Austria: All Quiet on the Southern Front

On the mountain top, two salamanders are making love. They are of the Alpine species, entirely dressed in black, including their large protruding eyes and their grinning, fleshy mouths. That and the fact that they are changing position so quickly, twirling each other’s bodies around, rubbing their heads against each other, entangling their long tails, holding on to each other with such fiery passion, make it impossible to tell them apart, male from female, or friend from foe: one could easily take their love making for a struggle for life and death, for they are not on a flowery meadow, but inside an old war trench.

The mountain peak, Kleiner Pal, constitutes the border between Austria and Italy. During WWI, it was part of the frontline, where the two armies of the new Republic of Italy and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire held each other in a tight grip, from May 1915 till the end of the war in November 1918, without ever changing the frontline, without having any effect on the outcome of WWI, but at the tremendous cost of the lives of almost a million soldiers. Austrians, Italians, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and many more unknown soldiers, now lie buried at the various Heldenfriedhöfe, or under the eternal ice of the Alpine glaciers.

Boundary stone between Italy and Austria today

Before WWI, the so-called Karnische Alpen, a mountain ridge between Italy and Austria, were a popular hiking destination, as it is now again. The terrain is steep and demanding, the mountain tops a challenge for the experienced hikers and climbers. In the peaceful tranquillity of high peaks and (seemingly) pristine ice-blue lakes it is hard to imagine the smoke and rumble of mortars, of shooting and shelling from a century ago. And yet, trekking by the exuberant pink shrubs of blooming Alpine roses, along the well-maintained hiking paths, one frequently comes across dilapidated garrisons, trenches, or dug out caves that once functioned as barracks, as shelters, as loopholes, or as storage spaces. The hiking paths, now called Friedenswege – trails of peace – were in fact trodden into the steep terrain as a military supply line, where horses pulled ammunition, food, and equipment to the trenches on the top. Until the horses died from cold and hunger, and were replaced by cable cars, quickly built by night, often under hostile fire. From then on, only soldiers marched along the paths.

This Southern stretch of the Alps was one of the most brutal and inhuman battlefields of modern European history. Covered with snow for three quarters of the year, sometimes more, it is a terrain so tricky and precarious that one third of the soldiers there died not from enemy attacks, but from natural causes: avalanches and mountain slides, and the freezing cold that brought pneumonia or kidney inflammation.

Kleiner Pal shrouded in clouds

“Any soldier’s worth less than an animal.”

Infantry soldier Karl Außenhofer wrote into his diary (published in 2016). A Tyrolean, he felt home in the mountains, but he suffered from malnutrition – by 1918, the average weight of the Austrian soldiers was 55kg – and inadequate outfits. Uniforms were of a heavy fabric that, once wet, dried slowly; with Italian attacks imminent, the soldiers at the frontline were ordered to sleep with their clothes on.

“Undressed for the first time in three months tonight. Couldn’t sleep from the pleasure…” Karl Außenhofer wrote. The soldiers were also ordered not to scratch their itches, to prevent infections and skin diseases. In vain.

The Habsburg monarchy had not been prepared for a war. Their weaponry was technically outdated. The turn of the century had brought technical innovations – industrialization and motorization – but outside its glamorous capital Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still an agricultural economy, a Catholic, authoritarian monarchy, stuck in the past. Yet, Emperor Franz Joseph had rushed into the war in megalomania and bloodlust. The assassination of Arc-duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb was a mere pretence to declare war on Serbia. The Vielvölkerstaat – the multi-ethnic empire – had long been troubled by rising tensions among the many peoples of the vast, sprawling empire. Now, the Kaiser wanted to deal with nationalistic, emancipatory tendencies once and for all in a short hit-and-run attack on a minor South Eastern neighbour.

Heldenfriedhof – war cemetery in Kötschach Mauthen near the Kleine Pal: A Czech, a Hungarian and two unknown soldiers share a grave.

“I caught lice from the Galicians,” Außenhofer wrote in his diary.

Ironically, in the trenches the different nationalities were for once united. But even in the face of death the tensions didn’t subside. Too long had prejudices been instilled into the minds of the “Austrians,” resulting in a social and economic gradient from the German speaking West to Slavic speaking East. Galicia, the utmost Eastern province, what is now Poland and Ukraine, was at the bottom of the scale. The discrimination of the Tschuschen – a pejorative term for Slavs sadly used to this day in Austria – continued in the military and was so harsh, that even Außenhofer felt pity when he wrote on July 17th 1915: “These poor Galicians don’t have shelter to lie down, poor devils, today it’s cold like midwinter, it’s raining so everyone gets wet to their skin.”

Vienna had tragically misjudged the Russians, who had vowed to support Serbia, and misjudged French loyalty towards Russia. Now their only elite regiments, the Tyrolean Standschützen, were involved in the unexpected heavy battle in the East, where they suffered great losses in a relatively flat terrain. Even though the monarchy had been able to draw 3.35million men at their general mobilization in July 1914, a year into the war, they were already lacking men. Then, in May 1915, Italy attacked from the South.

trenches at the Kleine Pal

The Italians sent their elite regiment, trained for the Alpine battle field, the Alpini, who now faced on the Austrian army of mainly Czechs and Hungarians: young men who often hadn’t seen a mountain in their lives before, and whose military training was as rudimentary as their equipment. Not surprisingly, the desertion rate was as high as the death rate, and at one point all white handkerchiefs were confiscated and exchanged for colourful ones.

