Mirrors of the antique capital
Every city has the ability to imprint its inhabitants — people, cats, dogs, birds, and plants. Its inhabitants are like moving mirrors, cloudy or clear, straight or more often, crooked. They can hide their reflections, obscure and distort them, but the observant eye is bound to find something in common between the flower beds and the houses in which the citizens and their pets live, the parks where they walk, the pavements, museums, churches, universities, and metro stations.
The city inevitably subdues you; you begin to live at its own pace, repeating lines and colours. The clarity of its reflection in its inhabitants is directly proportional to the time spent here. It is enough to touch city life for a day, for a few hours, for a new intonation to appear in your voice, for your gait and posture to change into other colours, for an unexplained cheerfulness to emerge, fuelled by the hot stones and wine of the barefoot south, or the sadness conveyed by the austere northern European cities with their perpetually drizzling cold rain.
Vienna reflects the past and present indistinctly. Vienna lives in its own time, never ceasing to look back over the centuries of its former power as capital of the Habsburg Empire. Life speeds up, takes new heights, breaks old records. Vienna doesn’t take part in competitions. She sways in her antique fiacre and watches with a condescending smile as the children race after her.
Her hair is grey, in the folds of a heavy dress the dust of the former glory of a once great empire. To the measured clatter of hooves, she leafed through an old album of engravings depicting Turkish sieges, battles with Prussian armies, balls, summer walks with a musical entourage through Baden, marriage ceremonies with plumes of new lands. Vienna patiently and obstinately turns back the hands of the clock and does not let them go beyond the 1918 mark — the year of the collapse of the monarchy and the birth of the alien Austrian republic.
Vienna is much less interested in modern technology than it is in nearly decayed engravings. Everything new is difficult to adapt to and often masquerades as the past. It is as if the new recognises that there is something man-made, living, valuable and not fake out there before the twentieth-century line, and therefore feels uneasy about its angularity and practicality. It worships the stones of the Austro-Hungarian era, preserves the plaster from the time of the Ottoman conquests and raises the buried foundations of the Romans to a pedestal.
The past prevails over the present, aware of its superiority, but does not hinder the new. Vienna is peaceful and does not tolerate enmity. Centuries-old buildings obediently raise their heads and their tiled hats are removed to put on penthouses of concrete and glass. But even in the geometrically stuffed dwelling the owner invariably hauls away from the antique shop darkened porcelain figurines and blackened silver spoons with the fingerprints of archdukes and archduchess.
A stone’s throw from the Museum of Art History (Kunsthistorisches Museum), a plethora of eminent masters have set their sights on contemporary art in the former imperial stables. It is emblematic and wise. After all, where better to escape the smell of blotches, cubes and multi-armed bodies than with Titian, Van Dyck, Dürer, Rubens, Peter Bruegel the Elder, Raphael and other residents of this art-historical communal apartment — the sometimes luscious, but talented and honest. Wise Vienna has settled them side by side, she knows it all and does not resist.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, Vienna was crammed into a patch of land. In the tight ring of fortress walls were squeezed palaces and music halls, the imperial court, people, poverty and its companion dirt. But the city’s fortifications were destroyed, and Vienna, like water from a broken dam, overflowed into the vineyards and the Vienna Woods, overflowed into the Danube, and flowed to the thermal waters of Baden. The old Vienna was renamed the Inner City; the new Vienna sprawled into districts and became like fans and spiderwebs from above.
The city was freed from its tight corset, but paid with its name for the freedom to breathe and allowed the cobwebs and fans to call itself. Twenty-three districts are twenty-three rags, cut from different books and magazines and fitted together. Some evoke longing or dislike. Others walk in favour — they have fur-trimmed shoes and feathers on Tyrolean hats. Others in the vine-covered hills run their bohemian-village economy and in their spare time off from their thoughts and walks produce enough young wine to put patchwork Vienna on the shortlist of the most livable cities every year.
Different religions and different faces coexist in the new Vienna. In the place of the formerly fortified walls, the Turks are busy peddling cheap food. The roof of the kiosk, under which the sweat-covered descendant of the Ottoman Empire is rolling out the pastry, is forced to look out over the stone of Prinz Eugen von Savoyen (1663 – 1736) — the commander of Heroes’ Square, who drove the Turks from Austrian and Hungarian lands three centuries ago. Does he think of the futility of his military campaigns? Does the hunger of the battles blow his horse’s nostrils when the wind carries the smell of pizzas and kebabs? But the descendants of those who fought under the banners of Eugene of Savoy are not averse to kebabs and consume them in no less quantity than Japanese sushi or hamburgers.
In the new Vienna, rallies, demonstrations, mass marches to the deafening drum and with various banners are permitted. Smaller marches are not forbidden either: even the city highways are blocked to allow five people to march with demands alien to the traffic, which must wait and wait patiently for the comic procession to pass by. The annual raids of the sexual minorities take place in front of the ever-present Eugene of Savoy and the Catholic Archduke Karl (1771 – 1847).
The parks of the noblemen’s urban estates are put up with the gardens of the municipal buildings. The inhabitants of the old mansions do science, sit at tables in suits, philosophize, or spend their time collecting handbags with shouty logos. Residents of municipal housing sell them bread and cakes, wipe the dust off pianos and bookshelves. Those already in costume, but still without their own table, dwell in apartments overlooking a wall or a neighbor’s dark window. The more suits, the higher up the floors their owner climbs, the closer he is to the coveted goal — a penthouse with a terrace or at least a terrace, with a view of the dream — a park of mansions and vineyards.
