The Habsburg Cafe (11 page)

In another, though cognate, sense these shrines of regal might and magnificence are also treasuries and armouries, guarding securely the wealth and the armaments to ensure that this realm, its monarchs and its people may continue to enjoy their unique privilege as those most favoured by God. No doubt in some ecclesiastical office somewhere in this city there must be a register listing the holy and venerable relics cocooned in their reliquaries of gold, crystal, precious gems and the rarest of marbles. How many splinters of the True Cross or how many thorns of the Passion are listed in that register? Does anyone have an accurate count of saints' bones, nail clippings, hair, bits of parchment-like skin, dried organs and viscera? Is there a fragment here of the swaddling bands in which the immaculately conceived Virgin wrapped her infant son, the Incarnate God? Is a piece of the scourge with which he was flayed after his betrayal by the Jews, preserved in an imperial or episcopal chapel? How many ampoules of his most precious blood lie hidden in chests and tabernacles?

These relics, objects of worship and veneration, provide guarantees of salvation or at least of remission. The holy places of Vienna are a pharmacopoeia for the next world, a spiritual pharmacy containing the best and most costly drugs to ensure immunity against perpetual damnation, a powerhouse of
weapons with which to fight sin and the devil. These engines may be turned, nevertheless, against God too. So much of his power is concentrated in this realm, and so many of his lieutenants too (albeit in bits and pieces) that their possessor might well attempt to vie with the all-powerful, denuded as his treasury is of its potency.

The iconography of baroque absolutism (in Austria as much as in the rest of Europe) was obsessed with apotheosis. On the ceilings and in the domes of civic halls, rooms of state and audience chambers in this city, the Franzes and the Josefs, the Ferdinands and the Rudolfs are depicted borne aloft in glory, their ceremonial robes billowing in the breeze, flights of angels guiding them through the swelling clouds. The deification of kings and emperors may have been more than a poetic fancy, a metaphor for their terrestrial greatness. Perhaps they believed that through the possession of so many of God's treasures, and because of the pomp, pride and circumstances of the temples they had constructed—temples of art and power as much as temples of religion—they could challenge God and displace him on his throne.

Berggasse is a thoroughfare dedicated to a shrine for darker dreams. There is nothing magnificent, imperial or even imposing about this drab street of solidly dull blocks of apartments and shops catering for the mundane necessities of everyday life—a flyblown grocery, a couple of bootmakers, a down-at-heel café or two. The Vienna of pomp and circumstance seems light-years, not merely hundreds of metres, away.

It is not difficult to imagine ghosts wandering towards the tightly-barred entrance of Number 19, where a small brass plaque advertises the opening hours of the Freud Museum. It is many years since those creatures of fable—Dora and the Wolf-Man—sought admission to the sanctum of cigar-smoke, priapic figurines and Oriental carpets. The shrine is now empty, its god or oracle fled long ago. What you may admire for the modest entrance fee of a few Austrian schillings is as much a dim echo of the past as the remnants of Mycenae or the bare
ruined choirs of the English countryside. The museum is a reconstruction—as is so much else in this city—an attempt to pretend that time has not passed and is, in a sense, stationary. The memorialisation of Freud is as irrelevant to the Vienna of today as the careful preservation of a pompous palais, an exuberant church interior, or those relics slumbering in their costly repositories. When, as an act of almost incredible generosity, the Nazi masters of the city exiled its octogenarian citizen, even allowing him to take with him his tools of trade and household gods—instead of reserving him for the inevitable fate of his kind—it pulled down the shutters over a heritage it could never recover.

Freud is in all probability our most accurate guide to Vienna at the greatest moment of its cultural history. That moment did not have the grandeur or bombast of the mighty imperial dream. It did not conquer nations with the sword or preside in strutting arrogance over a motley array of subject peoples. Rather it had the greatness and allure of decay, of a world in disarray and on the brink of disintegration. Freud thought that he had discovered the universal secrets of human behaviour, the wellsprings of what had previously been called the soul. Yet what he chronicled in his painstaking and obsessive studies of bourgeois neurotics and paranoiacs was the malaise of an age and of this particular world, rather than the secrets of all humanity. The pantheon of obsessions, repressions and neuroses he uncovered and interpreted—the tormented fantasies of those who shuffled along the cobblestones of Berggasse—represent the glory of that world, an imaginativeness which was capable of producing images that have fascinated the modern world, and have provided raw material for great writers as much as for amateur psychiatrists.

