This is the second part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week his appointee as Secretary of Defense is trying to dodge rape allegations.)
The dining cars on Austrian trains are hybrid affairs, neither restaurants with white linen tablecloths nor stand-up diners. For those wanting a proper meal, there are seats beside large windows, and a menu of various schnitzels and wurst (as you would expect). I ordered soup, bread, and a beer, and settled into my booth with a European rail map opened up to the alps.
In particular, I was on the lookout for the small Austrian town of Flirsch, which I remembered from my first trip to Europe in March 1970, when my parents took their three children by train from Luxembourg to Belgrade, Yugoslavia (then on the cusp of the Iron Curtain.)
On the way, we took an Austrian train along the spine of the alps from Basel to Innsbruck. At one point the train the train came to an unscheduled stop beside the Flirsch station, which for whatever reasons greatly amused my father, as if it were a symbol of nowhere.
* * *
My mother and two sisters were asleep in the compartment (it had six seats), and my father and I had rolled down the compartment window and were looking at the setting, wondering why the Trans European Express train wasn’t moving.
Above the station in the distance were snow-capped mountains. I don’t remember how long we were stopped in Flirsch, but it was long enough for my father to reminisce about the summers of 1935 and 1936, which he spent cycling around Germany, occasionally crossing into Austria near Salzburg.
In the first summer, at age 16, my father was a camper, and loved the European summer and the easy life of cycling and intercity trains. He discovered the taste of cold beer after long rides, and said that Germany seemed prosperous and content with itself. But the next summer, when he was one of the group leaders, everything had changed.
Instead of exchanging greetings with Guten Tag, Germans greeted each other with “Heil, Hitler!”, and at the summer Olympic Games in Berlin my father saw Hitler turn his back on the gold medal champion runner, Jesse Owens, who was Black.
* * *
At the end of the summer, the cycling group rode into the Obersalzberg, and there the mayor of Berchtesgaden insisted that they join a local parade that Hitler himself would be reviewing.
The dragooned Americans joined the rest of the townspeople in solemnly walking past Hitler on his reviewing stand, some five feet from the marchers. My father’s recollection was that he looked “grey and wan, almost ghostly” .
Before returning to the United States, the cyclists spent a night in a local youth hostel, where some of the German students taunted the Americans as “Jew lovers”. Words were exchanged, and it was decided that one American would fight one of the Germans to settle their national differences. It sounded like a medieval joust.
As my father joked (seeing the size and strength of his Aryan opponent), “I had the ‘honor’ to be selected to fight for the Americans.” They squared off and grappled until the hostel director and the American counsellor heard the commotion and broke up the fight. Leaning out the window in Flirsch, my father said, “I am glad they did. He was big.”
When he started college in New York that fall, he was amazed by how few classmates sensed war clouds on the European horizon, but in Jacques Barzun’s course on Contemporary Civilization, he came across a phrase, attributed to Leon Trotsky, that he used often later in life: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
*
From my Austrian railways dining car, I drifted back to my seat, hoping that some of the weekend travel crowd standing in the aisles might have thinned out, but nothing had changed.
I wanted to keep going with Stephen Zweig (“Austria was an old state ruled by an old emperor, governed by old ministers, a state that, having no ambition, hoped only to preserve itself intact by rejecting all radical changes in Europe…”), but wedged into my cramped seat, I lost my reading attention span, and passed the long afternoon looking out the window at the high mountain scenery.
Sometime in the middle afternoon, the train stopped in Innsbruck, where on the same family trip in 1970 we spent two nights in a hotel. In the intervening day, my sister and I decided we would go skiing, and after renting equipment we followed the crowds to a nearby lift, where to our horror we discovered that the only way down was on one of the Olympic (black…double diamond…) ski runs, which was chock full of moguls. I remember that it took us a good hour to get down the hill.
