The Danube Read online

  Miklós Gímes, a Hungarian journalist and son of the 1956 revolutionary of the same name, once told me how he fled Budapest in November 1956 as a child of seven with his mother, leaving his father behind as the Soviet troops re-invaded the country. And how his mother took him to a smart Viennese café like this one, and spent the last of the coins the Austrian Red Cross had given them at the border on cakes. As they sat there, in their long, unfashionable coats, clutching all their possessions in a single suitcase, the Viennese middle class studied them like creatures from another planet, then one by one came to their table and gave them money.

  The Sperl, with its old wooden tables, and rather brusque and beautiful waitresses, is definitely conducive to writing. Between slices of cake I trade limericks with a friend:

  ‘The national game of the Czechs,/is not what a person expects./This peculiar nation,/thinks defenestration,/is far more exciting than sex.’

  ‘An ancient fish is the pike,/his long faces are never alike./When I slept in Vienna,/I awoke in a terror,/that a pike might alight with my bike!’

  The military museum is a sturdy red brick fort five stops on the metro from the Nasch market.3 The first floor is lined with exhibits from the two Ottoman sieges of Vienna, in 1529 and 1683, and from the mopping up operations which followed: the capture of Párkány and Buda. The arrow that lodged beneath Count Guidobald von Stahremberg's shoulder during the siege of Buda is preserved at the centre of a glass monstrance, above the figure of a turbaned Turk who kneels in heavy chains with three dogs snapping at his heels. There is an accompanying verse: ‘Ein Pfeil, so zwanzig Jahr in Fleisch und Bein gesteckt, und tausend-fachen Schmerz dem Helden Leib erweckt, wird durch des Künstlers hand von seinem Sitz gebogen, und nach gemachten Schnitt noch glücklich ausgezogen.’ (‘This arrow lodged for twenty years in a hero's flesh and bone. It tortured him much, but was happily cast out by a surgeon's skilful craft.’) Guido was the cousin of the commander of Vienna's defences, Ernst von Stahremberg, and distinguished himself by his bravery, leading sorties out from the walls to attack the besieging Turks. He was seriously injured during a desperate attempt to stop the Turks storming the city after blasting a hole in the city wall. When he was struck by that arrow at Buda, just three years later, he must have thought his final hour had come.

  The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa – Mustafa the Black – reached Vienna with his army on 13 July 1683. The message he sent, asking for the unconditional surrender of the city, the conversion of its inhabitants to Islam, or their departure with guarantees that they would not be attacked, received no response from Ernst von Stahremberg. The city had only twelve thousand defenders under his command. King John Sobieski and his Polish-German troops were still several days’ march away. By all accounts, Kara Mustafa was a poor general compared to some of his shrewd and battle-hardened predecessors in the Ottoman military. Ibrahim, the elderly pasha of Buda, advised him to postpone his attack and first secure control of the frontier. ‘In support of his argument the pasha recounted the fable of a king who placed a pile of gold in the centre of a carpet, then offered it to any man who could take it without treading on the carpet. The winner was the one who rolled up the carpet from the edge, until he reached and was able to grab the prize,’ in Patrick Kinross's words.4 However, Ibrahim's advice was rudely dismissed, and Black Mustafa marched straight to Vienna. Without heavy artillery, so far from his base camp, he had to rely on mining the walls. For this to be done, trenches were dug by prisoners of war, right up to the city walls. On 4 September, more than two weeks into the siege, the greatest breach was made in the walls, and Turkish troops entered the city for the first and only time. But after hours of bitter, hand-to-hand fighting, they were ejected. That was the nearest Turkish soldiers ever came to taking Vienna, and the turning point in the siege. The same day came news that John Sobieski had crossed the Danube at Tulln with a bridge of boats, and had met up with the forces of Lorraine, Bavaria and Saxony. The three armies marched together for three days to reach the Kahlenberg ridge of the Wienerwald, the highlands overlooking Vienna to the west, which the arrogant Mustafa had left undefended. The Turks, although outnumbering the Christian armies, were now caught between the city walls and the relief army looking down on them from the heights. On 12 September 1683, a Sunday, bright and sunny after the rain of the past few days, John Sobieski personally led the attack. His soldiers seemed to the Turks like ‘a flood of black pitch coming down the mountain consuming everything it touched.’ By six in the evening, Kara Mustafa and the remains of his army had fled. Twenty-five thousand Turkish tents and their rich contents were seized that day, but the one on display in the museum was taken during the siege of Petrovaradin in 1716. It is richly decorated with carpets, and, rather incongruously, with oil paintings of the heroes of the battle on the Austrian side. In front of it is a massive cannon, the ‘Morser’, used in the siege of Belgrade in August 1717. A single cannonball killed 3,000 Turks when it struck their munitions store high on the Kalemegdan – a predecessor of the explosion at Smederevo in July 1941.

