Images of Vienna: An Affliction of Impartiality
How we talk about History: past, present, and televised.
Recently, a friend and I sat down to watch Vienna Blood on the BBC. We’d both been recommended it at various points, although admittedly I had been the focus of most people’s evangelical fervour; I am a historian, a German-speaker, and a fan of murder mysteries, and so murder mystery set in Vienna in 1907 should be the perfect confluence of my interests, and people have been trying to tell me this since it came out two years ago. What with one thing and another, I never got around to it until now — and what do you know, I do like it! I like it so much I want to tell you about it, even though it’s been out for two years now and this is, I admit, a little like trying to turn a bunch of literature graduates onto this guy I’ve discovered called Shakespeare. It’s a good programme: its narratives are interesting, its characters compelling, its historical world carefully crafted and convincing. It also makes me, a student of German and Austrian history, nervous.
Vienna is a peculiar city. I’ve been once, in the summer; it was tremendously hot and sunny, and everything was rather close and dry like almost any city in the summer. It was not, we agreed, exactly what we had expected, and we thought we might have come at the wrong time of year. Rather than sweating in the Prater, we felt that we should have been crunching autumn leaves, taking coffee behind fogged windows in heavy coats with the collars turned up, watching the mists waltz and swirl on the Danube. We should have come in November for the true experience of Vienna in all its romance and mystery. But I’m not sure that’s fair. I do think we came at the wrong time, and we should have visited in November — but November of 1905.
Vienna, I think, is an image — or, it is to anyone but the Austrians, perhaps. If anyone said anything half so pretentious about London I’d roll my eyes straight out of my head. But I, of course, think I’m right; the vision my family and I have of Vienna, which we found so incongruous with reality, is of a fin de siècle empire, lying on a chaise longue in a tattered ball gown as it sips coffee and speaks of philosophy and art, as it recalls how it used to waltz and be adored, as it slowly and beautifully sighs itself to death. It’s the slide into tragedy and pathos from once-glory; the last waltz before the band goes home; the desperate turn of the face into the last rays of sunlight before the encroaching storm. Vienna likes to think of itself this way. There’s a sort of glamour to it, that beauty of the kind worn by consumptive Victorians and old, faded opera singers. You can see it in Vienna Blood: the gilded room in which no-one will clap for Mahler, the fine Leopoldstadt apartment which is nothing but a theatre set, the school of invalided soldiers turned frustrated teachers. I can see the appeal of presenting this way: before this point, one has to confront the Austro-Hungarian empire head-on, in its prime, and once one gets into the thirties everything gets a little…fascist. But this little fin de siècle oasis is home only to dancers and philosophers and poets, concerned with things so much more cerebral, celestial, and transcendent than politics and grubby little dictators. It’s a pretty picture. I should like to visit it.
The problem I have with it is that Vienna is just so much more interesting than that. There is a lot of politics going on in Vienna between and before the wars; it’s commonly called Red Vienna, for how outrageously left-wing it was. This was a time of public healthcare, public housing, trade unions and strikes and violent clashes with the police. The housing blocks were proper socialist dream blocks, with gardens and all mod cons. Things, for a lot of people, were drastically improved in the twenties. It was a modern, industrial city, with a multicultural, multi-ethnic population, and at the same time it was a traditional, Catholic city desperately clinging to its imperial grandeur. On the 15th of July, 1927, 84 unarmed protesters were shot by the police. Antisemitism as we know it today was almost invented in Vienna around the turn of the century, and it got stronger and stronger in this polarised society of right-wing Catholics against left-wing workers and minorities. This is why Vienna Blood makes me nervous — I am fond of its characters, and I know where their society is going. But it is also what I like so well about it: Jewish society in Vienna was a sizeable chunk of the population and running strong, one of the largest urban Jewish communities in Europe, so of course the Liebermanns should go to the synagogue and expect that their child shouldn’t go to chapel at school. Viennese society, despite its waves of antisemitism, was relatively open and allowed for upward mobility; there is no reason why Max shouldn’t be a doctor, nor his father a wealthy businessman. We see both sides of this in Vienna Blood, but crucially it never falls too hard on either side; it may be tempting, for narrative interest, to ramp up the discrimination, but it doesn’t. It could just as easily claim that Vienna was a relative paradise, but it doesn’t.
After the Second World War, Austria tried on a new image. The Anschluss came in 1938, before Germany spread into Czechoslovakia, and so a claim could be made that Austria — far from any kind of collaborator — was, in fact, the first victim of the Nazis.
Wasn’t the claim at the time that you were also quite German, though? the rest of the world wonders. Didn’t you wave flags when Germany marched in?
Nope, Austria says. Didn’t happen.
