The Habsburg Cafe Read Free Page B

critics of Kakanian corruption usually came from the ranks of the powerful and privileged—Musil lacerated this world with unflagging energy; Wittgenstein’s detestation of Austria proved one of his most enduring obsessions. By contrast my great-grandfather, a minor cog in the great machinery of the Austro-Hungarian state, who might well have felt exploited by that régime, which dispensed privileges in a blatantly partisan fashion, always spoke of the Emperor Franz Josef as ‘that good man’, and remembered the grief with which everyone greeted the news of his Empress’s assassination when she boarded a pleasure boat on faraway Lake Geneva.
    Remembering the experience of a terrible century, and knowing what happened to that world, it is only too easy to be aware of the hypocrisy and, indeed, the evil that must have lain at the heart of that society. Yet, I too accede willingly to the fiction and fantasy that must have governed the lives of my relatives in those two cities and in the other capitals and provincial towns of the realm. I also find the allure of those images of the Kakanian good life irresistible. For me too they provide emblems of an existence that seems in many ways ideal, even though I know that their reality is quite the contrary. I anticipate with some pleasure, therefore, this opportunity that a quirk of history—the sudden flowering in Hungary of an interest in things Australian—will give me to explore this world, the wonderful cloud-cuckoo-land of Kakania.
A V ISION OF D ELIGHT
    The cabin screen flickers into life. With the washed-out colours and fuzzy images characteristic of in-flight movies, a successionof enticing visions floats across the screen. Here are the famous sights of Vienna—the great imperial palaces, the handsome townhouses of the inner city, the churches, theatres and parks that make it one of the most photogenic of cities. Towards the end of this short sequence, true to the spirit that had placed food at the centre of my family’s way of life in those distant years when Kakania flourished, the producers of this promotional documentary had decided to display emblems of what obviously remain the most haunting insignia of this world. The screen oozes with images of rich pastries, towering gâteaux, mounds of chestnut purée surrounded by snowy peaks of whipped cream, sandwiches shimmering under films of aspic—all the fabled delicacies Vienna’s cafés serve in almost indecent abundance in a world where not too far to the east there is hardship and the none-too-remote threat of famine. As in the Kakania where my family first experienced the blessings of civilised urban life, modern Austria obviously seeks to display its individuality, its charm and appeal in terms of the richest yet most delicate of foods.
    The social rituals of old Kakania were certainly concentrated in the ceremonies of food. Wherever you went in that world, whatever you did, food was the focus of communal life. It accompanied, and also defined, a way of life and a trust in the essentially wholesome nature of that life in much the same way that the consecrated wafer is both the actuality and the symbol of the mystery of the redemption. The reasons for that adulation of food were complex and intimately connected with the elaborate social structures—filled with barriers and exclusions—of Kakania. More forcefully than elsewhere in bourgeois Europe, such pressures threw emphasis on the family, the group and the caste. Whatever cultural pursuits members of this world might have followed, the focus of their lives was provided by the family circle, with all its networks and ramifications. Within that network, moreover, the quality as much as the quantity of the food offered and consumed served as powerful social and spiritual emblems.
    Five-o’clock-tea, a curious and copious meal, usually consistedof goose-liver paté sandwiches, quivering custard slices and