While Linda was away in Pennsylvania to attend the birth of grandson Jonathan Allen, I took the opportunity to visit Rome, and with long-time friend Cheryl made a trip to the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii. I had a wonderful day on each side of that trip to roam my favorite neighborhoods and galleries in Rome, and to see other old friends. After the orderliness of Vienna, Rome seemed initially like a maelstrom. Cars routinely cross through intersections against the light, whether or not there are pedestrians in the crosswalks. (Jaywalking is usually the safest way to cross a Roman street.) The sidewalks are narrow and crowded, frequently cramped or blocked wholly by cars that climb curbs to eke out a bit more parking space; like the cars, pedestrians move at a variety of speeds, many carrying suitcases, briefcases, and shopping bags, and families amble along three or four abreast, blocking the way; some people stop in the middle of a walk or in front of a shop doorway to chat; some amble as unpredictably as butterflies, talking on cell phones, free hand flying like an orchestra conductor's. Motorscooters, buses, trucks, and cars mill through the streets and intersections like jams of twigs, branches, and logs floating down a river. It is freedom and creativity and noisy impatience and frustrated exuberance. I love being in Rome. Rome is alive.
Heading South...
It rained heavily on the Saturday of our trip, and the highway from Rome to Naples took on a typically Italian rhythm, with cars and trucks moving like schools of fish, weaving, surging, and sidling by us, most of the drivers paying scant attention to how far they were drifting into our lane as they passed, oblivious to the expletives Cheryl blurted at them. After we left the autostrada just south of Naples, navigated a few small-town traffic jams, and slowly climbed the narrow road into the mountains, spectacular views (or so I was told) were wholly obscured by rain and fog. By mid-afternoon we were in Amalfi, a small town built into a steep volcanic mountainside rising out of the sea, and the rain was easing up. After we arranged for the car to be parked, we scaled five flights of stairs to reach our hotel; we checked in and then emerged into gray, drips, and sprinkles to explore the steep town slopes. Lots and lots of tourist shops heavy on the Amalfi lemon theme lined both sides of the main street and stretched along the waterfront. Most displayed the usual t-shirts, mugs, and refrigerator magnets; a few offered locally made majolica and other kinds of pottery. The restaurants were, for the most part, pizza joints--the alimentary equivalent of t-shirts, mugs, and refrigerator magnets. But we had come to Amalfi for the scenery, not the food, and the views were transfixing. The town is a maze of vertical cobblestone lanes and winding alleys; steep staircases carved in stone tunnels give the place the feel of worm holes in the timbers of a sunken ship, and we would wind, ascend, and descend to pop out on tiny squares lined with shops and flower boxes.
We browsed ceramics shops and other souvenir shops more like we were gallery visitors than shoppers. There was a tiresome uniformity to them--except for one. Along the waterfront we stepped into a deep, dark junk store--like a cave in the sea cliff. The shop was dimly lit, with a creaky wooden floor like a boat deck, and unfinished, grimy wooden tables and shelves on which rested dusty animal figures, curios, and dishes of wood, glass, and majolica. The shop seemed to be run by two young men, who were industrious about answering our questions and showing us articles. When we entered, we had noticed a very elderly man in a wheel chair, sitting between tables of wares, wearing an oversized blue knit wool cap on his head and a three-day growth of white whiskers on his drooping face, staring up at us with half-closed eyes rimmed red, looking very like a poverty-stricken, homeless grandfather smurf. Half visible under a black shadow blanketing half the room, he would glide on his wheels out into the dim light a few inches from time to time to blurt out numbers and then slip silently back under his rock; I realized that he was the owner, telling the clerks the prices of items we were examining. Cheryl found a small silver lion that served as an incense burner and asked the price. The man in the wheel chair answered, "3,000 euros." We made our way back out to the waterfront.
Sunday morning we were back on the winding coastal highway, so narrow that at spots cars and buses had to pull to the shoulder or back to a wide spot to let oncoming traffic pass. We drove up the coast to Positano and on to Naples, stopping from time to time to take photos and to browse produce and souvenir stands. At one point, as we passed a stand on the opposite side of the road from us, Cheryl spotted three puppies rolling around under its tables; she wanted to go back for pictures, so she pulled into the parking space of the next stand we came to. There was only the one space, and the family running the stand was clearly displeased when Cheryl emerged from the car and walked back toward the other stand. I thought it necessary, at that point, to purchase something from the place whose parking lot we had just usurped, so I got out to examine the boxes of apples, oranges, and lemons, and the thin, gnarly red peppers drying on strings in the sun. An obese elderly woman with bristling red hair and weathered skin red-brown like the drying peppers sat in a cane rocker in the shade of the awning. Beside her was a box of over-sized Amalfi lemons. In a deep, raspy voice, every few seconds, she shouted "Zitrone!" (lemon) at me and pointed to the box. I nodded--repeatedly--to Johnny-One-Note of the produce world. After I had feigned interest in their wares for several minutes, I bought an overpriced string of peppers; I looked up to see Cheryl returning. Freedom. We drove on toward Naples and, seeing a sign for Pompeii, turned onto the exit ramp on a whim and, at the bottom of the ramp, found ourselves directly at the entrance to the archaeological park.
Pompeii
Pompeii died young. An archaeologist's paradise for what it reveals of Roman houses, businesses, and daily life, the city has been dug out--brought back to life--for only a little more than a century. Many of its walls and buildings are in large measure reconstructed, and the valuable artifacts, frescoes, murals, and mosaics have been relocated to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, safe from weather and thieves.
