I recently became aware of another layer in the history of Wiener World, this one populated with ghosts from Napoleon's armies and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. War seems to take on a new and special pointlessness when the bones of anonymous dead enemies lie atop each other for eternity and the battlegrounds are buried like the soldiers' bones, with the armies' routes unmarked and the killing grounds overgrown by towns, plowed fields, and patches of disorderly green. On an uncharacteristically chilly, blustery July Sunday, Steve, a friend and student of military history, took me along on a tour of Wagram, a Napoleonic battlefield just east of Vienna.
In spring of 1806, Austrian and French troops battled first at two small villages, Essling and Aspern. They are sleepy little towns. Churches--some rebuilt on the sites of ones that were destroyed in the war--a stone granary, an observation tower, one-room "museums" open just a few hours one day a week, and a few markers are what recall the fighting at Essling and Aspern, and the later Battle of Wagram. Busy streets with concrete curbs, the usual businesses from electrical supply stores to barber shops, traffic lights, parking lots...the scenes of heavy fighting are now as anonymous as the rank and file who fought there. Battle illustrations and first-hand accounts of this fighting--Napoleon's first loss--show fierce close-in combat that resulted in thousands of casualties. We stopped along the road by the granary, the size of a huge farmhouse, where hundreds if not thousands of Austrian soldiers died in an effort to seize it from French troops. Hoping to examine the structure closely, we could get only as far as a fence along the road. Along the roadside I nearly stepped on a dead kit, a fox pup, that had recently been hit by car; its tail, the fur rich red and brown, was still glossy in the soft gray sunlight of this drizzly day. It was still a beautiful creature, becoming part of the earth, with wet, overgrown grass for a tombstone. Anonymous.
On nearby Lobau Island in the Danube, just opposite Vienna, Napoleon massed his troops and set up his headquarters. Lobau, which now serves as a "nature colony," is marshy and overgrown--shrubbery, trees, vines, weeds--with a network of dirt paths. Aside from the testimony of a few historical markers, there is no trace of the war or of the vast French encampment. Vienna's nudists famously sunbathe on the shores of Lobau--there, over the rainbow, where troubles melt like lemon drops--but not on this gray day, with the wind blowing droplets that felt like wet ice on my face.
In July, Napoleon battled the Austrians at nearby Wagram and defeated them, with both sides suffering heavy losses. The area is almost completely flat and agricultural, and artillery took a great toll on massed troops in the open fields. More than 300,000 soldiers took part in the fighting. At the small village church of Markgrafneusiedl--as charming as it is euphonious--the crypt is filled from floor to ceiling with the skulls and bones of the nameless fallen from both sides. Just outside the town of Untersiebenbrunn we came across an area the size of a home garden plot, designated "French cemetery." It is a small, overgrown area bounded on three sides by a plowed field and on the fourth by a drainage ditch; covered with brush, scrubby trees, and tall grass, it is not so much a cemetery as a burial pit that has almost wholly returned to nature, with a farmer's plow eager to encroach on it. The lot is encircled by a small, weedy, gravel path, like an enchanted fairy ring, put there to keep history from disappearing utterly under the wet grass that grows over the lot and along the roadside.
Wiedersehen
This week we are losing our local mentors. How different our lives have been because of them; how different our lives will be without them:
Jim and Sue, our sponsors, who a year ago this week met us at the airport as we began life in Wiener World, are moving back to the States. They gave us an enormous amount of practical advice about living here--understanding the public transportation system, using recycling, signing up for fitness training, getting our Internet operational, telling us who to call for housing issues, identifying good restaurants and specialty shops. On the day we arrived, we found cat-care already set up in the apartment and a supply of groceries, for which they would take no reimbursement. The next day they drove us shopping for electronics and other supplies and then took us to dinner; later they gave us orientation walks in the city. Most Friday mornings in the past year, regardless of the weather, Jim and I explored the coffee houses and book stores of the inner city, along with oddities such as the globe museum, and historic churches.
Farewell to Gaby, our friend and German teacher, who has just ended 38 years of work with the Embassy. Besides conversational German, she taught us about Austrian culture and customs, she helped us get concert tickets, she directed us to a good dentist, she told us where to get watch batteries replaced, she told us where and how to order a turkey for the holidays, she identified places for daytrips, she advised us about vet care when Earl the Cat was dying.... She did everything that she knew to do to help us adjust to and enjoy living in Wiener World.
