Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The one thing you soon learn to adjust to in Vienna is that the Danube is entirely incidental to the city. It
is so far from the centre that it doesn't even appear on most tourist maps. I tried walking to it one afternoon
and never made it. I got as far as the Prater, the vast and famous park, which is bordered by the Danube on
its far side, but the Prater is so immense that after a half-hour it seemed pointless to continue walking on
aching feet just to confirm with my own eyes what I have read a hundred times: that the Danube isn't blue at
all. Instead, I plodded lengthwise through the park along the long straight avenue called Hauptallee, passing
busy playing-fields, swings, a sports stadium, caf￩s and restaurants and eventually the amusement park
with its ferris wheel - the one made famous by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in
The Third Man.
A sign by the ferris wheel, the famous Riesenrad, gave a history of it in German. It was built in 1896-97
by an Englishman named Walter Basset, I noted with a touch of pride on behalf of my friends and
neighbours. I assume old Walter had some help because it's a pretty good size. It cost twenty-five schillings
to go up, but it wasn't operating. The rest of the park, however, was doing brisk business, though I am hard
pressed to explain why, since it seemed to be rather a dump.
Late one afternoon I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, in his old apartment on Berggasse, a mile or
so to the north of the city centre. Berggasse is now a plain and rather dreary street, though the Freuds lived
in some style. Their apartment had sixteen rooms, but of these only four are open to the public and they
contain almost no furniture, original or otherwise, and only a few trifling personal effects of Freud's: a hat
and walking stick, his medical bag and a steamer trunk. Still, this doesn't stop the trust that runs the
museum from charging you thirty schillings to come in and look around.
The four rooms are almost entirely bare but for the walls, which are lined with 400 photographs and
photocopies of letters and other documents relating to Freud's life - though some of these, it must be said,
are almost ludicrously peripheral: a picture of Michelangelo's Moses, which Freud had admired on a trip to
Italy, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, included not because Freud treated her or slept with her or even
met her, but because he once saw her perform. Almost all of the personal effects Freud collected during half
a century of living in this apartment - his library, his 2,500 pieces of classical statuary, his furniture, his
famous consulting couch - are now in a far superior museum in Hampstead because, of course, Freud was
driven from Vienna by the Nazis two years before he died.
The wonder to me is that it took him so long to go. By well before the turn of the century Freud was one
of the most celebrated figures in world medicine, and yet he wasn't made a professor at the University of
Vienna until 1902, when he was nearly fifty, simply because he was a Jew.
Before the war there were 200,000 Jews in Vienna. Now there are hardly any. As Jane Kramer notes in
her book
Europeans,
most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the
most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about
seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite
a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are 'physically revolted in a Jew's presence'. I'd have thought this
scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the
Observer
revealing that almost forty per cent of
Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and
forty-eight per cent believed that the country's 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just
a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population - still enjoy too much economic power and political
influence.
The Germans, however unseemly their past, have made some moving attempts at atonement - viz.,
Willy Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizs￤cker apologizing to the
world for the sins of his country on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. What do the Austrians do?
They elect a former Wehrmacht officer as President.
I thought about this as I was walking from the Freud museum to my hotel along the Karl-Lueger-Strasse.
At a set of traffic lights, a black limousine led by a single motorcycle policeman pulled up. In the back seat,
reading some papers, was - I swear to God - the famous Dr Kurt Waldheim, the aforementioned
Wehrmacht officer and now President of Austria.
A lot of people aren't sure of the difference between the Chancellor and the President in Austria, but it's
quite simple. The Chancellor decides national policy and runs the country, while the President rounds up the
Jews. I'm only joking, of course! I wouldn't suggest for a moment that President Waldheim would have
