In Europe

artist. The building is now one of the city's major tourist attractions, and the Viennese are so very proud of it: look at the things we dare!
    Seldom have I seen an exception that so proves the rule. Modern-day Vienna is like a city of high officials with nothing more to be high about. The atmosphere is doting, the shops are stocked with perfume and cakes, every snowdrift is immediately made to toe the line. It is almost impossible to imagine that this city can still reproduce, that people still make love here, that beneath these endless hats and responsible suits there can still be bodies, pale and trembling. At least five times a day I walk up and down Kärntnerstrasse, the big shopping streetbetween the Stephansdom and the Opera, the heart line of the city. The people walking there, young and old, nod to each other, and only two drunk tramps disturb the peace; but not really – just like Hundertwasser, they are a part of this closed system, the way a bakery drawn by Anton Pieck cannot exist without a pair of shivering waifs peering through the window.
    There is only one place in which you can take shelter from this city: in a coffee house. Without coffee houses there is no Vienna; without Vienna, there are no coffee houses.
    They still exist, these fantastic pleasure domes full of mirrors, leather sofas and brown marble walls, these roomy and intimate spaces where the glasses and cups tinkle festively all day long, where the evenings are warm as the wet snow blows against the windows, where poets, students and bookkeepers coexist, where it smells of coffee and
Apfelstrudel
, where you can look, talk, read or stare into your beloved's eyes.
    Vienna around the turn of the century was a typical city of the senses, and the coffee house played a central role in that. ‘Nowhere was it easier to be European,’ Stefan Zweig suggested, and explained that the coffee houses had all the major European newspapers, ‘as well as all the principal literary and cultural magazines from all over the world.’ Nothing, he felt, contributed more to the intellectual versatility of Vienna than the coffee house. Politically, everything was locked down tight, so what could one do but flee into art, into one's own soul? ‘We truly
did
know what was in the wind, for we lived continually with nostrils flared. We found what was new because we wanted the new, because we hungered after something that belonged to us and to us alone – and not to the world of our fathers.’
    There was always some reason for excitement at those worn tables. The new play by a certain Oskar Kokoschka, for example, entitled
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen
. Or a stunningly bare building, designed by Adolf Loos in his quest for the new purity. Or the composer Arnold Schönberg, who had racked his audiences with tonalities never heard before and was booed out of the hall – people had even thrown chairs. Or the latest erotic novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in which male slaves were reduced to quivering heaps by robust ladies with whips. Or the‘secret nerves’ of which psychiatrist Sigmund Freud spoke so compellingly. Or the cuts made in Mahler's rendition of Wagner's
Die Walküre
, a concession to the composer's many detractors. Or the most recent ‘quarterly figures’ published by Karl Kraus’ anti-newspaper
Die Fackel
:
    Anonymous diatribes: 236
    Anonymous threats: 83
    Molestations: 1
    Now it is Friday evening, and the quiet of a village reigns over the echoing Kärntnerstrasse. A cold wind is blowing. The only sound is coming from a ghetto blaster in the middle of the street. A group of about ten young people are swaying to something that sounds like house music, two girls in checkered outfits up in front, a tawny man at the back, clearly the boss. All the dancers are wearing green jockey caps. Four pedestrians have stopped to watch. A woman hands out pamphlets. The pamphlets say that this is a new church, that Christ will be returning soon, and that no train derails unless it is God's will.
    The snow falls softly between the big white buildings of the Hofburg, in the courtyards, on the roofs, the chimneys and the marble heroes.
    These days everything revolves around the next ball, and inside the Hofburg the people of Vienna are dancing the gold leaf off the walls. On 22 January was the Officers’ Ball, on 23 January the Pharmacists’ Ball, on 25 January the Hunters’ Ball, yesterday was the Technology Ball, tomorrow there will be the Doctors’