Filler
-- Boarding the 38 tram near downtown--a chubby, middle-aged dwarf, dressed all in red: red sneakers, red jeans, red jacket, and red cap. She sat and smiled and made faces at a toddler across from her, and then pulled down the cap brim--revealing a large "Chicago Bulls" logo--and fell asleep.
-- Crossing a large, busy intersection downtown, an old man with three Basset hounds on separate leashes. The light changed but drivers waited patiently as the low-slung creatures finished ambling through the crosswalk, tails wagging, heads down, noses pausing, businesslike, to check out each pebble, cigarette butt, and bit of flattened chewing gum. Finally, with a measure of exertion, they hoisted their bodies up over the curb, and traffic resumed its flow.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Teutonia: Munich
Until my visit to Munich, all I had seen of Germany on the ground was its airports, which I have transited many times over the years. From the air, Germany was mountains, greenery, farm fields, rivers, highways, and red-tiled roofs. From my childhood it was dwarves, dark and tangled forests, child-eating ogres, witches, candy houses, colorful beersteins, castles, and magic spells. A four-and-a-half-hour train ride from Wiener World, Munich in particular drew me because of its outstanding art galleries, beer halls, and Nazi past. In addition to having a chance to blend and integrate all my earlier impressions, I would be able to move in a single day from the sublime to the raucous to the horrible. While Linda was back in the States for the birthday celebration for her amazing, wonderful mother, and while I had built-in cat-sitters in the form of my visiting dear friend and ex-wife and her friend Dave, the time was right.
Despite the gray skies, cool temperatures, and occasional showers, Munich was jumping--more than Vienna's inner city, I thought. Vienna has a large, bustling pedestrian zone in its center, but Munich's seemed even larger and more crowded. The mix of people seemed different, too, with many more youth--lots of backpackers--and large numbers of Arabs and Africans. People-watching alone could have filled my days and evenings in the city. However, church visits and then a beer hall occupied my first afternoon. The next day I devoted to art galleries, and the next to a tour of Dachau and walks through city parks and a view of the Isar River.
The great art in Munich was far beyond what I had expected. I found four surprisingly rich art galleries with works from medieval to Renaissance to modern. I spent the entire day in the galleries strolling and gazing until my back, calves, and arches would no longer let me, and I began to envy the mobile handicapped on what may have been a day that the galleries had specially designated for them. In one museum more than a dozen people in wheelchairs rolled by, the rubber wheels on the wooden floors sounding like duct tape being stripped off a roll--an atonal symphony that complemented the modern art in particular. Although I normally do not spend nearly so much time with modern art as I do with each of the earlier periods, I did come across a number of recent works that I found myself getting lost in. Chief among those was Alex Katz's "Cityscape," a scene of a forest at night, silhouettes of tangled branches and trees faintly touched by white, like snow, and amorphous blobs of light--what might have been streetlights in the woods. The image of city-wilderness vaguely evoked fear of the unknown, of what is the wilderness in our civilized environment. Or perhaps it was just my awareness that I was in the city where Hitler had incubated his ideas....
Two evenings I had fine dining in the Augustiner and Hofbräu beer halls. The first was marginally saner than the second, which had more tour groups and more noise, and which is more well known because it is where Hitler got his start, orating to the masses. The beer halls were fun: wooden plank tables like picnic tables, some large enough to accommodate at least a dozen persons, were tightly arranged throughout plain, well-lit, cavernous rooms; the main decorations were deer antlers and heads of other ruminants large and small, suggesting that the halls had their origins in ancient hunting lodges--man caves, where in days gone by an orator might appeal to primitive passions. Strangers sat with other strangers, singly and in groups. The conversation volume was high, as was the air of conviviality, and the clatter of tableware and 1-liter beer mugs added to the lively cacophony. The menus listed mostly sausage and other pork delights, potatoes, sauerkraut, and dumplings; drinkers outnumbered diners by more than two to one. Although no one was orating hate speech, a table with a dozen drunken, fist-banging, table-slapping, chanting, shouting Brits managed to drive out a Japanese tour group seated nearby.
Although nothing compares with the Baroque churches of Rome, Munich has some fine ones. The most fun of the lot for me was the a church erected by the Asam brothers, who were architects and church builders. They made their own church like a showroom for prospective customers, covering every square centimeter with a bizarre array of cupids and gold pediments, of statuary, entablature, painting, fluting, and curlicues. A Baroque orgasm--with even a supine corpse on display in a glass box on the altar.
