In late November 1989, a last-minute switch in travel plans as I was going from Frankfurt to Athens put me on a "Czech OK Airlines" flight transiting Prague. We flew into the city on an old Soviet aircraft, a Tupelov, I think, about the size of a Boeing 737, but without that plane's appointments. Instead of overhead storage bins, there was only rope mesh, stuffed with shopping bags, battered cloth suitcases, and even the occasional huge sausage poking through the webbing. The only drink the steward offered was beer--excellent beer--decanted into drinking glasses from a 2-liter bottle; the food offered was slices of sausage. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia was coming down that night, and I wondered whether I'd see any evidence of disorder from aloft or during my short layover. From the air, the whole city was brightly studded with orange from sodium vapor street lights. The small airport transit lounge, I recall, had uncomfortable wooden seats and a ceiling oddly studded with light bulbs of different sizes, plus one plump, gray, and grumpy guard making sure no one exited the lounge. And that was all I saw of Prague. Simplicity, bareness, and signs of an economy just above the poverty line. But well lit.
Early last Saturday morning we boarded the train at Vienna's Meidling Station for the 5-hour, nonstop ride to Prague. Soon after we crossed the border from Austria into the Czech Republic, the change in the economic level became apparent. From the train window we could sometimes see local highways, shoulderless, narrow, and heavily patched. The villages and cities along the way looked more prosperous than the rural areas, which at times reminded me of Appalachia--tiny wooden and tar-paper shacks with small, fenced vegetable gardens along the lowlands of adjacent streams. Besides the stretches of farmland, small, rundown enterprises--brickyards, lumberyards, chemical plants, agricultural machinery repair services and outlets--often bordered the tracks. In the towns, the tracts of houses were a dull array of earth tones, many with carrot-colored roof tiles, the houses painted sauerkraut beige, potato tan, onionskin yellow, cabbage green, the occasional pumpkin, and various shades of sausage. Now and again we'd see a neon-green building, or sometimes a bright yellow one, or sometimes one of both bright green and yellow. It was as if someone, sensing dullness, tried to overcome it by serving popsicles with a plate of fried cabbage. Along the way we also saw what must have been abandoned sentry stands on stilts, prolific in fields close to the border; bunkers; and a junkyard of old tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other military vehicles, including an old jet fighter. I wondered whether any or all of these had been deployed when I passed through in 1989.
When we reached the train station in Prague, we were in a bustling, brightly and colorfully lit modern building lined with newsstands, shops, and fast food outlets. We finally located the driver our hotel had sent for us. A tall young man with a Beatles-style haircut and a shiny black suit, he soon had us at our hotel--its original structure dated from the time that Chaucer was a boy--on the Old Town Square. With just two days to tour, we contented ourselves with a visit to the castle and its church, and with wandering the old city, just taking in the street views and occasionally browsing in the shops. One of our walks took us to the hundred-year-old train station, a portion of which is preserved atop the new station; its huge old clock is stopped at 12. And sometimes it did seem as if the city, never having been bombed or destroyed by the many wars that ravaged Europe, enjoyed a timelessness.
The shops are filled with crystal, with pottery, with Russian dolls, with refrigerator magnets, with t-shirts that "I Heart Prague" and "Prague Drinking Team"; there are black light shows, abundant bars, tiny restaurants, "medieval torture museums," ghost tour sites, and even an "Erotic Grocery," its windows covered by a massive plain brown wrapper, which my curious traveling companion could not resist peering under.
At times the language barrier reminded me of being penned in the transit lounge more than 20 years ago. Although most of the shops and restaurants provide signs and menus in English and Czech, the churches and historic sites, for the most part, are labeled only in Czech. That made it frustrating, requiring the continual consultation of a guide book to determine what we were looking at, and it was not too often that one of us was sufficiently patient to shed gloves, dig out the book, and find the right page. Even Latin signs and tablets would have helped me, but there was only Czech. Thus, we were inclined to stroll a great deal on this visit, and to spend less time lingering at exhibitions and buildings than we otherwise might have. The television in our hotel room brought little relief from the language prison; it offered only Czech programming and one channel in German. Although we have both much improved our German since we arrived--we know an amazing amount now, and we don't know an amazing amount now--we are nowhere near being fluent. Tuning in to the German channel at night nevertheless gave us a feeling of comfort, almost like listening to English. German felt secure and familiar. The room was blessed with but one English sign--in our bathroom: "Please economize water consumption according to your feasibility."