Freud liberated Mitteleuropa to itself. He allowed it to celebrate its most characteristic preoccupations as valuable cultural assets. Before Freud, because of the aristocratic and imperial insistence that neurosis, obsession and indulgence in erotic fantasy were bad form, the bourgeoisie of this world had to sweep its most persistent preoccupations under the cultural
carpet. You entertained fantasies of killing your father or sleeping with your mother in the silent confessional of the bedroom. Then came Freud who allowed such sinful thoughts and forbidden desires a public face. He made them respectable: the innermost life of the Viennese middle classes, (their most cherished possession, truth to tell) could henceforth be displayed in the terms of their own culture—which those people always treated with the utmost respect. The fantasies of the bedroom and the bathroom—like Proust's little secret chamber at Combray—now had the cachet of respectability: they could be discussed in terms of Oedipus and Hamlet, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The characteristic self-absorption of this world—reflected perhaps by the curious design of Germanic lavatory-pans noted many years ago by Erica Jong in
Fear of Flying
—could form the basis of public concern and high art. Mahler's symphonies are inconceivable in a world innocent of Freud; without that spirit Mahler would have become no more than a bombastic Smetana. The atmosphere of Freudian Vienna was the licence which allowed Mahler to indulge in the vulgarity, neurosis, sugary sentimentality and endless repetition of often childish formulae and devices, and to transform them into sublime art.

Freud believed to the end of his life that his work was scientific and therapeutic. Its real value and object, however, were much more cultural and artistic. It gave shape and definition to the obsessions of this world—the tightly shuttered, overheated salons and bedchambers of bourgeois Vienna and of the domains of the Habsburg world—making its petty jealousies, snobberies and rivalries seem significant and momentous. A shabby domestic squabble could assume the proportions of an epic tale; an adolescent's clumsy explorations of sexuality could be seen as replicating the Fall of Man. What the old culture of patrician and aristocratic Vienna considered beneath contempt, much preferring the glories of the battlefield and the intrigues of the boudoir, became the preoccupations which its practitioners and consumers considered high art. Each time a Viennese or Hungarian matron experienced the anguish of jealousy provoked by the antics of an errant husband—
which was the case with my grandmother—she could comfort herself that she was reliving the greatest of mythic events evident both in the tales of antiquity and in the latest bestselling novel on the shelves of fashionable booksellers.

That dream spread beyond the confines of Vienna and of the Habsburg world. No figure of the late nineteenth century or of the early twentieth provided novelists, playwrights, poets, film-makers, musicians and painters with as much material as Freud. With the passing of time he himself became the subject matter of fictions as highly-coloured as the fantasies of his own patients. The novels in which he appears as a character form an impressive list in English alone. He has even crossed the equator, together with the other cultural baggage of the old world that arrived at various times on the shores of the antipodes. Brian Castro's
Double-Wolf
manages to tell a tale in which the seedy guesthouses, cafés and second-hand bookshops of Katoomba rub shoulders with the stuffy consulting room of Berggasse 19.

For the Vienna of 1991 Freud is no more a real presence than he is for the Australia of the time. Though this is the site of the beginning of those mysteries that have spread to most corners of the globe, its significance and potency are no more striking or glamorous than those of other deserted shrines. The rooms are largely empty. A discreet notice advises the pilgrim that Freud's possessions, the arcana of his ministry, the relics of the new religion, are preserved in Hampstead, that place of Egyptian exile from the homeland. Instead of the actual and presumably potent cult-objects we are greeted with a series of photographs, reproductions of letters, testimonials, a few books and pamphlets and a number of lesser holy objects—pens, inkwells, spectacles, cigar-cases. But the essential items of the mystery, the consulting couch, the statuettes, are elsewhere: they fled with their oracle. The strange emptiness of the Freud Museum in this dour thoroughfare is an eloquent reminder of the emptiness of the city itself. It too is an attempt to reconstruct a lost past. It too has to be content with the reproduction in place of the original.

