The Habsburg Cafe Read Free

that was eventually to engulf them began to darken their orderly and predictable lives, they did not feel threatened by its prejudices, exclusions and hatreds. In the time of my grandparents’ young adult life—in the years before the gunshot at Sarajevo that was to spread its poison through this world—these people felt safe and comfortable: safer and more comfortable than their families had felt throughout the turbulent events of the nineteenth century.
    Suspended high above the fields, villages and towns of this essentially mythic realm I can only wonder, knowing what became of this world and of the people who lived so confidently within it, at the naïve trust they placed in its stability and benevolence. That trust, like Kakania itself, was based on sentiment and folly. It was touchingly fragile, only too easily blown away by that gunshot, the echoes of which are still reverberating in Croatia and Slovenia on this sunny autumnmorning. (None of us knows at this time that in less than a year Sarajevo itself will once again stand as a symbol of the hatred and enmities which have always disfigured this part of the world.) Nothing could quell the fundamental and endemic violence of this world—not Kakania, nor the idealistic fable of universal brotherhood promoted by the grim-faced comrades, nor yet the very recently arisen dream of an American-inspired consumers’ paradise.
    My grandparents, and millions of their kind, believed fervently in that benevolent fiction. It was in turn bequeathed to my parents’ generation, and to their children. For us the myth of Kakania grew weaker and weaker with the passing of the years. Two wars and appalling cruelty, not merely of Auschwitz and Treblinka but of countless other atrocities against almost every nation or race living in this troubled world, tarnished but did not corrode the conviction that it contained the essence of civility, of the good life at its best, despite the pain, despite its inhumanity. These were all fantasies, humanity’s sad readiness to put its faith in illusions. Yet even for me, for whom that world is only a dim echo remembered from family stories, myths and anecdotes, and preserved in books and in music, its allure remains irresistible. In an hour or so, I tell myself, I shall (if all goes well) be setting foot once more on the cobblestones of Vienna, that city commemorated in countless cloyingly sentimental songs and ballads, which provided for many members of my family a sort of nostalgic hymnal—‘My Mother was a Viennese’, ‘The Fiacre Song’ and ‘Vienna City of my Dreams’.
    I know only too well of course that modern Vienna, in this palindromic year, which also marks the two hundredth anniversary of Mozart’s death, is a very different place from that nostalgic fantasy-city. Yet, as this great aeroplane begins to lurch towards the earth, the images of that Vienna are superimposed on my recollections of the actual and, therefore, inevitably disappointing city I have visited fleetingly on several occasions. These images are discontinuous and quite vague. They are probably indistinguishable from images of Europeanbourgeois life at the beginning of the twentieth century—the decades in which my family flourished despite the nightmare of a war that, they were convinced, was to be the last. That life attempted to preserve the manners and social rituals that distinguished the bourgeoisie from those below and also from those above during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Their life was, in all probability, governed by the same aspirations, goals and conventions as the life of their counterparts in Brussels and Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm, Milan and Belgrade. For people like me, the detritus of Kakania, those commonplace experiences, dreams and prejudices are unique—they are flavoured by the creaminess of Viennese cakes, by the tang of Hungarian spices, by the fragrant ham and