Eastern European Booklist

I’ve been drawing together some notes on Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria). I find myself with this list of books who have no common theme other than the fact that I liked them and they made a dent on me. This isn’t all that I’ve read on the subject—nor even all that I’ve learned from—but they are they ones that I most want to hang onto.

Istvan Bart, Hungary and the Hungarians (ISBN-10 9631348482; ISBN-13: 978-9631348484). Okay, this one is pretty obscure (why I’ve included the ISBNs). I found it in French (apparently the original language); Amazon lists an English version, but marks it “unavailable.” If anybody knows where I can get a copy, give me a headsup (update: thanks, Larry!). Meanwhile, it is the kind of thing the language-proud French do really well: a kind of “keyword encyclopedias” of Hungarian culture, via Hungarian language. I know zilch Hungarian and I haven’t the slightest intention of learning any. But this book is a wonderful browser and gives you at least the illusion that you are learning to penetrate a cultural fog.

Brigitte Hamman, Hitler’s Vienna. It’s a trip to go to the Vienna StaatsOper and to remember Hitler in attendance there (standing room) back when he was a rootless young nobody.

Jaroslav Hašek. The Good Soldier Švejk. Not a novel, really, but more a succession of sketches, like a Sunday funny paper, with the same character getting into predictably comical scrapes. Two interesting things about this book: one, it’s that rare novel that really tries to tell you something about “just people,” rather than sensitive, artistic types. The other is how popular it appears to remain among the Czechs. How many countries make a national hero out of a simpleton? I sometimes think that the Czech republic, tucked away in the remnants of the old Austrian Empire, on the edge of the old German Empire, can claim the appellation sometimes attributed to North Carolina—a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.

Franz Kafka, The Castle. I remember reading somewhere—Walker Percy?—that Kafka’s first readers (listeners?) in Prague used to collapse in helpless hilarity. Oh my God, they would say, he’s got us to the life (I’ve heard the same thing about Russians and Chekov). You can make sense out of Kafka anywhere, but somehow he makes more sense in Prague, once you understand a bit about his position as a German Jew in a Slav culture (for details, go here). And Prague actually has a castle. Bet they never told you that in your college lit class.

Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star. I’ve written about this before as one of the great holocaust survival memoirs. It’s also important for getting a sense of the past that Czechs still bear.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I am never quite sure whether to count Kundera as a Czech writer or a Parisian expat. I nominate this if for no other reason, then because of the film version—one of the best upscale blue movies ever. Man, the things that girl can do with a bowler hat …

John Lukacs, Budapest 1900. Still a fine book for getting a feel of Budapest itself, and more generally for the souring of nationalism at the end of the 19^th Century.

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March. For my money, Roth is the go-to guy for the look and feel of the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s amazing how fully realized a world he builds into this not-very-long novel, and how much it sticks with you.

Karl Tschuppik, The Reign of Emperor Francis Joseph, 1848-1916. Okay, another obscure entry. Tschuppik is hardly state-of-the-art history, but he gives you the feel of the old empire from the standpoint of someone who remembers it with wry nostalgia.

Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity. Others might suggest his non-fiction account, The World of Yesterday¸ which has its merits, but I think this novel does a better job of conveying the tang of the years leading up to World War I.

Plug

I’ve nattered on enough about Eastern Europe that I ought to put in a good word for the tour operator who honchoed us through so much of this. That would be:

H.A.T. Tours Ltd.

http://www.europeanoperatours.com/

Ignore “Ltd.,” it’s really a one-woman operation—that’s her on the web page. She’s an extraordinary person, a prodigy of energy and purpose who seems to do this sort of thing as if it were fun. She’s a wonderful traveling companion, and she has a remarkable life story of her own which I leave for her to tell.

Yes, I know what you are thinking about package tours; I have thought so myself, but believe me, at my age and in my general state of decay, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, so sweet as to leave your bags outside the door in the morning, and to see them reappear, as if by magic, in some distant city that night. Anyway, Grethe is in a class by herself. Give her a call and tell her Buce sent you.

