilis, the year of the 'Kristallnacht' pogrom, when twenty three of the city's twenty four synagogues were smashed up, along with all Jewish shops, windows shattered, and many Jewish homes. On March 13, Hitler drove triumphantly into Vienna, to the cheers of several hundred thousand Austrians. They were celebrating the 'Anschluss', the German annexation of Austria.
There were about 180,000 Jews living in Vienna at that time. 65,000 of them were killed. One of them, Rella Eltes, was Jacky's paternal grandmother. One day in 1938, the SS visited her apartment. They took Rella and her husband, Josef, away. Jacky's dad Erwin and his brother 'Uncle Fred', then aged 15 and 16, were left behind in the flat to wait, worry and wonder. After a day or two their father returned. Rella had been detained and they never saw their mother again. Jacky's dad had a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty. The main charge against Rella was that she had lined her underwear drawer with an old newspaper on which there was a photograph of Hitler. "You have insulted the Fuhrer by putting your nasty Jewish knickers on his photograph". Rella died in a concentration camp, possibly Belsen, possibly Auschwitz, possibly an establishment near the French border. We are not sure. Erwin, Fred and their father made their way, after many months of travel across Europe, on a journey that took in Marseilles, to England. They were interned on the Isle of Man, just in case they were enemy aliens. Yeah, highly likely....
Jacky's parents always said that the Austrians behaved even worse than the German Nazis. The Berlitz Pocket Guide to Vienna says that "The expulsion and extermination of the Jews left a great stain on the city and a gaping hole in the cosmopolitan culture in which the Jews had played such an important role". A great stain. Rella's spotlessly clean knickers on Hitler's dirty face.
There is a memorial in the Judenplatz to the sixty five thousand Viennese Jews killed by the Nazis. It is a large cube of concrete which you could be forgiven for mistaking for a public convenience. It is actually a powerful work of art by Rachel Whiteread. It is an idea, set into a concrete reality, that reverberates around your mind for a long time afterwards. It's like a library, rows of concrete books on concrete shelves, but with their spines on the inside, so you see only the opposite edges to the spines. You cannot see their titles. You do not know the names of their authors. At the front of the cube are two large concrete doors which have no handles. This is a library that you can never enter. You can discover nothing about the people who wrote these books, these lives, these memories, feelings, experiences. But you will know that they were there.
On the way back to the Post we passed the Greek Orthodox Church along the Fleisch Markt. A lovely, Byzantine building, on the ground floor of which is a shop. Orient Teppisches. S.P. Issakides, Import Export. "Oh yes", said Edith, "Mr. Issakides was one of Pappi's best customers". Edith's father had traded in oriental carpets. He ran away from his home in Baghdad ( as lots of people are doing now) to Istanbul and later moved to Vienna where he met Mutti, Edith's mother, who was working in a shoe shop.
Later, we went round to Edith's flat and had sauerkraut with Frankfurters. I tried on several pairs of Fritzl's shoes. None of them were right. A bit strange putting on the shoes of a man who couldn't walk.
Minerals and Deathsuckers
More skulls the next morning. Two young men came into the breakfast room dressed identically in shorts and black t-shirts on which there were white skulls, crossed swords and the words 'Naked Riders'.
We passed Goethe on the tram to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, at the bottom of Goethegasse. He was covered in verdigris like the statues in London are covered in bird lime. Harry Lime. Getting off the tram we saw lots of people smoking as they walked along in the fresh air. "They're sucking on death", Jacky observed. Deathsuckers. I took a snap of a crocodile at the base of a fountain and noticed, also, that Anthony Gormley had been busy installing standing figures on the top of the museums.
We went first to the Naturhistor Museum. Jacky wanted to show me the stones that make up the marvellous Systematische Mineraliensammlung, the systematic minerals collection. It must have contained many thousand bits of rock, most about the size of a fist, all displayed in wood-framed glass cases, dozens of which ran, in serried ranks, across several rooms. At first sight, it all looked incredibly boring. But when I started looking carefully, it gradually became totally amazing. Things like a psychedelic block of malachite next to a huge lump of translucent aragonite which looked as if it should have been in a bathroom.
In one room there was a large block of pale pinky-orange material, as tall as me, entitled 'Steinsalz von Pendjab. Geschenk des Hrn. T. Oldham in Calcutta 1873'. It reminded me of a poster made at a workshop I did with art students in the Punjab. Chandigarh 1985. Many people in the southern part of the Punjab could only get very saline water to drink from their wells. Prolonged drinking of this water gave people pains in their joints, back ache, bladder stones and yellow teeth. I was looking at a small part of the problem. It was pinky-orange. Next to it stood an even taller obelisk of salt from the Banya Saline Mine. Then bright yellow smithsonite from Sardinien and magenta spharocobaltit from Shaba , Zaire. Rhodocrosite from Mine Capillitas, Argentina, azurit from Medjankes in Poland. Malachite that looked like a brain, from Falkenstein in the Tirol, more malachite from Burra Burra in Australia, from Katanga in the Congo, from Durango in Mexico, Guangdong in China, Tsumeb in SW Africa, Siberien in the USSR, Arizona and Elba. Malachite everywhere.
