The Joker of Vienna

The most popular piece in the five years of this site (founded April 2016)

Dr. John Flynn

In one sense immortal after the dramatic monologue Der Herr Karl (1961), Helmut Qualtinger died in 1986 soon after giving a memorable film performance as the heretical monk Remigio da Varagine in The Name of the Rose. Apart from his career as writer, actor and cabaret singer, though, he was also a genius mimic and hoaxer, sometimes at a serious personal cost, at least before he developed his art of mischief.

One thing he craved professionally as an adult was to be taken seriously as a writer. His case echoes in part the jailing of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton in 1962 for their campaign of altering London library books with funny collages and false blurbs. Reports on their trial included a banner headline in the Daily Mirror (“Gorilla in the Roses” referred to a monkey’s head pasted to the cover of the Collins Guide to Roses) and…

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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.

Qualtinger: the Joker of Vienna

In one sense immortal after the dramatic monologue Der Herr Karl (1961), Helmut Qualtinger died in 1986 soon after giving a memorable film performance as the heretical monk Remigio da Varagine in The Name of the Rose. Apart from his career as writer, actor and cabaret singer, though, he was also a genius mimic and hoaxer, sometimes at a serious personal cost, at least before he developed his art of mischief.

One thing he craved professionally as an adult was to be taken seriously as a writer. His case echoes in part the jailing of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton in 1962 for their campaign of altering London library books with funny collages and false blurbs. Reports on their trial included a banner headline in the Daily Mirror (“Gorilla in the Roses” referred to a monkey’s head pasted to the cover of the Collins Guide to Roses) and news of it even made it as far as the pages of the Reader’s Digest. As Orton’s biographer John Lahr wrote

Rejected by the literary world, they made a spectacle of published books and the public that evaded them. They turned the library into a little theatre where they watched people reacting to their productions. It was one way of getting into print and making their statement.

Qualtinger’s desire to turn the world into his playground began much sooner. Quasi, as he was later known, was a lonely child but he got a puppet theatre as a present and entertained other kids with it while on holiday in Styria. There he’d perform fairy tales but, like the anarchist he already was, he omitted the moral lessons at his own whim. Back in Vienna, some envious classmates ambushed him on the street, smashed the lot and broke his hand in the struggle, having earlier warned him not to bring it to school anymore.

Not yet seventeen, he made his first real public appearance in Vienna in May 1945. He wore a large red star pinned to his chest and a red armband with Cyrillic letters sewn onto it. This was part of an attempt to pass himself off as a ‘culture kommissar’ while improvising Russian-sounding gibberish and carrying a poorly forged letter of recommendation. He was still only sixteen, after all, and was soon imprisoned for three months for commandeering a villa in the suburb of Währing as a base for his proposed communist theatre. By the time his mother returned to Vienna and got him out, his weight had dropped to seven and a half stone.

Nonetheless he wasn’t finished pretending to be a Russian. When a friend couldn’t get paid by a newspaper editor, Quasi ‘borrowed’ a Russian officer’s uniform and marched boldly through the American sector of Vienna towards his quarry. Improvising more Russian mutterings, he confronted the editor in his office. The guy quickly grasped the mentions of Siberia before paying up on the spot.

In 1951 Qualtinger pilfered some stationery from the Austrian branch of the international writers’ association PEN. On it, he notified the press and radio about the imminent arrival in Vienna of the famous Eskimo author Kobuk, whose Greenland trilogy Nordlicht über Iviktut was being filmed by MGM as Of Ice and Men.

On the rest of Kobuk’s impressive CV, it is something of a pity that the masterpiece sometimes rendered as The Burning Igloo was actually two separate classics. These were Brennende Arktis (‘Burning Arctic’) and Einsames Iglu (‘Lonesome Igloo’) but how nobody in Vienna copped on to the incongruity of the title of Kobuk’s drama, The Republic of the Penguins, remains a mystery.

At any rate, a crowd of reporters gathered on 3 July 1951 at Vienna’s Westbahnhof. Instead of the great Kobuk, it was Quasi himself, concealed by a fur jacket, a fur cap and sunglasses, who got off the train. Asked for his first impression of Vienna, he broke the spell by answering the throng in Viennese dialect. “Haaß is’!” (‘It’s hot!’).

Perhaps his most god-like prank played out over thirty years later in America. Quasi, still in Vienna, phoned the celebrated Austrian psychiatrist Friedrich Hacker, who spent most of his time in California. Pretending to be Ronald Reagan’s private secretary, Helene von Damm, who was also Austrian, he told Hacker that the President had suddenly gone mad and needed his help. Hacker got on the next plane to Washington and reported to a mystified Frau von Damm at the White House.

Our last anarchic moment does not really involve Quasi at all, except that he got on the phone to God about it afterwards, in total admiration. It concerns the aftermath of an evening at the Gutruf bar, when his friend Otto Kobalek turned up at a performance of Waiting for Godot. In the theatre Kobalek suddenly appeared on stage, with a plastic bag in his hand. It held a copy of an old futuristic novel, set in that same year. The future had finally become the present.

Waving the contents of the bag, he addressed the astonished actors and audience. Godot ist da. Sie müssen nicht mehr warten (‘Godot is here. You mustn’t wait any longer.’) Then he vanished back into the wings. A tickled Qualtinger called Samuel Beckett himself in Paris with the news. Beckett turned out to be very happy to hear it and sent his warm regards, as he too had always been waiting for this to happen.

PS

Der Herr Karl, a begrudger’s guide

The Schindler Girl

There’s an old saying in the music business. Musicians are a–holes. The first time I heard that, many years ago, it was said by a musician. He was a Dubliner who by then had already spent thirteen years making a living in a Bee Gees tribute act but he based his view on all the bands he had ever been in. The most recent affirmation I came across appeared in a magazine interview with Danny Fields (real name D. Feinberg), former Doors ‘publicist’ and manager of the Ramones.

Mention of the Doors leads on to a qualification at the outset. This is about the young Alma Schindler (1879-1964), with only passing references to her later life. It’s like explaining the reason for being chiefly interested in Jim Morrison and his creativity before he became famous. Why not later? That’s when the bullshit took over.

