TRIPS & EXPEDITIONS
Harry Goodwin (Year 12 ) reflects on the belle-époque grandeur and political resonances of these two historic cities VIENNA & BUDAPEST certain irony: at their pseudo-Versailles, Schönbrunn, I was touched by the juxtaposition of gold mirrors with Franz Josef II’s iron bed. We finished our time in Vienna at the Military Museum, ending in front of the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in June 1914. By it was his blood-spattered tunic. In the years after that fateful assassination, Europe’s spider’s web of dynasties and empires was blown apart by brutal ideologies which made the worst excesses of the anciens régimes seem like child’s play. During our night- time tour of Buda, Mr Smith revealed that all the genteel belle-époque buildings around us were from the 1950s: the originals were pounded into rubble as the Waffen-SS battled the Red Army to the death in 1945. Several buildings we saw are pockmarked with bullets fired into protesting crowds during the 1956 Uprising. The Soviets’ brutality has not precluded the emergence of a communist-kitsch industry in Hungary: just as tourists can pose with fake commissars at Checkpoint Charlie, so in Budapest visitors to the Soviet ‘statue park’ can buy mocked-up Orders of Lenin. Both sides of the political spectrum, it seems, can indulge in imperial nostalgia. Whereas dead emperors dominate Viennese life, in Hungary the past is no match for Viktor Orbán’s gutter politics. We ended our trip by the Danube, in front of a row of bronze shoes commemorating the 20,000 Jews who were shot and dumped in the river by Hungarian fascists in January 1945. A fortnight later Orbán achieved re-election by peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. There are few such memorials in Vienna: by the end of our time there I suspected its boundless pride in the belle-époque served to divert attention from Austria’s complicity in what followed. As Wittgenstein observed: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
L udwig Wittgenstein wrote that reviving a tradition is like trying ‘to repair a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers’. He had his hometown, Vienna, in mind. The eclectic grandeur of the Habsburg Empire is woven into the fabric of city life a century after its collapse: one need not visit any museum or palace to feel a twinge of nostalgia for the belle-époque. But if, like 30 Upper School historians and Messrs Smith, Ó Siochrú and Fletcher, you immerse yourself in the city’s past, you leave with a sense of the fragility of cultures. Mr Smith began with a walking tour spanning a half- a-dozen miles and as many centuries. We went from the Gothic heights of St Stephen’s Cathedral to the baroque glamour of the Jesuit Church to the neoclassical chill of the Hofburg Palace: Catholicism respectively triumphant, combative and displaced by the State. The earlier Habsburgs were a relatively pious bunch, and, as the gold fonts and emerald-laden crucifixes of the Imperial Treasury illustrated, they worshipped in style. Yet I was struck by something approaching unease. The uniforms and insignia deployed by the erstwhile Viennese residents Hitler and Stalin show that aesthetic overload can lure nations into a moral abyss. The gilded accretions of Napoleon, paid for by the pillage and suffering of the Grande Armée, conveyed as much to me. The aestheticisation of death was a recurrent leitmotif: in the Imperial Crypt we marvelled at the skill with which bronze had been rendered like silk, skin, fur and bone on the tombs of the Habsburg dynasts. Most moving, however, was the coffin of Joseph II, the 18th century’s greatest contrarian: a bare wooden box engraved with the words ‘Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all he undertook’. The Habsburgs, conscious of comparison to the unsurpassably fabulous Bourbons, imbued everything they did with a
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