Eastern Europe Restaurant Notes

From Eastern Europe, the best restaurants we found in Prague and Budapest, respectively:

• Czerny Kohut, Vojtesska 9, Prague, near the National Theatre. A true mom-and-pop operation with pop slaving over a hot stove while mom runs the front of the house. Thoughtful, carefully-prepared Czech fusion, if there is such a thing. They got an appreciative NYT review a few Sundays ago. They say that the review perked up business, but we were still able to get a table.

• Café Kor, V. Sas 17, Budapest. Tactful, attentive service (good wine suggestions) and yummy peasant food in an unprepossessing storefront. Lots of locals.

We also dined at Gundel (XIV Allakerti ut. 2, Budapest), no doubt the most famous restaurant in Budapest, if not in this part of the planet. You go more for atmosphere than for food, but Gundel probably exemplifies “old world charm” in the strict sense. Liveried waiters, carpets on the floor, and a string orchestra that looks like it got itself together for the funeral of the Archduke. Worth it for the experience. Korso in the Bristol Hotel, Mahlerstrasse 2,A-1010 Vienna, has some of the same atmosphere, though not quite so distinctive.

Arnheim Plots a Future for Soliman

Arnheim is fabulously wealthy. He is also a great man of letters. The State refused him a commission in the Austrian army because he was a Jew, and he is too grand to have served as an NCO. He has taken into his household a black boy named Soliman whom he first intends to educate, but later ignores. Just before the following excerpt, he has been soliloquizing in the presence of Soliman about the inadequacy of the old aristocracy, and the unsuitability of the new business class.

He wondered whether he had not allowed his mood to trick him into going too far. What if Soliman missed his master’s meaning and misunderstood the words to suggewst that he was entitled to think less highly of the upper classes? But something unexpected happened. Soliman had been fidgeting on his seat for a while and he now interrupted his master with a question.

“If you please, sir, Soliman asked, “about my father: Is he a king?”

Arnheim gave him a startled look. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, still somewhat sternly, though inwardly a little amused. But as he gazed at Soliman’s serious, almost resentful face, he found it touching. I pleased him to see he boy asking everything so seriously. He is a dimwit, he thought, and a really tragic case. Somehow he equated witlessness with a heavy feeling of well-being. In a gently didactic manner, he went on to give the boy something more of an answer to his question. “There is hardly any reason to assume that your father is a king. More likely he had a hard living to earn, because I found you in a troupe of jugglers on a beach.”

“How much did I cost?” Soliman persisted.

“My dear boy, how can you expect me to remember that today? It couldn’t have been much. But why worry about that now? We are born to create our own kingdom. Next year sometime I may let you take a commercial course, and then you could make a start as a trainee in one of our offices. Of course it will depend on you what you make of it, but I shall keep an eye on you. You might, for instance, aim at eventually representing our interests in places where the colored people already have some influence. We’d have to move with care, of course, but being a black man might turn out to have certain advantages for you. …

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities 593-4 (Vintage Paperback ed. 1995)

Opera Houses: "If This Was a Bordello..."

My friend Bob on the Prague State Opera House:

If this was a bordello, you’d say it was over the top.

But it’s not a bordello, it’s an opera house, built under the old Hapsburg Empire. So the fact that it looks like a perfumed cream cake is just par for the course. These delicacies are scattered all over the old Hapsburg domain. I hear there is one architect who did a bunch of them, but I haven’t been able to pin it down on Google just yet—I suspect I need to read Ruth Bereson’s The Operatic State (link) but at $120 a pop I think I will try to restrain myself.

Prague alone has three opera houses. At least two—the State Opera and the National Theatre—are cream cakes (I haven’t been inside the third). I particularly like the one—I think it is the National—with the bare-bosomed enameled caryatids who look like they are going to leap off the wall and chew your brains out during the encore. There’s an even better specimen down the road at Bratislava. Beyond that, exactly how far it extends is hard for me to say. Budapest seems a bit tame by comparison, but the basic design is similar. The Vienna SaatsOper has is own history, and its own garish ludicrosity but whether it is an imitation or an independent creation, I am not so sure. Meanwhile, I remember the first time I saw La Scala in Milan a number of years ago. I thought—right, Hapsburg—though whether I was thinking of the same thing or not, I can’t quite remember.