I prefer the ruins of Ostia Antica or Volterra. Though prominent, they are not so famous as Pompeii because their ends were not so dramatic. Cities that died of old age, as I hope to, have more attraction for me than the resurrected ones. Mark Twain noted something to the effect that Italy makes its living by displaying the body of its dead grandmother to tourists. Perhaps it is the impermanence evident from the ruins in Italy that, paradoxically, evokes the sense of timelessness I also feel there. The aged smurf in the wheelchair and the zitrone woman, ruins in their own right, may well have carried the DNA of some of the people who perished in Vesuvius' eruption in 79 A.D. I imagine the woman has always croaked "Zitrone!" all day with the regularity of the surf, while the aged smurf lurks eternally in his shop sea-cave waiting for a visitor to snorkel in and pay 3,000 euros for a lion-shaped incense burner.
Two days later I was home in Vienna, picking up my loving companion at the airport, and loving her all the more as I saw her glow while she talked about her beautiful new grandson and the new life he was bringing for all of us. Timeless....
Filler
Two Airports, Two Cultures
The Vienna airport, though small, is efficiently arranged and convenient in a variety of ways. Security checks are done at the individual gates, so there is no huge, crowded hall to process through, as is the case at so many international airports. I was able to check in quickly for the flight to Rome on Italy's national airline, Alitalia, and just a few minutes after I reached my gate I was through all the checks. Our flight left right on time. Apart from the orderliness of the process, one singularly Teutonic feature stood out--the announcements. One, delivered in crisp, authoritarian tones first in German and then in English, was the following: "Passengers so-and-so and so-and-so, proceed to Gate B3. You are delaying the plane!" Inflicting guilt, public humiliation, and harumphing probably work well here. In Italy, that announcement would have been met with a shrug.
Although my arrival in Rome was simple, with minimal bureaucracy, that was not the case at my departure. At Fiumicino Airport, Alitalia has perhaps 200 desks for checking in passengers. On entering the departure hall, I located my flight on a large electronic board that indicated which bancarella was serving passengers to Vienna: "Desk 118." There was, however, no one staffing Desk 118; the nearest desk with staff was three down, and a long line queued back from it. So I joined it. Bewildered passengers in the line, I overheard at times, were heading for Brussels, Madrid, and other points in Europe; they, too, had joined this queue because no one was at the desks assigned for those flights. As they got to the front of the line, the attendant checked in some of them and sent others to join other lines. After 30 minutes, I reached the desk and handed my reservation sheet and passport to the clerk, saying "Vienna." I anticipated that I would be dismissed to rejoin the roiling masses, and I wondered whether a modern Sysiphus--instead of rolling his boulder to the hilltop and then having it roll back down on him, for eternity--would be doomed to move from one line to another forever, in Fiumicino, dragging huge leather bags for his boulder. But the clerk came back, "Window or aisle?" I processed through security easily enough, as the x-ray technician chatted with an attractive colleague and ignored my bag, another made me remove my belt and watch and put them through the scanner, and another chatted distractedly on a cell phone. I proceeded to my designated gate, my carryon bag and Herald-Trib with crossword puzzle in hand, with an hour to go for the flight. At the gate, at the announced boarding time, I looked up to see the sign over the check-in desk change suddenly from "Alitalia/Vienna" to "Air France/Paris." A polite query to the staff person managing the desk got me the information that my flight was now set to leave from a gate 300 yards away. As I headed off, trailed vaguely by straggling fellow passengers for Vienna, I noticed that the large electronic boards continued to show the original departure gate for my flight. We left an hour late, but it didn't matter. Rome is timeless....
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Prague World
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Januwiener
Concerts abound. Happy to have opportunities to find amusement indoors, we have been taking advantage of them and of the art galleries. Outdoors it is cold and usually gray. As an Eskimo peers through an ice hole watching for the shadow of a fish to spear, I sometimes look at the afternoon sky hoping to see the blur of the sun behind the crust of clouds. Although this period will make springtime all the more exhilarating--the frequent snowfalls are mesmerizing to watch, and their white coat is clean and appealing--I'd just as soon do without too prolonged or too severe a contrast.
Recently we had a fine break from the cold and cloudiness, and it fell on a Sunday, sunny and in the low 50s, so we took advantage of it for a car trip and headed west along the Danube. A stretch of about 30 miles from Krems to Melk took us past Duernstein and its crumbling castle, which sits high on a hill above the river. It is where Richard Lionheart was held for ransom after being captured on his way home to England from the Crusades. (If Robin Hood had had any idea of the view here, he might not have gone to so much trouble to help raise funds to free the king. Among other things, we read, the ransom money went for Vienna's city defenses, including the huge wall that ringed it in the Middle Ages.) Smooth and wide, the Danube winds gently at this point, with the highway and towns built surprisingly close to the water's edge. The hillsides are nearly all groomed with vineyards, which at this time of year look like cornrows of wildly unmanageable brown hair, tangled and bundled along wires stretching from the highway to the hilltops. This area, called the Wachau, is said to produce the best white wine in Austria; given what I have sampled of this country's wines, however, that may be like the boast that Philadelphia produces the best scrapple in Pennsylvania. From Krems to Melk, the little towns look more medieval than modern.
We stopped at Melk, planning to tour a huge 11th-century monastery that rests high above the city. Rebuilt in the 18th century, the structure on two occasions served as Napoleon's headquarters. Although the monastery is closed until April, we wandered its grounds and arcades and walks, thinking how beautiful this setting is, with its elaborate gardens and fountains and view of the Danube. We promised ourselves to return when it re-opens. We made our way to the bottom of the hill and into the old part of Melk. Much from previous centuries shows through, not just in the thick stone walls of some structures, with projecting stone blocks to prevent damage by carriage wheels, but also in the swirled and arched brickwork of the pavement. We walked across a highway and went onto an old iron bridge spanning a canal that parallels the river. Like monks in prayer, a dozen or so brown ducks sat in a line on a fallen tree suspended from the shore out to the middle of the water, catching the rays of the January sun and softly quacking their orisons. With eyes unfocused, we watched the water, with the not unpleasant feeling of being a speck in history.
