A face followed me through the lands of Central Europe, the rosy-cheeked visage of Empress Elisabeth, better-known by her grotesquely cutesy German diminutive, “Sisi.” I saw her image everywhere, rosy-cheeked and half-smiling, dressed in a silver tulle gown with elaborate pins in her braided hair. She was, in Europe in the 19th Century, the Diana of her time, charming the glittering social life of the European capitals with her legendary beauty and cannily maneuvering her way through society and court politics.
I'm afraid I didn't see the appeal – maybe it's just modern standards but I saw an awfully normal-looking woman obsessed with the maintenance of her girlish waist, her personality so wrapped up in her appearance that she would not permit herself to be photographed later in life, married off to the decidedly schlubby Emperor Franz Josef I, heir to the throne of the Habsburgs, those Targaryens of the Alps, and she watched their inbred children play cowboys and Indians in their sailor suits in the Schonbrunn Palace. She would eventually be assassinated by an idiotically grinning Italian anarchist as the contradictions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire built, until a fateful day in Sarajevo involving her fail-nephew and a Serbian bullet, and eventually the empire's death in the negotiation rooms of Saint-Germain and Trianon.
But no matter – her face followed me everywhere through the Habsburg Lands, reduced to an icon, in the classical sense. An object rather than a human.
One of many objects of abject horror, at that. The horror is found in the twee little wooden houses with giant crucifixes on the side, in all the choirs of chubby middle aged men singing hunting lieder in Tyrolean caps, in magic flutes and Lippizaner stallions and giggly rococo architecture and tales of courtly love, all the tourist traps mit schlag.
And yet it was impossible for me not to adore the peculiar artistic expressions of the horror burbled up in those twilight years of empire that Franz Josef and Sisi presided over and those following uncertain years before the Anschluss, the invasion of the Sudeten, and the Arrow Cross regime finally put an end to the entrancing decadence. I was far more interested in metamorphoses and trials, a dream story playing out on the streets of Vienna that would unfortunately be remembered in the way it inspired Kubrick's final belly flop, in Venuses in furs on remote country estates, in Zweig's post-office girls and the snows of Gregor von Rezzori's yesteryear. In the poses of Egon Schiele's contorted subjects. I have little use for Mozart – I'll take Mahler, thank you very much.
Maybe it's because I see the reflection of then in now.
I followed the rivers, the Adige and the Inn and the Danube and the Vltava. I arrived via Padua, where Giotto and Galileo called the modern world forth, and where I drank the little cups of espresso topped with mint foam in the cafe where the Revolutions of 1848 were fomented, where Joyce wrote about Ireland from afar, through Verona, Trento, and the Brenner Pass, under the clear white cliffs of the Dolomites.
Like countless youths on their wandervogel in these parts many years before, and whose tracks I often very deliberately followed, complete with the shelters they built in the last few glorious years of Red Vienna, I took to the mountains, ready for cool clean air and pokey country train rides and hearty pension breakfasts and peaks to ascend. Each day I chose a path, with little plan, on my map of the Hohe Tauern region, and set off, finding the best ways to ford streams and scramble over boulders. There were waterfalls to walk alongside, cow skulls nailed above the door of each high meadow alm, there was sun glittering off the glaciers, there was the distant view to the fairytale schloss perched on the mountainside where, in a more sublime era, Aristotle Onassis and the Shah of Shahs had listened to chamber orchestras and tucked into truffled quails, and down below, there was the little alley where the brilliant Anton Webern had gone out for a late night smoke break only to get blasted by a trigger-happy US Army cook. I started each day with unpronunceable whole grain breads and local cheeses and rowan berry conserves prepared by a tubby hausfrau who didn't speak a world of English, and I ended each day with generous pours of Oktoberfest beer and GrΓΌner Veltliner and plum schnapps alongside kingly portions of trout and venison to get me ready for my next day with 30 kilometers or so of hiking, 2000+ meters of elevation change.
Yet I couldn't lose myself to the reverie. Each glacier I traipsed over was dead, a rump-end bit of filthy ice in the cirque of a long valley, piles of gravel inhospitable to life. The mood wasn't helped by the Euroshits in cashmere sweaters in their Audis at the base of the mountain, on a day trip from Zell am See.
Less Zweig's world of yesterday, more the modern Austria. Of the piano teacher that Elfriede Jelinek wrote about, the losers and corrections and woodcutters of Thomas Bernhard. And ergo the playing of funny games seemed a reasonable response.