  The museum seems almost deserted, until I spot a woman in a headscarf, walking arm-in-arm with a man with a moustache, and a younger man who is clearly their son, showing them around. Suleiman is a law student at the University of Vienna, and has lived in the city for eleven years. It's his third visit to the museum, he says, and he has arranged this excursion ‘to show his parents things related to the Ottomans’. We agree to meet again later, to discuss his experience of being a Turk in Vienna.

  ‘My father was more affected by it emotionally than I was,’ he tells me, when we meet at the Café Stein. His parents came out from Istanbul to help him and his wife with their new-born baby, Kerem. ‘Many Turks live in Austria, but they have no idea that this museum exists.’ ‘What about the way Turks are presented, as the eternal enemy … kneeling in chains under the Habsburg rulers?’ I ask. ‘Before I came to Austria, my uncle on my mother's side told me about a statue, of a Christian priest in St Stephan's Square, standing over a Turk. So I went to see it when I arrived. There's not so much material from the siege here. Sobieski took most of what he captured with him to Cracow, which was the Polish capital then, and it's on display in the museum there.5 I think a lot of images of Turks were made by people who never actually met one. There were all the wars at the time between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, so it was necessary to portray the Turks as some kind of monsters. But there were also many other contacts – we were neighbours, after all. All the foreign ambassadors and travellers who spent time in Istanbul paint a very different picture. I think the Austrians used the encounter with the Ottomans, with the Turks, much more wisely than the Spanish did. The Spanish just threw the Muslims out of their country. Here, the Austrians learnt many things from them. Like coffee-drinking, and visits to the bath-house!’

  He enjoys living in Austria, and says the people are kind to him on the whole, but most of his friends are fellow foreigners: Turks, Albanians, Bosnians, Arabs. ‘I don't know why that is. Maybe because we are all strangers here, and that draws us to one another. There is also prejudice towards us, but I do also have Austrian friends.’ Suleiman comes from Constantinople, and his wife is from the city of Yozgat in central Anatolia. When they have both finished their doctorates they plan to go back to Turkey to work. He plans an academic career. With a qualification from a European university his job prospects will be better in his own country. He attends a Turkish mosque close to his flat regularly, and sometimes goes to other mosques and meschid – prayer halls – in the city, if he is passing. Muslims tend to stick to their own national groups, he says, Turks with Turks, Saudis with Saudis. But when they pray together, in the mosque attached to the Islamic Cultural Centre on the banks of the Danube, he is always careful not to offend his fellow Muslims from Arab countries by doing things in a way that they find hard to accept. He cites one particular ritual prayer, the hesbat, which Turkish Muslims say aloud in a group, but which Arabs recite silently and alone. He do
es it in their style when they are at the same prayers, out of respect for their feelings.

  ‘What if Kara Mustafa had taken Vienna?’ I ask before we leave the café. The street is loud all around us, the hubbub of any western capital, the laughter of the women in the café, the sirens of police cars, the bells of the churches. ‘The sultans were already weak at that time, in the seventeenth century. As far as I know, Kara Mustafa had plans to set up a state of his own in central Europe. He might have ended up at war with the sultans himself. In any case, what makes a state strong is if justice reigns. In the latter Ottoman empire, there was less justice, and more corruption. In my view, that is why it fell apart. What makes Europe strong today is that it is just. It was God's will that the Turks did not capture Vienna. Would it look different if they had? For sure … the streets would not be so straight!’