Außenhofer, whose morale was also declining in the run of the war, did however not approve of the Czech deserters. A learned Austrian, the soldierly values of patriotism, duty, obedience, and bravery were deeply ingrained in his thinking – planted especially by the strict Catholic school system that was run military-style and featured physical and humiliating punishment. Disease and cowardly death were regarded as weaknesses, as failures. The brutality of war made Außenhofer even more detached.

“Today another mis-hap. A Standschütz took the cable car from Corvosa to Stern; when entering the station, his head was ripped off. Went to the Gasthaus at night, always full of people there.”

Natural border

The Gasthaus, the inn, Außenhofer mentions in his diary, is the Gasthaus Löwe in Galtür, which, by the way, is still operating to this day. Gasthaus Löwe was, like other inns, pensions, or hotels, where soldiers were accommodated when not serving at the front line. Ernest Hemingway, too, mentioned the Gasthaus Löwe in his short story “An Alpine Idyll.”

The American writer had arrived at the frontline in the final year of the war, in 1918, as a volunteer orderly for the Italian Red Cross, apparently in search of adventures, both amorous and heroic. His story about two Americans on a skiing trip doesn’t cast a favourable light on the Tyroleans. Hemmingway calls them beasts – but who wouldn’t, given a plot that involves a widower using the frozen corpse of his recently deceased wife as a hanger for his lamp? Who wouldn’t, given the merciless brutality of the war? But Hemingway only arrived at the very end of the war, and maybe the village people he describes were so callous and detached because they had been tested by hunger and loss of loved ones for four long years. For Austrians, the war was not an adventure.

View from the Kleine Pal

But, maybe, Hemingway had a point. The archaic societies of the inaccessible Alpine valleys were notoriously taciturn and rough, a demeanor that seems to come with the rawness of the scenery. Tyroleans were incomprehensible to the Viennese as well, both in their dialects and manners, and so held considerable exotic attraction, as was the case for Austrian writer Robert Musil, also stationed at the Gasthaus Löwe.

End of July. A fly dies: Worldwar, he wrote in his diary on July 28 1914, the day of the declaration of war. Like most upper-class men in the monarchy, Musil had attended military school and therefor held the title of officer. He immediately signed up for the front – albeit benefiting from an officer’s privileges: better pay, better accommodation, better food rations.

War. On the mountain top. In the valley peaceful like a summer holiday. Behind the barriers of the patrols one walks like a tourist, he wrote in 1915. The combination of the overwhelming beauty of the Alps and the adventure of war must have made for an intoxicating cocktail. Or was it rather his love affair with a certain “Gretel” from the village that impressed Musil, whose experience at the front differed so wildly from that of an infantry soldier. Yet, the ongoing cross-fires soon wore him out.

Big projectiles, not too high above our own posts, their sound making the air swell into a rumbling, a roaring with a metallic timbre. So it happened yesterday at Monte Carbonile, when the Italians were firing from the Cima Manderiolo to the Pizzo di Vezzeno, and the Panorotta above us to the Italians. It made the impression of an eery uproar within nature. The rocks were rumbling and roaring. The feeling of an evil futility.

A Griffon Vulture crossing the border to Italy.

Musil survived and went on to become a major European writer. He was however one of the very few writers dispatched as soldiers to the front. Contrary to other nations, who lost a whole generation of writers on the battlefields, the monarchy was aware of the importance of artists to boost morale within the population. Two institutions were established for writers to dodge the draft: the Military Archive, and the Pressehauptquartier, the military press headquarters, the latter a euphemism for propaganda, where acclaimed writers like Stefan Zweig, R.M. Rilke, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal eked out their lives. In safe distance from the front, and with varying degree of enthusiasm, they fabricated their eulogies.

“Victories, only victories; you never read of defeats,” infantry soldier Außenhofer wrote in his diary. He never experienced any heroic victories the field newspapers reported. Miraculously, Außenhofer survived the war, unlike nine million soldiers, unlike the emperor, who had passed away in 1916, and unlike the once proud Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated in 1918.

In local folklore, a salamander, is associated both with rain and fire, and the sky above the Kleine Pal is indeed growing heavy with dark clouds that threaten to bring both. But for the love-drunk salamanders, the trenches are deserted now. The Kleine Pal has become an Open Air Museum, where tourists can inspect the posts, the trenches, the caves, and even the old, rusty cable cars. But the museum, which is free of charge and not supervised, is scarcely frequented. The hike-up is steep and hazardous, so the signs at the bottom of the mountain warn, and should only be attempted in proper hiking gear and in perfect weather conditions. High up, seven Griffon Vultures are circling. Once hunted into extinction, they are a thriving, re-introduced species. Some Alpine swallows are plunging and rising, a marmot whistles in the distance. These are the only sounds. No rumbling, no roaring of rocks. Descending on the other side, one will be in Italy. No passport is required.