Dachau. I doubt that I shall ever get beyond cognitive numbness in my struggle to understand how Nazi Germany's leaders managed to enroll so many people in perpetrating--and others in pretending to ignore--the Holocaust. My decision to take a tour of Dachau, just outside Munich, did not bring me much further in my effort to grasp the event. Although much of what is now present is reconstructed, it is ample to evoke the enormity. I missed the chance to read the numerous posters displaying quotations from SS officers, townspeople, and survivors because our guide--a young man who seemed passionate about learning and teaching the history of the Hitler years--spent most of the tour bloviating about his own understanding of morality, religion, and human nature. At the end of the tour, as he puffed on his cigarette, with no sense of bemusement or irony he pointed out that smoking was permitted in all the outside areas of the camp except in front of the crematorium. His tutorial lasted so long that we missed our train back to Munich, and we returned to the city illegally using local public transportation. I wished that he would instead have used a beer hall for his oration so that I might have learned something more of Dachau.
Despite the gray skies, cool temperatures, and occasional showers, Munich was jumping--more than Vienna's inner city, I thought. Vienna has a large, bustling pedestrian zone in its center, but Munich's seemed even larger and more crowded. The mix of people seemed different, too, with many more youth--lots of backpackers--and large numbers of Arabs and Africans. People-watching alone could have filled my days and evenings in the city. However, church visits and then a beer hall occupied my first afternoon. The next day I devoted to art galleries, and the next to a tour of Dachau and walks through city parks and a view of the Isar River.
The great art in Munich was far beyond what I had expected. I found four surprisingly rich art galleries with works from medieval to Renaissance to modern. I spent the entire day in the galleries strolling and gazing until my back, calves, and arches would no longer let me, and I began to envy the mobile handicapped on what may have been a day that the galleries had specially designated for them. In one museum more than a dozen people in wheelchairs rolled by, the rubber wheels on the wooden floors sounding like duct tape being stripped off a roll--an atonal symphony that complemented the modern art in particular. Although I normally do not spend nearly so much time with modern art as I do with each of the earlier periods, I did come across a number of recent works that I found myself getting lost in. Chief among those was Alex Katz's "Cityscape," a scene of a forest at night, silhouettes of tangled branches and trees faintly touched by white, like snow, and amorphous blobs of light--what might have been streetlights in the woods. The image of city-wilderness vaguely evoked fear of the unknown, of what is the wilderness in our civilized environment. Or perhaps it was just my awareness that I was in the city where Hitler had incubated his ideas....
Two evenings I had fine dining in the Augustiner and Hofbräu beer halls. The first was marginally saner than the second, which had more tour groups and more noise, and which is more well known because it is where Hitler got his start, orating to the masses. The beer halls were fun: wooden plank tables like picnic tables, some large enough to accommodate at least a dozen persons, were tightly arranged throughout plain, well-lit, cavernous rooms; the main decorations were deer antlers and heads of other ruminants large and small, suggesting that the halls had their origins in ancient hunting lodges--man caves, where in days gone by an orator might appeal to primitive passions. Strangers sat with other strangers, singly and in groups. The conversation volume was high, as was the air of conviviality, and the clatter of tableware and 1-liter beer mugs added to the lively cacophony. The menus listed mostly sausage and other pork delights, potatoes, sauerkraut, and dumplings; drinkers outnumbered diners by more than two to one. Although no one was orating hate speech, a table with a dozen drunken, fist-banging, table-slapping, chanting, shouting Brits managed to drive out a Japanese tour group seated nearby.
Although nothing compares with the Baroque churches of Rome, Munich has some fine ones. The most fun of the lot for me was the a church erected by the Asam brothers, who were architects and church builders. They made their own church like a showroom for prospective customers, covering every square centimeter with a bizarre array of cupids and gold pediments, of statuary, entablature, painting, fluting, and curlicues. A Baroque orgasm--with even a supine corpse on display in a glass box on the altar.
Dachau. I doubt that I shall ever get beyond cognitive numbness in my struggle to understand how Nazi Germany's leaders managed to enroll so many people in perpetrating--and others in pretending to ignore--the Holocaust. My decision to take a tour of Dachau, just outside Munich, did not bring me much further in my effort to grasp the event. Although much of what is now present is reconstructed, it is ample to evoke the enormity. I missed the chance to read the numerous posters displaying quotations from SS officers, townspeople, and survivors because our guide--a young man who seemed passionate about learning and teaching the history of the Hitler years--spent most of the tour bloviating about his own understanding of morality, religion, and human nature. At the end of the tour, as he puffed on his cigarette, with no sense of bemusement or irony he pointed out that smoking was permitted in all the outside areas of the camp except in front of the crematorium. His tutorial lasted so long that we missed our train back to Munich, and we returned to the city illegally using local public transportation. I wished that he would instead have used a beer hall for his oration so that I might have learned something more of Dachau.
