Vienna - an Archduchess, a Funfair, a Populist and some Art.

Our trip to Vienna was great.  We were travelling with S, our oldest grandson, and staying in a curious and slightly decrepit apartment in a posh street of mansions rather like these.  

One day the owners of this apartment will probably spend a fortune modernising it and turning it into something sleek and conventional. But we liked the faded, almost romantic atmosphere of its big, high rooms, dusty staircase and warren of tiny offices on the other floors.

Young S. discovered that it had had once been the home of the Archduchess Elisabeth Maria Henrietta, daughter of Prince Rudolf, who was all set to inherit the throne of the Habsburg Empire.   

Unfortunately Prince Rudolf died when the archduchess was young,  in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress,  so she never had the chance be the daughter of an Emperor.  It seemed she didn't want to be one,  anyway, and her subsequent life took some sensational twists and turns. But more of that later.....  

Each day we'd descend the stone spiral back staircase, go through the arched entrance hall with its huge lantern hanging overhead, and out of  the heavy double doors to explore Vienna.  

We liked the Prater, Vienna's vintage amusement park, which over the years has accumulated acres of wooded grounds traversed by a miniature diesel-engined railroad, a running track, many 1970s-looking animatronic rides, a virtual reality parlour, terrifying looking chair swings, and a model railway layout  of Vienna which shows the city both by night and by day.   Plus, of course, all the usual fairground attractions like dodgems and a ferris wheel - the Prater's wheel featured in the 1949 film, The Third Man (click here for the scene).  I guess this, below, is supposed to be the wild west - at present those galloping horses are about to run right into a gate. 

Below, I was completely fooled by a mirror maze bathed in lurid multi coloured light, sometimes green, sometimes red and sometimes blue.  Perhaps I've had a sheltered life but I hadn't been in one of these things before. 

There was also an excellent display of award winning Austrian photographs, with each photo blown up large and displayed all around the park.     The one below specially caught my eye. It is entitled "Old Franz's 85th birthday" and I love this loden-clad old man, complete with gun, exchanging a kiss with his wife.  

   

The Prater couldn't be more different from the   "Kunstkammer" where we went the following day. This suite of galleries occupies one floor of Vienna's main art museum, the vast Kunst Historisches Museum, and comprises 20 giant rooms packed with unimaginably valuable items collected by generations of Habsburg emperors and their families.  

 I don't want to disrespect Britain's Crown Jewels or anything,  but if you really want to see the world's most skilled craftsmanship in porcelain, gold, silver and precious stones, in the shape of countless ornaments, decorations, salvers, plates, dishes, goblets, table settings,  automata, devotional items and more, then this place should be at the top of your list.

It's impossible to convey the enormous scale of the display, but here are a few of the items which caught my eye.  They include three of the many automata - ornaments that move or perform in some way.    This ship, a gilded banqueting table centrepiece, will roll across the table firing cannons as the crew move to music.

Here is a company of gold and enamelled musicians promenading on an ebony balcony.  

This large gold bell-tower automaton was based on the stage scenery of a play once attended by the emperor. 

I was also impressed by a very large calculator, made in 1727 which is supposedly for land surveying, although I doubt it made many surveying trips outside. 

This tiny object, known as a "prayer nut" (it's about the size of a walnut in its shell), is hang on a rosary.  I have enlarged it considerably because the carving is too small to be seen properly, at least by me.  I can't think how any one ever created it by hand. 

And here is a tantalus, a vessel for alcoholic drink, dressed up as a seated man literally wearing a table of food.  

 

 I can't vouch for the number of galleries, because I only managed to get through six of them, and that's because we only saw them towards the end of the day. Most of the time we'd been looking at paintings, followed by a pit stop snack in the museum cafe served by waiters (below)  It's not quite as pricey as it looks, which is good because I didn't spot anywhere else to eat. 

