Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
19. Austria
I walked through the station at Innsbruck with an almost eerie sense of familiarity, a sensation half-way
between d￩j￠ vu and actual memory. I hadn't been to Innsbruck for eighteen years and hadn't thought about
it more than once or twice in that time, but finding myself there now it was as if it had been no more than a
day or two and the years in between had never happened. The station appeared not to have changed at all.
The buffet was where I remembered it and still serving goulash with dumplings, a meal that I ate four times in
three days because it was the cheapest and most substantial food in town. The dumplings were the size of
cannonballs and just as filling. About as tasty as well.
I took a room in a small hotel in the centre, the Goldene Krone, and spent the dying hours of the
afternoon walking through slanting sunshine that bathed the town in golden light. Innsbruck really is an ideal
little city, with solid baroque buildings and a roofscape of bulbous towers. It is carefully preserved without
having the managed feel of an open-air museum, and its setting is as near to perfection as could be
imagined. At the end of every street you are confronted by a towering backdrop of mountains, muscular and
snow-peaked beneath intensely clear skies.
I walked the paved footpath along the River Inn, swift and shallow and clear as polished glass, passed
through a small park called the Hofgarten and drifted out into the residential avenues beyond: long, straight,
shaded streets lined with stolid three-storey houses that disappeared in the treetops. Many of them - too
many surely for such a small city - contained doctors' surgeries and had shiny brass plates on the walls or
gates announcing
DR G. MUNSTER/ZAHNARZT OR DR ROBERT SCHLUGEL/PLASTISCHE CHIRURGIE -
the sort
of offices where you know that you would be ordered, whatever the complaint, to undress, climb onto the
table and put your feet in the stirrups. Bright trams, empty but for the driver, trundled heavily past from time
to time, but all the rest was silence.
It occurred to me that one of my first vivid impressions of Europe was a Walt Disney movie I saw as a
boy. I believe it was called
The Trouble With Angels.
It was a hopelessly sentimental and naff fictionalized
account of how a group of cherry-cheeked boys with impish instincts and voices like angels made their way
into the Vienna Boys' Choir. I enjoyed the film hugely, being hopelessly sentimental and naff myself, but what
made a lasting indent on me was the Europeanness of the background - the cobbled streets, the toytown
cars, the corner shops with a tinkling bell above the door, the modest, lived-in homyness of each boy's
familial flat. It all seemed so engaging and agreeably old-fashioned compared with the sleek and modern
world I knew, and it left me with the unshakeable impression that Austria was somehow more European
than the rest of Europe. And so again it seemed to me here in Innsbruck. For the first time in a long while,
certainly for the first time on this trip, I felt a palpable sense of wonder to find myself here, on these streets,
in this body, at this time. I was in Europe now. It seemed an oddly profound notion.
* * *
I found my way back to my hotel along the city's main street, Maria-Theresien-Strasse. It is a handsome
thoroughfare and well worth an amble, so long as you don't let your gaze pause for one second on any of the
scores of shop windows displaying dirndls and lederhosen, beer mugs with pewter lids, peaked caps with a
feather in the brim, long-stemmed pipes and hand-carved religious curios. I don't suppose any small area of
the world has as much to answer for in the way of crappy keepsakes as the Tyrol, and the sight of so much
of it brings a depressing reminder that you are among a nation of people who like this sort of thing.
This is the down-side of Austria. The same impulse that leads people to preserve the past in their cities
leads them also to preserve it in their hearts. No one clings to former glories as the Austrians do, and since
these former glories include one of the most distasteful interludes in history, this is not their most attractive
feature.
They are notoriously red-necked. I remember that Katz and I, while hitch-hiking through Austria, made
friends with two Germans of a similar age, Thomas and Gerhard, who were making their way by thumb from
Berlin to India with a view to finding spiritual enlightenment and good drugs. We camped together in a high
Alpine pass, somewhere along the road between Salzburg and Klagenfurt, and in the evening walked into
the nearest village, where we found awaiting us a perfect inn, full of black panelled wood and a log fire with
