Halloweener World

To get in the proper frame of mind for Halloween, this chilly, sunny October morning I made my way to the Grinzing Friedhof. Friedhof, which means "place of peace" (cemetery), is one of the few euphemisms I have come across in German. This culture strikes me as matter-of-fact in so many ways, particularly when it comes to nudity or death or other subjects that make Americans shy, uneasy, or circumspect. (The word for mortuary, for example, translates as "corpse house.") The Grinzing cemetery sits at the edge of the village, on a hilltop--a good place, as hilltops are where heaven and earth meet. The composer Gustav Mahler, I have read, is buried here. I used a quest for his grave as my reason to thrash along the sidewalks through the dead leaves and up the slope.

There is a practicality about the business of burial here. Adjacent to the entrance gate are a pair of florist shops, and next to one of them is the entry to a stonemason's yard. The florists offer all manner of evergreen twigs and branches, along with chrysanthemums, pansies, and other flowers that are resistant to cold weather. These florists' business, it appears, is to assist with grave decoration rather than to provide displays for funerals. Neither the florists nor the stonemason hides discreetly in the shadows or seeks at all to be unobtrusive. Out front, like a menu board for a cafe, the mason has placed a sign with your three basic tombstone prices, ranging from roughly $1000 to $3000. Your basic one is your plain granite and comes in at 950 euros, and your high-end one at 2,200 euros is your black marble, polishing included free gratis. I looked into the graveled yard expecting to see a mock-up sample, with (in German, of course) "Your Name Here"--and perhaps a dash below it sandwiched by question marks--to whet the appetite of buyers, or at least to put passersby in a suitable frame of mind before entering the gates.

The cemetery has more the feel of a farm than of a garden. Just inside the gate is a modest little building, a bit shabby, reminding me of an adjunct to a barn. Its doors were open, and inside was a small chapel, rough and plain, with nine wooden folding chairs set in three rows on a stone floor, a lectern, and a bier on wheels, very like a shopping cart at a Home Depot garden center, though higher, and covered with ratty green felt. On the gravel paths I saw workmen in coveralls raking up leaves and other natural debris. At the ends of some of the rows of graves are concrete bins where grave decorations--flowers, boughs, and other vegetation--are tossed by the workmen as unceremoniously as children discarding candy wrappers on Halloween night. Three or four times during my stroll I had to step aside for these dusty, jeans-clad lieutenants of Death, who rolled through on garden tractors towing wooden-bed carts suitable for hauling a coffin or a pile of dead branches. They looked with annoyance at me and, I thought, at all us visitors, the solitary as well as the family groups, passing us like obese shoppers on scooters in a rush to get to the paint sale in Aisle 6. Because of a mild allergy to autumn leaf mold, I occasionally dabbed at tears under my eyes, hoping they would mistake it for grief and soften a bit as they rumbled past, but they remained as oblivious as a Vienna taxi driver to a crippled pedestrian in a crosswalk.

The cemetery blankets perhaps 5 acres. Along its edges, behind tumble-down wooden fences, are sheds for backhoes and other motorized, miniature farm equipment, along with shovels, piles of brown dirt, and a variety of gardening tools. Many of the marble vaults are decorated with flowers, but real, not plastic ones. There are no balloons, no pinwheels, and none of the tacky decoration that shows up in cemeteries in the States. Not many trees rise in the tract, and those that do look sad. Along with a few birch are traditional evergreens, cypress and pine; like the pine, the birch have been pruned high, presumably so their branches would not interfere with the backhoe operator's work. The cypress are particularly ragged, with wide gaps in their foliage, as if other trees had toppled into them, revealing wide and dark, brown, tangled interiors. These trees rose above a forest of mostly black marble slate, stones sometimes several feet high to accommodate the names of three or more generations, as families are interred in vertical stacks.

Here the old is embedded in the new. I did not find any dates before mid-19th century in the lists above the vaults, and most of the stones dated from the last 50 years. It occurred to me that the reason I saw so few old, weathered stones is that they are replaced--and updated, literally--each time a member of the most recent generation is interred. Still, I know that Grinzing has been here for several hundred years and must assume there is yet another cemetery, or perhaps those who died in the early 19th century and before are interred under church floors if not in other yards.

