Gay Austria

I

‘BITTE schoö!’ The plaintive and ingratiating cry of the little venders of cakes, chocolates, and mineral waters greets one at the Austrian frontier station; and is it mere fancy that the plaintiveness has become a little more marked in these recent years of suffering and change for Central Europe? The politeness and the timidity of that appeal always strike me as characteristically Austrian, and reveal the national character in much the same way that the military stolidity of the German customhouse officer, the vivacity of the habitués of the French seaports, and the curious slickness and nonchalance of the English railway porter bring home to one the characteristics of their respective countries.

I was present at St.-Germain when Dr. Renner and the other Austrian delegates entered that little zoölogical museum to hear from President Wilson and the premiers of the Allies the peace terms which were imposed on them; but when I thought of what the AustroHungarian monarchy had been, and what Austria had then become, I could not help recalling Wordsworth’s lines:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great is passed away.

The Treaty of St.-Germain and the kindred treaties broke up a once mighty empire, created three new independent States in Central Europe, — Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia, — and added scattered fragments of the Dual Monarchy to two existing kingdoms, Rumania and Italy. The great city of Vienna was once the bureaucratic and cultural centre of an empire of 50,000,000 inhabitants, with an area of 676,648 square kilometres, and is now the capital of a mountain republic of 6,526,661 inhabitants, with an area of 83,904 square kilometres, though among the smaller States of Europe it is one of the largest. With the disappearance of that empire went also the monarchy, which was the keystone of the imperial arch. There is strong monarchist sentiment in Hungary still, but there is little vestige of it in Austria. Idle tourists and holiday crowds now throng the gilded state apartments and dainty boudoirs where Maria Theresa ruled in her splendor, and where the last Emperor of the Hapsburgs, the ill-fated Charles, awaited the coming of the storms which engulfed his throne. To-day idle sightseers pace alongside the coffins of the great figures of the house of Hapsburg in the crypt of the Kapuzinerkirche, in much the same way that Frenchmen look at relics of the Bourbons and the house of Napoleon. They seem to say: ‘This is now all a part of History; something has gone, never to return.’

The war was a cataclysm sufficient in itself to produce startling changes in Central Europe, but nothing strikes the Englishman or American so much in his visits to Central Europe as the evidence on all sides that the war is something already hidden in the remote past. To the American and the Englishman the war is a landmark, something so stupendous that everything that has happened in the world since seems of minor importance. But when I was in Poland two years ago I discovered that the war that the Poles of Warsaw were thinking about was not the Great War, but that more recent conflict between the Bolsheviki and the Poles which brought Lenin’s troops within twenty miles of Warsaw; and I found the streets of the good city of Lemberg marked by the rifle fire not of Austrians and Russians but of Poles and Ruthenians, in the struggle which broke out after the termination of the greater hostilities. In the same way Austria has gone through so many subsequent crises that the war is to its people remote history. They had to pass through those tempestuous days when Socialism had its first practical experiment in government in desolated, isolated Vienna, when the krone fell tumbling and brought all the miseries of inflation in its train, and when all the revolutionary movements of restless Europe — German Putsche, Hapsburg coups, Communist risings, Ruhr occupation, Fascist flag wavings — had their repercussions on Vienna, that sensitive nerve centre of a distracted country. Even when the worst was over and the League of Nations, with generous American and British help, had come to the help of an impoverished republic, there were other troubles, like the Vienna financial crisis of 1924, which was due primarily to the unexpected demoralization of the French franc. There have been in Central Europe since 1918 many harbingers of trouble, and it is not surprising, therefore, that Austria has changed.

You miss, of course, to begin with, the pomp and trappings of the Empire.

