OLD VIENNA

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 85, 11 April 1945, Page 4

OLD VIENNA

SAD AND POOR WHERE HITLER LAID BRICKS

By GEOFFREY TEBBUTT

Vienna, which the Russians are entering, has been under Nazi domination for longer than any other European city outside the Reich proper—it was in March, 1938, that the German conquest began with the annexation of Austria. Hitherto it has been as fortunate as Paris in its comparative freedom from damage. The Germans marched in unopposed, and the Allied bombing has been directed chiefly at war plants in its environs. Vienna became a sad and poor city—the swollen head on the shrunken body of what had been the Hapsburg Empire — after Versailles. Two million people, nearly a third of the total population of Austria, lived there, in the fading dignity of what had been one of Europe's gayest capitals. Between the wars the depression brought Vienna a staggering suicide rate, and a death rate double that of its births. Jews flocked there from the Nazi oppression. Then the Nazis caught up with them. Early Hatred This was part of Hitler's fulfilment. He was Austrian-born, and it was in Vienna, as a young man before the Kaiser's war, that his obsession against Jews and democrats caught hold. Hitler was a bricklayer there. If any further warping was required, it was in Vienna that he developed the hatreds he is carrying on to ruination. Later, he lived in Viennese dosshouses, was "scrubbed" in the entrance examination for the Academy of Arts, and earned a small income by painting water colour postcards, which he sold in public bars. He did not forgive Vienna. His first attempt to seize power in his native land was made from the inside, when his hirelings murdered Dollfuss, the clerico-Fascist Premier, in Vienna in 1934. Nazis Swoop When the Nazi revolution misfired. Hitler washed his hands of it, sat back until he was stronger, and took Austria from the outside four years later. Except that they both lived in great Germanic cities, there was little in common between the Viennese and the Berliners. In the late 'thirties Berlin was bustling, prosperous, pushful. Vienna was down-at-heel, living on its memories and its music, keeping its melancholy charm, speaking a softer German, easier going, lighter in its touch, carelessly graceful, esteemed for its sly wit. The tall, ornate Gothic spire of St. Stephen's Cathedral, the landmark of Vienna, was standing when the Turks beseiged the city in 1529. Some of the original 12th century cathedral remains. About it are clustered the spacious coffee-houses, designed for talk and the agreeable wasting of time, precious alike to the Viennese and their visitors. Costly Ritual It was part of the ritual that a tip was due both to the waiter who took the order for the coffee, with its iceberg of thick cream, and the waiter who brought it, for games of chess and draughts and a selection of news papers in nearly every European language went with the price. Southward to the sulphur springs of the town of Baden, now taken by the Russians, Vienna had a highspeed tram fitted with a snack-bar and serving coffee and beer. A most remarkable and excellent tram. The Danube (which is brown, and not blue, although nobody would wish to quarrel with Herr Strauss) skirts Vienna, and parks and lazy bathing-places adorn its tributary waters. Vineyards creep close to Vienna and the vignerons retail their own wines to the accompaniment of music and song, Fresh green firbranches on poles outside their houses are the sign that they have just "ausg'steckt," or drawn off their new season's wine. This is a festive occasion, and signs at suburban tram termini indicate the names of the vintners who are currently turning it on. The Old City In the Old City, the palaces and monuments of the splendid courts of former times are clustered in the Hofburg, and the brave and spacious Ringstrasse follows the line of old fortifications. Farther out is the Schloss Schoenbrunn, a country palace of the Hapsburgs. Beautiful it is, with its parks and fountains. I don't remember it as well as I should, for I arrived there in a summer dawn, having been kept going all night with shots of Turkish coffee by a German newspaper man, a Jew, who wanted to practise his English even more than he wanted to show me the town. Probably he came to a sticky end, poor devil. A lot of people have come to sticky ends in helpless Vienna since 1918—famine, depression, civil war, artillery turned by the neo-Fascists on the great blocks of workers' dwellings, which the Social Democrat regime built, Nazification, invasion, counter-invasion, and the sorry story not yet complete. Austrians are not blameless for their own misfortunes. But Vienna, whose survival now depends on whether the Germans„decide to fight in it seems to have been unluckier than it deserved. It gave much to the world.