Die Schindlerin, or the Schindler girl, as the young Alma was often called, was a musician herself but it seems clear from her early diaries (January 1898 – January 1902) that her famous musico-sexual entanglements with Zemlinsky and Mahler were not in her best interests. Treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen, as the chauvinist motto goes. The drama queen Zemlinsky, whom she met in February 1900, was a bad influence on her (and on her diaries, where she eventually becomes a bit of a bore) but at least he did acknowledge that her birth as a girl did her talent no favours in the music world.

Simply put, she had started to think like a groupie. Mahler ‘rescues’ her (and the reader) at the end, if only by virtue of a speedy courtship, but his monstrous demand that she give up composing to be his skivvy demonstrates just how this bad influence evolved in a more fateful direction. I think life with Mahler drove her cracked, as the Irish phrase puts it. After they married, he expected her to open the door for him in silence when he arrived home for lunch and to remain silent for the meal, so that his artistic thoughts would be undisturbed. The joke label of ‘Mahler in the morning’ for the common earnestness of his fans did not appear out of thin air.

Furthermore, in a funny Daily Telegraph review (2004) of Mahler’s Letters to his Wife, Tom Payne observed

“When he failed to buy her a birthday present, he wrote: “What more can one give, when one has already given oneself?” Considering the sacrifices she’d made for him, you’d think a nice hat would have been a start.”

She had sold her soul to Mahler but, given her time and place, there really wasn’t much else a clever and good-looking bourgeois girl with a piano but without a husband could do. Ironically, as the 1898-1902 period in her own words reveals, music was not even where her true artistic talent lay. She was really a writer.

It is vital to note that there are two versions of these diaries:

(a) the German original, deciphered by Susanne Rode-Breymann in collaboration with Antony Beaumont;
(b) the shorter and very different English translation, for which Beaumont alone is responsible.

Though the English one too is packed with incident and observation (and too much material of interest only to musicologists), the introduction is enough to earn the recommendation that the volume should be consumed with caution. For example, it is there that the translator, sneering at Alma’s poor grasp of musical notation, comments that her first teacher – the blind Josef Labor – could only judge her compositions by what he heard. The subject is music, after all, and a complete inability to read it made no difference to Lennon or McCartney or the opinion of their admirers.

Furthermore, the translation is prone to the occasional howler. To give just two examples, he makes ‘physical’ out of psychisch (a passage where Alma contrasts the attractions of two men becomes unintelligible as a result) and – even worse, in the Austrian context – renders Schmäh as ‘smear’. In his history of Austrian humour, Georg Markus links Wiener Schmäh to Vienna’s ethnic mix and defines the particular sense of humour as a mixture of melancholy, sarcasm and a little malice.

By my own count there are also fifty-four important textual omissions in the English version, including several sympathetic remarks about Jews that don’t fit the picture of an antisemitic monster that is often hawked around, even now. The final important omission is her vivid account of a day in late August 1901 that she spent on a mountain hike in the Salzkammergut. Prevented by rain and fog from the final climb up Hainzen (1,638 m or 5,374 ft – I checked) she instead made it to the top of Katrin (1,542 m / 5,059 ft). This demonstrates how vigorous and tough she was (and Beaumont does include the day she extracted one of her own teeth) but it also prefigures how at sixty years of age (in 1940) she was able to lead her second Jewish husband (Franz Werfel) and a motley crew of refugees over the Pyrenees, away from the Nazis.

Alma did admire Hitler on meeting him before the war but she always liked a drink and was wearing champagne goggles at the time. As Rode-Breymann has recently (2015) observed, Sie hätte sich von Werfel trennen können und wie ihr Stiefvater, ihre Halbschwester und deren Mann in die Nationalsozialistische Partei eintreten können (‘She could have separated from Werfel and, like her stepfather, her half-sister and half-sister’s husband, joined the Nazi Party’). Instead, she walked the walk.

So, what kind of writer was she? My initial feeling on spotting all the gaps recalled Noël Coward’s advice to Little Jimmy Osmond. My dear boy, you have Van Gogh’s ear for music. Even more than having such an ear (e.g. for Wiener Schmäh), though, the translator sometimes seems blind to the sheer colour in Alma’s writing.

Several themes loom larger when one studies the omissions. Some important details of her relationship with the painter Gustav Klimt are left out, as are multiple occasions that detail the hassle and harassment that women – in all times and places – experience, which is a topic of particular public interest at the time of writing.

Beaumont does not do enough justice either to her powers of observation, powers of which she herself was very aware. He includes an early passage on the Kaiser’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations (1898) that eerily matches the tone of Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March but, as that of a woman in imperial Austria, her chronicle of the absurd and the farcical more often reads as a counterpoint to Hašek and The Good Soldier Švejk.

The only sensible way to present the most striking of these omissions is chronologically, the source being a diary after all.

1898

30 April
There is a scathing, sarcastic account of a ball thrown by the Austrian railways minister, Wittek, where, in her words, it rained excellencies, counts and barons. She details the exaggerated bowing of the ladies before old toffs and she resents being introduced like an exhibit in a gallery.

5 August
She is still only eighteen and the family is staying at the Franzensbad spa, in western Bohemia, for a funny little bedroom farce with some hotel neighbours. Alma first describes the arrangement of the rooms. A lady has the one beside her mother; beside the lady is the room with two of the lady’s gentlemen friends; then it’s Alma sharing with her sister Gretl; and beside them again lies another one of the lady’s admirers. In the course of the night the lady compensates the poor outlier with a visit, whereupon Gretl wakes Alma to complain about her shaking the bed. Then the girls realise the noise is coming from next door. Bald konnten wir auch eine hohe Frauenstimme vernehmen – und wir wussten alles (‘Soon we could hear a high female voice – and we understood everything’). She adds that their Mama could not get to sleep for a long time, due to the four hearties (Wackeren) drinking champagne, heavily.

16 October
Alma gets propositioned on a Viennese street. A year later Beaumont includes the entry about her being followed by a young man on another street.

13 December
She presents another farce, this time concerning the antics of a singer called Oberstetter who visited their home. Aunt Xandi cleared away the afternoon tea debris into the girls’ room and O. gallantly opened the door for her. He then noticed the girls’ collection of photographs and went in to have a look at them. Alma had raced downstairs in the meantime, in response to the arrival of two unexpected lady visitors. She brought the two ladies upstairs. Alma looked around the living room but O. was not to be seen. Suddenly, in the doorway to her room, a tall young gentleman appeared. The two lady visitors were astonished.