Friedenswanderweg with the Friedensglocke – the Peace Bell

AUSTRIA: COSSACK LULLABY

Slumber sweet, my fairest baby,

Slumber calmly, sleep-

Peaceful moonbeams light thy chamber

In thy cradle creep;

I will tell to thee a story,

Pure as dewdrop glow,

Close those two beloved eyelids-

Lullaby, By-low!

In June 1945, in the outskirts of Lienz, a sleepy town in the Austrian Alps, British soldiers found an abandoned new-born in the shrubs. Certain of her mother being dead, drowned in the near-by river Drau, they handed the baby girl to a local family where she would grow up a “wolf’s child.” A cossack brat. The off-spring of the wild Cossacks.

WWII had ended less than a month ago, on May 8th. The British had arrived in Eastern Tyrol as a victorious army, the Cossacks only days before them. 25.000 Cossack men, women, and children had crossed the stormy and snow-covered Plöckenpass from Italy.  It was a hazardous crossing, for they had travelled in their traditional Russian one-horse carts, which were suitable for the vast fields of the Eastern steppes, but not for the steep Alpine roads. The Cossacks had brought along all their possessions, their instruments and incomprehensible songs and wild dances, their jewelry and copper kettles, and a sheer uncountable number of horses, cattle and camels. The Eastern Tyroleans, in their inaccessible valleys had so far been spared from the horrors of war. Now, outnumbered by the strangers, they were in awe and fear.

Austro-Italian border, the Dolomites in the back

But the Cossacks hadn’t come as invaders but to meet up here with the British. Before setting out on this hazardous mountain crossing, in Tolmezzo, Italy, they had struck a deal, that the British army would take them as prisoners of war. The British, in God’s name, should take them, and not the Sowjets, who were advancing from the East, and who would execute them for treason, or the Italian partisans in the South, who had sworn revenge for what had happened in the war. Alas, it was the British who would fail the Cossacks in what would later be remembered as the tragedy at the Drau.

Valley of the Drau

Grievous times will sure befall thee,

Danger, slaughterous fire-

Thou shalt on a charger gallop

Cubring at desire;

And a saddle girth all silken

Sadly will I sew,

Slumber now my wide-eyed darling,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack graveyard of Peggetz sits nestled in a tranquil residential neighbourhood in the outskirts of present day Lienz. Those who visit usually stumble here by chance and find themselves alone with the orthodox tombstones and Cyrillic inscriptions. The lush panorama of the serene Alps, the arias of the blackbirds and the soft gurgling of the river Drau belie the drama of the past. The inscriptions, translated into German “Unbekannte Kosaken” are all the same: “Unknown Cossacks”, and bear the same date, June 1st, 1945.  Those buried here aren’t soldiers, a white print out at the gate informs, but at least three hundred women, children, and civilians, who had committed suicide when it became clear that the British were not keeping their promise, but handing them over to the Sowjets, where certain death in Stalin’s gulags awaited them.

Stemming from the wild fields, the vast uninhabited steppes of what is now Russia and Ukraine, the Cossacks were originally – some 1000 years ago – a loose community of freemen: anyone could join them, peasants fleeing the oppressive feudal systems of Poland or Russia, Jews or Christians alike. In the run of the centuries, their originally liberal culture was moulded by their role as eternal outcasts: By fending off frequent Tartar attacks, they gained their adroitness on the horse back and their military organisation. By standing up against Polish catholic oppression, they became fervent orthodox Christians. Organized in Hetmanats, democratic entities, the Cossacks soon started expanding their territories engaging in countless battles with the Ottomans, venturing far into the East, into Siberia and beyond.

Their military strength and ruthlessness soon became notorious. The great powers from the Russian tsars to the Austrian Habsburgers, and even the Vatican relied on Cossack merceneray armies. It is safe to say, that the Cossacks fought in every European war – they defeated the Ottomans when they besieged the Habsburger capital of Vienna in 1683, Napolean when he tried to invade Russia, the Prussians spoke in horror of the Cossack winters of the 19th century.

When I see thee, my own being,

As a Cossack true,

Must I only convoy gice thee-

“Mother dear, adieu!”

Nightly in the empty chamber

Blinding tears will flow,

Sleep my angel, sweetes dear one,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack’s present day representation as national emblems of patriarchal, autocratic and nationalistic societies of Ukraine and Russia stands in a stark contrast and perversion of the Cossacks’ tolerant, democratic origins, and their role as oppressed minority in these very same countries. In fact, the Cossacks were outcasts, tolerated at most but never integrated in Poland and Russia. But the Nazi-chapter and British betrayal of the Cossacks may play an important part in this interpretation of Cossack identity. There is, however, another side of the story. Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish writer of the Tsarian Russia, called the Cossacks the protectors of the Jews. “When we hear the word Cossacks, we grow a new skin. We feel safe, and fear noone,” he wrote in his short story “Wedding without music”, in which the Cossacks prevent a Jewish Pogrom.