* * *
Closer to Vienna, I recalled my first visit to the city, in January 1975, when I was in my junior year at college. I had spent the first semester that year in London, in a program affiliated with the London School of Economics. The semester ended with ten days of lectures in Freiburg, Germany, “to get the continental perspective,” as one of our professors liked to say.
At some point during the first semester—although maybe it was on the night train from London to Freiburg—I decided I wanted to stay on for another semester in Europe and applied to two programs: one in Lüneburg, in northern Germany; the other in Vienna.
After a forlorn Christmas (my first away from home), I decided to visit both cities, starting in Lüneburg, which struck me as dreary and remote. (What isn’t dreary in northern Europe in January?) That left me with no other options than Vienna.
I arrived there in mid-January with a letter of introduction from my London dean. He said that I would have no problems once I presented the letter; keep in mind, this was the era even before faxes.
To get to Vienna, I took the night train from Zurich, which operated as the Wiener Waltzer, although no dancing classes were required to get on board. In fact, it was a long string of clapped-out coaches. If it had sleeping compartments or couchettes, I could not afford one, and I passed an unsettled night dozing against a grimy window.
Along the way there were no glimpses of Flirsch, Innsbruck, or snow-capped Austrian alps—just the stale odor that came with European trains in the mid-1970s, something between cigarette smoke and spilled coffee.
* * *
It was just after dawn when we pulled into Vienna’s Westbahnhof, and I was relieved to get there, even though I had little sense of how to find my school.
Dragging a duffle bag filled with clothes and books ( luggage didn’t yet come with wheels), I followed signs marked “Centrum” that came and went in a thick morning mist.
Everything felt foreign to me—the cars, the street lights, the trams, and the shops just then opening up. With little sleep and slightly lost, I began to wonder why I had not simply flown home with the others in my London program and gone back to college, where I had a meal ticket, dorm room, and friends. Physically and emotionally, I was fogbound.
What changed on that walk was crossing the Ringstrasse as the clouds parted enough for me to see that I was in the midst of an imperial city.
All around me were Habsburg columns, formal gardens, palaces, and museums, the likes of which I had never seen except maybe in books. I warmed to Vienna as a place where I could live happily.
As Stefan Zweig wrote of his Viennese childhood: “Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.”
* * *
Back in Vienna on this trip, almost fifty years later, I wasn’t dragging a duffle bag but riding my unfolded bicycle. In the interval the city had constructed a gleaming new Hauptbahnhof (central railway station) over the ruins of the old, seedy Südbahnhof, which may have been what Prince Metternich had in mind when he quipped, “the Balkans begin at the Landstrasse”.
I had chosen a hotel near the station, and after unpacking I set off to make a few bicycle loops around the First District (Vienna inside the Ringstrasse), keen to see some of my old haunts.
The warm day had turned into a cold night, but I had a gaiter around my neck and lights on my handlebars. Besides, Vienna by night is a well-lit city. On a bicycle the only Viennese annoyances are tram tracks, in which it’s easy to wedge a tire and fall, and cobblestones, which have a way of loosening both teeth and bicycle bolts. I did my best to steer around the obstacles.
In less than an hour, I saw everything that I wanted to see: the contours of the Hofburg (illuminated at night), Palais Kinsky (where we had our classes and, yes, dancing lessons), Café Bräunerhof (where I read newspapers and met my friends in the afternoon), the Graben Hotel (where my father stayed when he visited me), the Grand Hotel (where in summer 1914, when world war was declared, my grandmother was stranded behind German lines), the Kärntnerstrasse (the main shopping street now a pedestrian mall), and the Ringstrasse (the imperial boulevard around the old city that now has tram lines, bike lanes, and sidewalks under an arching canopy of maple trees).
On a chilly Sunday evening, few people were out walking at 10 p.m. The illuminated façades showed Vienna at its finest, although what was most vivid in my mind was my brief encounter with my earlier life, which reminded of another passage in Zweig’s memoirs. He writes: “But only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.”
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