Vienna lost in time

Gstaad

There seems to be a touch of autumn in the air, a damp, still greyness. How quickly summers drift away nowadays. Typically, my boat is just about ready to be launched, now that my thoughts are turning inward, towards Mittel Europa, Vienna and the Danube to be exact. Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, described Vienna as a city of spectacular opulence ‘mixed with a sense of something missing, even at its core’. It’s a good one, but I prefer a different one, the one about ‘a city that’s like a grand opera sung by the understudies’. One drives from Passau into the metropolis through thickly forested German hills and vineyards, the onion domes glistening in the fading sunlight, the houses painted in light blue, pale pink and ochre.

What’s missing is the present. Austria is a safe, socialist state, the Habsburg palaces are now museums, the grand houses turned into government buildings, the great figures that once made Vienna the centre of the world gone for ever. The yellow Schoenburg palace lies empty, its walls covered with graffiti saying ‘make love, not krieg’. (I agree, but why write it on the walls of the mother of my children’s palazzo?)

The sense of emptiness is due to the passing of a great empire; as well as the passing of an era that saw Vienna inhabited by figures such as Freud, Bruckner, Mahler, Brahms, Klimt, Schiele and others. A couple of months ago, in the Bagel, I talked with my father-in-law about making a last nostalgic tour of the place. Peter Schoenburg is now 87 years old, and infirm. He is the head of the Schoenburg family, a princely clan since the 14th century. His spirit is willing but I’m not sure about the legs.