It was especially the Russian tsars who used the Cossacks for their political goals. In exchange for tax exemption and personal freedom, the Cossacks served the tsar as soldiers and police force, often exerting cruelty against political opponents and dissidents. There were however, both in Poland, Russia, and the protectorates poor Cossack peasants, who instead of fighting for foreign powers remained free and – oppressed. Accordingly, in the October revolution of 1918, the Cossacks were the first to fight the Bolsheviks – searching to keep their privilege – and the first to join the Red army.

In the USSR, the Cossacks were an oppressed minority because of their involvement in the October revolution. As aresult, when Nazi Germany pushed Eastwards, they offered Hitler support. Reluctant at first, Hitler installed Cossack battalions from 1942 on, as did the Sowjets. Doubtful that the Cossacks would fight and kill other Russians, the Germans deployed the 1st Don Cossack Battalion in the West Balkans to fight the Tito Partisans.

Thy return I’ll wait lamenting

As the days go by,

Ardent for thee praying, fearing

In the cards to spy.

I shall fancy thou wilt suffer

As a stranger grow

Sleep while yet thou nought regrettest,

Lullaby, by-low!

The fighting in the Balkans was abhorrent. The Don Cossack Regiment committed war crimes like mass rapes and executions, decimating the number of Tito partisans by the ten-thousands. Yet, with the Allied forces gaining upper hand in the war, the Cossacks had to withdraw. In another historic absurdity, the Germans now promised them a state of their own, in the Northern Italian region Friaul, right across the border from the Austrian Eastern Tyrol.

Dispossessing local Italian farmers, they established Kosakia in the steep Italian dolomites. Cossack families moved in from the East. Believing to move in for good, the Cossacks set up infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and orthodox churches, making the little town Tolmezzo their new capital. If they weren’t before, the dispossessions turned the local Italians into partisans who fought the Cossacks. 

I will send a holy image

Gainst the foe with thee,

To it kneeling, dearest being,

Pray with piety!

Think of me in bloody battle,

Dearest child of woe,

Slumber soft within thy cradle,

Lullaby, by-low!

When defeat became inevitable in April 1945, the Cossacks packed their carts and fled to Eastern Tyrol, which was under British control. There, they set up camp in Lienz and waited to be taken to Great Britain as promised. Lacking a common language and mores, they had little contact with the local population. Some traded food, others medical help. But all in all, the Tyroleans remained sceptical of their uninvited guests.

In the meantime however, the British, fearing for their own prisoners on Sowjet territory, decided during the conference of Jalta, to hand the Cossacks over so as not to anger Stalin. When the news of their impending deportation East not West hit the camp, mass panic broke out.

In an act of passive resistance, the Cossacks held mass when the British arrived. The soldiers found them immersed in praying and singing. Some children from Lienz witnessed what happened next:

“We saw, how the British soldiers rounded up the Cossacks. And at the near-by rail road tracks, we saw the wagons waiting, and then only we heard the screaming and shouting and praying and when we looked closer, we saw that they had locked their arms, forming a tight circle around their pope who held up high a cross. And then we saw, how they pulled them up on the wagons. They were covered in blood.”

The British shot and beat those who resisted. Some Cossacks shot back, but most committed suicide, by shooting their children and themselves, by throwing themselves and their children into the waves of the Drau. Some escaped into the woods, where they were later found hanging from the trees. A few hundred lucky ones escaped to the snow covered high mountains.

At the end of the Day, June 1st, there were no Cossacks left in Lienz.

A handful of wolf-children grew up in the villages of Eastern Tyrol, strangers from the wild fields they had never seen, lacking the words to tell the story, unable to hear their mothers’ lullabies.     

CRADLE SONG OF A COSSACK MOTHER  by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, translated by Martha Bianchi Dickinson.

Bell of peace at the Austro-Italian Border

Austria: La Ronde

It’s this time of the year again: The bee-eaters, those agile, gregarious birds, have returned from South Africa and set up shop at Lake Neusiedl. By means of their sharp bills they dig their burrows up to two meters into the vertical sand stone, completely ignoring the burrows they had carved out the previous year. It’s in their nature to build a new home each June.

It’s not in their nature to find new partner, though. Bee-eaters mate for life. Their romantic fidelity has inspired poets and biologists alike. Albeit, their sex lives aren’t as straight forward as it may seem. Both husband and wife like to engage in extra-marital affairs to further their own offspring’s chances of survival, turning the colony into a stage for a veritable Ronde à la Schnitzler.

Courtship follows an elaborate protocol. The groom presents the bride with a present – a bee or a dragonfly or even a butterfly, the avian equivalent to a bouquet of roses. After a little cuddling, the female will assume a receptive posture, after which the consummation of marriage will take place. Then both will joyfully take to the skies. Love is in the air!

However, monogamy is often limited to “social monogamy” – the shared raising of the hatchlings. Copulation often happens in the hidden, sometimes it’s forced, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.

A couple usually enlists other birds as babysitters, most preferably their own children. If the latter however wish to start their own family, the old couple will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent them from mating. The daughter in turn will sneak out in the wee hours of the day to find herself a secret lover.