Our walk back through Old Melk took us up centuries-old stone steps and back through the monastery grounds to the hill top, an ascent from the 21st century to the 11th. The Benedictines knew how to pick a place where earth meets heaven.
This Sunday, weather permitting, we'll drive back to Melk and then to Mauthausen, further up the Valley, following Rick Steves' advice: "After touring the glorious Melk Abbey, douse your warm, fairy-tale glow with a bucket of Hitler at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial."
Filler
-- Although the noon sun is still low in the sky, the days are getting noticeably longer, and once again we have nearly 9 hours of daylight. Even though the temperatures may just be in the high 20s, the humidity remains high, usually around 90 percent, a catalyst for the cold to penetrate knit caps, leather gloves, and leather shoes, and when there is an assist from the wind, my coat as well. I think of my kids when they were toddlers, and how we used to bundle them up for the Blacksburg winters until they looked like quilted beach balls and could hardly move. I must plan time when going out and coming in for the donning and removal of a similar number of layers. When I come in from outdoors, I must leave my shoes at the door, and not just because of the slush that has accumulated on the edges of heels and soles. Most walks are liberally strewn with gravel, and dozens of bits of it lodge in shoe treads; I have to pry out the largest so that they do not scar the wood parquet floors in the apartment.
-- Sunday night we had 4" of snow. When we got up at 6 a.m. Monday, the sidewalks and roads had already been cleared. The tram cars have special containers of grit and gravel under selected seats, for use by the driver when the tracks get icy. Sometimes, when the tram is stopped at a light, the driver will get off with a small spade and work on the tracks immediately in front of the train. Drivers also get up from their seats to help the elderly, and they allow passengers extra time to get on and off when conditions are slippery.
-- In addition to goulash, soup menus at this time of year commonly offer beef broth with a choice of liver dumplings or lung dumplings. There is no indication as to which beast these parts come from, cloven-hoofed, round-hoofed, or amphibian.
-- The city museum exhibits many items from the Turkish siege of 1683. Among the swords and muskets and armor and banners are standards festooned with horse tails. A description next to one of the standards states that the number of horse tails displayed was an indication of the rank of the officer. I strained to understand how such a meaning could have originated. Were these tails from random unlucky horses, or perhaps from captured horses, evidence of a custom like the taking of scalps? I remembered reading years ago of the officers in the egalitarian Chinese People's Liberation Army, whose rank was denoted only by the number of ballpoint pens in their breast pockets. Maybe a certain amount of whimsy helps keep death and destruction in perspective.
Recycling.
--The gravel that is liberally strewn on sidewalks here when they become icy is to be swept up and deposited in special boxes for re-use, not brushed into lawns or drains.
-- On the sidewalk in front of me downtown, an elderly woman stopped suddenly and stooped to pick up a crumpled kleenex. She blew her nose in it and put the treasured find in her pocket.
Recently we had a fine break from the cold and cloudiness, and it fell on a Sunday, sunny and in the low 50s, so we took advantage of it for a car trip and headed west along the Danube. A stretch of about 30 miles from Krems to Melk took us past Duernstein and its crumbling castle, which sits high on a hill above the river. It is where Richard Lionheart was held for ransom after being captured on his way home to England from the Crusades. (If Robin Hood had had any idea of the view here, he might not have gone to so much trouble to help raise funds to free the king. Among other things, we read, the ransom money went for Vienna's city defenses, including the huge wall that ringed it in the Middle Ages.) Smooth and wide, the Danube winds gently at this point, with the highway and towns built surprisingly close to the water's edge. The hillsides are nearly all groomed with vineyards, which at this time of year look like cornrows of wildly unmanageable brown hair, tangled and bundled along wires stretching from the highway to the hilltops. This area, called the Wachau, is said to produce the best white wine in Austria; given what I have sampled of this country's wines, however, that may be like the boast that Philadelphia produces the best scrapple in Pennsylvania. From Krems to Melk, the little towns look more medieval than modern.
We stopped at Melk, planning to tour a huge 11th-century monastery that rests high above the city. Rebuilt in the 18th century, the structure on two occasions served as Napoleon's headquarters. Although the monastery is closed until April, we wandered its grounds and arcades and walks, thinking how beautiful this setting is, with its elaborate gardens and fountains and view of the Danube. We promised ourselves to return when it re-opens. We made our way to the bottom of the hill and into the old part of Melk. Much from previous centuries shows through, not just in the thick stone walls of some structures, with projecting stone blocks to prevent damage by carriage wheels, but also in the swirled and arched brickwork of the pavement. We walked across a highway and went onto an old iron bridge spanning a canal that parallels the river. Like monks in prayer, a dozen or so brown ducks sat in a line on a fallen tree suspended from the shore out to the middle of the water, catching the rays of the January sun and softly quacking their orisons. With eyes unfocused, we watched the water, with the not unpleasant feeling of being a speck in history.
Our walk back through Old Melk took us up centuries-old stone steps and back through the monastery grounds to the hill top, an ascent from the 21st century to the 11th. The Benedictines knew how to pick a place where earth meets heaven.
This Sunday, weather permitting, we'll drive back to Melk and then to Mauthausen, further up the Valley, following Rick Steves' advice: "After touring the glorious Melk Abbey, douse your warm, fairy-tale glow with a bucket of Hitler at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial."
