Tag Archives: Austria

Landhaus Elfriede

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This is a beaten-up 8 x 8-inch print, very old itself, of an image I’m pretty sure my father took when he was in Europe with the U.S. Army in the mid-50s. I haven’t found the source image, probably a b&w negative, though I haven’t been looking very hard.

Landhaus Elfriede, Austria 1955

I brought the print home from a recent visit to San Antonio, especially taken with the composition. Moves right up from solidity and the Earth to misty mountains in the Sky. And — those haystacks. What a shot. Dad must have liked the image, too, or he wouldn’t have enlarged it (I’m assuming he did).

No note of time or place is on the back, but it was enough to for me to think, Somewhere in Germany, ca. 1955.

The other day I looked at it closer, and noticed the words written on the building: Landhaus Elfriede.

Landhaus ElfriedeGerman all right. Something to put into a search engine. I was mildly surprised to find an existing establishment of that name near Fitzmoos, Austria. Or as its web site says, “ein paar Autominuten vom Zentrum Filzmoos.”

The building pictured on the web site is some different from my father’s image, though their roofs are compellingly similar. You could argue — and I am going to argue — that the similarity is close enough, with any differences between the two attributable to rehab, renovation or fix-up-the-damn-thing efforts over the last 65 years. Now it rents apartments on a short-term basis.

It’s also reasonable to think my parents stayed there while on leave, because of course they did — it’s in the Alps, for crying out loud (and near Salzburg, besides). I like to think the mountains behind the Landhaus Elfriede, which are only faintly pictured in Dad’s photo, mightily impressed my parents, who grew up among hills and flats but not mountains.

Vienna 1994

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At Stephansplatz in Vienna in November 1994, I posed for a picture in front of Stephansdom. I decided to make a globe-like shape with my hands by putting the fingers of both hands together, fingertip-to-fingertip.

Stephansplatz in ViennaWhich looks like some kind of nightmarish gluing of my fingers together. Just an eccentric little gesture that didn’t quite go right. I’d realized sometime earlier that Vienna was as far east as I’d reached in July 1983, when coming from the west. In 1994, coming from the east, I’d reached Vienna again. So I had passed through every longitude. Hence, a globe.

Actually, I’d already passed through every longitude by the time I’d reached Prague about 10 days earlier, traveling from Krakow, because Prague is west of Vienna, but never mind. I figured Vienna was the meeting point. It occurs to me now that besides London, Vienna is the only place in Europe that I’ve visited more than once. Need to rectify that in future years if I’m able.

Had a good visit both times. Here’s Yuriko on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace.

Schönbrunn Palace

It was a foggy day. Just barely visible in the background is the Gloriette. The day I visited in 1983 was sunny, not too hot, and pleasantly windy. I parked myself on a bench on the slope between the palace and the Gloriette and sat a while, admiring the view and writing a letter. A peak moment.

The Christkindlmarkt on the Rathausplatz had just started when we were there.
Christkindlmarkt on the Rathausplatz In the background is, naturally, Vienna’s Rathaus. Lots of pretty things were for sale at the market, I remember, but more expensive than the equally pretty baubles we’d seen at Krakow Cloth Hall market, which wasn’t a Christmas market, but had ornaments.

Belvedere Palace. You want palaces? Wien’s got ’em.

Belvedere PalaceVienna’s Ringstrasse.
RingstrasseOne of the things that struck me when wandering around that part of town during my first visit to Vienna was spotting OPEC headquarters. It was in this building from 1977 to 2009.

If I’d known OPEC HQ was in Vienna, I’d forgotten that fact. OPEC isn’t that well known these days, but in the ’70s the organization was in the news all the time, generally characterized as shifty foreigners gouging upstanding Americans for oil. Not the kind of organization that occupies a building in a major European city, with offices and windows and phones and secretaries and all that. A silly thing to think, but often enough it’s hard to shake the prevailing nonsense.

Nonstop-Kino, Last Day of July 1983

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Why do I still have a movie ticket stub after a third of century? Don’t ask. I don’t save all of them, or even very many. This one, yes. On July 31, 1983, I went to the Nonstop-Kino in Innsbruck, Austria.

Nonstop-Kino Innsbruck 1983Rich and I took in a screening of Manhattan that afternoon. All together only four people — including the two of us — were at the show. Even so, in an example of doing what the Romans do, or in this case the Austrians, we actually sat in Row 6, Seats 7 and 8.

I’ve seen movies in London (Return of the Jedi and Babette’s Feast and Duck Soup) and Rome (I forget what) and of course many in Japan and some in other Asian countries, but the cinemas in the German-speaking world are the only ones I’ve encountered that sold seats like a live theater.

Manhattan was dubbed in German. I’d seen movie before, so that didn’t matter, but I didn’t think the voice actor doing Woody Allen was a good fit. In the age of the Internet, it’s easy enough to find out that the voice actor who’s done Allen for years — the Synchronsprecher, love that word — is one Wolfgang Draeger (who also was Sir Robin in Monty Python und Die Ritter der Kokosnuß). Apparently Draeger’s highly esteemed, especially for doing Allen. Still, I didn’t care for the match. His voice wasn’t nebbish enough.

Time for A Time for Gifts

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Bitter cold today, and it’s only going to get bitterer. Maybe minus 15 F. by Wednesday, after another round of snow. At times like that, icy little puffs push through the cracks in your house to remind you that the chilly world is indifferent to your fate, you who came from subtropical climes but were headstrong about migrating toward the pole.

My reading material at the turn of the year is A Time for Gifts (1977), in which Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in 2011 at 96, recounts part of his walk as a very young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1933-34. A remarkable story, well told, and reminds just about everyone else (such as me) that their travels are pallid indeed compared with his.

It features a lot of interesting detail: “I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but ritual scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm… and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime.”

And musings: “The Thirty Years War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of briefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principals shifting the whole time, and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the main actors. For, apart from the events – the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague – astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about in the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries in Europe…”