Die Situation war peinlich. A young man, from their bedroom. When the first shock was over, the guests sat down and Aunt Xandi made some small talk. O. now sat backwards at the organ bench, where he busied himself by taking his ring out of his pocket and putting it on, before searching for some sheet music and then disappearing a second time.

Alma decided to present some of her compositional work but the elder of the two lady visitors felt it was disturbing and said goodbye. As they reached the hallway, the door of the mezzanine opened with a great noise. Herr Oberstetter appeared on the scene once more. From behind him came the thunderous sound of water flushing. The elder lady took a few steps back but with just a few words he bounded down the stairs and fiddled with his winter coat. The two ladies greeted him with a slight tilt of the head and skedaddled.

Then came ‘the most beautiful part – the catastrophe’, as Alma puts it. Mama. She was very agitated that O. was even there, when he knew that she had gone to see his wife, so the fact that he had given that a miss offended her vanity. She came charging in ‘like an angry tiger’ and, when she heard the details, she screeched at O.

What, you came out of the girls’ bedroom!? Was the conversation not good enough for you!?

As he later departed, Oberstetter said, Now, I have to tell you, as you’ve done today, no one has ever received me, and I couldn’t help it.

1899

15 March
Alma describes walking home with her mother and Klimt. Her stepfather Carl Moll and a man named Spitzer walked in front of them, while Gretl alone had hurried ahead, deep in her own thoughts. Near the University a horde of drunken students emerged from a coffeehouse. Three of them descended on Gretl. She turned around and waited for Carl and Spitzer. Two of the three moved away but one remained behind her, with glazed eyes, barely able to stand. Carl came up and told him to get lost. He gave some lip, whereupon Carl gave him a slap. The women grabbed at Carl’s arms, trying to calm him down. They were about to move on when one of the onlooking pack shouted something smart. Wie eine wilde Katze, Carl waded in again and began boxing their ears, one after the other. Fortunately, writes Alma, the lads were so drunk that they did not resist, otherwise Carl would be no more. Klimt stood in front of a bunch and told them off, while Gretl kept screaming in her high-pitched voice, ‘Shame on you! Shame on you!’ Mama screamed for the police and started to cry. In freeing himself to get at them, Carl had pushed her violently in the chest. Alma felt temporarily unwell. Her mother was pregnant.

29 March
Of all the events of an extended tour of Italy, the dramatic trip to the edge of the Vesuvius crater is inexplicably left out. After the last stop of the funicular, there was a very hard, ten-minute climb in high ash. Sometimes they had to stop and stand still because the sulphur was so heavy on the chest. Just before they got there, Vesuvius spat a bit more so that head-sized pieces of pumice flew over them. Once they reached the top, they first marvelled at the size of the crater. Inside, it was so green, like an old copper kettle, constantly emitting yellow vapours that hung like a cloud high in the sky. Soon they heard a thunderous sound in the depths, then saw a flash of fire, with the ejection of glowing bits of lava, then a high column of smoke. Just before they left, there was a bigger eruption, so that glowing lava and a shower of ash flew over their heads. Their guide quickly placed some coins in the lava and Carl lit a cigarette with it. The black landscape, the fire, the steam… Ich war so aufgeregt, das mir die Knie zitterten (‘I was so excited that my knees were shaking’).

5 April
Alma is unimpressed by street thuggery in Amalfi and Sorrento. After a journey to Amalfi that had them swallowing dust for three hours, her party watched boys fighting in front of their hotel. One of them ended up lying on the ground, covered in blood. Immediately the speculative begging came to the fore again. The rest pointed to the injured one and asked for money for him – die edlen Feinde (‘the noble enemies’). In Sorrento the day before, Alma’s group was walking down the main street, Via Duomo, when they heard insane yelling. Up to ten boys were stamping on the stomach and head of a small one. Alma and the others drove them away and gave the child a few coins. He was no longer able to stand up on his own and he looked pitiful. Wir kochten alle vor Wuth (‘We all boiled with rage’).

16 April
Klimt’s rigmarole of an explanation as to why he couldn’t marry her is omitted, yet two weeks later, without this ironic preamble, Beaumont includes his fuming expression of the impossibility of them doing anything except blending completely into each other (i.e. he would have to throw the leg over).

When he finally lets her down, she marks the diary day with a cross. This mark is in both versions. Er hat mich kampflos hingegeben, er hat mich verrathen. ‘He gave me up without a fight; he betrayed me.’ This disappointment had a deep effect on her. It sounds so like Claire Zachanassian in Dürrenmatt’s 1950s play Der Besuch der alten Dame (‘The Visit’) … Ich liebte dich. Du hast mich verraten … that is said as the death sentence during her final meeting with Alfred Ill (‘I loved you. You betrayed me.’)

18 May
Again no justice is done to her powers of observation by the omission of the vignette about a sign at a Gasthaus. It was spotted during an outing to Grafenstein in Lower Austria. The sign politely requested guests not to carve up their food on the tablecloth. For Alma this anguished cry from the poor landlord made her wonder just what he had grown used to from his guests.

8 June
Alma’s fascinating account of her aunt Xandi’s twenty-one years as a mistress is too long to spell out here.

19 June
Beaumont includes details of a road accident in which a young man named Ernst Zierer is showing off on his bicycle and almost ends up under the wheels of a horse-drawn cab. Nonetheless he leaves out the most important part, given the Austrian context.

Ernst took someone else’s bike and went after the coachman. A row ensued. The coachman sarcastically said, You are a daredevil cyclist and I’m a miserable coachman. I had to mind my horses and save my lady thousands. It then turned out Ernst already had the pleasure of knowing the lady, having often bought his cigars from her. Alma explains she had been a tobacconist of very dubious reputation in Bad Ischl. She had gone on to marry a very rich man.

3 August
This is a Schwarzfahren story. In the station in Nuremberg, Alma notices that the return ticket for herself and Gretl has expired. The man of a couple there to see them off quickly gives them a hundred marks to get rid of them. The girls decide to get on, each with what she calls a bad conscience and a resentful heart. On the way the controller comes along and asks for their tickets. When they tell him ‘everything’ he continues grumpily on his way. Then comes the conductor. He fears punishment – for the girls. In Munich a friend is waiting at the station – fortunately for them – because they are intercepted and interrogated by railway officials with red caps. The controller keeps saying, ‘The ladies are having us on’, which Alma finds so very embarrassing. She adds if they had not had their friend there, they would still be in the company office. Oh, es war scheusslich. In the end they have to pay double the ticket price – 72 marks – as a fine.