The houses fight for a place in the sun, compacting where they have long been compacted, adding to the additions and completing the completed, but stubbornly respecting the height of the earth and do not grow above five or six rows of rectangular eyes. There are no more lanky, sky-scraping buildings in Vienna than there are weeds in Austrian gardens.
The islands separating the thoroughfares have basketball courts, and preschoolers are strolled into yards that look like gray wells. The low houses are crowded, like a Cannes beach, but the clouds are free. In order to see the sky, the owners hang balconies to the windows, that haven’t touched the sun for a hundred years, or built terraces on the roofs between the chimneys. Ceramic boxes with violets, tubs with palm trees and smoke from braziers fence off the neighbors. Straight corners and flat walls lose curvature, beveled ceilings, spiral staircases, protrusions, steps, towers.
Living in rectangles and squares, two-fifty high, is cheap, but the Viennese are bored. The Viennese overpay for lofts, for their garden with a table, two chairs, and a hydrangea bush. They pay extra for dormer rectangular windows with two tiny double doors or round ones, like on a submarine. Why…? To look in the window and see the wind blowing petals off the cherry blossoms or raindrops splashing rainbows on the glass.
The new Vienna is nourished, held and not allowed to disperse by the old Vienna. And only the inhabitants of the looped streets near the vineyards — the brightest flap, defined as number nineteen — do not care about the old Vienna. Vienna will let go — they won’t notice. They are fed by the bell ringing of cozy churches, conversations over wooden tables in the yards of squat houses with painted walls and shutters, homemade sausage, young wine and the approaching Vienna forest. The old Vienna patiently dries up the marshes of immigrants, and if it does not cultivate a beautiful garden from them, it prepares the ground on which, perhaps not for one generation, but certainly later onwards Viennese will grow.
The outer republican Vienna is more and more on the map, but little in reality. The monarchy without a monarch — the inner, former Vienna — has not moved from its place, has remained faithful to its piece of land. Its diagonal is measured by steps in fifteen minutes, but the spiral of the former Vienna is immense. As from a magician’s hat from it you can take out the endless faded ribbons and handkerchiefs from the crumbling in the hands of the brocade. One can get lost in the streets that have been walked hundreds of times; one can go north and come out in the east; if the light or the angle of view has change, and you can find a jewelry shop with a door bell and a twisted old woman, stringing semi-precious beads, where neither the shop nor the old woman had ever been…
The outer city is now separated from the inner city by cars running clockwise. A wide street was built in place of the castle walls, symbolising the free movement of people and new ideas. Through the demolished wall, the citizens flooded in, but the spirits of Vienna have not left the city. They live in churches and dungeons, behind windows hung with heavy curtains; before Christmas they drink hot wine in the squares, stroll the streets and mingle with the Viennese. And sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s a human or a materialised spirit tinkling with a spoon in a café, stirring sugar, or elegantly adjusting pearl beads.
The possibility of encountering the shadows of the past here is greater than the chance of not encountering them. On the dark, crooked, mouldy and tangled medieval streets in the late evening or early morning the ghosts of meat and fishmongers in unclean aprons, red-faced bakers powdered with flour, Jesuits burning forbidden books at the stake, corpse collectors with carts full of lifeless plague victims appear. Monocles and wigs from the heyday of music, balls, the success of the “The Magic Flute” and the decline of Salieri’s musical fame flicker outside the imperial palace.
The spirits guard the past of the old Vienna, polish the creaking, worn parquet, touch up the cracks in the faded gilding, shake out the moulted velvet and do not go beyond the ring of the former castle walls. There are no spirits in republican Vienna, nor are there any in Belvedere or Schönbrunn Palace. It may happen that the spirits reach the highest tower of St Stephen’s Cathedral at dusk, beckoned by the lights of the ancient Ferris wheel, and then they disobey the ban and fly over the magic circle. The carriage with the people on it swings high, as if the wind has blown and the spirit has touched it with its wing.
****
There are cities built rigorously, like Copenhagen, and then there is Vienna, fashioned out of domes, pilasters, columns, consoles, mascarons, friezes, caryatids, clefs, flats and sharps. There are dwellers reflecting the stucco, and there are Viennese whose reflections are a variety of forms and sounds. In the streets of Vienna the disheveled, absent-minded sharps are hurriedly pace; the unhurriedly stroll flats with raised collars and chins, the faded caryatids cruis the shops; the small sips of coffee drink portraits in huge pearls who have left museums and gilded frames; consoles vie at auctions for crumbling chairs and chests scarred by generations of tree bugs; hermes smoke at marble tables and look through newspapers on wooden frames — fresh, but already yellowed; mascarons look for inspiration on café ceilings and write in unintelligible, nervous handwriting, sipping cold coffee, in notebooks with torn-out pages, the dramas that Melpomene whispered.
Vienna subdues, and if you don’t resist, submitting to this city means becoming a dome or at least a frieze, reincarnating as a treble clef or at least a flat. To adopt her habits, to truly love music and go to exhibitions with a sincere interest. Move to a time of gilding and purple velvet. Somehow naturally, obeying the general mood, to get into the tempo of the adagio. Not to rush — but to keep up, not to push — but to be ahead.