For me, the Dutch and Flemish paintings were the main attraction, particularly several big canvases by Bruegel the Elder, (b. 1589).  I visited them years ago and had been so frustrated because  they're so intricate that printed reproductions don't fully resolve the fine detail, and yet the canvases are too large to examine closely on the wall.   Last time I went without a camera,  but this time I managed to capture sections which are easily missed even in large reproductions. 

What makes them so interesting is that Bruegel was a painter of peasant life, which mostly went unrecorded simply because nobody in those days was very interested in what peasants did.   It's such a window into the past.   Here's a fraction of a canvas portraying peasant games, pastimes and other leisure activities. You can see how old ladies sit companionably together outside the church, drunks sprawl on the benches outside the inn. A couple of people are fighting, and something is happening that looks like a conga.  Some folk play a game involving tossing balls into holes in the ground, while a boy in a chair tries to beat off his friends running around him and teasing him.  There may be some sort of small religious procession in the foreground, and I think that boys in the distance are lining up to jump over a broom. Even further away,  a bonfire is under construction.   

You might have to search the whole painting (below) before you spot the location of all this activity,  though.  

I was sorry to miss the other 15 or so galleries of the Kunstkammer, (not to mention at least another whole floor of the museum), but actually the Kunst Historisches Museum is a bit overwhelming and I felt more at home in the  Wien Museum,   which is near the Charles Church, not far away. 

Unusually for Vienna, the Wien Museum it is free to enter, so you can drop in when it suits you, and, in my view, better appreciate what it has to say. It is a modern museum which explains the city's story with the help of objects - paintings, posters, books, furniture and so on.    I was struck by a painting celebrating Vienna's first ever municipal gas supply. It's reasonably competent art, but the interest lies in its story. It was commissioned by a deeply controversial man, Karl Lueger, who was mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910, and was in the habit of hiring artists to paint pictures that promoted himself. 

This picture is large, and divided into three parts... It's big and hard to photograph but this is an overview, showing the period "before the arrival of town gas" to the left, "after town gas" to the right and, in the middle, two symbolic female figures. 

In "Before,"  (below) Vienna is made ugly by its coal-gas factories and charcoal production.   Both the rich and poor struggle in this dirty place to see their way through smog, crowds, animals and piles of goods.  They are illuminated only by the inefficient, "fish tail"  burners  of the time, which were dim, and stank, and flickered so maddeningly that they made people ill. 

The next detail (below) shows two female symbolic figures  The top one represents Vienna,  carrying a new gas lamp like a sceptre.   Below her dainty feet crouches Britannia, representing the British company that previously supplied gas to the city. She is utterly wretched, crouching humiliated in the dirt with her primitive streetlamp smashed, and her dirty old gas pipe cracked.  

To the right, rich men and clergy stroll along outside the cathedral, and beneath them, Vienna's magnificent, then-modern town hall (built 1872-83) looms over a well tended park, bright with modern gas lighting and packed with the rich bourgeois. 

You will observe Karl Lueger, flatteringly portrayed as more handsome than he appears in photos, lifting his silk hat graciously.   Those shown around him appear to have been painted from life, and may have been local dignitaries.  But the ones I couldn't take my eyes off were the three women so prominently shown in front of him.  

 Leuger took care to be seen with women supporters.  Although they couldn't vote, he calculated that women could influence their husbands and children to elect  him, and like many populists of the time, he enjoyed an ardent  female fanbase of women who needed somewhere to direct their emotions.   They were  known at the time as "Lueger's Amazons"  (female warriors).   

 In those days, a celibate man was admired, and so Lueger remained unmarried and said he was devoting himself to his work.   (After his death his mistress published a candid memoir which revealed  a different side of him, however. How shocked those respectable Amazons might have been if they had known!)

Are these three ladies members of his tribe of "Amazons"?    When I first saw them I certainly felt uncomfortable.   The rich, well dressed one on the left has the cold stare of a wicked queen, the one in the middle is wearing a creature on her head resembling a cross between a bird of prey and a stealth missile,  and the one on the right ....well.... I dunno.  I just wouldn't like to meet any of them on a dark night, well-illuminated or not. 