In general, as recent studies have shown, a lot of extra-marital sex in the world of birds is in fact instigated by females. Married males will not shy away from a little tete-a-tete, especially if they don’t have to take care of the hatchlings later. On a darker note: bachelors who haven’t managed to impress a female will resort to drastic measures to get their DNA spread: coercion and rape.

Comes September, the bee eaters will head South again. Many more of them.

The Austrian doctor and novelist Arthur Schnitzler published his novel “La Ronde” (Der Reigen) in 1879, causing a scandal for its frank description of sexuality. Or rather: it caused a riot. Not surprisingly, the book was banned. Then became a best seller. The Fifty Shades of Grey of its time. Passion is more colorful at Lake Neusiedl.

Vienna: Mother Figures

In 1908, during archeological excavations close to the sleepy village of Willendorf, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a tiny limestone figure depicting a voluptuous woman was found. The archeologists immediately recognized the value of the find, put it in a wooden box and delivered it personally at the imperial-royal Museum of Natural History in Vienna. The figurine became an archeological, historical and art sensation: the later dubbed “Venus Of Willendorf” turned out to be some incredible 29,500 years old. Hopes were high that the figurine would shed light on Stone Age and the beginning of human society. Yet, more than hundred years later the little woman remains a mystery. In her silence however she tells us more about us – and human nature.

The origins of the Venus remain unknown. The limestone she is carved out is not local, and the ochre she supposedly was painted with has long faded. She has no face, but an elaborate hairdo of seven concentric circles. She measures 11,5cm from the tip of her head to her ankles. The little woman has no feet, and never had. What she has instead is big buttocks, burly breasts, a billowing belly, and a prominent cleft between her thighs. She is without doubt a symbol of fertility. Fitting snugly in one hand, she was maybe a lucky charm, meant to be carried around.

But then again, if she was of a nomadic tribe, part of a group of hunters and gatherers, why was she obese, her arms thin and unfit to pick berries or dig for roots, and no feet to run from or after big animals? And if she was a token of procreation, why was she an older woman, instead of a young one at the pinnacle of fertility?

The terror birds roamed Earth in the Stone Age. This one roams the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, now residence of the Venus of Willendorf.

The Venus of Willendorf most likely was no lucky charm, but a totem of womanhood, the epitome of femininity, the antithetical man. Some researchers suspect the figure to be the self portrait of a female artist – her exaggerated proportions the foreshortening effect of self-inspection, her facelessness the result of the lack of mirrors. Others argue that the figurine does not depict a human woman at all, but a deity, a kind of Mother Earth. The Venus is maybe another proof that early societies were in fact matriarchies.

Whatever the truth behind the little figurine, the Willendorf woman was not the only, nor the oldest figurine found in the region in the 20th century. But she was and still is the most prominent. Something about her seems to resonate with (not only) Austrian culture. She is among the most popular archeological objects in the world – and definitely the prime attraction of the Museum Of National History in Vienna.

Museum of Natural History as seen from the twin Museum, the Museum of Art History. Both Museums were built in the style of Viennese Historism.

The Natural History Museum in Vienna dates back to 1750, when emperor Franz Stephan purchased the then largest collection of natural history objects from Chevalier de Baillou in Florence. This collection, assembled by noblemen and royals, comprised 30,000 fossils, snails, mussels, minerals and precious stones and made its way from Italy over the Alps by means of a mule caravan. The emperor was quite taken with his purchase. He visited the collection every day and furthermore financed expeditions around the world to ship home even more rare specimen of live animals, plants and stones.

Emperor Franz Stephan had enough time to indulge in his passion. It was up to his wife, Maria Theresia of Austria, to run the empire – and the family. The couple had sixteen children. Yet, it was exactly her being a supermom that turned her into a successful leader and business women. Despite her being a strict, authoritarian leader inspired by catholic fundamentalism, to the people of the empire she appeared gentle and big-hearted. Despite never having been crowned emporess, that’s what the people called her. Emporess Maria Theresia. She was their mother, a mother to nine nations. A mother of 50 million.

Another Mother Figure: Maria Theresa was mother to 16 and the rest of the monarchy.

Maria Theresia herself had no interest in natural history, but she recognized the importance of her husband’s collection when it came to mineralogy and the importance it possibly held for mining and exploiting raw materials from the soil. When Franz Stephan died, she donated the collection to the public. She hired a curator to create a museum (open by individual admission only, mind you) at her Imperial palace.

In the following 100 years, the collection kept growing and finally, under her great-great-grandson Emperor Franz Josef I, a new building had to be erected. The new Museum of Natural History, opened in 1889, is situated at Vienna’s pompous Ringstraße, facing its almost identical twin, the Museum of Fine Arts. In between the two imposing buildings, Maria Theresa sits enthroned as a bronze statue. A mere twenty years after the opening of the two museums, by 1918, the monarchy was history itself, but the two museums and Maria Theresia are still standing tall. As is the Venus of Willendorf.

Sunset in Vienna. Maria Theresia and a general in bronze, the museum of natural history in the background

After 29,500 years hidden in the soil, the Venus of Willendorf was condemned to her little wood box until 1989, when she was finally presented to the public. She now resides in her own little chamber on the second floor of the Museum, from where, through the windows, the visitor also has a good view of Maria Theresia, Emporess.