I doubt that the menus in the city have changed much since I flew through in 1989. The Czech selections consistently looked like what we find in Austria: the omnipresent goulash and an infinite variety of pork products, though servings were smaller and with more fat; cabbage--white sour and red sweet; potatoes, mostly fried. A basket of rye bread accompanied each selection. Fortunately, some restaurants offered faux Italian, just like in Austria. The pizza was great. The beer was excellent.
It was a different world--a charm much like Venice, and one of the loveliest cities I have seen: cobblestones, arches, twisting narrow streets, pastel buildings, arcades, stone towers and church spires decorated in Gothic generosity, a wide river, wind, snow flurries, masses of tourists, a wide gray river, the Karls Bridge lined with saints' statues, the architecture a harmony of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern. And the buildings are all from their own time, unlike the "historism" of Vienna with its self-conscious architectural anachronisms (though I love them, too). At night there is another kind of visual grace from spotlights aimed up at the structures and illuminating upper stories and church spires, giving them shadows that deepened their appeal. Across the Moldau from the old city, rising like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, sit the castle structures and St Vitus Cathedral, its spires seeming to reach all the way to heaven, joining Prague to another dimension. At night, the Moldau became the Jordan, with the Promised Land just on the other side of the Karls Bridge. Prague is still well lit.
Monday morning we stuffed ourselves at the hotel's copious breakfast buffet and got a car to the train station. We rolled back to prosperity, where the beer is also good, where the city is also well lit, and where the airplanes have always had plastic overhead bins. We were home by mid-afternoon, both of us thinking the Czech Republic is OK, and Old Prague is a fairyland.
Filler
Back to Austria.......
-- The Saturday evening before Valentine's Linda treated me to the lovely gift of a candle-light dinner cruise on the Danube. The Embassy office that plans social events in the city had arranged to have 10 seats reserved for the cruise; these, we were told, sold out quickly. How pleased we were to see that the seats, all around a single table, were on the glass-enclosed upper deck of the ship and right at the front. It was like being on the flight deck, with a 180-degree view. What a lovely evening it was, gliding along the river, a path of darkness lined with lights from roads, businesses, churches, and homes along the shores, good food, and a beautiful, loving companion.
-- for Earl...7 May 04 - 16 Feb 11...a few lines from Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"
"His dinner is ready. Won't he dine today, either? Or, does he live without dining?"
"Lives without dining," said I, and closed his eyes.
"Eh, he's asleep, ain't he?"
"With kings and counselors," murmured I.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Music Mensch
It was like swinging on a trapeze. A new musical experience this week--a mix of the Vienna Philharmonic, Lawrence Welk, a German beer garden, and a touch of Vaudeville--was more fun than a circus. On Tuesday evening we attended a show by Andre Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra, whose productions we had seen in the States on PBS a number of times. Like every opera and concert in Vienna, it was sold out, and the crowd was as joyful and enthusiastic as any we have been a part of. The crowd reminded us of the audience we saw at the large harvest festival downtown last fall, only the beer steins were missing, and here they were slightly better dressed.
The show opened with Rieu, his lion's mane bouncing to his Stradivarius, and his orchestra of 40-50 members and 7 singers marching to the stage from the back of the hall, playing "76 Trombones." The chorus and the women in his orchestra, looking quite floral, wore pastel gowns of yellow, orange, lavender, blue, and red, with the men dressed in black tie. Show tunes, waltzes, arias, and marches followed each other in rapid suggestion, with the audience clapping rhythmically and sometimes singing along and swaying in unison. Three tenors and three sopranos revolved on and off the stage to perform solos or to sing together. We counted more than a dozen large tv cameras--on a catwalk, on booms, on the edges of the orchestra, and with crews roving around the auditorium. One crew, crouching, moved stealthily through the aisles and even up on stage, right around Rieu, during the performance, like they were stalking him. At times, too, my eyes followed a camera attached to a long boom, positioned near the front row of the audience, moving like hummingbird over a garden: it floated, rose, and descended, sometimes over the audience and sometimes over the orchestra, invariably drawn back to the lovely pianist; for much of the show, it hovered over that particular flower. From time to time, vendors appeared in the aisles selling red and white paper boxes of some snack, not popcorn, but probably red meat or the two national vegetables: potatoes and salt. Beer, wine, and water were available at concession stands behind the seating; despite the atmosphere of exuberance, no one seemed to be drinking to excess.