In a sense, I suppose it is impossible to say why this matters. It’s the music and the theatre that counts and when the lights are out (as the old saying goes) they all look the same. Still, there is something over-the-top absurd about all of opera. I guess it’s nice to know that the designers of the theatres understood themselves as part of the grand master plan.

Pix: The interior above is the Prague National Theatre, complete with caryatids. The exterior at left is Bratislava and hey, what can you expect from a Treo 650? For better photos of Prague opera houses, go here.

Cenacalo

I'm a sucker for Cenacalos (Cenacali?)--last suppers, one of the great themes of Renaissance art. I can take you to five in Firenze, two of them almost unvisited by tourists, one of them virtually unknown (here's a website that lists ten, not all in Firenze (link)). But it's hard to beat this one that I saw last week on the side of the church at Kottingbrunn, Austria. Note that it is theologically correct, with Judas second from the right (in white) wearing a silly grin. Note that Jesus has black hair, and this in Teutonic Austria. Maybe somebody explained to them that he was Jewish.

Mini-Review: Robert Musil

They say that Robert Musil is the Viennese Proust. But I’ve never heard anyone say that Marcel Proust is the Parisian Robert Musil. Perhaps no one dares: Musil’s Man Without Qualities surely ranks high on the list of unread masterpieces in world literature.

I took a copy of Volume 1 of the two-volume Vintage edition of MWQ on my Eastern European excursion. What with two transcontinental plane flights, plus a 12-hour layover in the Frankfurt hauptbanhof (don’t ask--but see at right) I actually got through it.

Short verdict: Proust it’s not. It’s a an absorbing, probably even an important, book. It bears some noteworthy similarities to Proust. Each is long; each was the lifework of an author, left incomplete at the author’s death, which perhaps would never have been completed even if the author had lived. Each attempts to comprehend the whole of a society. And perhaps most important, each is perhaps not so much a novel as a section of loosely-connected essays, individually inspired by commonplace incidents.

But from there on, the comparison becomes somewhat invidious. For Musil, whatever his merits, isn’t nearly the artist that Proust is. A good many of his mini-essays are suave and subtle. Others are simply too clever by half, and others just fall flat. Many of the best of them verge on the edge of satire; the worst come closer to sarcasm, and pretty leaden, at that.

Many have remarked on Musil’s skill at characterization. On this score, I’d say that Musil does offer one really remarkable achievement: his portrayal of Moosbrugger, the brute and half-wit who kills a prostitute. It’s the kind of challenge that puts a novelist on his mettle: the main point of someone like Moosbrugger is that he is inarticulate, and the novelist is last person in the world equipped to deal with the inarticulate. I suppose you could say that Russell Hoban did it in Riddley Walker. Or maybe the more apt comparison is what Tolstoi did with the wolf in War and Peace. Anway, it’s a rare achievement and for Musil, a real one.

Aside from that, I’d say he is less successful. The general is well realized, but again, pretty much on the level of satire. Soliman the black servant is original and arresting. Rachel the house maid is sympathetic and convincing, but not nearly so richly textured as Proust’s Françoise. Others, particularly the women, tend to blur.

A more devastating criticism addresses the larger matter of atmosphere. When you read Proust, you feel Paris (or at least a slice of it) in your blood and bones. I read about Musil’s Vienna partly in Vienna, and it still isn’t as vivid to me as Proust’s Paris can be.

I shouldn’t go overboard here. I tend to be distrustful and impatient with novels; unless they catch me fairly early, I tend to set them aside (I don’t really finish very many). I hung on here for 725 pages, so I must have found something worth my while. Indeed when I found something that impressed me, I noted a page number on the back flyleaf: I filled a page with those little chicken scratches: it looks like I have 40 or more.

But this is only the first 725 pages. There are another 400 pages in the other volume, not to mention a full 640 pages of “posthumous papers.” I don’t think I’ll be getting to all them real soon. On the other hand, if I’m ever again stuck in the Frankurt hauptbanhof…

Can We Join The Euro?

Seemed like every morning on our late European excursion, we were greeted with news of a new low for the dollar against the Euro. I guess what goes around comes around: I lived in London in 1976 (on an American paycheck) and as the pound fell against the dollar, I got a ten percent pay raise every month.

But it does prompt me to speculate: can’t we just join the Euro and be done with it.