29 August
The Rhine Maidens episode involves a boat chase on a lake. At the outset Alma prefaces it by saying this would seem far-fetched in a novel. She makes a similar comment after two wedding proposals are received in one week (see Beaumont). Anyway, she and some other ladies were in a rowing boat, whistling some Wagnerian riff at a woman’s house to attract her attention. A young man appeared on the shore instead and whistled back at them.

Tired of heavy oars, they changed to a smaller boat at a boathouse, where the young man quickly rented one in order to follow them onto the water. If they went fast, he went fast. If they turned, he turned the same way. The pursuit reminded Alma of Wagner’s elusive Rhine Maidens. They returned to the boathouse, so he did too. They abandoned the boat and hurried up the road. Then they heard the voice of a young man they knew, calling them back to the water. They turned to their saviour for protection but when the two young men spotted each other there was a cry of joy and big hugs. The girls were astonished. The two chaps were best friends.

24 September
Rosa Kornbluh was a friend who had a weird experience with Klimt on an Italian train, where he terrified her in a tunnel. That much is in Beaumont but here 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.

2 October
The girls buy some sausage and pretzel sticks on their way home in the evening and consume them on the quiet streets in an unladylike fashion. The sudden appearance of a couple of people makes Alma hurriedly conceal a piece of sausage in her leather bag. Die ist nun fettig. Eine kleine Berührung, und der Fleck ist da ewig (‘That’s greasy now. A little touch, and the stain is there forever’).

1900

1 January
In the English version, there are three proposals of marriage. In the German, there are five. Beaumont omits the surreal pair. Alma gets up on New Year’s Day to be offered the hand of Onkel Fischel, a quite elderly, sickly and impoverished family friend. She cannot believe her ears and thinks he’ll end up in an asylum. Man müsste lachen, wenns nicht so traurig wäre (‘One would have to laugh, were it not so sad’). The following day, she writes about the experience again. Während er sprach, sah ich immer von den goldenen Zähnen auf die Glätzel, von der auf die knöchernen Hände, von da auf die befleckte Hose… while he spoke, her gaze constantly shifted from the gold teeth to the little bald head, to the bony hands, to the stained trousers.

16 January
Alma’s dinner conversations with two gobshites at the Hotel Victoria are worth retelling. Wärndorfer asks her is she sure she has nothing to regret. Out with it, says Alma. He elaborates on his stalker-like observations at an exhibition (the first man to approach her – no, not him – the second – no, not him either – the third – ah, he’s the one – he knew it aus jedem Muscel ihres Gesichts (‘from every muscle of her face’)). He adds that the beautiful Alma has for once been left picking for scraps, that the shoe is on the other foot. She is disgusted by his creepy introduction of ‘such a delicate subject’ and when he asks what other way was he to take it she tells him to make of it what he will.

On her other side, Hancke, whom she always sees as an ass, begins to sound plaintive. Then he tells her he has considerable capital in Vienna, from various sources, if she gets his drift. She asks him what is he on about. He starts coughing, which gives her a chance to change the subject. He then draws her a picture of his future apartment and says he’ll have a room too many. ‘Get yourself a butler’ is her advice. Then she turns back to Wärndorfer.

26 January
Regretting performing (dancing madly, talking nonsense) at a social gathering, Alma states that at least going out had brought the benefit of someone asking Carl for a painting. She then discusses the tricky financial situation of the family, at a time when Carl is not selling enough pictures. Den Zins für den 1. Februar haben wir noch nicht zusammen. Eine solche Lüge steckt in unsrer Existenz – wir leben weit über die Schnur. They hadn’t got the interest (repayment) together yet for the first of February. ‘Such a lie is planted in our existence – we live far over the line.’

7 March
Alma makes notes about two balls on the same night. The first, chez Baronin Odelga, consists of Jewish civil servants, while the second, at the Lanners, is a mix of Jews and the military. At the first she is given a noble introduction as “Fräulein Alma von Schindler”, which makes her write them off as dopes (Trottelvolk). At the second only the maids were drunk but otherwise it was classy.

31 March
Alma gets a letter from Baronin Odelga, noting that she hasn’t shown her face in the weeks since the ball. Her presence is demanded at another do, which Alma considers an impertinence, but, having made excuses not to dine there, she and Carl attend in order not to piss these people off too much. At the event, an old Jewish lady pesters Alma to sing but Alma says she does not sing. The old lady says that it’s a pity because she wanted her to take part in an operetta. Then she pesters her to dance a minuet with another young woman. Alma turns away from her. Carl stands up and says he must go. Alma is delighted and follows him to the door. Before they can leave the old lady catches up to ask her to come back for dinner on Tuesday but Alma remembers that she is going to Budapest. For three weeks, she hastily adds. In conclusion, she promises herself not to go back to this kind of hassle any time soon.

21 November
She has always detested Herr Krasny and done little to hide it but in response to his feverish marriage proposal she tells him to be quiet and when he starts trembling all over she recommends some cold water (kaltes Wasser – eine kleine Douche). The encounter is deemed unpleasant … ich sinke … this kind of thing gives her a sinking feeling.

That same evening Alma observes the Schadenfreude of the tenor Erik Schmedes in the audience, when another singer has throat trouble. Though Beaumont reluctantly includes the fight at the opera – when it seems Schmedes beat up a rival who made a smart remark about him skipping a high note – he gripes that Alma’s hearsay account doesn’t tally with the part of the score of the opera in question. The German edition states the fight would probably have erupted later in the wings but in general Beaumont leaves out too much of Schmedes. He is the most entertaining musical character. He seems to have had the soul of a clown.

1901

21 January
Alma makes a comment that Zemlinsky being ill would at least give him the chance to give a rest to the ants in his pants.

25 February
Carl is awarded a gong and doesn’t know why. One of his well-wishing visitors is a State official for whom he had previously lobbied. The man had got the job, an achievement which Alma mentions also involved large-scale bribery on his part.

16 April
Alma refers to Zemlinsky as a miserable coward but kisses a card from him. Her mother later asks why she has ink on her mouth. Again, in the German at least, her sense of humour has not quite deserted her.