Incredible what the earth is made of, such diversity. Some charming pieces of baryt from Frizington in England. A football-sized geode of coelestin from the Vallee de la Sofia in Madagaskar. Turquoise and azure blue krohnkit from Chuquicamata in Chile. A huge block of gypsum from Utah and a small, pale yellow piece of beaverit from Beaver County, also in Utah. A knob of krokoit from Congohas do Campo in Brasil. Metavoltin from Madeni Zakh in Persia. Olivenite from Redruth in Cornwall next to herderit from Gilgit in Pakistan next to vayrywenit from Viitaniemi in Finland. Lime green pyromorphit from Roughtengills in England, gypsum with hoar-frost on it from Murcia in Spain, babingtonite from Zhougguo in China, hiddenit from Nuristan in Afghanistan, apatite from Salzburg, vivianite from Anoua in Cameroon, lazulith auf quartz from Big Fish, Yukon, Canada, sapphirius from Bakersville, North Carolina and nephritic jade from British Columbia. Fluorescent aragonite from Derbyshire and anglesit from Leadhills in Scotland, all fluorescing in glorious technicolour - yellow, orange, blue-violet.
I was pretty 'stoned' by the time I reached Saal IV, another palatial room with a parquet floor and decorated ceiling. Around the upper part of the walls were twenty large, legless figures each holding a big crystal, a lump of rock or supported by an outcrop of quartz or examining slabs of granite. The sculptor must have had a great time. In between the statues were grand paintings of landscapes showing different types of rock in their natural environment.
That was the only Natural History Museum I've visited without seeing a single plant or animal. They were there, of course, but we were full up with minerals.
In Breughel's Room
One of Vienna's greatest treasures is the Breughel room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Despite being full up with stones, we needed a quick shot of Breughel. On the way, we looked at Breughel's son Jan the Elder's painting of a vase of flowers against a black background. It shows around 130 different types of flower. Before farmers started using chemical sprays. Round the corner were some Archimboldos including 'Wasser', a face made up of eels, crabs, fish, lobsters, octopi and squid. He'd have loved Photoshop. I was surprised to learn that Archimboldo had been appointed court painter, in 1562, for Vienna and Prague.
Pieter Breughel lived in The Netherlands, some of which we saw from our KLM flights into and out of Amsterdam on the way here, between about 1525 and 1569. So, he died when Shakespeare was five. His room is absolutely awesome but still very human and comforting. That feeling of being in the presence of something great. 'Hunters In The Snow', blue lead grey icy colours, hunters returning to their village with knackered dogs and just a single dead fox. Cold crows in beautifully painted bare branches dark against the wintry sky. The landscape spreading itself out below the hill in the foreground, on which a bramble seems to be shooting out defiantly, as if spring were coming. Looking as close at it as I could (Jacky had already been told off for drinking out of her mineral water bottle) I could see for miles and miles to the furthest village.
Then the wonderful and wonderfully entitled 'The Gloomy Day'. One of those days when you just don't want to get out of bed. A few blokes half-heartedly pollarding willows or gathering faggots for the fire. A day to be endured. One of the six seasons in Breughel's series about the rolling round of the year. Then the 'Turmbau zu Babel' where all the languages of the world are spoken, so much confusion that the builders can't finish their work. The famous 'Kinderspiele' in which two hundred and thirty children are painted playing eighty three different games. "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent', two halves of human nature. At Carnival time a pig roasting on a spit, a man playing a guitar. In Lent only fish and cripples, beggars, blind men, polio victims, amputees. A tavern on the left, a church on the right. The "Bauern Tanz', the peasant dance, podgy bagpiper, couples leaping, getting pissed in the warm glow of a country fair. And, of course, the most famous of all 'Bauernhochzeit', a high old time at the 'Peasant's Wedding'. According to Flemish tradition, the bridegroom was not invited to the wedding feast. Saal X.
Leberknodel at the Prater
Third Man territory. Big wheel, big meadow, pasture, prater so Edith says. This is near where she lived until she was ten. She had spent that morning in prison talking to a Sierra Leonean heroin dealer/addict and his legal aid lawyer. We had lunch outside at the park restaurant, hot and sunny. I thought I'd try the Rindsuppe mit Leberknodel mainly because of the words. Edith explained that the knodel, or dumpling, was made from the liver and lung of a cow. It was fine for a vegetarian.
And that was about it. That evening we were confined to barracks because of a long-lasting thunderstorm. We sat in the bar of the Hotel Post with the windows open to try and cool the place down a bit while the rain poured down against the light from the streetlamps on Fleisch Markt. On the flight back, I finished 'Don Quixote' which I had started several weeks and 940 pages ago.
Edith goes on being the path. We bring our songlines back with us and, sitting here at home I try to imagine how lonely it must be at number 17/12 Untereweissgerber Strasse.
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