The next morning I was back on the train to Vienna, heading past mountains, greenery, farm fields, rivers, highways, and red-tiled roofs--and the dwarves, dark and tangled forests, child-eating ogres, witches, candy houses, colorful beersteins, and castles.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Flying n Things and Flying Things
During and following the wonderful wedding festivities of Z and Linda's daughter Jacci, I was privileged to see lots of loving family and good friends, and on June 30 I flew home again to Wiener World. I especially like one thing about the night flights east over the Atlantic: seeing the sunrise accelerate as the plane approaches Europe, creating bands of orange in the sky as rich and varied as the sausages that sizzle on the roller-bar grill at the Schwedenplatz wurstel stand. When I arrived at the Wiener World airport at 8 a.m., the car service I regularly use provided me with a young Iranian driver, Sammy, a garrulous, gangly 28-year-old, whose closely shaved head shone as brightly as his smile. Despite the fatigue that pressed against my tired eyes and loopy brain, I tried gamely to respond to Sammy's wish to practice his rudimentary English with me, and he in turn agreed that I could practice my rudimentary German with him. And so we sped along by fits and starts, our sentences halting, speeding, slowing, and halting again in the same rhythm as the morning rush-hour traffic. He told me how he loved Americans and America, but not the viele Waffe (many guns), and I plied him with questions about life in Iran and what he thought of the mullahs (evil, he said); each of us repeated the other's phrases in correct English or in correct German and tentatively suggested vocabulary when the other's tongue stalled. Throughout the drive, Sammy had the car radio tuned to Radio Wien, which plays American popular music along with German and Italian songs. As we pulled up to my residence, an old American Gospel song came on: "Turn your radio on...come listen to the Master's radio...get in touch with God...." I was home in Wiener World...with all its cultural incongruities, where the menus offer nine kinds of potato, where an eccentrically modern, green glass office building sits across from the Gothic-Renaissance cathedral Stephensdom, where a staggering drunk pedestrian will wait patiently for the Walk/Don't Walk sign to change even when there is no traffic, where black socks with sandals manifest fashion sophistication in the warm days of July.... Glory be to God for dappled things.
Where Babies Come From
This past gray, rainy Sunday Linda and I drove into Burgenland, once part of Hungary, a low-lying agricultural region known for its asparagus, fruit, and--for Austria--fairly good red wine. Although the region lacks the drama of the alps of adjacent Styria province, its charm is in its gently rolling farm fields, many of them quilted at this time of year with huge-headed sunflowers. This drippy Sunday morning they turned their heads in vain to find the sun and settled instead on a light gray patch of sky. By noon we were in Rust, a village that has sat since the Middle Ages on the edge of the Neusiedlersee and, perhaps for centuries, has served as home to a large population of storks. Although I had briefly visited Rust during my recent trip to Sopron, I had not had the opportunity at that time to walk its streets and parks, and I was happy to be back and to be able to share the town with Linda.
The storks spend April to September in Rust. Their summer homes are large iron rings set on the house roofs that look out over the Neusiedler marshlands and shallow lake. In each ring sits a huge nest, perhaps 4 to 5 feet across, the twisted and interwoven twigs, dried reeds, and brown grasses forming an assemblage that looked like the crown of thorns on the crucifix in the town's medieval church. In many of the nests we could see fledglings poking their heads up while parents tended to their feeding and changed their diapers. On some roof lines adult storks stood vigil, dark silhouettes against the gray sky, as still and timeless as the stone geese and ducks that once decorated the yard of my long-deceased, still beloved Aunt Rose in Hope, Kansas. We strolled the streets as the sky dripped on us, admiring the 17th- and 18th-century homes and gardens and brilliant flower boxes, and made our way to the Elfenhof restaurant. I was dismayed not to find stork on the menu--Linda less so--and, while she opted for a salad, I still thought it best to eat something that once bore feathers, and so settled for chicken, boneless breasts wrapped in prosciutto and stuffed with sheep cheese...far more appetizing than what, I imagined, the baby storks were getting to eat.
After lunch we made our way to a park at the edge of the lake. Next to the water stood a man and two children fishing, and lurking in the adjacent grassy area--which offered much evidence of a recent stork poopfest--a lone stork, perhaps 4 feet tall, white with black wings and long orange legs with backward knees, kept a glassy eye on the fishing lines, pacing excitedly when the man reeled in a small, silvery fish. Seeing the interest of the stork, the man shooed it away, but the stork only looped back, as persistent as a fly at a picnic. We strolled back to the car, stopping to purchase a large plush stork for a souvenir of our visit.