7 July
Is it English prudery that left out what Alma was doing with her finger in bed on this day? In the introduction, Beaumont primly says he was uneasy about including “the indiscreet account” of the divine Mahler’s fiasco when he first attempted to have sex with her. He still saw fit to omit Alma’s expression of feelings of shame immediately after the line (that he kept) where she wrote she longed for rape (24 July 1901).

In the end these differences in quality between the German original and the English translation made me think of another great diarist, Alan Clark. In the preface to his first volume (1983-91), Clark concluded by listing all the criticisms that he saw could be levelled against his chronicle. He kept his trump card for the last line. But they are real diaries.

Sigmund Freud & the interpretation of everyday life

It was the German sociologist Marianne Krüll who analysed Freud’s handling of the Oedipus story in the light of his own family history. In her view it was a creative compromise of the kind sometimes used by children with parental conflicts. Instead of seeking the real source of hostility toward his father, Freud made the Oedipus myth one of the most pervasive parables of intellectual life. Thus, she claimed, he may have stood Oedipus on his ear and a ‘Laius complex’ would have been more accurate.

In other words, it was Laius, the father, who, because of a prophecy that he would one day be murdered by his son, left the infant Oedipus on a mountaintop. Freud chose to believe that the power of Sophocles’ drama lay in the tragic destiny of the son who, not knowing his real parentage, unwittingly murders his father and marries his mother. Krüll claims it was only Freud’s bias that prevented him from recognizing the guilt of Laius. Nevertheless there remain convincing reasons behind Freud’s interpretation and one of these ironically comes not from The Interpretation of Dreams but from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

“The strange fact that the [Oedipus] legend finds nothing objectionable in Queen Jocasta’s age seemed to me to fit in well with the conclusion that in being in love with one’s mother one is never concerned with her as she is in the present but with her youthful… image carried over from childhood.”

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life deals mainly with the type of error (parapraxis) which has become the everyday concept of the Freudian slip. Apart from the many vivid examples of slips of the tongue and pen, and of forgetting and bungling, we should be interested too in a comment he makes on the losing of objects of value. He says it may be the offering of a sacrifice to the obscure powers of destiny to which homage is still paid today. This is one explanation of karma: despite logically ridiculing superstitions, often we are unconsciously superstitious and will attract misfortune because we believe deep down we deserve it, for something we have done or failed to do. Another lies in the fact that bad behaviour that earns an advantage in one situation often rebounds in another.

Later in the book he unsurprisingly states that superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble. In this light, Oedipus is trouble. He too is a sacrifice to the obscure powers of destiny; a lost object of value. A Greek tragedy reflects that life is a tragedy. Is it any surprise then that Freud’s favourite cynical joke concerned a brandy drinker who was ordered by his doctor to give it up on the chance that might save his failing hearing? As soon as he did, his hearing improved, but when his doctor hailed him to no effect on the street, months later, he knew he’d gone back on it. In a loud voice, he asked the man why. Solange ich nicht getrunken hab’, hab’ ich gehört; aber alles, was ich gehört, war nicht so gut wie der Branntwein (‘When I didn’t drink, I heard, but nothing I heard was as good as the brandy’).

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life shows us that many absurdities in human interaction are almost miraculously capable of rational explanation but moreover his work also carries the implication that the surreal aspects of existence evoked by slips and superstitions are part of the eternal order of human affairs and therefore comprehensible, at least to a figure like Freud. Given his field of interest, he doubled up for a twentieth-century casting out of spirits.

Vienna, October 2013

Dr. John Flynn

In October 2013, once aboard the plane to Vienna, I would have fallen asleep right away but for having to stay awake to order the breakfast. Awake all night with an upset stomach and then a long drive to the airport, I got less than an hour after that. At the Schweizerhof I had a shower and then slept for another three. Then it was time to head off, a bit like a zombie. That changed at Harry Lime’s doorway, by the smooth, sloping cobbles of Schreyvogelgasse. 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.

Under the pale, yellowy pillars and ceiling arches, the Café Central was a temple for reflection on some of the characters – Freud, Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, Tito – who had taken a…

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Der Herr Karl, a begrudger’s guide

On 15 November 1961 Austrian television broadcast an hour-long dramatic monologue 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 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.

Karl’s voice seems to have been based on that of Hannes Hoffmann, from 1947 to 1969 the owner of Qualtinger’s favourite bar, the Gutruf. Hoffmann was an interesting figure in his own right and the transcript of a lengthy interview with him from not long before his death in 1988 is included in Georg Biron’s book Quasi Herr Karl (2011).

Married three times, Karl seems amiable at first but bit by bit, in a mixture of Viennese dialect (what he really thinks) and imperfect standard German (for what he thinks his audience wants to hear), he reveals himself to be a Mitläufer (a camp follower) and opportunist who rode each wave as it came.

Until 1934 he was a socialist but it didn’t pay. He demonstrated for rent-a-crowd right-wing groups because there was a bit of money going (fünf Schilling). Karl then vividly describes the arrival of Hitler in Vienna, the rapture of the multitude on the Ring and Heldenplatz and the police all wearing swastika armbands. To Karl the intoxicating atmosphere felt like the buzz of a wine tavern. Qualtinger’s impression of the blue-eyed Führer passing close to where Karl stood and simply grunting Jaja! at him is blackly comic. Da hab i alles g’wusst, wir haben uns verstanden (‘Then I knew everything, we understood each other’).

A Jewish neighbour in his apartment block – sonst a netter Mensch (‘otherwise a nice guy’) is forced to wash the pavements. Karl describes the block’s Hausmeister laughing at this, though, as a Nazi party member, it is Karl himself who supervises the cleaning. When the neighbour (somehow) returns after the war, Karl raises his hat and greets him in a simpering fashion but the neighbour won’t even look at him. This hurts Karl’s feelings. He argues that someone had to clean the pavement. I war ein Opfer. Andere san reich worden, i war a Idealist (‘I was a victim. Others got rich, I was an idealist’).

When the Russians came, people rushed to throw their Hitler portraits on the nearest dung heap but Karl kept his on the wall and deliberately encouraged some Russian soldiers into his apartment. He tore down the picture and trampled on it and then, satisfied with this gesture, they left him alone. Karl subsequently got the chance to suck up to the Americans, whom, he notes, had good food. Wangling a job as a civilian guard, he had ample opportunity to chase away hungry compatriots now that he was a self-styled defender of the West.

