Travel to Vienna

Vienna, the late 1980s.

I visited Vienna fifty years after Mom escaped from the Anschluss. One evening, on the way back to my hotel from a highly personal tour of the city, I ran into several horse-drawn carriages—like the ones in New York’s Central Park South. They were waiting for business; a sign advertised them as, “Fiakers for Rent.” My heart skipped a beat. The word Fiaker and my Viennese mother suddenly came back from the distant past. Mom used the word Fiaker when I was a child to describe such carriages during our annual holidays to Miramar, a beach town on the South Atlantic. I had not heard it since she had died.

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My trip was on legal business. I was about thirty-five years old and was developing a name as a specialist in intellectual property and biotechnology. One of my first clients was a pharmaceutical company from Germany. I had already visited them a few times in their production facilities near Frankfurt when, one day, much to my pleasure, they announced that they had acquired a research lab in Vienna. They wanted my opinion on some of the biotech research they were doing and how best to protect it worldwide. Would I be so kind as to come on over and visit them?

Ohmygod, I thought, OH-MY-GOD! Would I mind coming over to Vienna? Are they kidding? Wien, Wien, nur Du allein, the anthem of Vienna Gloriosa, started playing in my head, in the high-pitched voice of a mother whom I had last heard sing it almost a quarter of a century earlier. Mom would be so proud if she only knew that the Austrians, after forcing her to leave in 1938, had now hired her son to be their lawyer. Sweet, I thought. For better or worse, Vienna was her passion and so, for me, Vienna was my Mom. Since I barely got to know my mother, I was left with getting to know the city where she grew up, as though through such effort I might glean her through the fog of long ago.

I flew to Vienna on Austrian Air, in love with the Viennese accent of blonde flight attendants as they offered Kaffee and slices of Apfel Strudel before landing. I could barely hold back the tears when the plane touched ground. Since becoming an adult, I had learned about Vienna Dolorosa and the pain it had inflicted on my family. That day, however, I was not a grown-up, but an eleven-year-old boy who confused the city he was about to visit with his long-gone mother. All that boy could think of was that he would be close to her again after so many years of absence. I was not disappointed.

Filled with emotion, I descended to the tarmac, took in the air, and happily marched toward the terminal building. My first encounter was with two tall soldiers standing at the glass doors, one holding a sub machine gun and the other a German shepherd on a leash. They were studying us carefully. As I marched past them toward a sign that said PASSPORT KONTROLLE, I overheard one soldier approach a passenger behind me and say, in a friendly tone, “Papieren bitte? . . . Papers please?” I had seen enough movies of nasty Gestapo agents yelling “PAPIEREN BITTE!” to frightened Jews in 1940s train stations to get a sudden case of the creeps. It was ingrained in my share of the tribal unconscious that I should dread anyone with a German accent who asked for documents while holding a dog. I broke into a sweat and tried to wait in line patiently until I handed my American passport to the immigration officer sitting behind a glass booth.

“What is the reason for your visit to Vienna?” he asked in a monotone, without looking at me but down at my passport.

To visit my mother, I almost said. Instead, I answered, “I’m visiting a client on business.”

“And what business is that?” he asked politely.

“I’m a lawyer,” I replied. Jewish lawyer, I added in my thoughts. Name is spelled G-o-l-d-s-t-e-i-n, did you get that? . . . I am back . . . We always come back.

“And how long will you be here?” he probed, this time looking up into my eyes.

Don’t know. Depends on whether the creepy feeling goes away. “Maybe through Sunday,” I said. “I hope to enjoy the sights over the weekend before returning.”

“Ah, very good idea. Vienna is beautiful! Willkomen in Austria Herr Dokter Goldstein. Enjoy your stay,” he said with a smile, stamped my passport, and waived for the next passenger.

The Austrians have a funny way of calling me Mr. Dr., I thought. Yet I loved his accent and the way he pronounced “Goldshtine,” just like Mom had always done, not “Goldsteen,” as my American colleagues did back home. The place sure sounded like the real thing. The creepiness started fading.

As the taxi approached the inner city I began to recognize the famous landmarks one by one, as though I had already been there. Vienna Gloriosa was as gorgeous as Mom had always told me that it was. The Ambassador Hotel was in the middle of a modern pedestrian area. A welcoming letter from my client was waiting for me with arrangements for the next day. I skipped the unpacking and in no time was downstairs, walking up and down the streets.

Whichever way I turned I quickly ran into a familiar place. A few blocks south was the Café Sacher next to the Opera House; a few north was St. Stephan’s Cathedral; Mozart had died two blocks to the east. And ten minutes to the west was the infamous Heldenplatz, where my Uncle Jack had witnessed the arrival of Hitler in 1938. I stared at the balcony on the Hofburg Palace from which Hitler had celebrated his Anschluss, and I shivered. From there I walked over to the Café Central, where I sat at a small table. Mom's ghost came over, winked, settled next to me, and ordered a Kaffee mit Schlag.  The coffee was great, the pastries even better, and everyone’s accent was just right. A waltz was playing in the background. We sat together for a while and watched the well-dressed middle-aged burghers window-shopping arm in arm.