The decorum of Strauss and other formal, though light, music had a special counterpoint. During a song about winter in Vienna, artificial snow drifted down on a portion of the spectators as flood lights shone through it to create a wintry backdrop of the orchestra; toward the end of the song, a great mass of faux snow dropped on the audience's heads, much to the delight of Rieu, the orchestra, and the rest of the crowd. And there were other antics. Besides orchestra members being blatantly obvious about passing around liquor and foaming champagne bottles, stripping to t-shirts for one musical skit, and otherwise performing bits of slapstick, some members of the audience inadvertently complemented the circuslike fun. During The Blue Danube Waltz, several couples got up to twirl to the music in the rapid Vienna waltzing style. The aisles, however, were narrow and crowded, and fast-moving couples turned into bumper cars. The inevitable happened: one couple toppled, essentially flattening four people in a row of seats. Although the woman got up immediately, the man had great difficulty untangling himself from the jungle of legs and arms he had fallen into. The process of getting to his feet probably took 20 seconds, but it seemed like an hour. With his partner supporting him, he limped out of the hall, looking far more embarrassed than in pain, and it occurred to me he might have been faking the limp just to dampen the amusement.
Balloons dropped from the ceiling of the auditorium at what Rieu announced as the closing number, but the show went on more than another 30 minutes with the same energy with which it had opened. It finally concluded after some 10 encores and, finally, Brahms' Lullaby.
Filler
-- Sunday morning we drove along the "High Road," which, like a miniature version of Skyline Drive, connects Cobenzl, Khalenberg, and Leopoldsberg, three mountains (hills) north of Grinzing, and looks out over one of the larger stretches of the Vienna Woods. Leopoldsberg, which we had not visited before, offered fine views of Vienna and the Danube Valley, and the river, from that elevation, actually looked blue rather than gray-green. At the very top of the hill a wall enclosed a crumbling 18th-century church and a tumble-down two-story house, which had once served as a restaurant. This peak, like the other two, was an important staging area for Polish and other forces that arrived barely in time to save Vienna from the Turks besieging the city in 1683. Beethoven, we read, used to stroll the paths on the slopes of Leopoldsberg.
-- In nearby Nussdorf, I looked for the path Beethoven used to take up the mountain and the stream by which he found inspiration. I did not find the path, but I will go stroll-searching for it again. I did find an old, boarded-up roundhouse for a cogwheel train now long gone, and a street named for the stretch it once traversed. There is more to discover in the area, with its rough cobblestone streets and walks, and low-roofed yellow and blue houses with projecting stone bumps to guard against damage from carriage wheels. Beethoven occupied at least two residences in this area, which has many houses and other structures dating to at least the 18th century. And in this village tuberculosis took the last breath of Franz Kafka.
-- On Sunday afternoon we visited Simmering, south of the city. The huge Central Cemetery, which opened in 1874, holds more than 2 and a half million graves; among them are those of famous musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Austria's most prominent statesmen. Some are beautiful, and some are bizarre. An arcade holds several memorials, including one of a miner, whose grave entrance is designed as the entrance to an old mine, complete with Disneylike dwarves posed at the door, holding tools. The cemetery is well tended, with one exception. The old Jewish section looks like a setting for a horror movie, with toppled and teetering marble stones, slick with mossy patches; large clumps of overgrown grass, dark green, matted, bent, damp with dew, grieve over the stones and plots. We presume that these graves are in this state because the families were deported or killed during the war, or fled the city, and there is no one left to tend them.
-- Tail high, and near the end of his ninth life, Earl the Cat still wobbles slowly to the door to greet us when we come home.