An excellent introduction to Qualtinger and Der Herr Karl is available in Georg Markus’ Wenn man trotzdem lacht – Geschichten und Geschichte des österreichischen Humors (2012), which has Quasi, as he was known, as the main figure on the cover.

Both a history and compendium of Austrian humour, this book begins with a chapter on Wiener Schmäh, which Markus links to Vienna’s ethnic mix and then defines as including melancholy, sarcasm and a little malice. Nevertheless, in the very first paragraph the author makes a rather dubious claim. Das Lachen ist hierzulande von geradezu existenzieller Bedeutung und die Heiterkeit mit der anderer Völker nicht vergleichbar (‘Laughter is, in this sense, of an almost existential importance and the amusement is not comparable with that of other peoples’).

The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics (1986) is a book by Breandán Ó hEithir (1930-90) that traces the political evolution – even thirty years on from publication, development may still be too strong a word – of the Irish State and its adjoining northern statelet over sixty years, from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s. The writer defines the begrudger of the title as the most common type of Irish character. Such a person is usually cynical, snide and hungry for the next unflattering story about an official role model or public event that won’t bore anyone else in the retelling.

Ó hEithir describes most Irish people as time-serving sycophants but, to be fair, the begrudger is often justifiably cynical, as the author also points out. One may easily be short of a job, a house, regular sex… or food in Ireland: one is rarely short of a bitter belly laugh.

The book begins with an anecdote from the morning after the signing of the Treaty (1921) that partitioned the island and created the Irish Free State. A passing priest asks a blacksmith why he looks so glum.

It was the gentry that kept me going and what’s left of them will leave the country now. I’m ruined.

The priest assures him that freedom will mean the Irish will have their own gentry but this only causes the blacksmith to mutter darkly in his wake.

Our own gentry!? We will in our arse have our own gentry.

The blacksmith was right. Instead, we got opportunists, the post-colonial class whose innermost vocation Frantz Fanon saw as remaining part of the racket. The success of the Irish in America magnifies the awareness – learnt from the Brits – that electoral politics is the safest form of organised crime, where privileged access to the trough of opportunity is tolerated thanks to successful patronage. Incidentally, charity-sector fiddling has emerged in recent years as a type of scam at which the Irish in-crowd have proved themselves world-class.

In a nation of embezzlers, though, this phenomenon of camp-following and opportunism isn’t just restricted to politics and those with political connections. To give a simple example, there was a party for the elderly in one rural parish at Christmas in 1999, the year the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) had issued a national apology in the wake of the States of Fear TV series, which had documented our children’s gulag. Just imagine, the number of children in institutional ‘care’ in the Irish State between the 1930s and 1970s had been, in absolute terms, greater than that in Britain, while our population had been little more than 5% of that across the water.

Of course it became fashionable and convenient to blame the Church alone for such horrors but what of the society that gave the Church such power? In 2017 the latest such scandal is that of the mother-and-baby homes, those institutions where unwed mothers were put and where their babies – if they didn’t die and get thrown into unmarked graves – were often secretly sold for adoption. These places were never secret, the people knew the score, that’s how things were done. 2017 is also the year that Brunhilde Pomsel died. She was Goebbels’ secretary and lived to be 106.

‘The people who today say they would have done more for those poor, persecuted Jews… I really believe that they sincerely mean it,’ she said in interviews for A German Life. ‘But they wouldn’t have done it either.’

On a lighter note, the Christmas party committee had asked a relative of mine to help out at the event. The members had already gathered a lot of good food and drink in the form of donations. At the party in the parish hall, a retired nurse advised that some hot whiskey punch would be the best drink for the old people in the winter but that suggestion was shot down. Instead, the committee gave them sherry. They had plenty of sherry. Soon there was a crash. An old lady had keeled over. After that the guests only got tea and sandwiches. The wine, the chocolates, the brandy and whiskey bottles and the beautiful cakes remained untouched. Soon the old people were packed off on a bus.

What happened to the goodies? The cars reversed in, loaded up and drove away. “Never again,” said my relative. What happened to Max? According to Markus, all is known is that he got fired from the delicatessen after he was caught trying to take home some bottles of vermouth in a small case.

PS … Article 40.2.1 of the Irish Constitution says, “Titles of nobility shall not be conferred by the State.” Aristocratic titles have been banned in Austria since 1918, so Austrians have compensated for this deprivation with excessive use of academic ones. Some people even use a different calling card (e.g. one that uses “von” in the name) when dealing with Germany, where such elaboration remains legal.

PPS … For more on Qualtinger, please go to…

The Joker of Vienna

Vienna, March 2017

4 March, Saturday

It was a rainy night on the way to Dublin in JP’s van. We met P. T. at the airport. In Vienna the sun was shining, though the wind and dust picked up as the day went on. After the Museumsquartier courtyard offered nothing of interest, we couldn’t get seats inside or outside the packed Palmenhaus so we dined instead at the Führich behind the Albertina. The Zwiebelrostbraten I had was a good lunch choice, in keeping with the waiter’s initial comment. Gute Wahl. Then the walking tour began.

We had to queue with the nations of the earth to get into the Café Central but the pit stop was met with approval before we found we couldn’t get up the steps below Ruprechtskirche. It’s a Baustelle, as the side of a building is being torn down. An empty, silent digger showed that work had been abandoned for the day. I just snapped P. T. zipping up after leaking in a nook therein. He got the idea from an Arab who seemed to appear out of nowhere or out of a brick wall. Thereafter we got to Ruprechtskirche via Rabensteig before heading down Fleischmarkt and cutting back to the cathedral via the large Jesuit church on Seipel Platz. Back at the Hotel Admiral, JP and I needed some sleep so it was two hours later before all three of us went to Charlie P’s on Währingerstrasse.

P. T. left by half past eleven but JP and I didn’t get back to the hotel until three in the morning, after a stop at a Würstelstand. The only nuisance had been a drunk young local lad tapping me with his elbow for an extended period in the pub. He was reeling at the counter so I only complained once. Bitte, bitte, Ellenbogen. Bitte!

5 March, Sunday

JP and I didn’t leave the hotel until two this afternoon. I’d made it down to breakfast after nine – in boots with no socks – just so I’d sleep on better with something in my stomach. I even brought a Semmel with ham and cheese back to the room and ate that at noon to enhance the effect.