Austria: Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

As of today it’s official: The Austrian Roller is extinct. According to the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, there are no breeding couples of European Rollers in areas they thrived in only a few decades ago. The death of a species doesn’t come unannounced. For years, NGOs and even the EU have warned of the imminent loss of the strikingly beautiful bird. In vain.

Coracias garrullus was a gregarious bird, as its name suggest, and flamboyantly colored, its turquoise feathers glittering like emeralds. Together with its close relatives, the bee-eater and the kingfisher, it was one of the few birds that brightened up the otherwise monochrome Austrian bird world. The vibrant group’s evolution can be traced back to the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. Yet it took only thirty years to wipe them from their traditional breeding grounds in Eastern Austria.

A European Roller

European Rollers are loyal to their homes. They return from their South African wintering grounds with unbelievable exactitude – a field, a bush, or a tree the monogamous bird and their mating partner will defend as their territory. If they come back, that is, for this year only non-breeders made their way home.

Fallow grassland in Hungary, where rollers still are abundant.

The bird’s patriotism has not been reciprocated by Austria. Intensive agriculture has eaten away their habitat – there are hardly any shrubs left, bushes or fallow grasslands the rollers need as hunting grounds. Dramatic drop in insect population due to wide spread use of pesticides and the fierce weather condition of the past five to ten years has further reduced chances of survival for the young. Finally, add illegal bird hunting in the Mediterranean – their migration route – to the equation. Life was in deed tough on Rollers.

A lonely kingfisher – the last one of its kind in Vienna…

Despite their challenges, Austrian Rollers stayed picky when it came to mating. They didn’t mingle. DNA research suggests that Austrians never even interbred with their next cousins in neighboring Hungary. But as Austrians they should have known better. The history of Austria and Habsburg Empire has proved: incest leads to decreased adaptability and ultimately extinction. The Austrian royal family practically eliminated themselves by means of genetic deficiency.

Sadly, the current Austrian government not only denies a nation’s need for diversity, but climate change as a whole. European Rollers won’t be the last species we will loose.

To be fair, it is not only in Austria that European Rollers have gone extinct. The birds no longer breed in Scandinavia, Russia and Germany. While their numbers are declining in North Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria they are still very common, in countries like Italy or France even increasing – due to conservation efforts like the installation of nest boxes or collaborative programs with farmers.

In Eastern Austria. Rollers and farmers aren’t nemesis. The former actually needs the latter as farmers dig up the beetles for them. It’s industrialized agriculture and the use of pesticides that’s the problem.

In 2015, Birdlife Austria issued a statement demanding immediate action. Rollers, as well as the buntings and shrikes, are under imminent threat of extinction. The NGO pointed towards € 40million that were provided by the EU for Austrian conservation programs but were never put to action. No single politician found the strength to stand up against agricultural lobbies in Austria. The reasons for this lack of political will or courage lie in the conservative make up of Austrian society. Agriculture symbolizes traditional values that, especially in the rural communities, still go unchallenged in Austria.

The red-backed shrike, once common, is also near extinct in Austria.

In 2013, the Albertina, one of Vienna’s most prestigious museums, lent Albrecht Dürer’s highly acclaimed water color Wing of A European Roller to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is one of the major nature studies in Art History.

In 2012, Birdlife International called for political action as there are only six breeding pairs of Rollers in Austria left.

In 2010, because the bird was so beautiful and oh so rare – only breeding in one little community in Burgenland, Eastern Austria – the Republic issued a stamp celebrating the bird.

In 2008, the European Union issued the Species Action Plan with the goal to restore the European population of rollers to a favorable conservation status.

In 2005, Birdlife international changed the status of European Rollers from LC – least concern – to NT: near threatened.

In 1520, Albrecht Dürer painted the Wing Of A European Roller. The bird is abundant in Europe and the painter mesmerized by its beauty.

Epilogue:

Please visit the Albertina in 2019, when from September on, the Wing Of A European Roller will be back to Vienna and on display in a special exhibition about Albrecht Dürer’s nature studies. Can’t say Austria doesn’t value its treasures. It practically excels in the art of preservation.

https://www.albertina.at/ausstellungen/albrecht-duerer/

Epilogue 2:

The reason why the wanderwarbler is quite enraged by the extinction of the roller is not only but also that contrary to what the name suggests, the bird in the logo is actually a European Roller.

Vienna: Salt and Pepper

The Saliera, the only work of art undoubtedly attributed to the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini

In 1544, the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini sculptured an intricate little salt table, saliera in Italian, which, for different reasons, went on to become one of Vienna’s most famous works of art. The Saliera is insured for the breathtaking sum of 60 million Euros. And good that it is…

Created for Charles I of France, the Saliera is a virtuoso piece in the then fashionable style of Mannerism. While in Renaissance art natural beauty, symmetry and balance were enhanced, Mannerism exaggerated these qualities to an extent that artworks appeared asymmetric, artificial. Mannerism addressed intellect rather than emotion – complex and sophisticated, with style and technique outweighing beauty and – meaning. A characteristic that some might find quite suitable to Viennese etiquette and manners…

The peppery Earth

Made of ivory, gold and enamel, the Saliera depicts a man and a woman: an allegory to the Sea and the Earth. A small vessel next to the man holds salt, a temple-shaped box next to the female figure pepper. On its base it even has a set of roles, for convenience at dinner parties and banquets – or for pure appreciation.