  Downstairs, on the way out of the museum, stands the car in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were riding when they were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip and the Black Hand gang beside the Miljačka river in Sarajevo in June 1914. The car is painted dark green and has the name ‘Graf & Stift’ on the bonnet. The archduke's eggshell-blue tunic is stained with blood, and one side is cut open in an L-shape, presumably by physicians trying to save his life. But Princip could hardly miss his target at such close range. Ferdinand's bodyguards that day, if he had any, must have been masters of incompetence. Also on display are three of the Browning-Colt pistols used by the assassins, which match the fourth I saw in the Military Museum in Belgrade. There's a poignant photograph of Ferdinand, Sophie and their sons and daughter. The peculiar green-plumed feather hat the archduke was wearing that day is also on display. I try to imagine the moment when the children were told of the death of both their parents. The assassins would later express regret over the death of their mother. ‘We did not know that the late Franz Ferdinand was a father,’ one of the conspirators told the court. ‘We were greatly touched by the words he addressed to his wife, “Sophie, stay alive for our children.” We are anything you want – except criminals. In my name and in the name of my comrades, I ask the children of the late successor to the throne to forgive us. As for you, punish us according to your understanding. We are not criminals. We are honest people, animated by noble sentiments; we are idealists; we wanted to do good; we have loved our people; and we shall die for our ideals.’6 A portrait of Sophie, in oil pastels and chalk, and looking rather shy, stands on an easel next to the car. The way the reflection of the overhead light falls on the glass front of the picture gives the impression that she is wearing a golden crown. Her husband incurred the wrath of almost the entire Habsburg court for marrying ‘beneath himself’ – poor Sophie was a ‘mere Bohemian countess’. While the coffins containing their bodies were accorded full military honours by the army on their sad journey home by train to the coast, and thence by battleship to Trieste, followed by train to the South Station in Vienna, they were disposed of with a minimum of ceremony at Klein‐Pöchlarn beside the Danube. ‘One can hardly grasp the enormity of it,’ begins the front page article of the Reichspost for Monday 29 June 1914, beneath the headline ‘Heir to the Throne and his Wife Murdered’, ‘our archprince and heir to the throne, the man in whom the peoples of the Habsburg empire entrusted all their hopes, indeed their whole future, is no more.’

  The Viennese Police Academy is in Marokkanerstrasse (Moroccan street). I've arranged to meet Omar Al-Rawi, a Social Democratic deputy on the city council, who was born in Iraq, to watch the swearing in of 350 new police officers. A handful of them are Muslims, and several dozen are from national or religious minorities in Austria. Travelling from east to west on this river, I'm especially curious about the fate of ‘easterners’ when they reach western Europe.

  Lana Sehić stands at attention in her dark-blue uniform, her cap with red band and gold braid, silver stripes down the sides of her trousers, and the double-headed eagle on her left shoulder. She has deep brown eyes and red lips, and she's glowing with pride and happiness. Beside her thinner-necked, blonder, mostly blue-eyed colleagues, one might guess that she was not born in this corner of central Europe, but who would guess that she comes from Bosnia? ‘I was ten years old when the war broke out in Sarajevo. My father was killed in the first month – as a civilian, not a soldier. Soon after that we escaped in a convoy, with my mother. We went to Germany first, because my mother had relatives there. Then we came for a month to Austria to visit a family. They helped us stay here.’ She and her mother were among the 90,000 people from Bosnia who found temporary refuge in Austria in 1992. Now she feels more Austrian than Bosnian. She goes back once a year on the anniversary of her father's death, to see her grandmother – her last relative in Sarajevo. She was attracted to the police force by a friend's stories. There are a hundred thousand immigrants from the former Yugoslavia living in Vienna, and the fact she can speak their language makes her job as a policewoman easier. Looking down the list of names, there are several others from the former Yugoslavia. She is not a practising Muslim. ‘There are Serbs, Catholics and Bosniaks in our family, so my parents thought it would be better if we were brought up without religion.’

