In the City of Dreams once more

VIENNA, Austria – Yesterday they had elections in Vienna. It looked like nobody cared. The city was quiet, the mood drowsy. The conclusion, I was told, is foregone. Unlike us back home, Austrians – with a few "explosions" now and then – hew to their custom of Die Hoflichkeit (politeness), almost stodginess – a hangover from the heady days of the old Empire, which no longer exists.

I’m happy to be back in Vienna, which is ridiculously easy to reach from Paris. You get on an Air France plane from Charles de Gaulle (Roissy) airport, Aerogare 2, and within an hour and 20 minutes you’re landing at the newly-enlarged Schwechat Airport. Our flight was delayed 45 minutes because one passenger with already checked-in luggage didn’t arrive, so his stuff had to be located and unloaded for "safety’s sake." Then we had to queue up with 14 other aircraft, turn by turn (behind Gulf Air, Cathay Pacific, and a dozen Air France Regional flights, before winging off into the blue sky. La ciel bleue, as the immortal songbird Edith Piaf once warbled, a deep blue sky reigned over La Belle France after a brief shower.

It was sunny, too, as our plane swept into Schwechat airport, skipping over a low range of mountains. There used to be a joke in the old days. The plane’s captain would announce: "We will be landing in Vienna in just ten minutes. Kindly fasten your seatbelts, and set your watches back 20 years!"

This still looks true enough as your car brings you from airport to city. You glimpse the soaring carved façades with Double Eagles rampant (signifying the two Crowns of a lost Empire – which the Austrians foolishly forfeited when they started World War I. And for what? For the assassination of the nephew of then reigning Emperor Franz Josef – a man the Emperor didn’t really like – in the primitive outpost town of Sarajevo (remember the center in recent years of the Bosnian civil war?). The unfortunate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visiting the "colony," and his ill-starred wife Sophie, had been shot to death by a young Bosnian Serb student who cried out for independence for Serbia!

The Emperor Franz Josef, in indignation sent his army in 1914 August, to punish the Serbs, a move which drew the Germans, the Russians, and in the end almost everybody else into the fight. Franz Josef, who had ruled for 63 years, finally died on November 21, 1916, after plunging Europe into a world war in which four million of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s best and bravest died – and Vienna lost sway over 50 million people: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and other Southern Slavs.

Everyone, as I’ve said, namely the Germans, the Russians, the Belgians, the Turks, the Italians, the French, the British, the Australians and New Zealanders, and eventually the Americans, were drawn into this stupid war.

Months after hostilities had begun, the Junkers (officers) of the German Kaiser Wilhelm’s general staff – stuck in the mud of Flanders – asked each other in puzzlement how come they had been embroiled into this costly struggle, and nobody could logically answer why. Wars are always waged without logic – and are sparked by the most trivial causes.

Thus it is that the visitor to Vienna finds this grand city a head without a body, with 2 million Viennese presiding over a population of less than 10 million Austrians. The palaces and great structures, so lovely in baroque construction, had been erected for a kingdom that once stretched from sea to sea, up and down the length of the Danube River who flows through eight countries from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.

Witness to this loss are the final titles of the late lamented Franz Josef: "Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria; Grand-duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukovina, Grand-duke of Transylvania." The last-mentioned in Rumania is the "home town" of Count Dracula.

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"The Austrians," a German friend once grumbled to me, "are the greatest public relations frauds in history: they’ve managed to convince the world that Adolf Hitler was a German and that Ludwig van Beethoven was an Austrian!" (His name, of course, is being withheld by the author for his own safety – you see, his wife happens to be Austrian).

The remark, however, happens to be true. Adolf Hitler whose fanatical career scorched Europe East and West was born in Breunau on the river Inn – well within Austria but not far from Bavaria. Beethoven, for his part, was born in 1770 in Bonn (now the Federal Capital of West Germany) – but left for Vienna in 1793, as soon as he could travel, never to return to his home town.

When I passed on the complaint to an Austrian acquaintance in Manila, the latter scoffed: "Yes, Hitler was an Austrian but nobody was willing to listen to that Little Corporal in Austria so he left for Germany where all the Germans were eager to Sieg Heil him to power. As for Beethoven he found his job as an organist in Bonn so boring that he escaped to Vienna where he came into his own."

Much as they would like to shrug off the Hitler connection, the Austrians – like the Germans – have short memories. Now both Germans and Austrians condemn Hitler. All the world, it is said, loves a lover: but nobody backs a loser. In his prime on the other hand, Herr Adolf was the great Aryan hope of the Teutonic world. When Hitler and his Nazi legions goose-stepped into Vienna on March 14, 1938, to set the seal on Anschluss the annexation of Austria, he was greeted by cheering throngs of tens of thousands and didn’t have to fire a single shot.

Hitler took a suite at the Hotel Imperial (where I’m now staying two doors away). The Hitler Suite, No. 124, is still very much in demand. Those who wish to book it in this historic, palatial 130-year old hostelry on the Kartner Ring and the Schubert Ring strasse must reserve it weeks in advance. (Every suite has a butler, decked in impressive black tie and tails).

In any event, Der Fuehrer used to appear on the balcony of his suite to acknowledge the applause of thousands of Viennese and other Austrians. Church bells pealed in ecstasy, Swastika banners festooned the metropolis, even the tall tower of St. Stephen’s church.

Let’s face it. Hitler had – as one old Panzer commander admitted to me years ago in Wiesbaden, the gift of charisma: a personal magnetism and power to mesmerize men and women. They would lean over to touch him or brush his sleeve, exclaiming: "Ein sehr schoener Mann!" (What a lovely man!)

Only later did the dimensions of his madness dawn on the Viennese. That along with the fact that Herr Adolf hated Vienna which had snubbed him when he had lived there as a starving smalltime artist vainly striving for admission to the prestigious Vienna Academy, barely keeping body and soul together in a pauper’s refuge in the Meidling district, or a charitable men’s home on the Meldemannstrasse.

Hitler made Austria a subprovince of the German Reich and consigned Vienna during the war year’s to the status of a provincial town. What’s more, he tore the guts out of old Vienna. Before World War II, Vienna’s 300,000 Jews provided the élan, sparkle, culture, as well as scientific and literally life to the Viennese milieu. Hitler and his Nazis chased the luckier ones out of the country. Sigmund Freud, who fled to England on June 4, 1938, died in exile there just over a year later.

The majority of Jews were herded into concentration camps, from which most never returned. Less than 8,000 Jews live in Vienna today.

But Vienna lives on. Dances on – in the three quarters’ time of the immortal Waltz. Sings on in the magnificently rebuilt Staatsoper (State Opera House) – just across from the fabled Sacher Hotel (which invented "Sachertorte", the dessert for which the mouth waters) and, don’t forget, "Starbucks" at Number 1 Kartnerstrasse.

Yes, Virginia. The insolent Americans have invaded the world capital of Café life! There are now three "Starbucks" – decreeing No Smoking (nicht rauchen) in a metropolis where everybody smokes.

As a young man, I used to listen enchanted to the voice of Richard Tauber, whose matchless voice rendered that lilting tune: "Wien, Stadt Meine Traume." Vienna is still, as he sang, The City of My Dreams. Diminished, slightly dowdy – but still Vienna.