With Mom next to me, I walked the streets of Leopoldstadt, up and down the Untere Augarten Strasse. That was the street where the fatherless trio of my widowed grandmother and her two kids had lived between the two World Wars. I stopped for a few minutes at number 15, their very house. It was a dreary post-War construction in stucco brown and did not say much to me. I walked in and out of the Prater amusement park and sat for a while in the Augarten Park. I imagined my young Mom and her brother laughing as they were swaying back and forth on the swings. I became distracted by two ugly flak towers that had been built by the Nazis during the occupation and which had been left intact. They seemed to be a reminder of . . . what? The evils of war? The glorious days of Anschluss to the Third Reich? It wasn't clear why the towers were still there so many years later.

In the afternoon, at the suggestion of the concierge, I walked to the Künstlerhaus art gallery, which had just opened an exhibition called “Dream and Reality Vienna 1870-1930.” Each room of the gallery was dedicated to a different activity during those six decades. There was a set of rooms about the Vienna Secession, the late 19th century art movement of painters, sculptors, and architects. There was another set of rooms about the Bauhaus movement in Austria, a room about journalism, another about opera, and so on. The rooms covered every possible interest: economy, literature, music, politics, war. It was extraordinary and did not hold back from exploring the dark side. There was even one room dedicated to antisemitism, with posters, pamphlets, and endless film loops of agitators spewing hatred. The very reason for the exhibit and the meaning of its title was to contrast the dreams of Vienna’s creative spirit with the reality of poverty, ethnic prejudice, and hatred lying underneath. The exhibition contrasted the richness of Vienna Gloriosa with the cruelty of Vienna Dolorosa.

At the end of the exhibition were two rooms dedicated to Sigmund Freud. The first, a rather large one, was pitch dark and had nothing in it but a narrow pedestal in one corner, on top of which was a miniature model of his analytic couch sitting under a spotlight. The second room explained the history and development of psychoanalysis. It didn't take much to guess that the curators wanted to put all of Vienna on the couch to try to understand the many sides of this strange city.

After leaving the art gallery I wandered a few long blocks to Berggasse number 19, Freud’s house. I wanted to see the famous couch. I walked up the inner staircase and visited his apartment and office. I was disappointed that the couch was no longer there but in the Freud Museum in London. Yet I was moved at being in the inner sanctum of this pioneering thinker.

Freud loved Vienna and was heartbroken when, after the Anschluss, he had to emigrate to England. He did however have deep reservations about his fellow Viennese. In 1914, in his History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Freud wrote that he was unhappy that, of all places in Europe, the Viennese medical intelligentsia had not accepted his theories of the unconscious. He thought that, had he perhaps given them a good show in the form of a noisy debate, his compatriots might have been more open-minded. He knew how much the Viennese loved a show. To explain himself, he recruited Friedrich Schiller, the 19th century German writer. Schiller, in a famous set of epic poems, The Wallenstein Trilogy, wrote about the Thirty Years’ War, which had ransacked Europe in the 17th century. His hero, General Wallenstein, had won many a battle for the Austrian emperor. Wallenstein muses about a Swedish foe that he did not capture and who therefore escaped the executioner. The General says that Vienna never forgave him for this, but that the worst insult the Viennese suffered was not military but the lack of a good spectacle:

I know you had already in Vienna / Leased your windows and your balconies /

To see him [the Swedish foe] on the executioner's cart. / I might have lost

the battle, lost it too / With infamy, and still retained your graces . . .

. . . But the Viennese never forgave me That I cheated them of a good show.

. . . das vergeben mir die Wiener nicht, Daß ich um ein Spektakel sie betrog.

Freud knew the penchant of the Viennese for good entertainment, as I would discover the next day at the opera. Through Schiller, Freud suggests that, had he given his colleagues a spectacle in the form of a raucous debate about psychoanalysis, they might have more quickly approved of his work.

Schiller’s wry comment on the Viennese rang as true to Sigmund Freud in the 20th century as it did to General Wallenstein in the 17th. When I look at the photos of gleeful Viennese watching the “spectacle” of Jews brushing the streets in 1938 I remember another concept that Freud knew well, Schadenfreude. It is the delight that we take at the misfortune of others. It seems to me that the Viennese had a well-honed, even sadistic, sense of spectacle, be it of a man on his way to the gallows or of fellow humans scrubbing sidewalks.

***

Until I saw the sign advertising those horse-drawn carriages near my hotel, I had not heard the word Fiaker in more than thirty years. The last time had been long ago, during our yearly vacations on the South Atlantic. I looked at the horses for a while. Then I closed my eyes and, with Mom next to me, saw an identical line of Fiakers outside the Miramar train station waiting to take us to the Palace Hotel near the ocean. Mom always let me ride upfront on top, next to the driver. Suddenly, in my mind’s eyes, I was no longer in Vienna, but at the driver’s bench on a Miramar Fiaker. I smelled the horses in all their equine aroma of sweat and dung. The spontaneous return of the Fiaker memory was as close to a Proust madeleine as I have ever tasted. Here’s an old-time Argentine Fiaker:

I was happy when I opened my eyes and returned to Vienna. Mom’s smiling ghost was still there, enjoying my visit. In my next blog,  A Night at the Opera, I will tell you of my evening at Vienna’s crown jewel, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Vienna State Opera. Some more of those delicious Proust madeleines were waiting for me there.