Filler
-- Although the noon sun is still low in the sky, the days are getting noticeably longer, and once again we have nearly 9 hours of daylight. Even though the temperatures may just be in the high 20s, the humidity remains high, usually around 90 percent, a catalyst for the cold to penetrate knit caps, leather gloves, and leather shoes, and when there is an assist from the wind, my coat as well. I think of my kids when they were toddlers, and how we used to bundle them up for the Blacksburg winters until they looked like quilted beach balls and could hardly move. I must plan time when going out and coming in for the donning and removal of a similar number of layers. When I come in from outdoors, I must leave my shoes at the door, and not just because of the slush that has accumulated on the edges of heels and soles. Most walks are liberally strewn with gravel, and dozens of bits of it lodge in shoe treads; I have to pry out the largest so that they do not scar the wood parquet floors in the apartment.
-- Sunday night we had 4" of snow. When we got up at 6 a.m. Monday, the sidewalks and roads had already been cleared. The tram cars have special containers of grit and gravel under selected seats, for use by the driver when the tracks get icy. Sometimes, when the tram is stopped at a light, the driver will get off with a small spade and work on the tracks immediately in front of the train. Drivers also get up from their seats to help the elderly, and they allow passengers extra time to get on and off when conditions are slippery.
-- In addition to goulash, soup menus at this time of year commonly offer beef broth with a choice of liver dumplings or lung dumplings. There is no indication as to which beast these parts come from, cloven-hoofed, round-hoofed, or amphibian.
-- The city museum exhibits many items from the Turkish siege of 1683. Among the swords and muskets and armor and banners are standards festooned with horse tails. A description next to one of the standards states that the number of horse tails displayed was an indication of the rank of the officer. I strained to understand how such a meaning could have originated. Were these tails from random unlucky horses, or perhaps from captured horses, evidence of a custom like the taking of scalps? I remembered reading years ago of the officers in the egalitarian Chinese People's Liberation Army, whose rank was denoted only by the number of ballpoint pens in their breast pockets. Maybe a certain amount of whimsy helps keep death and destruction in perspective.
Recycling.
--The gravel that is liberally strewn on sidewalks here when they become icy is to be swept up and deposited in special boxes for re-use, not brushed into lawns or drains.
-- On the sidewalk in front of me downtown, an elderly woman stopped suddenly and stooped to pick up a crumpled kleenex. She blew her nose in it and put the treasured find in her pocket.
Monday, January 10, 2011
God Is on Our Side
At the Military Museum
Just as the sturdy churches in England sometimes remind me of military fortresses, with prominent tombs and memorial tablets for fallen soldiers, so did the Austrian Military Museum have several features that reminded me of a church. Located on a rise just above downtown, the museum sits in the center of several army barracks built after the popular uprising of 1848, positioned so as to give the military proximity to the inner city and easy access to bashing demonstrators. The Military Museum in German is called simply and melodically Der Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. Inside, room by room, the history of Austria from the 15th century to the present opens like blossoms in the springtime.
Before we had even fairly started our march through the exhibits, we saw on a set of glass doors "Panzergarten Geschlossen." The "Tank Garden" was closed to visitors. As happened when the dentist said "Enjoy the cleaning," I was uncertain whether "tank garden" was a translation issue or a frightening cultural difference. Beyond the glass doors in the wind and frost, in a grass cloister, there were dozens of World War II era tanks and other armored vehicles, all of which lacked color, delicacy, and pleasing fragrance. The gardeners who parked them took advantage of every square inch of a large courtyard: the vehicles were crammed together in disorderly lines--like cars at an intersection in Rome--poised to invade but waiting decades for the light to turn green. A sign on the glass doors indicated that the garden will reopen in April, and I am certain that it will be much lovelier when the turrets are in bloom. My thoughts drifted to Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler and Germany" and the lead tenor stormtrooper belting out "We're marching to a faster pace / Look out here comes the master race!"
Although several of the exhibits were engrossing, Linda and I found two rooms of particular interest, the one depicting events leading up to World War I, and the other devoted to World War II.
Prominently displayed is the car in which Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, the event that ignited World War I. A bullet hole is visible in one of the rear doors; adjacent to the car, a glass-enclosed pall displays the prince's uniform, complete with blood stains and a small sign with an arrow helpfully noting the hole in his collar where a bullet entered his neck. Nearby was the sofa on which he expired. Seeing the blood-spattered garments of Franz Ferdinand, I have to say, was awesome, more affecting even than the often grisly relics in the churches of Rome. His death, and World War I, took on a depth of reality that I could never gain access to merely by reading about those events. Definitely worth the pilgrimage.
Mines, bunkers, and guns of every type, and helmets, uniforms, and pistols taken from American and Russian soldiers...some displays from the past hundred years reminded me of the Maltese crosses designating fallen military from the 1940s in the Grinzing cemetery--the feeling of historically experiencing war from the other side. A poster announces the city's food ration: 1 kilo of turnips and 3 kilos of potatoes per person per week. Other posters call for donations for troops. The exhibits own the past--the suffering and deprivation, and Hitler's rule--with simplicity but also with what feels like colossal understatement. Vienna has no plaques to designate where Hitler lived, where he studied art, or where he made speeches or held rallies. The military museum, at least, displays a few posters with his visage, as well as swastikas and a yellow star of cloth with "Jude" on it. Perhaps the room has as much balance as is possible. To wholly repress a figure such as Hitler, a form of "dehumanizing," carries its own risk of creating mystery and interest and possibly even attraction. To be wholly open about him, on the other hand, might create a risk of revival and draw pilgrims to his vision of a religion of the state.