Charles son, Charles II, gave the Saliera to the Habsburgers as a present to Ferdinand II of Tyrol, when the former married Elisabeth of Austria. The Habsburg emporers and archdukes were avid collectors of exotic and uncommon materials, like precious stones, ostrich eggs, shark teeth and their likes – many of which were believed to hold magic powers – and were turned into works of art by chosen artists.

The Vanitas Group – An Allegory of Transcience is another famous oeuvre at display at the Kunstkammer. Sculptured in Medival Ages by (most likely) Michel Erhart, it contrasts the chaste beauty of Youth with the frivolity of age. The world was in the tight grip of catholic chastity back then…

The Kunstkammern – arts and natural wonders rooms – were collections that attempted to represent the erudition of their time. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna was completed in the 19th century, the Saliera was transferred to Vienna, and has been at public display, well protected, since the Museum was opened in 1891. The Kunstkammer at KHM, Vienna, is still considered the most important of its kind in the world.

The Saliera sat idly among other spectacular, delicate or bizarre statuettes, clocks or automatons – until 15th years ago, on May 11th 2003, when during a renovation the museum covered by a scaffolding, the salt dish was stolen. No alarms went off, the Saliera was simply gone.

The KHM – Kunsthistorisches Musem – Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna – after renovation and without scaffolding.

The museum offered a reward of one million Euros for its recovery. Without success. It was in January 2006 only that the Saliera was discovered, buried in a forest 90km North of Vienna. The thief – one by occasion rather than training – had turned himself in. He had been caught by surveillance cameras and recognized by his friends.

Ever since then, the Saliera is the most popular piece of art in Vienna.

The Saliera advertised on Banners in Vienna.

Austria: Family Business

What a frenzy in the air! With flying colors, the gregarious bee-eaters have returned from their Southern African winter domiciles and are busy setting up shop in Austria. Using their beaks for digging and legs for kicking, they carve tunnels of up to two meter length in the soft sandstone near lake Neusiedl.

A bee-eater leaving home for the hunt. The bigger holes are bird’s nesting chambers, the smaller ones bees’. What neighborhood…

Bee-eaters are fast flyers. Spotting their insect prey from a distance of up to 60m they shoot like bullets through the air for the kill. Bees might be their preferred diet, but bee-eaters will do with any flying insect. They will however never eat from the floor. They have manners after all. They are social creatures.

taking a plunge

The divorce rate among bee-eaters is low. Once a bee-eater found their mate, they will most likely stay together for years to come. Traditionally courtship ends with the presentation of a gift – not surprisingly a bee, or even a dragonfly – and then the bride leaves her family to move in with her in-laws. This is when all the trouble begins.

Prey is presented as a gift – or robbed- some individuals speialize in kleptoparasitism.

In-laws rarely have an interest in grandchildren. Rather, they want to have more children themselves and – since hunting is so demanding a business – they are in need of baby sitters, not grandkids. The in-laws will harass the newly weds and keep them from procreating mainly by blocking them access to their nesting chamber. To keep the peace, the young couple often obeys, delaying their own egg-laying for a few years.

The bride however, will feel short-changed. She left her own family for the groom after all. So she comes up with a scheme: She sneaks in with a completely different family, trespassing territory lines, and demands intercourse with a male. Upon return, she secretly lays her own eggs into her mother-in-law’s nesting chamber. She’s not scrupulous – without a flinch she will discard of already laid eggs. Yet, she must time her actions well – if her off-spring hatches too early or too late, they are doomed as well. The mother in law will know no mercy. Family – can’t choose them.

Lake Neusiedl, Nationalpark

Vienna: Remembering The Lost

On January 27th, Vienna commemorates the Holocaust Memorial Day. 72 years ago, on January 27 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest Nazi concentration camp.

More than six million Jews were killed in the holocaust, plus an estimated number of 200,000 Roma and Sinti, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men. To never forget the tragedy, the United Nations declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

80 years ago, in 1938, Austria was annexed to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler famously welcomed by the masses in the streets of Vienna. In the following seven years, more than 65,000 Austrian Jews lost their lives and the Jewish community was extinguished.

Judenplatz, the Jewish Square, in the center of Vienna, is now a sleepy, little square. Once it was the center of the Jewish community, Instead of a synagogue, a holocaust memorial stands on Judenplatz today, to remind the passers-by of the Jewish lives that vanished in the third Reich. The concrete cube, designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, resembles a library, but the books are turned inside out. They are inaccessible, unreadable, a symbol of the many biographies, the untold, unheard stories, that were irreversibly lost in the holocaust.

The statue of Ephraim Lessing stands opposite the holocaust memorial at Judenplatz. Lessing wrote the novel “Nathan, The Wise”, a plea for religious tolerance, in 1779.