Contributing to the matter-of-fact feel here is that most of the stones are minimally informative--nothing but names and dates of birth and death. There are no Bible verses or Biblical images such as angels or stone lambs, though crosses are in abundance. Only a very few show signs of whimsicality. I saw two marble crosses with "Wiedersehen!" engraved on the transept, and another with "Unvergesslich!" (Unforgettable!); one black stone had a picture of a dog, perhaps a rottweiler, etched into it, and just below were the words, "I am here, I wait for you." I did notice that the World War II years, especially 1943-45, showed up frequently. Some of these were on stones of persons middle-aged and older, who died in Vienna, as that of a husband and wife with the same date of death, but some had died in their teens and 20s. In many cases, their professions had been military, designated by the Maltese cross next to the name. One of these young men is noted as having belonged to the Luftwaffe. Another says "Our Only Son"; he died on the Russian front in the winter ("Gefallt Donez 1943") at the age of 18 and is buried below his parents, who lived into the 1960s. How unnatural it seemed to think of combatants in Hitler's forces as having also been human, of their ends as having been sad, of their short lives as having been unfulfilled, and even of their having left behind parents, parents who grieved.

Some cemeteries are well-tended gardens, but I most appreciate the ones that are tended just imperfectly enough to reflect the passage of time. Rome would not be so calming to the spirit if it had no ruins. I appreciate a few clumps of overgrown grass and a few weeds, a burial yard in which the stones are weathered in different stages, with the oldest illegible from lichen and erosion by winds and rain over centuries. I never did locate the grave of Gustav Mahler.


Filler

A number of the wine gardens and inns in lower Grinzing have signs on their exteriors saying that they have been in business since 1683--the date of the last Turkish siege, in which Grinzing was burned to the ground.

I have seen no Halloween decorations here other than a child-sized scarecrow that sits out front of a flower shop and is taken in each night. Pumpkins, however, are now popular on menus: pumpkin-seed oil salad dressing, baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup.... And geese are abundant on restaurant menus and in grocery stores.

Under Wiener World

The deep texture of Vienna's architecture makes many of its streets a pleasure to experience, but it can be a struggle to get from it a linear sense of history in the city. Unlike Rome, where history is often discernible by its layers, surface Vienna is a deceptive melange: classical, medieval, and Renaissance styles appear in abundance, often adjacent to each other or to modern structures; it is not immediately apparent whether a Gothic church dates from the Middle Ages or from the 19th century, and portions of some churches date from both. It is not just the architecture that imparts that jumbled sense of time. During our touring the past couple of weeks, we have found that, like the Danube, history runs through the city in different channels and sometimes seems to meander, pool, and eddy as it makes its way to the sea.

Beneath the Stone

Near the heart of downtown is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Roman settlement, known as "Vindobona" from the 1st to the 4th century A.D. The desk attendant, a grizzled, dark, and dour figure, was a modern Charon, requiring obols for the boat ride across the Styx, down his staircase. We paid and headed for the underworld. A 20' descent takes a visitor to the street level of 2000 years ago and an excavation of the foundation outlines, walls, and other elements of the structures that remain from a Roman fort and various living quarters. Allied bombs the last week of World War II uncovered coins and other artifacts from more than one temple from the Roman era. (Elsewhere in the city, and even out as far as Grinzing, there are other, though more meager, remnants of Roman buildings.) All in all, however, the evidence of the Roman world felt sparse. While we were in the excavation, we could hear the clip-clop of fiacres, the horse-drawn carriages, on the street above. It was as if the street noise itself was from another time--the 19th rather than the 21st century--while we gazed on remnants of the 2d century.

Beneath the Bronze

The Capucchin church in the city center hosts the crypt of the Habsburgs. There are many boxes, nearly all bronze and most of them ornate, holding the rulers and their families, except for the daughters who were married off to create political alliances and who are interred in other lands.