Since my time in Rome 10 years ago, my thoughts have often run to the similarities in secular and religious saints, and the propensity to idealize and conflate in creating such figures. In Rome, statuary and pictorial presentations of the Virgin are nearly always with the baby Jesus: the qualities of fertility and maternal nurturing celebrated in the Virgin are, in the view of some, conflated with the qualities of the Egyptian deity Isis--goddess of motherhood and fertility, who also had powers to resurrect. Isis's temples were numerous throughout the Mediterranean region long before the appearance of Christianity. In the churches of Rome, representations of Mary and Jesus frequently resemble poses of Jupiter and other Roman gods--for example, the hand holding a globe or scroll, or even, as in the equestrian statue of Marcus Aureleas on the Capitoline Hill, the extended hand with the "clemencia" gesture. With religious figures, many pilgrims welcome the chance to visit not just their bones but their clothing, whether it be the coarse robe of St Francis or the Shroud of Turin. How good of the local authorities here to display the vestments of Franz Ferdinand. Der Heeresgeschichtliches Museum is a holy place, taking account of good values and evil ones, and thus promoting its theme posted throughout: "War belongs in museums." Much better than "God is on our side."
A Mighty Fortress. The religious and the military sometimes blend in curious ways. A cannonball is lodged in the stone of the south wall of St Stephen's, with the year 1683 inscribed just below it. It is an artifact of the Turkish siege of Vienna in that year. The church was struck by hundreds of cannonballs, and damage to the walls and Gothic decoration is still evident. On the side of the church is a statue of San Juan Capistrano, who stands atop a conquered Turk who is snarling at onlookers. Both, I think, are waiting for the swallows to return in the springtime, perhaps to nest in the Tank Garden.
Filler
-- For New Year's Eve dinner I chose a typical Austrian dish: Tafelspitz (boiled beef). It was served with three kinds of potatoes: cold boiled, hot boiled, and fried.
-- The week after Christmas, stands abounded around the city selling goodluck charms for the new year--mostly in the form of little pigs, clovers, and ladybugs...none in the shape of potatoes.
-- A teenage girl with a little boy, about 4, sitting opposite me on the tram. She took off her mittens and his, and, as both smiled, she helped him practice counting and addition on his fingers. As they arrived at their stop, she bundled him up again; they got off and, holding hands, ran together laughing up the sidewalk.
-- On a daytrip to Neusiedlersee, a shallow lake on the Austrian-Hungarian border, through frozen slitted eyelids we watched the wind sweep skaters and ice sailboats, and loft and bounce two huge, colorful kites, one shaped like a fish and one an octopus. The horizon was not a line but a blur of white-gray ice and white-gray sky. In a small cove, skating school was underway: parents strapped little skates on children, some of whom had probably learned to walk only months before.
Just as the sturdy churches in England sometimes remind me of military fortresses, with prominent tombs and memorial tablets for fallen soldiers, so did the Austrian Military Museum have several features that reminded me of a church. Located on a rise just above downtown, the museum sits in the center of several army barracks built after the popular uprising of 1848, positioned so as to give the military proximity to the inner city and easy access to bashing demonstrators. The Military Museum in German is called simply and melodically Der Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. Inside, room by room, the history of Austria from the 15th century to the present opens like blossoms in the springtime.
Before we had even fairly started our march through the exhibits, we saw on a set of glass doors "Panzergarten Geschlossen." The "Tank Garden" was closed to visitors. As happened when the dentist said "Enjoy the cleaning," I was uncertain whether "tank garden" was a translation issue or a frightening cultural difference. Beyond the glass doors in the wind and frost, in a grass cloister, there were dozens of World War II era tanks and other armored vehicles, all of which lacked color, delicacy, and pleasing fragrance. The gardeners who parked them took advantage of every square inch of a large courtyard: the vehicles were crammed together in disorderly lines--like cars at an intersection in Rome--poised to invade but waiting decades for the light to turn green. A sign on the glass doors indicated that the garden will reopen in April, and I am certain that it will be much lovelier when the turrets are in bloom. My thoughts drifted to Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler and Germany" and the lead tenor stormtrooper belting out "We're marching to a faster pace / Look out here comes the master race!"
Although several of the exhibits were engrossing, Linda and I found two rooms of particular interest, the one depicting events leading up to World War I, and the other devoted to World War II.
Prominently displayed is the car in which Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, the event that ignited World War I. A bullet hole is visible in one of the rear doors; adjacent to the car, a glass-enclosed pall displays the prince's uniform, complete with blood stains and a small sign with an arrow helpfully noting the hole in his collar where a bullet entered his neck. Nearby was the sofa on which he expired. Seeing the blood-spattered garments of Franz Ferdinand, I have to say, was awesome, more affecting even than the often grisly relics in the churches of Rome. His death, and World War I, took on a depth of reality that I could never gain access to merely by reading about those events. Definitely worth the pilgrimage.
Mines, bunkers, and guns of every type, and helmets, uniforms, and pistols taken from American and Russian soldiers...some displays from the past hundred years reminded me of the Maltese crosses designating fallen military from the 1940s in the Grinzing cemetery--the feeling of historically experiencing war from the other side. A poster announces the city's food ration: 1 kilo of turnips and 3 kilos of potatoes per person per week. Other posters call for donations for troops. The exhibits own the past--the suffering and deprivation, and Hitler's rule--with simplicity but also with what feels like colossal understatement. Vienna has no plaques to designate where Hitler lived, where he studied art, or where he made speeches or held rallies. The military museum, at least, displays a few posters with his visage, as well as swastikas and a yellow star of cloth with "Jude" on it. Perhaps the room has as much balance as is possible. To wholly repress a figure such as Hitler, a form of "dehumanizing," carries its own risk of creating mystery and interest and possibly even attraction. To be wholly open about him, on the other hand, might create a risk of revival and draw pilgrims to his vision of a religion of the state.