The show opened with Rieu, his lion's mane bouncing to his Stradivarius, and his orchestra of 40-50 members and 7 singers marching to the stage from the back of the hall, playing "76 Trombones." The chorus and the women in his orchestra, looking quite floral, wore pastel gowns of yellow, orange, lavender, blue, and red, with the men dressed in black tie. Show tunes, waltzes, arias, and marches followed each other in rapid suggestion, with the audience clapping rhythmically and sometimes singing along and swaying in unison. Three tenors and three sopranos revolved on and off the stage to perform solos or to sing together. We counted more than a dozen large tv cameras--on a catwalk, on booms, on the edges of the orchestra, and with crews roving around the auditorium. One crew, crouching, moved stealthily through the aisles and even up on stage, right around Rieu, during the performance, like they were stalking him. At times, too, my eyes followed a camera attached to a long boom, positioned near the front row of the audience, moving like hummingbird over a garden: it floated, rose, and descended, sometimes over the audience and sometimes over the orchestra, invariably drawn back to the lovely pianist; for much of the show, it hovered over that particular flower. From time to time, vendors appeared in the aisles selling red and white paper boxes of some snack, not popcorn, but probably red meat or the two national vegetables: potatoes and salt. Beer, wine, and water were available at concession stands behind the seating; despite the atmosphere of exuberance, no one seemed to be drinking to excess.
The decorum of Strauss and other formal, though light, music had a special counterpoint. During a song about winter in Vienna, artificial snow drifted down on a portion of the spectators as flood lights shone through it to create a wintry backdrop of the orchestra; toward the end of the song, a great mass of faux snow dropped on the audience's heads, much to the delight of Rieu, the orchestra, and the rest of the crowd. And there were other antics. Besides orchestra members being blatantly obvious about passing around liquor and foaming champagne bottles, stripping to t-shirts for one musical skit, and otherwise performing bits of slapstick, some members of the audience inadvertently complemented the circuslike fun. During The Blue Danube Waltz, several couples got up to twirl to the music in the rapid Vienna waltzing style. The aisles, however, were narrow and crowded, and fast-moving couples turned into bumper cars. The inevitable happened: one couple toppled, essentially flattening four people in a row of seats. Although the woman got up immediately, the man had great difficulty untangling himself from the jungle of legs and arms he had fallen into. The process of getting to his feet probably took 20 seconds, but it seemed like an hour. With his partner supporting him, he limped out of the hall, looking far more embarrassed than in pain, and it occurred to me he might have been faking the limp just to dampen the amusement.
Balloons dropped from the ceiling of the auditorium at what Rieu announced as the closing number, but the show went on more than another 30 minutes with the same energy with which it had opened. It finally concluded after some 10 encores and, finally, Brahms' Lullaby.
Filler
-- Sunday morning we drove along the "High Road," which, like a miniature version of Skyline Drive, connects Cobenzl, Khalenberg, and Leopoldsberg, three mountains (hills) north of Grinzing, and looks out over one of the larger stretches of the Vienna Woods. Leopoldsberg, which we had not visited before, offered fine views of Vienna and the Danube Valley, and the river, from that elevation, actually looked blue rather than gray-green. At the very top of the hill a wall enclosed a crumbling 18th-century church and a tumble-down two-story house, which had once served as a restaurant. This peak, like the other two, was an important staging area for Polish and other forces that arrived barely in time to save Vienna from the Turks besieging the city in 1683. Beethoven, we read, used to stroll the paths on the slopes of Leopoldsberg.
-- In nearby Nussdorf, I looked for the path Beethoven used to take up the mountain and the stream by which he found inspiration. I did not find the path, but I will go stroll-searching for it again. I did find an old, boarded-up roundhouse for a cogwheel train now long gone, and a street named for the stretch it once traversed. There is more to discover in the area, with its rough cobblestone streets and walks, and low-roofed yellow and blue houses with projecting stone bumps to guard against damage from carriage wheels. Beethoven occupied at least two residences in this area, which has many houses and other structures dating to at least the 18th century. And in this village tuberculosis took the last breath of Franz Kafka.