P. T. was gone early and I put my phone on silent to minimise the impact of any texts. I’d already denied his request to come a-knocking, all for the cause of sleep. He probably got the same answer from JP. We caught up with him in Café Griensteidl where we had lunch (Fiakergulasch – I’ve eaten well). Then I brought them past the 1516 bar on the way out to the Oberes Belvedere.

The gallery has a “selfie copy” of Klimt’s The Kiss. It stands in a room overlooking the bare garden that slopes away, all the way back down to the lower palace. The original hangs in comparative darkness in the next room.

P. T. and I went in. JP went back down the hill to 1516, where we rejoined him after five. My favourite painting had been the sunny Der Naschmarkt in Wien (1894) by Carl Moll.

JP was “happy out” in the pub. I left them there around six. I had to get some money and freshen up at the hotel. A young Arab woman in a headscarf got some from an ATM on Kärtner Strasse and then just stood there yakking on her phone while the screen showed ads in anticipation of the next customer. Rolling my eyes at the gentleman behind me, I had to issue another Bitte or two, over her shoulder, before she moved away without even turning her head.

Back in 1516 by nine, after an appointment with a sweet Romanian hairdresser. P. T. didn’t stay out too long tonight either. Not for the first time JP mentioned that the early morning flight is just a bit too much. Oh, we’ve managed well but it is a physical test, basically losing a night’s sleep to get here from Dublin. There were at least two Hungarian girls among the waitresses. JP was absent for the moment the dark little one smiled and did a vertical high kick at the nearby service end of the counter (“So fast nobody saw it,” she giggled). When I asked her in Hungarian if she was bored, she got back to work. The tall, curvy one had simply said Igen when confirming where she was from. Hungarians don’t expect foreigners to have a clue about their language. The barman was Irish, from Galway. There six years, he’s about to get married.

We ended up in Flanagan’s (a stone’s throw away) because JP was looking for a charger for his phone. He liked that place too. It was quiet, unsurprisingly, on a Sunday night. A lad with his back to me had a black and white baseball cap and for a minute or two I thought he was a Jew. The top of the cap was white and the black blended in with his dark hair. The optical illusion of a skull cap struck JP too, when I told him to take a look. We talked a bit to a barman from Coolock, in Dublin. He’s been in Vienna twelve years. Married a Croat.

My two companions seem to have been very impressed here – “a real melting pot” (JP) – but, as I said to them, I’m not doing the 07.10 again. Certainly not just after driving 200 km from the south coast. JP likened the effect to jet lag. From past experience I know I won’t know the impact of this trip until the aftermath but I did all I could in a couple of days. I’ll know how good it was when I recover from it.

Vienna, New Year’s Eve, 2015

The Westbahn train from Linz was crowded but I easily found the hotel after getting the U-Bahn to Alser Strasse. Three young Italians were taking a long time to check in but, when these other guests around reception cleared off, I ended up talking to the man behind the counter, comparing the death tolls of the Irish and Ukrainian famines. He didn’t want to pin the latter 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. 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 our puritanical priesthood. Das war ein Befehl von den Priestern. Sonst, zu sexy.

Anyway, I dropped the bag in the room and 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.

A little video of a couple of Freud’s hats in a glass case and the preserved waiting room beside them was a good memento to come away with but, before leaving Berggasse, I also took a photo from the street of the lit windows on the first floor. 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 which they think has limited seating – than anything Freudian. Schlange means both queue and snake in German but there, one couldn’t dream of either.

The temperature had dropped below zero and my legs froze as I kept walking, having passed a locked-up Irish pub I’d looked up, on Landesgerichtstrasse. Ending up in the Museumsquartier, I said I’d keep going and get something to eat in Flanagan’s. A hot whiskey prepared by the manager thawed me out and I didn’t ask him about food, having already stopped for a final Bosner. Though the single sausage had looked more like a Käsekrainer, it was just as well I’d had it, as there was no sign of anyone eating in the pub. After a beer to follow the whiskey, I slipped away. A place like that is too much like home and only alright for one or two at most, if you want to keep it country. Another country.

The hotel room window, even if it had been double glazed, which it wasn’t, couldn’t compete with the fireworks and bangers. I got back around ten, having wandered through the crowds in the lit-up Innere Stadt. They were enjoying the amenities (food, drink, music). Before turning into the hotel I strolled to the far end of Theresiengasse just for a look and to kill more time. Ganz Wien was blaring from some open third-floor windows on Kreuzgasse, as I passed that junction. A Falco moment. Once more my legs were feeling the cold so I called it a night.

Talking again to the man at the desk, I found out he was from Kiev. My impression that he missed the USSR was reinforced. 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?’) He told me his two sons were soccer players but I didn’t want to peer too hard at his name tag to get the surname. Something ending in -ov, I thought. It was raining firework debris on the roofs and the racket was quite intense. There were sirens too, now and then. The curtains were closed. He didn’t look at all Slavonic. He was swarthy and reminded me of some actor, such as Lee J. Cobb (smile, voice, moustache) or Pernell Roberts or a combination of both. A group he said were from Odessa then emerged from the lift and when one of them came over to talk to him I said goodnight.

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.

Up at half past eight on New Year’s Day, I opened the curtains. That revealed some snow on the windowsill. It was still snowing at the airport. The plane needed de-icing. Before leaving the hotel I’d asked a different chap at reception if the Christian name of the man from Kiev was what I’d thought it was. He found it amusing when I added that we’d had a long conversation, like it was nothing new.

Vienna & Salzburg between Budapest & Munich

August 2015

At Keleti station in Budapest, in an August heatwave in 2015, the machines wouldn’t give international tickets and the office was slow chaos, with backpackers getting the most awkward tickets possible and people farther back in the queue having to hold open the heavy door that led into the tight space with the hatches. With the low chairs at those hatches, it was like a small dole office. A fair-haired North American chap with dreadlocks eventually came away from one of them to relay the news to his two female dreadlocked companions – also white – that they would have to make five changes, wherever the f*ck they were going. The set-up might have done with a few of the Hungarian soldiers we’d seen up on the Vár the day before.

A guy in front of me watching them wore a t-shirt advertising Iron Maiden and The Trooper. He must have given up his dreams of martial glory for the sake of heavy metal.

