Jill Rees: Welcome Press

The Hotel Terminus is near the centre of the city, in the Museumsquartier, and has a dozen English in Action teachers staying here, although they seem to have all gone out for Saturday night partying. My room is small but perfectly formed, and over-heated in the Austrian way against the frost-ridden nights.

It is quite warm during the day, and everyone comments on how unusual the weather is here in the east of Austria this year. Only three days ago I sat with Catherine and Jenny in the Schlusspark in Eisenstadt, basking in the sunshine overlooking the lake and gardens of the great palace.

I was teaching for the week in Neusidl am See, the world’s most boring town with its one long high street running down to the See and the nature reserve. This morning the other teachers and I awoke with glee to be leaving that dead place and coming to Vienna for a week.

Martin, my senior teacher, was pleased to help me buy the train ticket from the machine in the station. It’s straightforward but we have to do it in German even though there’s an English translation, I think for showing off purposes. Just over half an hour later, we were back in the Sudbahnhof and taking the tram to the hotel.

Across the street looking out of my window, a girl in her apartment seems to be a student; she has been writing an essay for hours, here papers strewn around her.

I have just eaten a huge repast of hummus, dolma, artichokes in chilli and dried papaya bought from the nearby Nachsmarkt, a delirium of Turks and Africans selling real food, finally, fruit and vegetables which the Austrians are strangely suspicious of, preferring pastries and potatoes with their ubiquitous Schweinfleisch (pig meat). The window ledge serves as a fridge. It is two windows with a cold space in between, a kind of artisanal double glazing, which I imagine they are obliged to have so as not to ruin the traditional facades of the buildings.

After a couple of hours sampling normal life here, chatting in Starbucks while everyone checked out their emails - you get 30 minutes free airtime with a cup of coffee, then round the corner to Kafka Cafe, the tiny vegetarian cafe and restaurant where Kafka used to go to write - I tramped out to walk around the glorious if imperialist streets of this old centre of European culture.

Apart from Kafka, luminaries like Mahler, Mozart, Freud, Klimt, Schonberg, Wittgenstein, Haydn - the list in endless - are honoured in street names even if they were not so in life. I walked down the Mariahilferstrasse, looking longingly in all the shop windows (shops!! After Neusidl!), past the Kunsthistorischemuseum through the Burggarten, the gardens of the Hofburg Palace and to Albertina Square, frowned on by the museum of modern art with it great modernistic iron wing arching over the steps to the side.

I was proud of myself for having managed to come here first, largely by accident as I couldn’t find where I was on my map at all and felt embarrassed to get the Rough Guide out every two minutes. My intention back in Neusidl was to first come to the Monument against war and fascism here, to say Buddhist prayers for peace as my first action in Vienna.

I thought this would be a good cause, as I seem to be walking over the bodies of the many dead from the Anschluss throughout this delicately balanced land.

There are two statues with writhing bodies showing the various horrors of the twentieth century in Europe (and now Iraq), torture, dying children, bony concentration camp naked men; a heavy crunched down iron lump covered in barbed wire and chains, on which people have left bunches of roses, and a stele made of volcanic black stone on which is written Austria’s vow for peace in the future. Three giggling American girls came by arm in arm, fooling around, when one of them suddenly saw the statue and cried, laughing, ‘Oh look, there’s a woman giving birth to a baby!’ They began to be a little embarrassed as they looked more closely and realised the baby was crying with terror on its little face and the woman was being tortured. They didn’t know at all what the monument was for, and were quiet for a moment, looking at the various people in a kind of mourning pose in front of it, before recovering and heading on to the shops, giggling afresh.

I wonder if, in the future, perhaps sometime one lonely night, the memory of the meaningless figure will come back to them, and they will have had enough sorrows to understand its significance. I don’t know whether to hope they remember it or hope they never have to think about death or terror. I don’t know if peace is bought with the awareness of the horror of war, or with the innocence of youth which has known only peace. They say we must never forget.

Beside the monument were two men in bowler hats standing beside their carriages pulled by white Austrian horses, glowering at the tourists round the monuments as if to say: ‘And why aren’t you asking for a ride?’ I took a photo of one of the guys and he glowered even more, even as he helped a family into the back. Mind you it must be a cold job; the horses were stamping their hooves and snorting misty breath.

Mapless, I made my way along the side of the Opera House to a wide shopping street which was pedestrianised. I was trying to follow the route W E Sebald describes in Vertigo, but I couldn’t remember it. Even more difficult, he hadn’t been able to remember it in the book, as he had wondered aimlessly and only retraced his footsteps later on his map in the hotel room. I let myself be comforted by this, thinking if he could find his way back I might be able to, despite not being able to remember where the hotel was, the name of the street, and not actually knowing what the buildings I had passed were called.

An icy wind blew down the side of the Opera House, and I tried to keep track of its direction, so I could walk towards it home. Kärntner Strasse, I later found out this street was called. It had even more shops, designer stores, McDonalds of course, and a Starbucks which tempted me but no! Enough coffee!

Just before Stephansplatz I was stopped by a young man intriguingly dressed in 18^th century garb with Mozart wig and mask, asking if I had any intention of listening to classical music while I was here. He tried to sell me tickets from 39 Euros for a Strauss and other stuff gig at the local park where the Strauss family used to play regularly. I told him I would try to go during the week, but can’t buy a ticket right now, money being the other thing I’d left at the hotel, whose whereabouts I didn’t know. He hadn’t heard of the name either and looked worried when I said I couldn’t remember where it was and didn’t know the address, but I reassured him I’d manage somehow.

Instead of going straight to the Cathedral, I slipped down a dark side street at the end of which was a green copper dome. It turned out to be St Peters Kirche, a beautiful church where people were coming in to Mass, and which had free organ concerts every day, so that is a must. Today they’re playing ……Strauss, but I’m hoping there might be some Messian or something more modern if I go in the afternoon in the week.

The Cathedral is being cleaned, and I was looking up somewhat critically at some samples of the cleaned parts next to the blackened ones when I caught the eye of a dark-haired young woman. We smiled at each other and I wondered if she was an EIA teacher who I should remember, or just a stranger who had grasped my thoughts on the brickwork and had similar reactions.

I had to veer onto the road round the north side because the pavement was lined with more carriages with horses and steamed with the smell of horse shit where they had made themselves at home.

I nipped into one of many shopping precincts, with coffee houses and lounge areas in reception rooms for people to rest from the cold streets. By now I’d had to fish round in my bag for my hat as well as wearing gloves. What put me on the right track home was the Opera House, and I did get the Rough Guide out on the way back so I would know which building was the Art museum for tomorrow.

Saturday 2 February 2008

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Tags: Albertinaplatz, EIA, Europe, first impressions, peace monument, teaching in Austria, TEFL, Vienna