I’d passed through Hitler’s hometown before I ever got out there. In a heatwave in August 2015, a Hamburg gentleman of about sixty spotted me at breakfast in Vienna, applying a serviette to my face. He came over, hoarsely repeating the German word for Hell.
Hölle! Hölle!
On the train to Salzburg that day my mother and I got talking to a retired American couple who’d sold their house in upstate New York to move to Florida. I think Bob sold his mass of Waterford glass on eBay. His wife had fallen off the train that had brought them as far as Linz. I didn’t ask why they had come by Linz. They were thinking of squeezing in the Sound of Music tour, despite the evident lack of enthusiasm of the holiday planner, their daughter.
We left Salzburg two mornings later. In the station a black vintage train pulled up at our platform. Uniformed serving staff jumped out to unravel short rolls of red carpet below each carriage door. Who could these passengers be? They were Australian tourist casualties from Linz. They had to be practically carried off. One old lady was handed down a set of wheels like those that belong in a nursing home. The next woman out that door was a bit younger and had better pins but she sported a broken arm.
I got off in Linz that December. Down past Hauptplatz the bridge over the Danube crosses to the Urfahr end of the city. The car lights on the bridge shone through the murk as an icy mist blew up from the water. After heading back I found a small and dark pub down a long tunnel that is typical of Upper Austria. The pretty young blonde behind the counter didn’t know what a hot whiskey was so I had a few bottles of Weizenbier instead. My eyes at times were stinging with the smoke, long banned in Ireland, as the place filled up.
It was small and dark but there was a lot of people then and it was amazing how the girl handled it alone. Some people were coming to the counter, some were ordering from tables, some were paying up front, some were running a tab. When the boss turned up and held a full ashtray under her nose, as an admonition, she rolled her eyes (“Ah, du spasst mich”) and shook her head.
The guy next to me at the counter wouldn’t have looked out of place among the crew of U-96 (Das Boot), down with all the scraggy beards and hunted eyes. He said the informal people of Upper Austria hadn’t much use for Sie, except with Polizei und Richter (police and judges). He ordered something that looked like a grilled slice of a large brown loaf, topped with some cheese etc. He told me what it was called (Holzknecht) and then I had it too, a traditional meal for poor people working in the woods.
The next night saw a different barmaid there, a dark girl with exotic eyes. I got talking to a bespectacled young darts fan who was only into the darts on TV because some Austrian had qualified for the last whatever of the world championship. J. wasn’t the only person during this trip to ask, Warum Österreich? As for why Austria, I referred to a quote from the actor Christoph Waltz.
Austrians tend to make their lives easier, so first of all they are very polite and second they don’t mean it… The difference between Austrians and Germans is very much like Irish and English.
The down-to-earth impression made by Linz that first time brought me back for a couple of days in October 2017. While we were enjoying coffee and dessert in the elegant Café Traxlmayr, a pair of retired ladies chatting intently over a couple of tall beers attracted the attention of my wingman.
Fair play to the two old dears, tanning the pints in the middle of the day.
That night, we ended up in the small, dark place once more. The girl with the striking eyes was behind the counter. They were green, interesting, hard to read. I took a photo of a young chap buckled at a table where she kindly left a pint of water.
On the train to Vienna in the morning, a row developed between the couple sitting at the table across from ours. She was on the phone for a long time first, a good-looking girl with faintly Asiatic features. Russian, I guessed, from a few words I could make out, such as mozhnó, droog and rabot. When he wasn’t eating (an apple, a banana, other stuff) or sleeping behind a hanging jacket, he spoke to her in English and his accent was Germanic (i.e. Austrian).
They had a weekend engagement in Vienna, so flowers and a present had to be bought for their hosts, but first he wanted to deposit her at the Albertina while he walked around. Unfortunately for her, it seemed he intended for her to carry three bags while at the museum. “I’m shocked,” she said, several times. She also observed that he was “the man in this couple”, which had Mr. Sensitive asking how she managed whenever she was on her own. She countered with, “But I’m not on my own now” so Prince Charming offered to carry one of the bags.
Several times I’ve gone back to Linz. At the Hotel Wolfinger my fourth-floor room overlooked the Hauptplatz rather impressively. I could hear a clarinet by one of the cafés below my window. The trams rolled up and down through the long square with a steady rumble.
It was a quiet Sunday night, the night an old nutter with a cravat and smelly feet marched in with his sunglasses on. He started causing hassle about the pub service, the drink and the music. Diese Musik ist Gift für mich! Poison it may have been to him but it wasn’t even loud. Feeling a mixture of irritation and gallantry, I used du when telling him in exasperation to leave the girl with the exotic eyes alone and just wait for his Guinness to settle. In a how-dare-you tone of voice he announced he had a doctorate (“Summa cum laude” blahdy blah). When I said that so did I (“Ja? Ich auch.”), he then said he had TWO of them. Then he called the cops to report the impudent Gast at the counter but he quickly paid up and fled when the barmaid told him she’d had enough of him. She called the owner. Soon two cops walked in, so we had to do a bit of explaining. Anyway, the Polizei seemed to be somehow familiar with this character and his antics and they soon left us in peace. We did a gentle high five before she observed the nut-job wasn’t as bad as the Nazi who had thrown a pint over her, some other night.
It wasn’t the only boozer in Linz where I saw someone get barred. In a heavy metal bar, the metal from the speakers was generally boring but it wasn’t too loud. One entrant to the pub was refused service. The rather pissed but well-dressed, middle-class gentleman was in a better state than many drunks at home. All he did to cause offence was bow extravagantly to the rockers at the low tables but, anyway, a good suit must be the new long hair, to be met with a frown and expulsion.
The last time I went to Linz, pre-Covid, it was January 2019 and the landscape in Austria was snowy and icy. On the train an Elvis impersonator – der König – sat down with his kit bag nearby before I moved to the dining car, where the low drone of a deep American voice was a constant. It went on and on about a cookery class. The man’s hair, like the King’s, was a mite darker than it should have been at his age.
Having checked into the hotel, I had to get something quick to eat. The cold froze my arse in a heavy snowfall on the way down Landstrasse to the famous Bosner Eck hotdog stand. The lights of that long street looked wonderful through the brief blizzard but I was almost sick with the cold. Back at the hotel I donned a pair of pyjama leggings before heading to the pub.
One Stammgast (regular) called S. told a story about getting his own back on some Russians, who had spiked him with gherkins injected with vodka, by spiking them with an Austrian wine elixir called Sturm, which also acts as a laxative. In his workplace he was “Herr Doktor”, of course, though he did amusingly describe the German managerial habit of shouting as useless for Austrian productivity.
His face dropped a little only when I included Mauthausen in the list of the Austrian places I’d visited. Normally I omit that but this time I threw it in, for the hell of it.
On one of the trains I’ve taken out of Linz sat a retired nurse. After I put her heavy bag up on the rack we chatted all the way to Vienna. Her parents came from Steyr. She said they had never bought into the Nazi fad and added that her father had taken sustained pleasure after the war in reminding those who did that they had done so. In Austrian culture it seems no one admitting to have cheered Hitler on Heldenplatz in Vienna in 1938 is the other side of the comic coin of the Irish once all claiming to have been in the GPO for Easter 1916.
Dr. John Flynn 