I should have asked, “Viccelsz velünk?” when the waiter asked me and my mother to make way for six French f*ckers, plus dogs, up there, at the Miró cafe. Anyway, we got on the train with just a few minutes to spare and the three-hour trip to Vienna was comfortable. Within two weeks Keleti made international news, thronged with refugees. Across the aisle on the train, some Brits and a spherical though pretty Indian girl with an American accent had some ‘psychedelic’ colouring books that didn’t keep them entertained for very long. Two of the chaps vanished to the bar carriage.

If anything Vienna was even hotter than Budapest. Every twenty minutes, late that night, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and neck. At the Westbahnhof we had gone down to the packed U-Bahn but on the Volkstheater station platform I simply couldn’t see the correct exit, it was so far away, so we emerged on the Burg Ring and passed the correct exit on our last daylight slog, up to the Hotel Admiral. That night we made it back over the Ring, down through the dark Burggarten and up the steps to the Paumen Haus with its red neon sign. There we sat outside and got things we needed such as chairs, drinks and food.

After each of two brief stretches of sleep I had a shower in which I turned the tap from lukewarm to cold. Then I went back to bed again, my ears full of water from that and from sweat rolling into them. Even my shoulders were sweating. I’d been turning the old air conditioning unit on the wall on and off and sometime after dawn I just left it on and finally managed to sleep properly until nine.

We spent the whole day walking around the Ring and the Innere Stadt. There was no way we were going to any outlying palaces with vast gardens of low hedges and shrubbery that offered no protection from that sun. My companion really liked the Café Central and we got to hear a young string quartet on Kärtnerstrasse (“They’re not gypsies, they’re conservatory students”). I’d still like to know the name of this tango.

We did the walk I’d mapped out:

(1) up the Ringstrasse to Schreyvogelgasse (Harry Lime’s doorway);
(2) down to Freyung to the Ferstel Passage;
(3) a pit stop in the Cafe Central;
(4) along Herrengasse to the Hofburg and a detour through the arches to Heldenplatz;

(5) back through the arches to Kohlmarkt and Graben (we lunched in the vicinity);
(6) down to Stephansdom (in and around the cathedral);

(7) Kärtnerstrasse (incl. a detour to the Loos bar where I tried a mojito, because I recognised the name, but it was like mint soup);
(8) back to the hotel via the Opernring.

At eight in the evening we went to the Witwe Bolte, which was practically around the corner from the hotel. After a garden supper, during which the skin of my head still felt a bit prickly, we were back in the hotel by ten.

My head continued to melt. The dissolution restarted as soon as I lay on the bed. Cold water from the tap gave brief relief but then a rivulet rolled down somewhere. I filled the sink so I could have a dunk now and then.

There was a slim, dark girl doing long hours down at reception. She was wearing a white garment with buttons, that evening. It made her look like a nurse. She had matching dark frames for her glasses and she kind of embodied the female cool around there, even though most were typically, for Austria, solid and well built. She’d checked us in the day before. By then my head was already melting, unconnected to this hotel, given the time it took to sort out the three-stop journey on a packed U3 line from the Westbahnhof and then make our way on foot. I explained we had just come from Budapest and she looked at me quite sympathetically before remarking on the weather (“Das ist heiss”).

A Hamburg gentleman of about sixty spotted me at breakfast, applying a serviette to my face, and he came over, hoarsely repeating the German word for hell (“Hölle! Hölle!”). His wife was Danish, a quite tasty blonde, twenty years younger. She appeared at reception as we were checking out and asked about the fire alarm that was going off, only to be told it was nichts, nur das verflixte Telefon. The woman at the desk was waving the receiver as she spoke.

On the way to Salzburg we 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 in the house on ebay. His wife had fallen off the train that had brought them to Linz. I didn’t ask why they had come by Linz. They were thinking of squeezing in the Sound of Music tour, despite the lack of enthusiasm of the holiday planner, their daughter.

We were in Salzburg by 2pm and though it was a hot if reasonably short walk to the hotel, my companion wanted to make the most of the afternoon, in case it pissed rain the following day. We got the no. 3 trolley bus as far as Mirabell. On entering the gardens we passed two very dark chaps with a clarinet and accordion, playing Stranger on the Shore. “Now they are gypsies,” I said.

Another reminder that US citizens always like to catch a show came from a woman who keenly spotted a marionette theatre poster as we left the gardens. We walked to the Dom and then dined outside at the Zipfer Bierhaus, where two wasps had to be killed, one by me, one by the waiter (“Raus!”). My companion became convinced that Salzburg was the best, with the most stylish clobber. “Have you noticed how soft-spoken the people are?” I asked. We retreated to the hotel early. The rooms had electric fans.

Though I didn’t hear anything, it rained for much of the night. The breakfast at the Guter Hirte was the best, with scrambled egg, scrambled rashers, little sausages, and then we did the Festung. These mist-covered mountains were all now to see. Anyway, across the river we climbed the Kapuzinerberg steps, though the greenery that hadn’t been there that snowy February curtailed the view.

Down from the hill, I had a look in the Shamrock and my February wingman, Daniel, was there on his own. He told me about his most recent abstract paintings that might soon get some café exhibition space. After there it was a trail of churches plus the sight and sounds of a jazzy procession of bishops, skeletons and devils on their way to put on an Everyman (“Jedermann”) show for the crowd gathered on the stand that had been erected on the enclosed Domplatz.

I had a few more in the Shamrock that night. At half past eight my pal had to leave. It seemed they had to put up with a lot of tourists messing, in and around the pub. Only recently, he said, he’d opened the door onto Rudolfskai well after closing time only to be greeted by the sight of an American girl rolling around on the ground, fighting another girl of indeterminate nationality in front of cops and onlookers.

After a hot dog at the Heisse Kiste Würstelstand across Staatsbrücke, I walked up Steingasse, which was spooky in the dark. The warm red light was on but there was a restaurant, clinking and nattering, right across the alley, though the few diners al fresco were shielded from the sinners by some plants. I didn’t have a theoretical hour to spare.

We left the hotel at ten the next morning. This time I had heard heavy rain but it was only gloomy out by then. 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 casualties from Linz. These war wounded 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 managed to sleep a few minutes on the train to Munich. We dined across the street from the Hofbräuhaus, which was very hot and mental, on the evidence of a few seconds inside. What is it, though, about Bayerstrasse? This day I saw two beggars there without feet. One at least had knees, which kept him upright, like Toulouse-Lautrec.