Once visitors have entered through large glass doors like those of a modern department store, there is a voyage into bare, gray, timeless sturdiness. From the doorway it is just a few steps to a toll booth, which sits at the top of stairs leading down to yet another underworld, one of several centuries. The glorious Habsburg past contrasts with a modern, Spartan setting. The crypt rooms and floors are gray concrete. The walls are bare, and the rooms are cold. Each room has geometrically arranged, ornate bronze boxes, some on concrete pedestals; the lids are covered with designs of family crests and weapons and skulls and crossed bones. The higher the rank, the more elaborate the decoration and the more likely the box is to be in the center of the room; lesser royalty are placed in rows along the walls--as if honor, or position, after death were something outside time.

Here lie my favorite Habsburgs, all from the 19th century, and all misplaced in various ways, including their century. The first, Emperor Franz Josef (died in 1916), most likely wished he could have ruled in an earlier time, or at least before the revolutions in 1848 spread so much democratic sentiment; the second, his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, wished he could have lived in a post-monarchy era; the third, Franz Josef's reluctant wife, Empress Elisabeth (whom I referred to in an earlier posting as Sisi), apparently wished she were living in a time when all women were liberated. If the dead could have opinions about where they ended up, Franz Josef is probably the only one of those three who would be pleased. His body rests in the center of a room, between those of his wife and only son, and slightly elevated above them. (I thought of Arlington Cemetery, where flag-rank officers are buried high on the hillsides so that they have better views of the Potomac than the lower ranking officers and enlisted do.) Franz Josef's son, Rudolph, struggled under his society's and his father's constraints until, despondent over the choking artificiality of the monarchical system and his inability to bring about democratic reform, he shot his mistress and put a bullet in his own head. Because of the nature of his death, a great deal of civil and ecumenical manipulation of the rules was required to inter him on holy ground. His wish to be buried next to his mistress was ignored, and Rudolf wound up for eternity next to and below his father, in an arrangement that leaves him paternally dominated--visually, at least--for the ages, and many miles from the grave of his beloved. And poor Sisi. She hated the monarchy and she hated Vienna even more. The Empress spent nearly all her final years away from the city, loathing its court society and complaining often and bitterly of Vienna's winters. The bronze sarcophagus keeps her not just in a subordinate position to the emperor, but in the city she loathed, where for the remaining winters of eternity she will be "rolled round the earth's diurnal course."

Behind the Brass

We recently had a tour of the history of the Jewish community in Vienna. There is little physical evidence of it, mostly as a result of events during the Hitler era. Instead there are 1950s structures built on sites where once stood beautiful, centuries-old synagogues that were burned down by mobs, and other modern buildings atop bombed-out, one-time Gestapo and SS offices. Mostly the tour was a chilly walk from one somber brass plaque to another...signs of the times.

Filler

-- Response from the state rail system in regard to an email query:

"Dear Quentin Gehle!

This are your wished timetable:"

-- Car stuff. The process of getting the car made legal seems to be endless. We are through with the safety inspection, and this morning I dropped the car at the Toyota dealership to have our turn-signal light lenses changed to EU specifications and to have snow tires mounted. (There is a hefty fine for driving without snow tires after November 1.) Yet to be scheduled is the "technical inspection," which seems to involve a team of mechanics dismantling the vehicle and sniffing and licking each part after examining each with a jeweler's loupe. Since both of us has have good distance-vision, there is one regulation we can ignore: a driver who needs glasses is required to carry a spare pair in the vehicle. Yesterday we purchased the required orange caution triangle, first-aid kit, and four safety vests (for the driver and as many passengers as the car might hold). All this for a country with the second-highest accident rate in the EU. Having finally gotten around to buying our 2-month highway-use decal, we did a reconnaissance drive to the airport on Sunday morning, and once on the autobahn were passed regularly by cars going 100 mph and more.

-- The Potato Again. On Saturday. as we strolled through a crowd in the pedestrian shopping district of the inner city. we passed a man standing over a large black metal vessel with a bed of white-hot charcoal, slicing a potato, which he was grilling and selling to passersby.