  As one of the most prominent members of the Muslim community in Austria, Omar Al-Rawi has a broad overview of both its diversity and its unity. ‘The first and most important experience for most Muslims when they come to Vienna is that they see their own religion in all its variety. Muslims can be very tolerant of Jewish and Christian people, but when it comes to their own community …’ he chuckles, ‘they have a lot of struggles with each other.’ Many confuse their ethnic and traditional ways of living with their faith, he says. Shi'ites and Sunnis from Iraq, Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia, staunch Sunnis from Turkey … ‘when they meet, a big discussion begins. They have to learn to be tolerant of each other.’ About half the Muslims in Austria are of Turkish origin, then comes a group from the former Yugoslavia, such as Lana. After them the Arabs, the Pakistanis, the Afghans and Iranians. ‘We also have a new, Russian-speaking Muslim community here – the Chechens. So we had to get hold of Korans in Russian translation.’ While the parents have often lost their religion, their children return to it, he has noticed. Since the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, and the bomb attacks in London and Madrid, state surveillance of the community has also visibly increased. ‘Muslims in western Europe have freedom of thought and of speech, and the imam can say anything he wants at Friday prayers, without fear that the security police will imprison him.’ But the attacks have led to what he sees as a state backlash. ‘They should differentiate more between being liberal in their faith, and radical in political ways. You can have strong feelings about the war in Iraq, or the situation of the Palestinians, without preaching hatred or intolerance … It would be interesting to compare this situation with that of Liberation Theology in Latin America. There were priests and preachers there who were very liberal in their theology, even going against the Pope and the Vatican, but at the same time very left wing. More attention should be paid to the same nuances in Islam in Europe. When Muslims here gather, and sing their songs, or quote verses from their poets, Austrians stare at them and wonder what is going on.’ Austrians use double standards towards Muslims, but Muslims are guilty of double standards towards one another, he says. He sees no contradiction between being a Social Democrat and a Muslim – the two ways of thinking fit very nicely together. And besides, ‘it's much safer to be a politician here than in my own country,’ he laughs.

  A month after my visit, Austria was finally due to open its labour markets to fellow European Union nationals from eastern Europe. ‘This is not going to be a dramatic topic … Because the East is already here,’ said Labour Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer. There were already 29,000 Hungarians, 17,000 Romanians and 16,000 Poles in Austria, he stated. He expected at most 25,000 more to arrive after 1 May 2012, looking for work. Those figures were disputed by Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the far-right Fr
eedom Party, who feared hundreds of thousands rather than just tens of thousands more people would arrive.

  The road out of Vienna to the north-west follows the tram tracks, out through the city towards the village of Nussdorf. It was here in September 1683 that the first clashes between the Saxon and Imperial Dragoons on the Austrian side and the Ottoman defenders took place. By nine in the morning the Austrians had taken Nussdorf. Meeting nothing more frightening than trams and buses, I head out of the city with the Danube clearly visible on my right, and down to the shore at Klosterneuburg. Legend has it that Duke Leopold III (1351–86) was walking in the vicinity with his wife when the wind off the river caught her veil and blew it into a tree.

  Looking up into the branches the emperor had a vision of the Virgin Mary, and ordered a monastery to be built on the spot. The town has grown up around it. A later story of Klosterneuburg concerns a certain rat-catcher – a slightly different version to that of the better ‐known Pied Piper of Hamelin.7 Here, too, a reward was offered by the city authorities to anyone who could rid the city of a plague of rats. Here, too, a piper appeared and led the rats out of the city, down to the river to drown. When the mayor refused to pay the agreed fee the piper refused the pittance in the purse thrown down at his feet. When he returned, some weeks later, he played a different tune, and all the children of Klosterneuburg followed him down to the Danube. There they boarded a strange, brightly painted, ship. They sailed away downstream and were never seen again – except for two children: one because he was deaf and had not heard the wonderful music; the other because she had gone back home to change her skirt.