-- On Sunday afternoon we visited Simmering, south of the city. The huge Central Cemetery, which opened in 1874, holds more than 2 and a half million graves; among them are those of famous musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Austria's most prominent statesmen. Some are beautiful, and some are bizarre. An arcade holds several memorials, including one of a miner, whose grave entrance is designed as the entrance to an old mine, complete with Disneylike dwarves posed at the door, holding tools. The cemetery is well tended, with one exception. The old Jewish section looks like a setting for a horror movie, with toppled and teetering marble stones, slick with mossy patches; large clumps of overgrown grass, dark green, matted, bent, damp with dew, grieve over the stones and plots. We presume that these graves are in this state because the families were deported or killed during the war, or fled the city, and there is no one left to tend them.
-- Tail high, and near the end of his ninth life, Earl the Cat still wobbles slowly to the door to greet us when we come home.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Mauthausen
Our outing last Sunday was supposed to be a sunny drive along the autobahn for two hours, a short tour of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, and a sunny drive on a slow road home through the Danube Valley, past quaint little villages here and there, each with its own ruined castle. We are learning that a forecast of "sunny" here probably means no more than that the sky will be a slightly lighter shade of gray than it usually is. Our drive began in light fog, which turned to middling fog by the time we reached our destination, and, like the somberness of the camp, the hung in front of us all the way home.
Like so many of the ruined castles along the river, the concentration camp sits high on a hill above the town. The Austrian Government has preserved and maintained it, and in 1970 it opened as a museum and memorial. Russian soldiers were quartered in the camp barracks after the war, probably resulting in at least some modifications to the relatively few remaining buildings, and the creation of the museum and visitor facilities, along with subsequent preservation work and the erection of numerous memorials across the grounds, has also done something to change the look.
Although much is gone, the walls, the watch towers, the barbed wire--those things alone would have been enough to evoke the ghosts of the 130,000 people who died there. Sometimes it was difficult getting a grip on what transpired: the room that served as the gas chamber looked smaller than I had expected, kind of like an extra-large closet. The ovens looked too small to admit an adult of normal size. Nearby is a quarry, where prisoners were worked to death.
The scale and depth of what occurred in Mauthausen created another kind of cold and fog--an impenetrable barriers to understanding. I could recognize the suffering only in some of the museum's photographs of individuals and through the introductory film, which provided brief narratives by survivors and accounts from some of the American soldiers who liberated the camp at the end of the war. The victims--a wide range of nationalities--included Jews, gypsies, criminals, Spanish nationalists, and large numbers of POWs, particularly Russians, hundreds of whom were slaughtered after an escape attempt. As townspeople reported, SS officers returned to their homes in the village below in the evening, tended their flower gardens meticulously, took good care of their pets, and played with their children. I cannot begin to understand it; I will leave the cultural psychoanalysis to others.
Like so many of the ruined castles along the river, the concentration camp sits high on a hill above the town. The Austrian Government has preserved and maintained it, and in 1970 it opened as a museum and memorial. Russian soldiers were quartered in the camp barracks after the war, probably resulting in at least some modifications to the relatively few remaining buildings, and the creation of the museum and visitor facilities, along with subsequent preservation work and the erection of numerous memorials across the grounds, has also done something to change the look.
Although much is gone, the walls, the watch towers, the barbed wire--those things alone would have been enough to evoke the ghosts of the 130,000 people who died there. Sometimes it was difficult getting a grip on what transpired: the room that served as the gas chamber looked smaller than I had expected, kind of like an extra-large closet. The ovens looked too small to admit an adult of normal size. Nearby is a quarry, where prisoners were worked to death.
The scale and depth of what occurred in Mauthausen created another kind of cold and fog--an impenetrable barriers to understanding. I could recognize the suffering only in some of the museum's photographs of individuals and through the introductory film, which provided brief narratives by survivors and accounts from some of the American soldiers who liberated the camp at the end of the war. The victims--a wide range of nationalities--included Jews, gypsies, criminals, Spanish nationalists, and large numbers of POWs, particularly Russians, hundreds of whom were slaughtered after an escape attempt. As townspeople reported, SS officers returned to their homes in the village below in the evening, tended their flower gardens meticulously, took good care of their pets, and played with their children. I cannot begin to understand it; I will leave the cultural psychoanalysis to others.
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