"BLOPP! Stage Pass"

On Monday, as I was contemplating What Columbus Means to Me and feeling gratitude and warmth toward the American Congress for funding this particular holiday, we took a tour of Vienna's Ottakringer Brewery. To identify us as paying visitors, the brewery gave us each a lanyard with a yellow card reading "BLOPP! Stage Pass." I don't know what it means, but I do like the sound, which makes me think of spilled beer hitting the floor.

The brewery is a brick and wooden bridge from the days of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Sisi to the present. For the revolutionaries of 1848, the residences of the Habsburgs most likely spoke of a society that, in many ways, fit Faulkner's paradigm of the American South--the palaces here are versions of Southern plantations, relics of a caste system, built by the impoverished for the pretty porcelain elite. And today palace tourist audioguides speak of an idealized past--as they recreate what never was. The Ottakringer Brewery, on the other hand, is a functional, living monument to the past that was. Built in 1837, the brewery grounds contain a lovely old red-brick, blue-collar palace, which produced a golden palliative for a grimy existence with 12-hour workdays; currently the beverage it produces washes down many a sausage and potato on the tables of Wiener World, as well as my Sunday-night pizza at Nino's of Grinzing. Ottakringer remains a low-rent district, an area that has been occupied mainly by workers since the Industrial Revolution, and, before that, hosted a Turkish encampment during the 1683 siege of Vienna. (To this day are the Viennese are grateful for the kebap stands that the Turks were forced to leave behind. These stands also sell Ottakringer beer.) One historian referred to the Ottakringer district as a "grim industrial neighborhood" at the time of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. During the years of occupation after the war, the brewery survived in the Russian zone of the city, which ensured continued impoverishment, though it has grown more prosperous since Austria's independence in 1955.

Our back-stage tour had the brewery's gift shop for a staging area. Organized by one of the Embassy's offices, our group of more than 30 massed at noon in that plain and simple space lined with metal shelves and with a concrete floor--and the panache of a high school locker room. The shelves displayed different kinds of Ottakringer beer--though not many different kinds--and yellow-and-black T-shirts and beer glasses. We tourists milled about and chit-chatted in small groups, eying the closely-cropped heads and shiny black suits of the Ambassador's security detail, and trying to discern the outline of weapons under their coats. We hoped for no drama.

Soon a young man in jeans and a baseball cap with an Ottakringer logo led us off through a double door and into a parking lot to hear the history of the brewery, essentially a narrative identifying a succession of proprietors; he passed quickly over the business being seized from its Jewish owners during the Nazi years, and growing prosperous after the war. Up and down staircases we went, redolent of sweet yeast and bitter hops; we paused to look down at metal silos, huge cylinders, and fast-moving belts conveying cans, filled and unfilled, at very high or very low temperatures, through different stages of filling and pasteurization. Of the lecture on the brewing process itself, I recall only this: "The yeasts are tiny animals that fart CO2 and piss alcohol." As the guide said this, he looked directly at the Ambassador to determine whether that choice of English verbs amounted to a breach of decorum--with a tiny smirk suggesting his hope that it did. (The return gaze was, however, diplomatically impassive.) As the tour concluded, we were led up more stairs to the "party room."

We closed with a cast party, ourselves the players, in a fire trap in an attic--disguised as beer hall. The floors were of wood, as were rows of picnic tables; the ceiling was made of planks held up by rough-cut beams that I am guessing (from the cut marks) were made more than a hundred years ago. At one end of the room stood a bar and two sets of taps. Although our BLOPP cards had little tabs to be torn off and deposited for up to four sample glasses of different kinds of beer, no one was counting. Soon a large basket of large, fresh, warm pretzels appeared on a table top, and the tour closed on a social hour.

The last act involved trying to find our way out. We first tried to leave the room the way we had come in, but we were stopped by an employee and directed toward another exit. We found our way down a wooden hall and some wooden stairs into an uncharted parking lot. For the next 10-15 minutes we bobbed about the premises, like little ships at sea, randomly passing and re-passing other groups of four-to-six people who also were unable to navigate back to the street. Every turn brought us to a high fence or building wall, and we imagined we were from time to time passing ships from tours of years past. Finally we found a truck gate and exited, exultant at seeing the outside world again. We went full circle, making our way back to the gift shop to pick up souvenir glasses and T-shirts, much as I imagine Columbus to have done at a Carib Indian gift shop before his return voyage, to prove he had been there.

