Night in Vienna

On the Ring the sight of the Burgtheater recalls Thomas Bernhard’s at times grotesquely funny 1984 novel Holzfällen, which for a while turns into a rather good play, once the Actor appears, to ramble on and on about Ekdal in The Wild Duck, even while slogging through his dinner party soup. Suicide is a theme – the funeral earlier in the day has been for a woman who hangs herself, in some detail – but by then its treatment has turned blackly comic, as in when the host asks the Actor if working at Vienna’s Burgtheater wouldn’t give someone every reason to do that. Before the end, as if to stress the point, the host also waves his false teeth in the Actor’s face.

Behind the theatre can be found Harry Lime’s doorway in The Third Man (1949), where Orson Welles first appears by the smooth, sloping cobbles of Schreyvogelgasse. The first time I stood in, there was still daylight but lights shone from scattered windows. They reflected in others. Evening traffic hummed and rumbled on the nearby Ringstrasse, beyond which the university rose in the dusk.

After the Freyung square, on Herrengasse a drunk American woman (“I’m a human rights defender” blah blah) wanted “twenty or thirty euros for a hotel” (i.e. for more drink). You must be f*cking joking, I thought, before I walked on (“Eh, no”). Looking back I saw her simply waiting for the next man to pass.

Further down Herrengasse, the Café Central was in darkness for the night. One evening in that café, a young French girl came back to my table, blushing, looking for her annotated city map. I offered her mine but hers had “mes notes”, while another French girl, alone at the next table, read Freud. Trois essais sur la théorie sexuelle. I’d already read somewhere that France had six hundred thousand psychology students.

The French are always value for money in Vienna. I’d only arrived in the city another night when I overheard a phone conversation on an underground platform that began with, Je sors du concert. C’était supérieur. Is this the only foreign place that cuts their mustard?

It was a New Year’s Eve when I set off to find Berggasse and Freud’s apartment, even though I presumed it would be closed. It wasn’t. It was packed. A mixed French group pushed the street door ahead of me. Upstairs a stubbly Frenchman with a woolly cap didn’t bother going in. His wife turned to him. Tu restes au café en face? He chuckled and nodded. Il y a un sex shop en face.

The people jumping the ‘queue’ to swarm around the entrance desk had been more of an illustration of Alinsky’s key psychological principle – that people only push to get on a bus they think has limited seating – than anything Freudian. Schlange means both queue and snake in German but there, one couldn’t dream of either.

At the hotel that same night I ended up talking to the man from Kiev behind the desk, comparing the death tolls of the Irish and Ukrainian famines. He must have asked me something about Ireland for us to jump on to that topic but in fairness he was curious about Irish dancing as well. He imitated the arms held down by the dancers’ sides, a style I explained was ordained by the puritanical priesthood. Das war ein Befehl von den Priestern. Sonst, zu sexy.

He didn’t want to pin Holodomor on Stalin, just “die Moskau Regierung” (the Moscow government), and I wasn’t going to argue with him about the 1930s. Not on New Year’s Eve. My impression was that he missed the USSR. He was proud of Nikita Khruschev and Ukrainian generals and a nearby monument to the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front. I’d have guessed he didn’t care much for Jews either, though all he did was express sympathy for the Palestinians. Woher kamen diese Juden? (‘Where did those Jews come from?’)

Though he’d claimed Rokossovsky was Ukrainian, that invited a later check. The Marshal was of Polish origin and spent almost three years as a prisoner of the State from 1937 until his release without explanation in 1940, during which time he somehow never signed any false statement. He later told his daughter that he always carried a revolver so they would not take him alive if they ever came for him again.

From Herrengasse one can get to Graben via Am Hof or via Hofburg and Kohlmarkt. Behind Peterskirche (the green dome over the lit window) one finds the vintage Gutruf, which is best known as the haunt of Helmut Qualtinger (1928-86) (see below). It’s a gemütlich place for drink and food but knowing at least some German is advisable there.