It was WWII that ended the abhorrent Third Reich, a war that came at a high toll for the city of Vienna and its inhabitants. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the cruel fights over the city. It was also the Red Army that liberated Vienna from the Nazis.

Today, Vienna is again capital city of the Austrian Republic, but still high bunkers are scattered all over Vienna. These towers, unique to the cities Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, and equipped with canons to fight hostile bomber planes, were built by the Nazis in a last and futile attempt to withstand the allied bombardments.

As the sun sets, Joggers pass by a high bunker from WWII in Vienna’s Augarten.

This year however, the commemoration day is over shadowed by the recent inauguration of Austria’s new government, a right-wing neo-liberal coalition, which – following an international trend – fails to distance itself from fascist thinking. Are the tragic events of 20th century already forgotten in Austria?

This high-bunker was turned into a Zoo and Museum. There are no canons on its rood any more. “Smashed to pieces in the Still of the Night” it reads instead – a reminder of dark times in the Third Reich.

Two weeks ago, on January 13, the streets filled again. Despite the bitter cold winter weather, an estimated number of 70,000 people, peacefully demonstrated the Austrian new government’s program of economic aggravation and xenophobia, reminding many of the bitter days of the Third Reich. But instead of bombs, it rained hearts. For a day, Vienna was filled with love – and hope that history will not repeat itself.

 

Vienna: Tu Felix Austria, Nube

When her husband died, Mary Theresa had her bedroom wallpapered in grey silk. She had her jewelry given to her court ladies, dressed in black and wore a black veil for the rest of her life. Often she was found sitting at her late husband’s sarcophagus in Vienna’s capuchin crypt. After her own death, sixteen years later, a piece of paper was found in her prayer book, on which she had noted the duration of her marriage:

29 years, 6 months, 6 days, equals years 29, months 335, weeks 1540, days 10,781, hours 258,744.

Mary Theresa, sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma had been lucky to marry the man she loved.

To her father, Emperor Charles VI, she had been a disappointment. He had wished for a son, a heir to the throne. And while he had her raised to become a lady of the court – Mary Theresa was excluded from education and contemporary erudition, but trained in painting, dancing and the French language, he still did everything to ensure she and the husband he would chose for her would follow on his throne. He chose Francis Stephen of Lorraine, by pure coincidence the man Therese loved.

At the age of 23, after her father’s sudden death from poisoned mushrooms in 1780, Mary Theresa stepped up, literally.

Detail of the Vienna Burgtheater, the most important german speaking theater. It was built under Mary Theresa.

By the time of her coronation, she had been married for four years, pregnant and mother to three. The empire she inherited was run down and bankrupt, the army non-existent. On top, a female reign was considered a liability by the adversary powers. The empire was attacked right away. Yet, Mary Theresa proved herself an astute leader. She charmed other nations into supporting her.

While she negotiated successfully to have her husband crowned Holy Roman Emperor – due to her gender Mary could not be crowned Empress herself – she did not grant Francis I, as he was now called, a say in leading the Empire. On the contrary, Mary Theresa led the country as a matrone, a mother figure. Soon the country prospered under her leadership and Mary Theresa honed her image of a generous, warm mother, who loved her people as much as she loved her own off-spring. She had sixteen children. The fourth was a boy, the later Emperor Joseph II.

Bella Gerant Alii, Tu Felix Austria Nube. – Let others wage wars, thou, happy Austria, marry.

While Mary Theresa did not dispose of a powerful army, she used her 16 children to set up agreements and deals. She wedded them off all over the continent to ensure coalitions, territorial gains or military support. Her children’s feelings or love interests were of no concern to her.

Mary Theresa was an ardent catholic. She believed her power God given, and her life style reflected a puritan and strict view of the world. Yet when it came to marrying off her youngest daughter to French King Louis XVI, she even negotiated the deal with the notorious Madame Pompadour, chief mistress on the French court, of whom she did not approved. Mary Theresa believed in absolute conjugal faith. Sadly, her husband, Francis I, did not.

tourists take in the sun by Mary Therese’s statue in front of the museum of art history, where her portrait in black is at display

To the children of the Habsburg Empire Mary Theresa was as strict a mother as to her own children. She introduced compulsory education to all between six and fifteen. Her relationship to her own sons and daughters was as distant as their geographic location: Mary Christina was married to Saxony, Mary Amalia to Parma, Mary Karolina to Naples, Ferdinand Charles Anthony to Modena, Maximilian Francis became bishop of Cologne, and Maria Antonia was beheaded as Mary Antoinette in Paris in 1793. But this Mary Theresa never learned.

She had died in 1780 already, wearing her beloved husband’s housecoat.

Vienna: Cherubs

By daylight, walking through the center of Vienna feels like a journey into the glorious past of an empire: the palaces with their cheerful rococo facades, playgrounds for the little cherubs, cute little creatures, half angels, half cupids.


But wait for night fall, when the streetlights are turned off, and only the illuminated windows cast shadows on the deserted streets.

The cherubs are still playing in the dark, innocent.