Since my time in Rome 10 years ago, my thoughts have often run to the similarities in secular and religious saints, and the propensity to idealize and conflate in creating such figures. In Rome, statuary and pictorial presentations of the Virgin are nearly always with the baby Jesus: the qualities of fertility and maternal nurturing celebrated in the Virgin are, in the view of some, conflated with the qualities of the Egyptian deity Isis--goddess of motherhood and fertility, who also had powers to resurrect. Isis's temples were numerous throughout the Mediterranean region long before the appearance of Christianity. In the churches of Rome, representations of Mary and Jesus frequently resemble poses of Jupiter and other Roman gods--for example, the hand holding a globe or scroll, or even, as in the equestrian statue of Marcus Aureleas on the Capitoline Hill, the extended hand with the "clemencia" gesture. With religious figures, many pilgrims welcome the chance to visit not just their bones but their clothing, whether it be the coarse robe of St Francis or the Shroud of Turin. How good of the local authorities here to display the vestments of Franz Ferdinand. Der Heeresgeschichtliches Museum is a holy place, taking account of good values and evil ones, and thus promoting its theme posted throughout: "War belongs in museums." Much better than "God is on our side."
A Mighty Fortress. The religious and the military sometimes blend in curious ways. A cannonball is lodged in the stone of the south wall of St Stephen's, with the year 1683 inscribed just below it. It is an artifact of the Turkish siege of Vienna in that year. The church was struck by hundreds of cannonballs, and damage to the walls and Gothic decoration is still evident. On the side of the church is a statue of San Juan Capistrano, who stands atop a conquered Turk who is snarling at onlookers. Both, I think, are waiting for the swallows to return in the springtime, perhaps to nest in the Tank Garden.
Filler
-- For New Year's Eve dinner I chose a typical Austrian dish: Tafelspitz (boiled beef). It was served with three kinds of potatoes: cold boiled, hot boiled, and fried.
-- The week after Christmas, stands abounded around the city selling goodluck charms for the new year--mostly in the form of little pigs, clovers, and ladybugs...none in the shape of potatoes.
-- A teenage girl with a little boy, about 4, sitting opposite me on the tram. She took off her mittens and his, and, as both smiled, she helped him practice counting and addition on his fingers. As they arrived at their stop, she bundled him up again; they got off and, holding hands, ran together laughing up the sidewalk.
-- On a daytrip to Neusiedlersee, a shallow lake on the Austrian-Hungarian border, through frozen slitted eyelids we watched the wind sweep skaters and ice sailboats, and loft and bounce two huge, colorful kites, one shaped like a fish and one an octopus. The horizon was not a line but a blur of white-gray ice and white-gray sky. In a small cove, skating school was underway: parents strapped little skates on children, some of whom had probably learned to walk only months before.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Christmas Miscellany
We have greatly enjoyed spending this season in Vienna, although we have both missed our families. All to be expected....
Music Week
-- We have not heard recorded Christmas music in the markets or stores in the run-up to Christmas. As a result, no doubt we'll enjoy a certain freshness to the strains of "Jingle Bell Rock" in two more Christmases, when we again ply the aisles of the Rte 29 Food Lion with a shopping cart, admiring the festive pyramids of snacks with cheeselike substances and standing paralyzed by choice in front of a bin of frozen turkeys. Yet Vienna has ample compensation for this loss: church choirs abound in the public squares, here as in Salzburg, and brass bands as well. Hearing familiar carols in German, moreover, lends them a freshness. "Stille Nacht," which was written near Salzburg, sounds even lovelier than "Silent Night." This country is so much about music, and they do it so well.
-- Last Sunday evening found us at the Musikverein, a lovely, palatial 19th-century concert hall, to hear Mozart and Bruckner. The orchestra was wonderful; the acoustics were wonderful; the experience was transporting. At the end of the performance, we made our way to Landtmann's cafe, which has been in business since the 19th century. It sits on the Ring, a wide road that circles what was medieval Vienna; the road stands where once stood the medieval walls of the city, which were torn down in the 19th century. A small history printed in the back of the cafe menu notes that every important politician in Austria over the past century has visited the cafe, and the management makes no distinction about customers because of their political views. At the end of World War II, Russian soldiers looted Landtmann's and shot out its grand mirrors, but the cafe was renovated soon after and back in business. The dining area the night we were there was packed, though we did not have a long wait for the table, and the view would nevertheless have been worth a long wait. Outside our glass-enclosed dining area stood an 18-foot Christmas tree, decorated with colored lights twinkling through the snow flurries, and across the Ring Road stood the Rathaus, with its Gothic arches and towers brightly illuminated in flood lights, and below it Vienna's largest Christmas market, crowded with shoppers, lit with a million lights.
-- The next night found us with other Embassy couples at the home of an American professor who teaches opera in one of Vienna's universities. He gave a clear, basic presentation on opera and focused his remarks in particular on Mozart's Don Giovanni, showing scenes from it, with music, on a DVD. He explained how the score and certain instruments reflected and enhanced emotions and traits of various of the characters as they moved through the narrative. This background was an invaluable contribution to our ability to enjoy the performance when, two nights later, we saw it at the State Opera House.
Christmas Eve--at home with champagne flutes on the coffee table and concert music on the television as we opened our gifts for each other.
Christmas Day--we hosted a friend of Linda's from work. Having a guest gave us the incentive to go all out with the dinner: turkey and all the works. The meal, at least, did a good job of replicating the usual experience at home...though we still missed the hugs and love and good wishes of our families.