Having lost the rich stream of neurosis, obsession and myth-making
that primed the pump of its culture—the painters, poets, musicians and writers of the
fin-de-siècle
—Vienna has sunk into the desuetude of imitation, reproduction, nostalgia and kitsch. It is no longer that hothouse where a basically Jewish bourgeois culture ran into headlong conflict with the older values of Catholic Austria. The spunk has gone from this world, leaving behind merely pale imitations of its former glories.

One of my last days in Vienna brings me back to the opera, for the five hours of Wagner's
Lohengrin
. The experience of my earlier visit led to a decision of considerable gravity. Yesterday I joined once more the queue that forms on most days at the box office and exchanged my seat in the third tier for one in the stalls. The expense is probably unjustifiable, but (I comfort myself) five hours is a long time and, moreover, the opera is to be performed by those stellar names that you usually encounter only on record labels. Those expectations are frustrated as soon as I look at the ominous slip of paper inside the programme: the world-famous conductor and two of the principals are indisposed; they are to be replaced by three no doubt excellent performers whose names are, nevertheless, completely unfamiliar to me. I wonder what terrible affliction has visited this august establishment, and whether the change of cast is at all connected with the world-famous conductor's spectacular row with the management—which has even attracted the attention of the arts columnists in distant Australia.

Wagner described
Lohengrin
, probably his most popular work, as a ‘Romantic Opera'. Dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerians usually sneer at this relatively immature opera, but for most audiences, such as the well-dressed Viennese gathering here on this late afternoon in autumn, it represents the most accessible of the composer's demanding music—even though it goes on hour after hour after hour. Vienna did not take readily to
Wagner's overblown music-dramas and he, in turn, poured all the scorn of his contempt on this frivolous public. He smarted from their rejection of
Tristan and Isolde
, that ‘undemanding' love story he had written to woo their patronage. Budapest, a decidedly provincial town during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, developed Wagner-mania earlier than this much more sophisticated and musically cultivated city.

Yet Vienna also succumbed to the sinister magic of those outrageous essays in self-aggrandisement, dangerously addictive drugs which, once tasted, can never be abandoned. As the first, high notes of the prelude begin sounding on the violins, I, only a halfhearted Wagnerite, and one more conscious of the tedium of
Lohengrin
than of its magic, find myself entranced by this absurd tale of maligned maidens, knights of the grail, dark enchantments and miraculous restorations. As the wonderful sonorities rising from the orchestra pit fill the auditorium—this is after all arguably the world's finest orchestra—I become a willing accomplice in an act of artistic vandalism. I know that these bombastic music dramas—among which
Lohengrin
may indeed be the most refined or at any event the least barbaric—represent a perversion of all that music, culture and civilisation should strive to achieve.

The cult of Wagner emerged in step with the rise of Fascism, National Socialism and the other ultranationalist totalitarian movements that swept over much of Europe. The spirit of
das Volk
—the people, the tribe—could be heard pulsing through the Master's music. This was not the carefully crafted, elegant music of patrician culture. It had nothing to do with the classical virtues of restraint, moderation and economy of means. Instead it unleashed demons lurking within the listeners' veins. It did not appeal to the intellect or even to the sensibility, but principally to the emotions—raw, unmediated, residing not in the individual consciousness but in the consciousness of the tribe.

Wagner broke with the conventions of opera both spiritually and physically. The Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, built to his own specifications and embodying his ideals, has none of the
social gradations of theatres like this one in Vienna. Its rows of seats rise without interruption from the first row to the last: there is no gallery, no boxes, apart from a couple of discreetly placed private recesses which were reserved for his family in the original design. The justification for this in the rhetoric of nineteenth-century cultural politics was the example of ancient Greece, where the design of the great amphitheatres—at Epidauros, Delphi and in many other places throughout the peninsula—did not establish social distinctions between various groups within the audience by erecting physical barriers. Gone too were the elaborate decorations in gold, marble, plush and paint that contrived to turn many of the opera theatres of the ‘old' Europe into jewelled cases to display the audience as much as the spectacle on stage.