The Beautiful Gray-Green Danube

On Sunday we took a river cruise from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia. The 75-minute trip down the Danube began at Schwedenplatz, where Vienna's city center touches the river. The boat, a sleek, white vessel, held perhaps 150 passengers, in a cabin that was windows all around. Although there may have been commuters in the crowd, most passengers appeared to be tourists, and among them were several families with small children, many of whom rolled aboard in strollers. The boat seemed an ideal way for families with little ones to travel because of the freedom to move around. The kids could get up and stretch their legs, and many took advantage of it. As the river slid past, some set aside their fruit juice, rice cakes, and apples to add graffiti to the fogged lower sections of the windows, from stick figures to tic-tac-toe grids, readily erased with a coat sleeve once filled in. The ride was smooth, like a water slide, and relaxing. It made me want to have a rice cake and some juice and take a nap, but I chose to stay awake so that I would not miss anything.

Although I have long understood that the surface of water changes color according to the sky, the Danube has always looked army green to me on even the brightest day. At Schwedenplatz, the river is in one of four channels that divide it as it flows past Vienna, and so it is much narrower at that point than it is outside the city. Although we have seldom noticed graffiti in Vienna, the narrow channel that we were in for several hundred yards was lined with concrete walls that made quite a fine easel, even better than the fogged boat windows. Far from being a tangle of black swirls, scratches, and scrawls, this graffiti is brightly colored witches, ghosts, and cartoon figures like the Incredible Hulk mixed with an occasional political slogan; they followed along beside us until the levee walls gave way to stone embankments and trees. Despite the moisture on some of the windows in the cabin, we could see quite well through most of the glass panels: low banks lined with trees and, occasionally, insubstantial wooden fishing lodges with decks leaning out toward the gray-green water roiling dizzily on its way to the Black Sea. No pleasure craft were in evidence on the way down, though we passed a few barges. The river, like the shore, appeared deserted for long stretches.

As we moved along the river, recordings in German, Slovak, and English barked a smattering of facts about the size of the boat and its engines, as well as about the river itself. We were informed, for example, that the river near Vienna is approximately 640 bratwurst wide and some 30 cucumbers deep. The mountains and castles, it seems, lie in the opposite direction of the one we were going in. The Danube Valley is wide east of Vienna; gentle, tree-covered slopes gave way only once to a small town on the south bank; finally we passed the one-time border of Austria and Slovakia, where a fortress with walls extended along a small hill sits crumbling. After a few more miles, we slipped under a bizarre Communist-era bridge--a big metal flying saucer, or perhaps a jellyfish, was suspended above one end of the bridge, holding up the rest of the span with its cable tendrils. And then we tied up at the quay in Bratislava.

Initially I thought the boat ride might be the high point of the trip. Although we had left the European Union, there was no customs control to pass through at Bratislava. The exit path from the boat led us along the pier and then up a concrete ramp and then a wooden one, which took us into an old wooden structure that served as the Welcoming Portal to Slovakia. In the tobacco-smoky haze were tourist gewgaws, a bar, and a "WC," which was guarded by a tiny, snarling, dried leaf of a woman, whose wild, frizzy red-gray hair was arranged to cover both her heads. In scratchy Slovakian, I think, she croaked a demand for 40 cents--as I judged from a sign--for the privilege of urinating in her kabinka. It flashed through my mind that I had just paid a fee to Cerberus to enter Hades. At last we emerged into a cold, gray breeze and onto a riverside walk adjacent to a busy street. Jacket collars turned up and zipped tight against the prying fingers of the wind, we crossed the street with uncertain steps, hoping we were heading toward the old city and making visual mental notes of landmarks to help us find our way back to the boat in the afternoon. At that moment, I was wishing it were already afternoon.