Filler
-- Directions on my "Waving Cat" Christmas toy:
o One NO. 5 battery for praviding the power, enabling to automatically beckon the hand for months, setting it at any position, never to be offected by the lights.
o When it is in the initiative operation, please insert the battery into the bottom of the treasure-beckoning cat according to the inscribed polaritities. Then it can work immediately. The hand beckoning will automatically enter the stable condition for several minutes.
o Inside attaching poly luck-beckoning lyrics, sticking them for immediate realizations.
o Inside attaching several self-filled out creative and catchy phrases' lable paper.
o If finding that the hand-beckoning stops swinging, please change the same battery with type number.
Sad Postscript on the Week
Earl, our once fat, happy white Persian, is dying from a kidney ailment; since he is willful as cats are wont to be, he will get to exit on his terms and on his own calendar, with an assist only if there is chronic pain. He had been uncharacteristically reclusive one day last week, and the next day I resolved to get him examined. I selected the clinic from a list provided by the Embassy that identifies medical offices that claim to speak English "fluently." I called for an appointment, and the person who answered spoke no English; I understood to bring Earl in at 9:30 a.m. I pulled him from his comfy nest in a lower shelf of the tv cabinet and put him in his carrier--which, judging from his low growl, he recognized from the flight here in July. We stepped into the icy wind for the tram ride to the vet clinic a couple of miles away.
Located in the basement of a large house in a residential neighborhood, the clinic has two vets, both women, who occupy the floors above and advertise 24-hour care. I entered and was hit with a cold blast of German at the desk (where English is spoken "fluently"), finally figuring out that the attendant wanted my name and address, followed by information on Earl. Tier? Katze. Farbe? Weiss. One of the vets, the extremely large Dr Elizabeth, loomed from behind a doorway behind the desk and said, "Take a short seat." With Earl in his carrier, I stepped through another doorway to a waiting room with hard wooden chairs along the wall and a saggy old sofa with pillows encased in dog pictures; a cold tile floor sloped to a drain in the center of the room. I thought I might be sitting in an abbatoir, chairs arranged for spectators. Two large bulletin boards decorated one wall: a disorderly jumble of pictures--a missing orange tabby, black cats with yellow eyes, labs, retrievers, schnauzers...pets found after being abandoned, pets for whom homes were needed, pets whose lives were to be sold or given away...pet-sitting services for rent-a-care. Separation...belonging...birth and death...the universe we all share. On another wall was a painting, perhaps by a child, of a moonlit black cat against a starry night sky. Earl is white. He likes sitting at the glass doors, in the warmth of our livingroom, and watching snowflakes slip slowly to the surface of the stone terrace, losing their identity in the quiet cold whiteness of the snows that preceded them. My chair was hard, and I stayed bundled up. Across the room from me was a lone white door with a shiny brass plaque in elegant script reading "Ordinance." Below it another sign in German: "Enter please only when ordered." After a 20-minute wait, with Earl remaining uncharacteristically quiet in his carrier the whole time, we were ordered.
The vet, Dr Elizabeth, got a growl out of Earl in fluent English when she palpated his tummy. Two x-rays ("Zwei is for the Kontrol"), blood tests, urine tests, and a scan later, she told me he had diseased kidneys, one being 80 percent gone. "This spot in the x-ray is not the kidney stone. Let me get my wordbook to tell you the English. Ah ja, it is the cal-ci-fi-cation." Earl was soon hooked to an IV with magic yellow fluid. After that procedure, I was handed a bag with a variety of special-diet food "for him to try what pleases best" (turns out he hates it all) and four kinds of medicine to be given each evening. Then an instructive staccato commentary: "This is for the kidney." "This and this is for the Gaster." "This is against the vomit." I secured the carrier and headed for the reception desk as she said, "Does he make the stool?" "After this, then the liver goes and there is more treatment." "Bring him to Monday for lab work." "That is 330 euro." No receipt. A trip home through the black wind, and Earl climbed into the gold reading chair to nap next to his brother Walter.
We have had additional visits to the vet, with mixed results. Earl is declining gradually, but he may yet level off and maintain a modestly decent quality of life for days, weeks, or more. We head into 2011 with the gift that comes with the imminent passing of a pet: a sense of compassion and a renewed awareness of mortality--and a consequent desire to value what we have while we have it.
Music Week
-- We have not heard recorded Christmas music in the markets or stores in the run-up to Christmas. As a result, no doubt we'll enjoy a certain freshness to the strains of "Jingle Bell Rock" in two more Christmases, when we again ply the aisles of the Rte 29 Food Lion with a shopping cart, admiring the festive pyramids of snacks with cheeselike substances and standing paralyzed by choice in front of a bin of frozen turkeys. Yet Vienna has ample compensation for this loss: church choirs abound in the public squares, here as in Salzburg, and brass bands as well. Hearing familiar carols in German, moreover, lends them a freshness. "Stille Nacht," which was written near Salzburg, sounds even lovelier than "Silent Night." This country is so much about music, and they do it so well.
