GRANDEUR AND HUMANITY

Evening Star, Issue 20612, 11 October 1930, Page 2

GRANDEUR AND HUMANITY

HABSBURGS AND DEMOCRATS IN VIENNA [Written ■ by Lloyd Ross, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] As I walked through the palaces of Vienna I bathed in the luxury of three centuries of imperial power. I felt like the boy of the legend who was painted with gold leaf; King Midas could not have wished for a greater store of pictures, glassware, tables, and ornaments than it was possible to see for threepence in the museums of Vienna. In 1278 the German King, Rudolph of Habsburb, drove the King of Bohemia out of Austria, and made his sons Dukes of Austria. Between that date and 1918 the Habsburgs poured into Vienna all the wealth from their European conquests. They built palaces and stored these palaces with the most valued things that painters, jewellers, architects, and sculptors could conceive of and money could buy. The only limits were those of imagination and desire. .The Belvedere was built for Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1714-23. In summer the prince occupied the Lower Belvedere, a straggling building of two stories now housing the Baroque Museum. For important receptions and festivals the prince ascended the gentle slope of lawns and terraced gardens, stood by some fountain built by the Bavarian Girard, or mounted steps with marble sculptures of children representing the months, by Hans Gasser, and entered the beautiful Upper Belvedere, a flash of white overlooking the city. Archduke Francis Ferdinand lived here from 1904 until he was assassinated in 1914. This same prince owned an art collection which is exhibited in another palace. To-day art collections and palaces belong to Austrian citizens and tourists to see and admire. Stand beside the monument to Prince Eugene, near the Hofburg, and wonder in every direction at the towers of churches, palaces, and public buildings breaking the sky line. If Manchester, in England-, reminded one of a pin cushion of chimneys, Vienna might be a giant’s crown with dazzling jewels—some such a crown as belonged to Conrad 11., surmounted by a cross and adorned with four enamelled plates, precious stones, and Oriental pearls, and worth (let us say) five million pounds sterling._ For sevenpence I gazed on this crown, on Charlemagne’s crown, on the jewels of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the jewel casket of Maria Louisa, a bowl thirty inches in diameter made of a single piece of agate, on imperial mantles, pontifical , girdles, red silk shoes, and gloves adorned with pearls. I walked over floors of polished wood. I looked up in a gorgeous marble room, two stories high, and sauntered along a room in white, red, and gold, 100 ft by 100 ft. I might easily have been a guest of Maria Theresa. Visitors to the palaces cannot now sleep there. Who could live with so much gold and silver and velvet around? Yet what dreams one might

have had! In the Hofburg Palace are the apartments with gobelin tapestry hanging from the walls, occupied by Alexandra I. of Russia during the Vienna Congress of 1815, which divided Europe after the Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon himself lodged at the Schonbrunn Palace in 1805 and 1809; Francis Joseph died near at hand on November 21, 1916, after a reign of sixtyeight years. Who would not have given his life to have danced a minuet in these rooms of mirrors and high painted ceilings? Who would not have wandered along these avenues of poplars and have forgotten that all the world was not so beautiful, so leisured, and so fortunate?