The experience got better quickly. Soon, strolling along, we found ourselves in a charming, flower-filled square before the national theater, and after a few cobblestone blocks more we were in the old center, with its leafy squares and curiously ornate structures and bright shops and businesses in a variety of pastel blues, yellows, oranges, and creams. It is like an architect's playground: even some of the humblest buildings have gargoyles, embedded turret towers, caryatids, Italian balconies, crenelated stone entablature above windows and roof lines, palladian windows, and mixed elements of Gothic, Roman, and Greek revival. Napoleon provided an additional historical touch to one building: embedded perhaps 20 feet up in the bright yellow wall of the city hall is a cannon ball fired by his army. As we ambled along, peeking in shops and churches, we saw also that scattered around the city are two kinds of bronze statues: secular saints--whose names to me are as unpronounceable as they are historically opaque--to remind local citizens of national ideals, and then fun, whimsical, life-sized figures, including a bronze man popping out of a manhole and a smiling Napoleon leaning over a park bench. They were brass mimes--and much preferable to real ones. We saw, too, a great amount of decay. Fenced, weedy lots bordered on the backs of crumbling medieval buildings. The old churches were sometimes in a sad state of repair, though others had been recently restored. Plain like the castle on the town hilltop, which was burned out and then rebuilt in 1953, there was little to recommend the churches except perhaps for worshipers, who appeared to pack the services. Under a stone arch we saw a seated beggar in bright pink pants. As we passed, he pulled back a sleeve to display and wiggle an arm stump (well healed)...himself a colorful, restored ruin.

Our thoughts began drifting to the return trip and being indoors. We stopped in for lunch at the Senate Cafe, which, like so many places in Vienna, offered a menu with lots of pork and goulash choices, but also a number of faux Italian dishes. Tempted though we were by "beef soupe with noddles," we opted for sandwiches. After lunch and another hour or so of strolling and browsing shops, we decided to take off the chill by stopping in a chocolate shop. I had a warm bowl of white chocolate, thick like cream, topped with ground hazelnut, and delicious. When Linda's chocolate fondue was set before her, she asked me if I would like to try one of the wafers and dip it in the sauce. Absorbed with my own selection, I first had a couple of spoonfuls of my own dish and then looked up, starting to reach over to get a wafer to dip to try hers. Too late. She had the bowl upended, with the bottom against her nose, licking out the last drop; the wafers were gone.

It was time, then, to make our way back to the boat. Like my white chocolate, our glide back up the river was sweet and gentle.

Filler

Austria's funniest home videos. Occasionally on a downtown street we see that half the sidewalk disappears: it becomes a stone staircase that drops one or two floors to a sidewalk below. There is no gate, no sign, no warning. It is a black hole, waiting to suck in pedestrians texting, talking on cell phones, or reading maps, and it surely provides hilarious instances of cracked heads and broken appendages.

German class. Teacher trying to get an American student to say her street address number correctly in German:

(All pronounced in German)
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: Perfect...let us move on....

Things medical and post-nasal. We have both noticed an abundance of brass plaques at building entrances advertising psychiatrists' offices. It still momentarily distracts me whenever I pass one that reads [type of practice] followed by Gesundheit [which means 'health'].

Each academic title is mentioned here when a doctor is addressed, as in "Dr. Dr." for a psychiatrist, who normally has a doctoral degree in medicine as well as in psychology.

More black socks. The Austrian national soccer team players wear black socks.

Television advertisement. Two young women sit under a tree, having a picnic in a green field on a sunny day; each forks up slices of potato from a bowl, chatting about the goodness of that homely tuber; the scene is followed by an endorsement for a brand of potatoes. I continue to wait for some tourist to stop me on the street and ask me where a person should go for a good potato.

Grinzing scene. A young man, perhaps Turkish, stands in front of the grocery where Linda and I shop a few times each week. He arrives on the tram and is at his post when the store opens at 7 a.m., and he leaves at 7 p.m. when the store closes. He has three or four German magazines about sports and other topics that he sells for 3 euros each, and sometimes he asks for an additional coin. He is there in the rain, in the wind, in the gray mist that is so common here, and by the end of the day he still has most of his magazines. In the mornings, when he sees a grocery clerk carrying empty boxes to a trash bin across the street, the young man runs to see whether any food is being discarded. Linda and I are starting to accumulate a pile of magazines that we cannot read.