The Kaiser is no more, and the handsome officers in their gay uniforms and the light-hearted ladies rolling in their barouches along the Prater have gone with the Hapsburgs. That incurable gayety of the Austrian, which in the old days took the form of proud pomp and glittering circumstance, no longer holds revel on the banks of the Danube. The disappearance of the army has in itself made a political and social revolution in the life of the country, and the young men who would have been captains in crack regiments are now acting as bank clerks — and, incidentally, very good clerks, too. Palaces have become museums, and gay houses which once dispensed princely hospitality are now mysteriously and darkly closed or are let out in apartments at the dictation of the Socialist municipality which now controls Vienna. The cafés are not so sparkling; the night clubs, I am told on the authority of those who frequent those establishments, are comparatively tame affairs, and the hotels and shops, for some time at any rate after the war, had a very precarious existence. As has happened all over Europe, the middle classes in Austria have either disappeared or have just succeeded in adapting themselves to the new order of things, and that culture, that ease, that opulent hospitality of a well-established bourgeoisie, has faded away into the limbo of things that are no more. You feel to-day that Vienna is more of a working-class city than it was. That it has become again a comparatively happy one is, I think, a great tribute to that perennial resilience of the Austrian people which, if it takes the form of insouciance in good times, can also become a barrier of determination and patience in the hour of trouble.

The Austrian who before the war was either a bureaucrat or the willing victim of a good-tempered despotism has now become a politician with an active share in guiding his country’s destinies, and that he is a somewhat bitter politician can be excused on the ground that he has had to face a multitude of problems, and that the old antagonisms of aristocrat and social democrat, of Catholic and Jew, of workman and peasant, curbed and, so to speak, canalized under the Hapsburgs, have now become raging torrents. Vienna, which was once ruled by a nominee of the Court, is now under the dispensation of a Socialist administration, whose leading light is Dr. Breitner, a distinguished banker who went over from capitalism to the proletarian camp; once seat of an empire, she has now become a place of interesting Socialist experiments, for the city which provides seventy per cent of Austria’s total state income gives a large revenue to its new municipal rulers. Their activities are innumerable — cheap trams, hostels of all kinds, for young and old, sick and poor, and above all, huge housing enterprises, especially for the outskirts of the city, where enormous blocks of flats, somewhat in the shape of a Roman amphitheatre, are continually arising, monuments to the ingenuity of the Socialist administrators and to the needs of a population suffering severely from house famine. In all Austrian politics, state and municipal, one is perpetually coming up against this housing problem. Capitalists groan at the virtual abolition of rents, with the consequent restrictions on the fluidity of capital, thus hampered by the inability to raise mortgages on bricks and mortar; the working classes rejoice at these nominal rents and at the huge sums set free for the building of these communal flats, while they also say that the provision of these cheap houses solved one of the important problems of Austrian industry, employers being able to give smaller wages to employees who are thus comfortably housed at the expense of the State.¹

Whatever may be said about the merits or demerits of the Socialist régime which is now the dominating feature of Vienna, there can be no doubt that it has succeeded in solving, for the time being at any rate, many great problems, and the result is seen in the healthy faces and sturdy figures of the mass of the population and the disappearance of that terrible hunger which stalked through the streets and rendered ghastly the faces of men and women who had passed through the famine days of the war.

II

On the negative side, then, the Hapsburgs have gone, and to some extent the representatives of the working classes reign in their stead, at least so far as the municipality of Vienna is concerned. Now let me come to the positive side of the new Austria, and let me say at the outset that, following the imperious call of all life and of its organisms, the new Austria is determined to live. Most people said that the mountain republic, with the huge bureaucratic city of Vienna weighing it down on its eastern extremity, deprived of the industries of Czechoslovakia, the rich food of the Hungarian plain, the coal mines of Poland, the outlet to the sea at Fiume, would inevitably collapse. But Austria still lives, and gives every prospect of becoming as much a part of the European commonwealth as, say, Switzerland.