Purists will cavil that we aren’t a member of the European Union, but I don’t see why that should be a deal-killer: if the Moldavans are on track to claw their way into the Union, you think there’d be some way to make room for us.

A more serious objection might be that we would have trouble with the fiscal integrity standards, given our penchant for spending money like drunken sailors, without showing any inclination to pay our debts. Remarkably, the fiscal standards seem to serve as a barrier to entry; apparently once you are in the Euro, you can do anything you damn please.

Short of actually joining, of course there is an easier route: we could simply peg our currency to the Euro. It’s a recognized strategy for weak or marginal economies, and I can’t think of any good reason why we shouldn’t take advantage.

Meanwhile, we came home to find we were holding about $140 worth of unconverted Eurocurrency. Our first impulse was annoyance. But then we reflected that we are due back in Europe again next may. The way things are going, this currency stash may turn out to be the best investment we’ve made this year.

Goodbye to the Pension

There is a Starbuck’s right catty-corner to the Vienna StaatsOper, just across the street from the Hotel Sacher, home of Sacher torte, the ultimate Viennese artery-buster. There was a terrific uproar when Starbuck’s moved into this coffee-shop city just a few years ago. But I suspect the battle is over, and that Starbuck’s has won. The best cup of coffee I had in Vienna last week was at Starbuck’s. And what with the reputation of the old coffee houses for inefficency and hauteur, I do not see how the old coffee houses can survive.

Just down the street from Starbuck’s is another anachronism: the Pension Suzanne, one of the last (I suspect) of the classic family-run “hotels.” If you are of a certain age and class, you spent a fair amount of your adult life in pensions. You will remember them tucked away opportunistically in the spare corners of office buildings, or upstairs over family restaurants, or otherwise eking out the limits of the available resources. They offered bed, sometimes breakfast, and varying degrees of hospitality and efficency. I remember convoying my family across Europe in the summer of ’74: we had to catch an early train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, so the proprietor left us a stack of sandwiches (cold cuts and cheese on white bread) on the front counter, in lieu of the morning meal. In ’85 and ’87, I enjoyed extended “teaching summers” in Rome, the guest of Norbert Pelzer on the second floor of the Villa Helene, upriver from the Piazza del Popolo: he was civil and courteous and he fielded inquiries in half a dozen languages, although he never did seem to be able to get the hot water right. Around the same time my daughter, by now an adult and living in Germany, furnished us with a German-language tour guide to Greece, which fitted us out with any number of similar accommodations, quirky, well-scrubbed and cheap.

I’ve mostly drifted upscale since then. Sometimes it was the client who paid, but advancing age and a modest increase in solvency have made their mark. The pensions have found their demographic niche contracting, just as the Barbarian horde of down-market motel chains moved in as competition.

I should romanticize too much: I’ve stayed in pensions that would give the willies to Norman Bates –lumpy mattresses, greasy wallpaper, paper-thin walls and neighbors who kept you awake with their spasms of ecstasy. There’s a reason why I tend to deploy my travel dollars elsewhere. But they’re part of the texture of the time. The Suzanne is, I suspect, one of the last of a dying breed, and travel will have lost a particular flavor without them. Besides, at a derisory $140 a night, how can you possibly go wrong?

Footnote(s) on upmarket hotels: We did stay at the Suzanne last week, although I admit we spent most of our jaunt in far more up-market digs--the kind of place where if you are not careful, you wind up spending $46 for a glass of OJ and a bowl of bircher museli. Just two quick.beefs about the upmarket segment. One, I guess others have remarked on it, but I still marvel at the fact that the more pricy the hotel, the more likely you are to be nickled-and-dimed (or Euroed-and-Kronered) to death with extra charges. And two, the upmarket segment has importated a particularly unattractive feature of the United States hotel trade: the accordion bill, which expands before your eyes. If a pension tells you the rate is 98 Euros, then 98 Euros is what you pay. If the hotel quotes you 250 Euros, then you can be pretty sure it will be 250 plus this tax and that tax, and just about any kind of fee the febrile imagination of the desk clerk can conjure into being.