Leuger laid the foundations for Vienna's excellent infrastructure, which has stood the city in good stead.  But antisemitism, misogyny and hate were the tools he used to gain support.  He told the usual far right story of "we're in a mess because of .... [insert name of scapegoats]" which speaks to the most primitive human emotions, and usually works, however illogical the reasoning that is offered to support it.    

 In fact, the Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, personally loathed Leuger, disapproving so strongly of his divisive approach that he refused three times to confirm him as Vienna's mayor. Still, 

 when the Emperor was finally persuaded to give way, Leuger was elected with a huge majority, so cultivating the ladies obviously paid off.   Perhaps they didn't believe they themselves were included in the women whose fault things were. 

The museum also displays a beautiful ceremonial chair (above) that Lueger designed for himself. The craftsmen who made it hid a note inside the chair's structure which was only discovered a hundred years later,  when it needed to be conserved.  The note said how much they hated him.  These days in the city's Lueger Square, his statue is regularly defaced, and nobody is quite sure what to do with it.  

Lueger died in 1910, and then there was the First World War.  After that, Vienna became extremely left wing: the period is called "Red Vienna" and all kinds of social innovations were made which further improved the infrastructure.   You can sometimes spot artwork around the city that comes from this period, like this Communist style mural of happy healthy children on a block of flats.

 

Vienna is famous for its coffee and cream cakes, and many of the traditional coffee shops attract long queues of tourists. They have prices to match and rude or indifferent service. We didn't eat out much, but did visit the Cafe Central, because that is not only historic but also has a good reputation, which we found it lived up to.  

On one cold and blustery day we lunched in its glassed-over courtyard,several stories high with a slightly  Palm Court atmosphere. Here, a kind and friendly waiter helped to make our meal really cosy and congenial - and the cakes were great! 

We also loved The Third Man Museum.  You have to plan carefully to be able to visit, as it is only open for a few hours once a week,  but it's  run by real hardcore fans of The Third Man film, who have funded the whole thing themselves. They have spared no time and expense in putting together one of the very best private collections of film memorabilia and Viennese wartime history that I have ever seen.  Throughout the museum  you can find videos of relevant interviews they have conducted, and visits they have taken to pursue aspects of "Third Man" lore. (Who knew that Osaka Central railway station played the "Third Man" theme to announce the departure of the day's last train?) 

I was enchanted by a 1980s interview with the man who had played five-year-old "Little Hans" in the film. ( You'll find him in picture No. 47 on the Third Man page here)  

He was likeable, genial and full of amusing anecdotes, and pointed out that the half-ruined Vienna tof the film was just a playground to him in those days.

The museum has a section full of memorabilia of this curious post war period when the bomb-shattered city was divided into "zones" run by Britain, the US and Russia.  Everything from care packages to military memos and American soldiers' letters home showed the human side of this curious historical interlude. 

We visited many other things in Vienna, including the personal railway station built for the last emperor. It was built by Otto Wagner, a groundbreaking architect of the late 19th and early 20th century who deserved to be world famous but unluckily made little impact outside Vienna.  Even here, not much of his work has survived, and this is one of very few buildings that still exists relatively unaltered. 

He had the difficult task of building something incredibly imperial on a budget, so the decoration on the waiting room (for instance)  is only woven into fabric instead of inlaid in wood as one might expect.  This octagonal room features a magnificent painting showing an eagle's eye view of the city, but because of poor old Otto Wagner's bad luck, even this little gem narrowly escaped permanent disfigurement, and was restored only in this century.

Oh,  I'll just tell you a little more about the Archduchess who had once lived in our accommodation. Poor woman, her family was about as dysfunctional as a family could be, and she was not an easy person herself.  During her tempestuous life, she shot a love rival, who later died, employed armed guards to ensure she had custody of her children, and became such an ardent socialist that she took her son out of school and set him to work in a factory. Her biography on Wikipedia reads like part of the synopsis of a family saga about the Habsburgs.  It is interesting, but we were glad that she didn't live in the house any more!