For me, the best book about Vienna is the German version (the English version is a travesty) of the extraordinary early diaries of Alma Schindler, before she married Gustav Mahler, who basically drove her cracked, as the Irish phrase puts it.

Take this example from 24 September 1899, which only appears in the German. Rosa Kornbluh was a friend who had a weird experience with Gustav Klimt on an Italian train, where he terrified her in a tunnel. That much is in Beaumont’s translation but on this day Alma details Rosa stalking her Italian fiancé. He had come to Vienna but hadn’t let her know. She ran into him on Graben and followed him into the cathedral, where she fainted. When she came around, he told her he’d thought she was in Budapest. Alma then describes two occasions watching the pair at the opera. The second time she sees them sitting together in a porch during an intermission. ‘He: sulky and silent. She: like a sleepwalker, excited, with glazed eyes. She must be crazy… He has my sympathy now… He cannot save himself from her, from her love, from her jealousy.’ Er kann sich ja nicht retten vor ihr, vor ihrer Liebe, vor ihrer Eifersucht.

Turning back south towards the Ring, I emerged at the back of the Opera House. In doing so I passed the junction of Führichgasse and Tegetthofstrasse. On 15 November 1961 Austrian television broadcast the hour-long dramatic monologue Der Herr Karl. It was set in the basement store room of a Viennese delicatessen. Therein a middle-aged character called Karl talked to an unseen younger colleague while intermittently replying to the voice of his female boss upstairs and helping himself to samples of the stock. The public response to the play about a Nazi Mitläufer (fellow traveller) was uproar but the hour had made the performer – Helmut Qualtinger – immortal.

Der Herr Karl was no invention from scratch. Another actor, Nikolaus Haenel, had worked in such a deli and with such a character just after the war. The establishment stood on the corner of Führichgasse and Tegetthofstrasse and the chap was called Max, though Haenel forgot his surname. Nevertheless he later drew a picture of a bespectacled and rather thin-faced figure, aged about fifty, with a moustache a little wider than Hitler’s. While going through the motions at work, stocking shelves and mopping the floor, this Man of the Crowd had told Haenel his life story.

Years later, Haenel became aware that Qualtinger was in search of a character with a Nazi past so he approached him with the idea of Max. Though Qualtinger was still in his early thirties and much heavier than the original, he was intrigued and the pair met in a restaurant over three or four days, wherein Haenel told him all he remembered and Qualtinger took copious notes, which he later turned into a script with his writing partner, Carl Merz.

One of my favourite images from the city’s history is of Qualtinger and Falco having a laugh in what looks like the Gutruf. The Viennese humour known as Wiener Schmäh has been linked by Georg Markus to Vienna’s ethnic mix. He defines it as including melancholy, sarcasm and a little malice. It’s more than ten years now (2008) since my first night in Vienna, when I got talking to two Austrian chaps in a bar on Schwarzenbergstrasse. They asked if I spoke any German. It was rusty then. I know the words of Rock Me Amadeus. They said Falco was a hero, in death. He’d undergone a posthumous resurgence in popularity at home, as the things he’d said had come to make more sense. The autumn day (2013) I found Falco’s grave in the sunshine and falling leaves of the huge Zentralfriedhof, the main cemetery, it was peppered by the smell of sewage wafting up from the shores on the lanes.

Despite Claudio Magris’ Danube being largely pretentious verbiage, he couldn’t ruin everything with his waffle. Some of the material is just too strong. The funniest part of his book is set in the early hours in the Zentralfriedhof, in the company of one Herr Baumgartner and his shotgun. The weapon is used, for example, on the hares that have a “passion” for tearing up and eating the pansies left by mourners. It is not quite a free-fire zone, though, as Herr Baumgartner has to answer for any graves or offerings damaged or shattered or bloodied or peppered by stray buckshot in the dark.

Wien ist anders. Vienna is different.