You did, as well — little girls in white dresses gave Hitler flowers, I’m sure I’ve got a picture…
No, no. We never did the antisemitism thing: we were philosophers, then there was a golden age of Jewish inclusion, and then we were victims. Austria is better than this. The Shoah was a…blip.
This is called the Geschichtslüge — the history lie. That there was some “better Austria”, some golden decade, some stretching history that isn’t German in which the atrocities of the war were some kind of fluke. It is, I think, the worst of Vienna’s images. I worry that, through preservation of the sighing, dying empire image, we propagate this one, too.
It isn’t fair to say that Austria is German, or that it ever was part of Germany; even Germany doesn’t really exist, it’s just 16 old principalities, bishoprics, and city states in a trenchcoat. What we now call Germany is only 30 years old, and has as good a grasp on who it is and where it’s going as most 30 year olds. The idea of what Germany is is a complex one, and has been since long before there ever was a Germany. The Holy Roman Empire stretched over vast swathes of central Europe, but barely controlled its lands; it is, honestly, more comparable to the EU than to a nation state. While Britain and France were attempting to establish firm monarchies (and now and then beheading them, according to the mood of the time) the Holy Roman Empire was still a collection of bickering prince-bishops, town councils and petty rulers all collected under a Kaiser who had thought that group projects would be easier than this. The problem is solved and worsened by Napoleon, who invades, consolidates the territories, calls it Germany and wanders off. Of course it’s Germany, he says, you all speak German.
And everyone side-eyes Austria.
There are then two schools of thought — Greater and Smaller Germany. Greater Germany, advocated by Austria, pushes all these lands together based on shared language and cultural similarity, and it naturally moves the capital to Vienna. Smaller Germany, favoured by the Prussians, leaves Austria well alone and has for its capital the Prussian city, Berlin. As you may well guess, Prussia win — but thus begins a certain cultural confusion. It’s what allows Austria to read the Anschluss both ways, as is convenient.
It is at this point that I put this essay down and do not pick it up again for over a week. I have made my home in history; I have settled at a comfortable distance from my subject, and know not how to respond when the present sidles in and looms over my shoulder as I type. Annexation sounds different these days. In the second episode of the second series of Vienna Blood, one of the government ministers announces the plan to shore up the empire and strengthen its resolve with the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; what year is this set, again? my friend and fellow History graduate asks me. 1907, I reply, taut and quiet. We hum and wince and hunch into the sofa, watching the first pebble of the First World War go tripping down the mountainside and trying not to check our phones. The war in Ukraine has been going on for a while now; for some reason, when it began, I didn’t think it would last. Some generalised disbelief that it was even real — the that won’t happen to me instinct, I suppose. And of course, it isn’t happening to me, any more than the war in Afghanistan with which I grew up in any way happened to me. But it does mean that I don’t want to talk about how History remembers annexation anymore. I no longer feel qualified to comment. Derek Walcott, in Omeros, writes:
He had no idea how time could be reworded, which is the historian’s task. The factual fiction of textbooks, pamphlets, brochures, which he had loaded in a ziggurat from the library, had the affliction of impartiality
And I hide there, safe in relative irrelevance, and make jokes about the nineteen-twenties — but I’ve stumbled backwards into the twenty-twenties, and the jokes aren’t as funny. For my dissertation, I plan to translate a Viennese satire from 1937 about the author’s experience of being left-wing and Jewish in fascist Vienna, railing against the apathy of its populace and how they would rather not know of the horrors with which they live; my supervisor thought I could, perhaps, find some comparison with the modern day in this. I’m not sure if I can bear to laugh at it yet. I am not so brave as the original author in whose footsteps I tread.
I have no clever conclusion to reach. I had not thought that this essay would be about this; I had supposed it would be about a TV show I have been enjoying, and the idea of the Geschichtslüge which has been returning to me intermittently of late for reasons I couldn’t see. History earns its own tenderness in time, Walcott writes: for men like Chamberlain, subject of Munich: The Edge of War, recently brought to Netflix, who tried their best and were wrong. I have become accustomed to the distance of history and the softening influence it brings. The pictures are gentled, faded like old photographs, and cannot hurt us; perhaps this is why images of places in the past are so malleable, made up as they are of soft edges. We will never see Vienna quite as it was, nor perhaps quite as it is — we cannot see past what has been crafted, and what is being crafted now. It is a strange time to be alive, I keep saying, but maybe it always has been a strange time to be alive. Maybe I am only crafting an image of my present and immediate past, in which this now is strange and harsh and unfair, and the past in which I was a child was calm and comprehensible and sunshine-summery. My youth was one long August, and now it is winter and I stand bewildered on the ice. This is the image I paint, the colours through which I read the world; that was the golden age, and this, now, is the…blip.
Welcome to the lie. Make yourself comfortable on the sofa — you were telling me how you used to waltz.
