Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Today I found my sister here in Vienna at a Soka Gakkai Buddhist meeting. I got the phone number of the centre from the Internet and sent an email. The Women’s leader contacted me at once and when we spoke, she told me about a meeting in my district Vienna 4. Unfortunately in my arrogance I thought I could find the street easily, and left it much too late before I realised I couldn’t find it. Luckily the hotel chap had an A-Z and helped. It isn’t very far, although I had to walk across the Naschmarkt and over Karlsplatz, the park that the kids at school told me was the place to buy hard drugs. I didn’t see any dealers, although there were a lot of bobbies about, swinging their truncheons and chatting as they walked around in male/female pairs, quite like the UK and nothing like Germany! The SGI Director General for all of Austria was present at the meeting, as well as a Japanese lady who had been practising for nearly 50 years! The DG translated for her into Japanese and a local woman did the same for me into English, so it had a very international feel. There was a study of a Gosho Letter to Sairon-Bo which followed on from their Study lecture, to kick off the meeting. It turned out that Sylvia, my translator, started practising on exactly the same day as me! Same year! The Japanese lady agreed we must be sisters. After the meeting they brought out a huge platter of food, sushi made by the Japanese lady, tuna and pasta salad, Austrian brown breads and juice. We all exchanged emails and SMS, and Sylvia invited me to the centre tomorrow to do some chanting.

They were talking about the desolation of youth, which is practically the only experience I’ve had in Vienna after teaching for a week. Two of the women were teachers of English! And one was saying her class expected another war to start. She spoke to them about hope. And tried to make them understand that these things aren’t foregone conclusions, the people aren’t powerless in these matters. Wars are the extremes of the devilish functions of greed, foolishness and anger. Those warmongers feed off these negative feelings in all of us. If we don’t feel them, but instead feel hope and courage, and determine to take actions continually to make friendships and links between ourselves and other people, we can block the negativity and make the world how we want it. This is the Buddhist ideal of Kosen Rufu, of creating world peace through one-to-one communication between people.

Another first today was my first cake and coffee in a Vienna coffee house with Martin after classes. The decor was Imperial, carvings on the beautiful old wooden panels and velour wall coverings. We’re still getting on although I lost him in the toilets at the Naschmarkt (long story), which is just as well as we’re together for four weeks.

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As planned, I went to Starbucks and started surfing. Dylan came in quite soon and set about working away. The way to spot a real artist is that they are always working, where sometimes people say they are writers and so on, but they treat it like a hobby in a way. Artists are pretty boring most of the time because they are passionate mainly about their work. Amanda came in and refused to sit on uncomfortable chairs. She likes to be comfortably ensconced in Vienna cafes relaxing over a hot coffee! It’s an ideal life for a writer to have time in isolation to work but also to meet other interesting people as EIA people are without any effort.After a bit of a chat, I tramped down to the Museum of Historic Art, only a couple of hundred metres down the Mariahilferstrasse. There are so many museums, all in the magnificent buildings of Imperial Vienna, that I had to check which one was the Art museum, as I didn’t want to end up surrounded by dinosaurs in the Naturhistorischemuseum. Before making my way to the Breughels, I went to look at the Titians, where I spent some time in front of a portrait of Benedetto Varchi, a celebrated humanist of his time, who Titian clearly liked. He has a wide open face with an exaggeratedly high forehead, a clear gaze and, most importantly, light before him in the direction he is looking. Contrast this with his portrait of the Pope, who is surrounded by blackness and dark, except for the light shining on himself. Just looking at this painting made me feel that I want to stand up proudly as a humanist. He has the nobility usually reserved for royalty in his features, the nobility of objective, scientific and humanistic dynamism.

Downstairs has a collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman artefacts and sculptures, with, quite casually placed really ancient Greek figures at the entrance. They are Trojan, and pre-war, and are of the Greek gods. The only thing is, there is a clearly apparent resemblance to the gods of Hindu. This makes sense, as Stephanie was talking about the Trojans of the Iliad being still eastern, with the feminine gods and values still prevalent. Later the Greeks took over, and the Odyssey shows us that Western dualism was beginning to mix in, eventually, especially with later Judeo-Christian thought, overwhelming our philosophy forever. This is incredibly clear as you go inside, and see a relief wall sculpture from only 2 years after the Trojan war, still Hinduistic but taking on more familiar western forms, and a little later the same kind of relief, but in full perspective relief and clearly completely western.

Round to the Egyptians, a power-statue of Horus with one of the pharaohs began the decline to the ridiculous, a mummified alligator, its snout peeping out from the swathes of grimy cloth, among the various animals surrounding one of the Egyptian dead dudes. They really were weird.

Talking with the school contact teacher for tomorrow, we got to talking about our kids and her husband was interested to hear about Ev as he is a professional anthropologist, specialising in Nepal and the Far East. He works for the anthro

pology Museum in Vienna, which has been closed down for two years for complete refurbishment and is due to re-open in the Autumn. He has offered to show Ev round if she comes to see the exhibits sometime. He was delighted to hear of someone who likes anthropology, as I think people tend to take the piss out of him normally (Ross syndrome!)

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The journey to Eisenstadt

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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.