Revolution was inevitable. The wealth was obtained at a terrible cost. Imperial Vienna housed 72 per cent, of its inhabitants in apartments having only one room and a kitchen. Twenty apartments in one hundred had gas and electricity, eight had toilets, only four in a thousand had their own water supply, Of the building space available, 86 per cent, could be used for the actual apartments, leaving the rest a crowded dismal playing ground or confined, unhealthy yard. In 1913 the death rate From tuberculosis for every 10,000 inhabitants was thirty. (In 1926 it had been reduced to twenty.) Of a block of sixty-two kitchens only one had a light. One week’s wages were necessary to pay for a month’s rent. The average of inhabitants to one room was five to eight. Though around the city, on the site of the old fortifications, there ran a circle of wide streets with avenues of trees along the middle and gardens _on both sides, this “ Ring ” shut in a city that was notorious, even in Europe, for disease, vice, and unhappiness. No one could have prevented the co-existence of misery and debauchery, of unbelievable poverty and unlimited luxury; no one was to blame—for who, after seeing the golden cradle of Napoleon’s son, could try to put any blame on a nobility born into such isolated splendour? The dwellers in these_ palaces would , have fainted at the sight of commoners, who, however, one stormy day in November, 1918, burst into these gilded apartments, turned out the princes, put in caretakers, set up turnstiles, and freely admitted the citizens of a republic. A monk from the Capuchin Monastery led us down into the vaults beneath the church, where are the tombs of the princes of the fallen empire. Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis of Lorraine, with their many children, are there; Charles VI., Emperor Matthias, and Ferdinand 111. are hardly distinguishable from the 138 sarcophagi that are crowded in a few rooms; but Francis Joseph has a vault to himself. Candles were burning. The visitors crossed themselves. The monk suggested a prayer for their late emperor. Yet, if the Habsburgs had cared as much for the living 'as they did for the dead they might still have been sleeping amidst their art treasures. If they ever return they will find their treasures carefully preserved, and if the catalogues of to-day remain they will at last know the extent of their wealth. In one castle they would find a trade union college, in another a home for backward children, but for the rest they need _ only pull down the notices prohibiting smoking arid the entry of dogs, and go on living as if Charles I. had not abdicated. But Vienna, the city around the palaces, will have changed. Although the power of the Habsburgs has been tumbled into the dust, Vienna is still the most beautiful and impressive city in Europe because of their existence. If, to-morrow, the long-threatened march, of the rural Fascists overthrows the municipality of Vienna, it, too, will leave behind visible traces of its years of power, as beautiful and as impressive as those of the Habsburgs. Housing accommodation for 123,000 people was built between 1923 and 1927. To date 45,000 municipal dwellings ha. - e been erected; the immediate aim is 60,000. Wherever one travels in Vienna there are to be seen white beautiful groups of new buildings rising resplendent amid the misery and darkness of the old regime. _ It was something worthy to have built , the houses that were so necessary—even to-day there are 20,000 people on the waiting list for apartments—but when, the houses have been erected _ with imagination, with a wide conception of the necessity for beauty and utility,_ and with a breadth of vision that included' laundries, libraries, kindergartens, and open air baths, one must enthusiastically admire the spirit of a people who so courageously set about building a new city amid the_ ruins of the old. English people might criticise the apartment life; but the Viennese have always lived many families under the one roof, with common staircases and common yards. The municipal houses have no personal baths; the rooms are small judged by New Zealand standards. Yet once having accepted the limitations of apartment _ life—“ How else could we live in a city?” the Viennese ask—the new buildings are admirable. At first we seemed to be approaching a massive block of brick along a noisy street front. The balconies were full of window boxes of flowers, but we doubt whether we would like to live so close to the bustle of the street traffic. Then we enter past a beautiful statue, under an archway, into a quiet, peaces ful, secluded garden—the same satisfactory feeling of contentment that we felt when we stepped off the Oxford main streets into the college quadrangles. Viennese children were playing in their sand pits. Their parents were gossiping beneath a tree that had not been cut down when the tenements were built. They loved to live there in their communal garden. The municipality has built 5,000 houses in garden cities, but the majority prefer tenement life. A fountain was playing. Through the garden we passed a small kindergarten (in Vienna there are 101 kindergartens and 530 governesses; 900 children attend daily). Children were playing amid the trees beside the free open-air bath, of _ which there are twenty-two in the city. Only half the land must bo used for actual building. And the rent of these apartments, including garden, porter, repairs administration, and use of all facilities except personal gas and electric light, varies from 8s to 28s a _ month. Welfare centres and maternity homes have also been built. _ Every mother has a right to free advice and a free baby outfit, 9,808 of which were distributed last year. There are thirty-five educational centres for young mothers; 165,000 visits were made last, year. And so on. Somebody, of course, has to pay for these extensive social reforms, and there are graded taxes on servants, confectionery, expensive, hotels, houses, entertainments, motor cars, does, advertisements, auctions, and the unearned increment of land.

Imperial Vienna fostered art: democratic Vienna fosters human beings. The one built castles and palaces, the other built communal flats: the one left a store of precious works of art, the other is producing healthy and intelligent ehi I dren._ 'Republican Vienna owes a debt to its former rulers for their treasures. It is paying that debt in houses, libraries, and kindergartens.