Actually, that last may be only one beef in two parts, so here is another: the price of hotel laundry. I've paid less for a room in a pension than the price they charge you to clean a tee-shirt these days at an upscale hotel. At these prices, it would make sense to FedEx the stuff overnight from Budapest to Mumbai and let the locals down there beat it on the rocks.

Wonder What They'd Think of the Cell Phone

Regulations governing attendance at the Vienna Opera in 1897:

1. A canon (sic?) will be fired in the Imperial & Royal Arsenal at 5 p.m. daily as a signal to visitors to the Court Opera, that they should begin their preparations at home. On days when the performances commence at 6:30 p.m. the signal will be given at 4.30.
2. At 6 p.m. or 5.30, respectively, a second shot will give warning to ticket-holders who asre resident in the outer suburbs that their journey to the Court opera should now start. It has been arranged with Viennese householders that the concierges shall inform such tenasnts as intend to visit the Opera on that day as soon as the 6 p.m./ or 5.30 p.m. shot has been fired, and shall urge the such tenants to leave the house immediately.
3. As the tramway and omnibus system, particularly during the current pipe-laying operations, is exceptionally prone to involvement in traffic blocks and thus may cause ticket-holders in vast numbers to arrive late, all owners of season-tickets and ticket holders are obliged on their word of honour never to board one of the said vehicles to travel to the Opera once the above mentioned signal has sounded.

—Ruth Bereson, The Operatic State (2002)

As retrieved from Google books (link).

Eastern European Music: Executive Summary

Okay, so we’re back from Eastern Europe. It was a noisy excursion: 10 musical performances in 15 days, including eight operas in (let’s see) seven different venues, Probably the marquee item was a Tosca at the Vienna Staatsoper with Neil Shicoff as a dynamic Cavaradossi, at a ticket price about five times as great as we paid at Budapest, Prague or Bratislava. I'm not a red-hot Puccini fan (more of a Mozart man myself), and indeed, of Tosca, the long midsection where the title character offs the bad guy, is about enough for my taste, but this was, with qualification, a world-class production, well worth the price.

Five times as expensive as the rest. And five times as good? I wouldn’t go that far. Just a couple of nights before, we saw a Magic Flute in Budapest that was as cheerful and energetic as you could want—and in Hugarian, yet (a personal first). Back in Prague, we saw mostly-Czech casts in Czech theatres do Czech performances of Czech masterpieces – Janáček’s Jenůfa and Dvořák’s Rusalka—about as thorough a dose of the local culture as you’re likely to get. Also in Budapest, we saw Béla Bartók’s ballet, Wooden Prince, in the same city and I think maybe the same theatre as the one in which it was premiered.

Meanwhile in high-priced Vienna, we saw a Verdi Otello which, in spite of a superb Iago (Falk Struckmann), seemed never quite to jell. And over at the Vienna Philharmonic, we enjoyed superb acoustics to absorb what must have been the worst Beethoven Fifth Symphony we’ve ever heard, slack, sprawling and flaccid. “He conducts Beethoven as is if it were Brahms,” snarled Mrs. Buce, and it wasn’t a compliment. Wonderful hall, though. Insider tip: get seats near the back, in the parterre. Sound just caterwauls around you.

Coincidence or not: each of the two Vienna operas--Otello and Tosca--is a three-person show: in Otello, Otello, Iago and Desdemona; in Tosca, Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia. In the Vienna performances, in each of the two all three roles were at least adequately cast, but in each, it was the singing in title role was the weakest. Probably just coincidence.

In Bratislava, we saw a cruelly misbegotten Carmen¸ with a Don Jose who looked to be about 60 years old, and who was fighting the flu (his understudy must have been chewing shoe leather). There was a voice-over announcement at the beginning of the performance which we couldn’t understand, but they seemed to be saying “please excuse the tenor, he is all that we can afford on this lousy budget.”

Side note: am I missing something, or is every Eastern European opera house built next to a steam laundry? Seems there were clouds, or fog, or smoke, or some such, on the stage in about two thirds of all our performances. Can the singers really tolerate this stuff? What about their insurance carriers?

Another side note: I really want to say something about the weird Hapsburg elegance of these Eastern European opera houses but I need to do a bit of research first. Just in case I don’t get around to it—believe me, they are weirdly elegant.