-- Last Sunday evening found us at the Musikverein, a lovely, palatial 19th-century concert hall, to hear Mozart and Bruckner. The orchestra was wonderful; the acoustics were wonderful; the experience was transporting. At the end of the performance, we made our way to Landtmann's cafe, which has been in business since the 19th century. It sits on the Ring, a wide road that circles what was medieval Vienna; the road stands where once stood the medieval walls of the city, which were torn down in the 19th century. A small history printed in the back of the cafe menu notes that every important politician in Austria over the past century has visited the cafe, and the management makes no distinction about customers because of their political views. At the end of World War II, Russian soldiers looted Landtmann's and shot out its grand mirrors, but the cafe was renovated soon after and back in business. The dining area the night we were there was packed, though we did not have a long wait for the table, and the view would nevertheless have been worth a long wait. Outside our glass-enclosed dining area stood an 18-foot Christmas tree, decorated with colored lights twinkling through the snow flurries, and across the Ring Road stood the Rathaus, with its Gothic arches and towers brightly illuminated in flood lights, and below it Vienna's largest Christmas market, crowded with shoppers, lit with a million lights.
-- The next night found us with other Embassy couples at the home of an American professor who teaches opera in one of Vienna's universities. He gave a clear, basic presentation on opera and focused his remarks in particular on Mozart's Don Giovanni, showing scenes from it, with music, on a DVD. He explained how the score and certain instruments reflected and enhanced emotions and traits of various of the characters as they moved through the narrative. This background was an invaluable contribution to our ability to enjoy the performance when, two nights later, we saw it at the State Opera House.
Christmas Eve--at home with champagne flutes on the coffee table and concert music on the television as we opened our gifts for each other.
Christmas Day--we hosted a friend of Linda's from work. Having a guest gave us the incentive to go all out with the dinner: turkey and all the works. The meal, at least, did a good job of replicating the usual experience at home...though we still missed the hugs and love and good wishes of our families.
Filler
-- Directions on my "Waving Cat" Christmas toy:
o One NO. 5 battery for praviding the power, enabling to automatically beckon the hand for months, setting it at any position, never to be offected by the lights.
o When it is in the initiative operation, please insert the battery into the bottom of the treasure-beckoning cat according to the inscribed polaritities. Then it can work immediately. The hand beckoning will automatically enter the stable condition for several minutes.
o Inside attaching poly luck-beckoning lyrics, sticking them for immediate realizations.
o Inside attaching several self-filled out creative and catchy phrases' lable paper.
o If finding that the hand-beckoning stops swinging, please change the same battery with type number.
Sad Postscript on the Week
Earl, our once fat, happy white Persian, is dying from a kidney ailment; since he is willful as cats are wont to be, he will get to exit on his terms and on his own calendar, with an assist only if there is chronic pain. He had been uncharacteristically reclusive one day last week, and the next day I resolved to get him examined. I selected the clinic from a list provided by the Embassy that identifies medical offices that claim to speak English "fluently." I called for an appointment, and the person who answered spoke no English; I understood to bring Earl in at 9:30 a.m. I pulled him from his comfy nest in a lower shelf of the tv cabinet and put him in his carrier--which, judging from his low growl, he recognized from the flight here in July. We stepped into the icy wind for the tram ride to the vet clinic a couple of miles away.
Located in the basement of a large house in a residential neighborhood, the clinic has two vets, both women, who occupy the floors above and advertise 24-hour care. I entered and was hit with a cold blast of German at the desk (where English is spoken "fluently"), finally figuring out that the attendant wanted my name and address, followed by information on Earl. Tier? Katze. Farbe? Weiss. One of the vets, the extremely large Dr Elizabeth, loomed from behind a doorway behind the desk and said, "Take a short seat." With Earl in his carrier, I stepped through another doorway to a waiting room with hard wooden chairs along the wall and a saggy old sofa with pillows encased in dog pictures; a cold tile floor sloped to a drain in the center of the room. I thought I might be sitting in an abbatoir, chairs arranged for spectators. Two large bulletin boards decorated one wall: a disorderly jumble of pictures--a missing orange tabby, black cats with yellow eyes, labs, retrievers, schnauzers...pets found after being abandoned, pets for whom homes were needed, pets whose lives were to be sold or given away...pet-sitting services for rent-a-care. Separation...belonging...birth and death...the universe we all share. On another wall was a painting, perhaps by a child, of a moonlit black cat against a starry night sky. Earl is white. He likes sitting at the glass doors, in the warmth of our livingroom, and watching snowflakes slip slowly to the surface of the stone terrace, losing their identity in the quiet cold whiteness of the snows that preceded them. My chair was hard, and I stayed bundled up. Across the room from me was a lone white door with a shiny brass plaque in elegant script reading "Ordinance." Below it another sign in German: "Enter please only when ordered." After a 20-minute wait, with Earl remaining uncharacteristically quiet in his carrier the whole time, we were ordered.
The vet, Dr Elizabeth, got a growl out of Earl in fluent English when she palpated his tummy. Two x-rays ("Zwei is for the Kontrol"), blood tests, urine tests, and a scan later, she told me he had diseased kidneys, one being 80 percent gone. "This spot in the x-ray is not the kidney stone. Let me get my wordbook to tell you the English. Ah ja, it is the cal-ci-fi-cation." Earl was soon hooked to an IV with magic yellow fluid. After that procedure, I was handed a bag with a variety of special-diet food "for him to try what pleases best" (turns out he hates it all) and four kinds of medicine to be given each evening. Then an instructive staccato commentary: "This is for the kidney." "This and this is for the Gaster." "This is against the vomit." I secured the carrier and headed for the reception desk as she said, "Does he make the stool?" "After this, then the liver goes and there is more treatment." "Bring him to Monday for lab work." "That is 330 euro." No receipt. A trip home through the black wind, and Earl climbed into the gold reading chair to nap next to his brother Walter.
We have had additional visits to the vet, with mixed results. Earl is declining gradually, but he may yet level off and maintain a modestly decent quality of life for days, weeks, or more. We head into 2011 with the gift that comes with the imminent passing of a pet: a sense of compassion and a renewed awareness of mortality--and a consequent desire to value what we have while we have it.
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