So onwards to the old capital of Mitteleuropa culture, the city of Metternich's congress under gloomy skies. I sat in the dining car staring out, Ethan Hawke not meeting his Julie Delpy, to arrive in a brooding city of gray and beige stone, tourists drinking spritzes and pretending to be warm in the outdoor cafes under lurid neon. I choose a promising spot – a self-styled “American” bar, from a time when such a distinction was meaningful, with a sign saying “no sightseeing.” This should be good.
And it was. I spent the next 36 hours in a whirlwind, the kind that should not be described lest it fall apart in memory. A Schiele self-portrait and a Schiele beauty, on canvas and off. Hunters in the snow. Minerals in the wunderkammer. I'll leave it there.
Only to be followed by the sense of desolation that follows true happiness. It was then that I saw Emperor Franz Josef's shitter. Apropos.
Northward, then, through the Czech lands, which bore a shocking visual similarity – not even a similarity, a clone – with the rolling hills of Eastern Iowa where so many Czech farmers wound up, right down to the Harvestore silos. And onto Prague, where I was greeted on Wilsonova by an aging platinum blonde taking a smoke break and staring down the world with utter contempt outside the sort of “gentlemen's club” that caters to Brits that caption their photos “What an absolute legend!” She was already wearing her PVC thigh-high boots at 4 in the afternoon, made all the more incongruous by her coffee-stained pink hoodie.
But what could be a better city to arrive at in a bitter mood on a fall afternoon, with its leering Art Nouveau signage for casinos and cheap hotels, signs reading “EROTIC CITY” flickering in the rain, foxlike girls walking swiftly past and meth-addled and toothless gutter punks smoking and bullshitting outside dispensaries, statuary of blackened saints and gilded trumpeters on the bridges over the Moldau, the darkness made all the more glaring by the aggressive attempts at selling happiness to the tourist hordes, ice bars with robot servers, chanting Hare Krishnas (didn't know they still existed), self-conscious naughtiness, street magicians with curled mustaches, half-price specials on Becherovka shots, electro-swing covers of Macklemore, strip clubs catering to groups of young Arab men in matching black t-shirts and tight fades, all the invocations to drink and fuck and spend. I drank. I didn't fuck. I spent more than I should have.
And I took a broken-down train with workingmen drinking plastic two liter bottles of Staropramen at 8 in the morning to the mysterious little town of Terezin, in the swamplands along the Elbe, where the ambitious Gavrilo Princip breathed his last inside the star fortress built for the protection of Habsburg Bohemia, and where thousands of ghettoized Jews from around the Reich were sent to look serviceable for when the Red Cross came around to make sure everything was above board (the Red Cross seemed to think so). Their children's colored-pencil drawings of princesses and football games hang in what was once the camp school, children who thought that as uncomfortable as this was, they would some day return to their homes in Augsburg and Krakow.
Say what you want about there being no atheists in the foxholes, I have never in my life been more certain in my refusal to believe in a just and kindly god.
Their spirits followed me down the Danube to Budapest, where it was impossible not to see the return of the fascist impulse, not least in Orban's Hungary, in a city where life continued more or less as normal, even as things got darker. Not least in the makeshift memorial to the murdered partisans outside the hideous authorized neo-neoclassical war memorial. And not least in the long trains of flatbed cars with camo olive-drab troop trucks on the back en route to Kherson and points east. And I stayed in what had once been the Jewish quarter, and what still – somehow – kind of was. A neighborhood of narrow, hemmed-in streets with unpainted tenements and passing drunks and graffiti'd alleys, an Old World equivalent to the Lower East Side of New York (at least as it once was) in more than a few ways.
Sure, I could be writing about the splendid Baroque streets, the Buda Castle – Empress Sisi rearing her head again – ancient hot springs, but what would be the point? After a while in Europe, the ostensible wonders blur together. Distinguishing between them would be a chore.
I finished my last night in the heart of the Jewish Quarter at one of the famed ruin bars that rose up in the abandoned houses of Budapest after the wall fell in '89, when rock music was still considered subversive, when a squat looked like a squat and not like a fashion campaign trying to look like a squat. But I was – finally – happy.
And for the first time I set down my notebook and just soaked it all in to the best of my ability. Sure I felt a little bit too old to be there (in just a few hours I will no longer be a coveted 18-35 male), but hey, the vibe was good, the beer was good, Phoebe Bridgers was playing on the soundsystem well past the distortion point, and if the world is burning, I might as well dance through it.
And if she's reading this – to a certain mermaid a little off the Stephansplatz, I'm terribly glad you were there to dance with me.