The skies opened on the trip home in the afternoon and then lightened, and, like the sunflowers, we turned our heads to the West, and flew along the Autobahn to home, where our recent avian acquisition now dangles its long legs from a nest on our bookshelf.
Filler
-- At the Schottentur streetcar station, a white-haired, hump-backed woman pulled an aged, scruffy white terrier by its leash across the crowded, bustling stone floor. The dog's legs were stiffened, unmoving, and the woman dragged him some 50 feet over the slick stone surface like a pull toy on wheels. When they reached the escalator, she stooped and picked the dog up. Its tail then wagged rapidly, the old dog happy as a toddler who had wanted all along to be carried.
-- Whenever we drive through the center of Vienna on a stretch next to the Danube, we pass a sausage stand boldly announcing its specialization in Pferd (horse). Horse liver sausage, cheese mixed with ground horse, and several other equine blends along with just your basic horse are all listed on the menu board. Lippizaner, one presumes, brings a premium price.
Where Babies Come From
This past gray, rainy Sunday Linda and I drove into Burgenland, once part of Hungary, a low-lying agricultural region known for its asparagus, fruit, and--for Austria--fairly good red wine. Although the region lacks the drama of the alps of adjacent Styria province, its charm is in its gently rolling farm fields, many of them quilted at this time of year with huge-headed sunflowers. This drippy Sunday morning they turned their heads in vain to find the sun and settled instead on a light gray patch of sky. By noon we were in Rust, a village that has sat since the Middle Ages on the edge of the Neusiedlersee and, perhaps for centuries, has served as home to a large population of storks. Although I had briefly visited Rust during my recent trip to Sopron, I had not had the opportunity at that time to walk its streets and parks, and I was happy to be back and to be able to share the town with Linda.
The storks spend April to September in Rust. Their summer homes are large iron rings set on the house roofs that look out over the Neusiedler marshlands and shallow lake. In each ring sits a huge nest, perhaps 4 to 5 feet across, the twisted and interwoven twigs, dried reeds, and brown grasses forming an assemblage that looked like the crown of thorns on the crucifix in the town's medieval church. In many of the nests we could see fledglings poking their heads up while parents tended to their feeding and changed their diapers. On some roof lines adult storks stood vigil, dark silhouettes against the gray sky, as still and timeless as the stone geese and ducks that once decorated the yard of my long-deceased, still beloved Aunt Rose in Hope, Kansas. We strolled the streets as the sky dripped on us, admiring the 17th- and 18th-century homes and gardens and brilliant flower boxes, and made our way to the Elfenhof restaurant. I was dismayed not to find stork on the menu--Linda less so--and, while she opted for a salad, I still thought it best to eat something that once bore feathers, and so settled for chicken, boneless breasts wrapped in prosciutto and stuffed with sheep cheese...far more appetizing than what, I imagined, the baby storks were getting to eat.
After lunch we made our way to a park at the edge of the lake. Next to the water stood a man and two children fishing, and lurking in the adjacent grassy area--which offered much evidence of a recent stork poopfest--a lone stork, perhaps 4 feet tall, white with black wings and long orange legs with backward knees, kept a glassy eye on the fishing lines, pacing excitedly when the man reeled in a small, silvery fish. Seeing the interest of the stork, the man shooed it away, but the stork only looped back, as persistent as a fly at a picnic. We strolled back to the car, stopping to purchase a large plush stork for a souvenir of our visit.
The skies opened on the trip home in the afternoon and then lightened, and, like the sunflowers, we turned our heads to the West, and flew along the Autobahn to home, where our recent avian acquisition now dangles its long legs from a nest on our bookshelf.
Filler
-- At the Schottentur streetcar station, a white-haired, hump-backed woman pulled an aged, scruffy white terrier by its leash across the crowded, bustling stone floor. The dog's legs were stiffened, unmoving, and the woman dragged him some 50 feet over the slick stone surface like a pull toy on wheels. When they reached the escalator, she stooped and picked the dog up. Its tail then wagged rapidly, the old dog happy as a toddler who had wanted all along to be carried.
-- Whenever we drive through the center of Vienna on a stretch next to the Danube, we pass a sausage stand boldly announcing its specialization in Pferd (horse). Horse liver sausage, cheese mixed with ground horse, and several other equine blends along with just your basic horse are all listed on the menu board. Lippizaner, one presumes, brings a premium price.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