It has, of course, lost terribly by the war. The enormous bureaucratic army concentrated in Vienna after the breakdown of the Empire, with the result that, the state finances are laboring under an appalling pensions list, while industry is gravely handicapped by the necessity of providing some sustenance for the great number of men thrown out of employment. In my visits to Austria since the war I have come across many small tragedies — distinguished army officers in the ancient city of Graz, who have somehow or other to live on pensions which, to a general, work out at something like £150 a year; many Austrian noblemen who are parting with estates which have been in their families for generations; good upper-middle-class families whose sons are working as ordinary mechanics in the Ruhr, despite high qualifications and good university degrees. There are many empty rooms in the great banks of Vienna. In addition to the banks, the railways, newspapers, large export houses, and luxury trades suffer from the restricted territory in which they now have to operate. Before the war the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was the nearest approach in the Old World to that economic unity of which the United States is the great example in the New. The peoples of the Danube, under the flag of the Hapsburgs, were self-sufficing; their export trade was practically nil, compared with that of other great States, and their imports were correspondingly small. Now, so far as Austria is concerned, all is changed. Austria, like England, has to live on its invisible exports, for it not only has to import large quantities of raw material and food from abroad, but it also suffers from a lack of imports for its manufactured goods, owing to the mass of tariffs which now make Central Europe a stumblingblock not merely to the freetrade economist but to the ordinary practical business man. That, indeed, is the great change which differentiates post-war from pre-war Austria — it cannot live on itself. It is hampered on every side by hostile trade barriers, and its position is therefore one of very great difficulty.

How is Austria going to meet this problem? In the first place it was necessary to stabilize the currency, and as a result of the action of the League of Nations that task has now been achieved and Austria, with the withdrawal of League control last spring, has now been given a clean bill of financial health. The second step was to try to come to some arrangement with the neighboring States, for the purpose of overcoming the tariff obstacles, mainly by means of commercial treaties. Unfortunately, this palliative has been only partially successful, and at the moment Czechoslovakia and Austria are threatened with a tariff war, owing to the breakdown of the recent trade pourparlers. Nationalism, since 1918, has been rampant in Central Europe, and artificial industries have been created not so much for the purpose of developing trade as of gratifying racial amour propre. Flag waving is a harmless amusement compared with tariff building, and the mania has become so widespread in Europe that the business men of the principal countries, led by Germany, are taking the matter in hand themselves and by regional arrangements and the fixing of prices and markets are trying to bring some order into the economic maze created by nationalist politicians. Austria, which has to sell its goods in order to pay for its food, is particularly hard hit by this economic chauvinism, and much of its chronic unemployment is due to this cause. Failing for the time being to create some kind of Zollverein on the Danube, Austrians are engaged in a number of enterprises whose main purpose is to reduce the adverse balance of trade, which according to the latest report of the Austrian National Bank was 1076 million schillings (the schilling being roughly sevcnpence). They are trying to develop their agricultural resources, led in this respect by the President of the Republic, Herr Hainisch, who is himself a practical agriculturist and whose prize cow, Bella, is mentioned in many a conversation which he has with foreign visitors to the famous room in the Ballplatz where Baron Aehrcnthal used to receive the ambassadors. Last year they had made such progress that Austria, which at one time was expected to produce only about thirty per cent of her food supplies, is now producing more rye, oats, and potatoes than she can consume, ninety per cent of her barley, and fifty per cent of her wheat, sugar, and cattle.

Then they are utilizing their superb water power for the purpose of generating electricity, thus saving their coal bill. As you travel through Austria, you see silver threads shining amid the pines on the mountain sides. It is water, Austria’s best raw material, on its way to provide the power for her main-line trains and light and heat for her cities and villages. Thus during the past six years fifty-four high-power stations have been erected at a total cost of 300 million schillings, a third of the cost only being borne by foreign countries. The effects of these undertakings are incalculable, for not only are they providing work for some of the enormous army of unemployed, but at the same time they greatly assist industry through the cheapening of motor power. It has been estimated, indeed, that the annual saving in coal amounts now to almost one million tons or a sixth of the quantity of coal that Austria has to import annually from abroad.

