The Habsburg Cafe Read Free Page A

frothy beer of Prague.
    At the distance of many years, thinking about that vanished world—to the site of which the plane is alarmingly hurrying—such images of food and its associated rituals seem to sum up its intrinsic nature. Perhaps my family, and the social phenomenon it represented, elevated food to an almost sacerdotal level because of the restrictions placed on their lives in that caste-bound world, where social mobility and indeed the expression of individuality were severely circumscribed. In that rigidly stratified society upward movement was impossible; becoming
déclassé
, sinking down through the strata until you were indistinguishable from your maid or the milkman, was feared with religious awe. You were confined in your niche as surely as the peasants on feudal estates, some of which persisted even into my lifetime. For that reason you had to make do with what you had, and enjoy the benefits of nature’s bounty.
    What scope these restrictions allowed those people seems to have satisfied them on the whole—or so it would appear from the perspective of the present restless and dissatisfied world. They accepted, often without question, arbitrary and apparently unjust restrictions. The professions open to them, the resorts where they could take their vacations, the parts of a city where they might live were all governed by rigid codes of conduct that they did not question. They always travelled insecond-class carriages, even though many of them could afford to be conveyed in the plush comfort of first-class, and even though some could scarcely afford a second-class fare. They saw it as their birthright: a mid-point between plebeian third and patrician first class. When they went to the theatre they would congregate in those parts of the house appropriate to their station in society. The restaurants they frequented were not those to which the great nobility or even the minor gentry of the Austro-Hungarian world flocked for its pleasures.
    Yet for all this they considered themselves an essential part of that world. My Viennese relatives lived in a comfortable but undistinguished flat in a grey block in a grey street on the far side of the Danube canal, remote from the Vienna of legend and of tourist brochures. On their walks, when they went shopping or to the theatre, or to conduct a piece of business, they would often enter the magic realm of the inner city, that small section of a large and often dreary metropolis that provided material for many myths and fantasies. They would pass through the handsomely planted gardens of the Hofburg, the stronghold of Habsburg grandeur, and walk across the great courtyard into a network of streets where I too hope to be walking in a few hours’ time.
    In those streets they would walk past outward and visible signs of the world from which they had been excluded—aristocratic palais after palais, a roll-call of the great and powerful families of the two realms, especially that of the Esterházys, the proud lords of those borderlands where German-speakers (like my mother’s family) came into often troubled contact with Hungarians speaking their barbaric tongue. Around these structures—chastely rococo or elaborately baroque—clustered purveyors of goods and services essential to the maintenance of aristocratic and patrician life, each with its imposing emblem bearing the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs to signify the patent of imperial patronage. Even those of my relatives who lived in a somewhat provincial and decidedly raffish Budapest would have moved through a similar, though perhaps less clearly defined, world of restrictionsand exclusions that nevertheless—and paradoxically—ensured their well-being and safety.
    Once they had lost the hotheadedness of youth they settled into a life of responsibility and probity, feeling at one with this world, drawing sustenance from its very rigidity and stratification. The searing