Thanks to the enterprise of the bankers — Austrian bankers are really statesmen and manufacturers, and deal in coal, run hotels, or manage factories with equal skill — Austrians are making the best of Vienna’s central position, standing as she does at the gateway of the East and West, for the purpose of retaining the influence she enjoyed as the hub of the banking world of Central Europe before the war. The banks have met with considerable success in this respect, helped doubtless by the fact that, while the business man of the hinterland has to go somewhere to transact his business, his wife prefers Vienna to any other capital. There are fine shops, good music, innumerable theatres; and women have an uncanny knack all over the world of making men do their business in the place where they are seeking their pleasure. Besides, the Vienna bankers know their business, and their skill has done much to promote the recovery of that great city which Mr. Zimmerman, the League’s representative in Austria, described the other day as Austria’s greatest, asset.

But above all it is by the development of its tourist traffic that Austria hopes to balance its budget. Austria, I have said, is a mountain republic; and if those glorious peaks and ranges of pine-covered hills render the farmer a poor return, they promise to yield in time a golden harvest to the railways and the hotel keepers. A country endowed by Nature with the snow-capped giants of the Tyrol, with the waving symmetry of the wiener Wald, with the rushing streams of the Salzach and the Mur, and with the stately Danube revealing beauty after beauty on its way from Linz to Vienna, is surely justified in its ambition to become another Switzerland. And, if Nature has been bountiful, man has been assiduous in his devotion to beauty. Vienna alone is a jewel of which any country might be proud — bringing to its service, in the course of a long and glorious history, the arts of all the schools in almost all the countries, crowded with noble monuments, and still radiating from its hearths, despite its vicissitudes and sorrows, the generous glow of a gracious and immemorial culture. In the moment of its greatest misery Vienna, the proud city of Maria Theresa, refused to sell its priceless tapestries; and even with an unemployment which approximates to half a million it maintains intact its world theatre and world-famous national opera. For such a spirit will not Austria be forgiven much in the halls of Apollo?

Nor is Vienna the only city of Austria. There is Innsbruck, with its magnificent monument to the Emperor Maximilian in the Imperial Church, whose glorious figures in bronze have given immortality to the age of chivalry. There is Graz, that charming university town, whose venerable buildings rise from the banks of the swiftrushing Mur; there is Steyr, which takes you at one step right back into the Middle Ages, where can be still seen behind its ancient walls those rooms where Protestants worshiped in secret in the sixteenth century — and, coming to a later age, there is the house where Schubert lived, and where music lovers still search for the score of the Lost Symphony. Above all, there is Salzburg, whose musical festival in the early autumn is still one of the great events of musical Europe. I love to pass a summer’s afternoon in the gardens of that amorous Archbishop of Salzburg at Hellbrunn, in whose pleasant grounds he raised a coquettish villa to his mistress. Trout bask lazily in its ponds and rivulets, and children still flock to see all the mechanical toys set in motion by water power. Salzburg is one of the most romantic towns of the world; one of the kindest, too, despite the deluges of rain which too often descend on its ancient courts and old-fashioned streets.

Altogether, then, Austria is beginning to look up. Its people have a hard task in front of them, but with a grim determination, which seems alien to the character of the most lighthearted nation in Europe, they are doing their best to solve it. Every now and then the old Viennese love of laughter breaks out. I attended, not so very long ago, a performance of Mozart’s ever delightful Così fan tutti in the Redoutensaal in Vienna. In the middle of one of the acts one of the actresses suddenly laughed at the amusing quips of one of the male lovers. She laughed so merrily that she was unable to proceed with her part of the duet. Thereupon the male actor began to laugh. This was too much for the conductor, who also began to rock his sides; then the faithful orchestra began to rock their sides, too. Finally the whole house burst into uproarious merriment and the progress of the opera was held up for some minutes. The Viennese people can still be as light-hearted as Lehar’s operas. The desert can blossom as the rose; Austria can still smile; and surely gayety in a sorely tried house is the finest form of courage.