Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 6: Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.
During my stay in Rome, a veteran Australian wanderer taught me a “wedding crasher” trick he claimed to have learned in Greece when not otherwise preoccupied with devouring skewers of souvlaki, cradling drams of ouzo, and ineffectually pursuing love near the Aegean (or was it beer?) beaches.
The Australian said that he had undertaken a careful study of tour groups.
Allow me to interject that Australians were fine teachers when it came to learning how to save money. They seldom departed Down Under for a European stay without remaining away for months, preferably years, often finding temporary employment with fellow Anglophones. Employed or not, every drachma, mark, pound and forint counted for them.
Not only that, but Australians were invariably friendly, easy-going and impossible to dislike, and they appeared to have been gifted with a cultural “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Hypothetically, an American or Englishman drunkenly urinating on a beloved civic monument would prompt protests, denunciations and immediate arrest, culminating with expulsion from the locale, and likely the entire country.
But if an Australian did the same, odds were that he’d be regarded as no more than an overly exuberant lad on holiday, soon to be merrily sharing drinks with the same policeman who’d misplaced the key to the jail cell housing the American or Englishman. At least this is the way it looked to the rest of us, who sensed that our own margin for “nationality error” was far slimmer.
I thought about the Australian when I saw the obligatory Vienna souvenir t-shirts: “There are no kangaroos in Austria.”
His strategy for frugality at museums and historical sites was based on the simple observation that while solo visitors (or pairs, or trios) typically bought tickets and were controlled individually, groups generally were ushered straight past the checkpoint as a unit; seeing as the group’s guide typically was busy with administrative tasks at entry, the counting of heads often became delayed until everyone was inside.
By waiting patiently in the shadows for an aggregation of fellow English speakers to arrive, solo travelers like us could artfully feign membership in the group, discretely sidling over to join the crowd just as it entered the site. Then, once safely inside, there’d be an artful detachment and the resumption of one’s individual identity, although still hovering close enough to hear the guide’s explanations in English.
After all, he added, what’s the worst that could happen? You’d be kicked out, and free to circle back later after the employees changed shifts, this time with an improved accent.
My opportunity to test the Australian’s group tip came at the Kaisergruft, the imperial crypt, where I merged seamlessly with a mass of New Zealanders and followed them down the stairs at a respectful distance of several yards to the ornate graves of the Habsburg dynasty rulers and their immediate families, which contained some, but not all, of their body parts, owing to the macabre custom of removing hearts and entrails for interment in selected churches elsewhere (presumably to mark imperial and ecclesiastical territories with near-canine precision).
When it came to obscure, arcane and obtuse rituals, no other royal house in Europe ever came within a country mile of the Habsburgs. It was at the Kaisergruft that I learned to my surprise that Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma, widow of Karl, the last Habsburg emperor, wasn’t yet dead. She was 93 years of age that summer of 1985; having witnessed the beginning of World War I, Zita would die only eight months prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
My mind was suitably blown.
There was another significant omission that day in the Kaisergruft. Absent from eternal duty in the Habsburg crypt was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the empire, whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo came three years after Zita’s and Karl’s wedding, and proved to be the impetus for a seismic, dynasty-toppling war.
From the moment I saw Vienna for the first time, stepping off the train from Venice into the slightly battered Sudbahnhof (now replaced by a space-age Hauptbahnhof), a steadily evolving fascination with the history of the Habsburgs kept percolating in the back of my mind. It was shaded mustard yellow and dark green in the fashion of the government buildings in the era preceding the Great War, and although I didn’t yet realize it, my subsequent travels would be similarly colored.
A get together with the Habsburgs, whether fact or fiction, brought me to Vienna, but there were may other reasons. For one, I was ready for immersion in classical Central European beer culture. I yearned for schnitzel, sausages, dumplings and the many vaguely Teutonic types of lager I’d read about in the beer writer Michael Jackson’s books.
Additionally, I harbored cultural bucket list expectations derived from essential texts like Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor, which tells the story of Crown Prince Rudolf’s 1889 murder-suicide pact with his mistress in Mayerling (where I subsequently paid a visit in 1997). Rudolf was Emperor Franz Joseph’s only son; his death shifted the imperial succession to the emperor’s nephew, Franz Ferdinand.
The Third Man with Orson Welles was viewed in preparation, and Strauss waltz cassettes duly queued up during preparatory sessions at home consuming an Austrian beer called Kaiser (available at Cut Rate Liquors). I imagined the old man with the mutton chop whiskers, Franz Joseph himself, would have approved. It was said he allowed himself a single beer each Sunday afternoon to unwind.
Kaiser was available in Vienna on draft, and I couldn’t help pondering its namesake, whose chronology was lengthy and eventful. Like Zita, Franz Joseph’s life spanned crazily disparate eras, from the immediate post-Napoleonic era to World War I. He became emperor in 1848 at the age of 18 and occupied the throne for 68 years, until his death at 86 in 1916.
In Austria-Hungary, obeisance to the emperor’s many-titled royal personage served to greater or lesser extent as the accepted bond between the empire’s many nationalities and their languages, customs, aspirations and diverse outlooks, with virtually every strain of the 19th and 20th century European experience eventually woven into the complex fabric of its capital.
Ironically, as Franz Joseph presided over the empire’s inexorable decadence and decline, Vienna experienced a blossoming of intellectual and cultural life, of which the loftier social classes weren’t always truly cognizant. These times are chronicled in another must-read book by Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914.
Among those with connections to the imperial capital city during those pre-war years were artists (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele) and musicians (Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg); academics and scholars (Sigmund Freud and his retinue); writers like Robert Musil and Karl Kraus; future world political figures (Adolf Hitler, Josip “Tito” Broz); radical Zionists (Theodor Herzl) and hyperbolic anti-Semites (Georg Ritter von Schönerer); brewing descendants of the pioneering lager master Anton Dreher (namesakes of the Italian lager we’d consumed in Pecetto); and not one, but two actors who bizarrely appeared on the 1960s American television show Hogan’s Heroes: John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter).
Banner came to Vienna from the Ukraine, but Askin was born in the capital nine years before Franz Joseph’s demise, and like Zita, he was living in 1985 (he died in 2005). The rest were ghosts, and they crowded into my thoughts during the four nights I slept at the Ruthensteiner, an unaffiliated youth hostel owned by a native of Vienna and a woman from Pittsburgh, who married after attending college together in the States, and catered to generations of backpackers.
The Ruthensteiner started operating in 1968, and it remains open for business in 2025; that’s 57 years, almost as long as Franz Joseph reigned as emperor. The price for a bunk bed in a male dorm room was the schilling equivalent of $6 during my stay in 1985. That’s how I managed to finish the trip under budget, and all it took was learning to tolerate mass snoring.
Four days was enough for an introductory overview of Vienna, an exposure that I expanded greatly in forthcoming years. I walked the Ringstrasse; took a bus out into the Vienna Woods; listened to classical music in the imperial gardens; and checked out the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There were visits to the Hofburg and Schönnbrunn palaces.
Once I hopped a morning train to Melk, a town on the Danube about 50 miles west of Vienna, and crossed off three objectives: first, a visit to the imposing Baroque abbey; then a hearty lunchtime meal of bauernschmaus (“peasant’s feast”), a mixed grill of pork, ham, sausages, sauerkraut, and dumplings; and finally a boat ride back downriver to Vienna. The evening ended with cheap local wine at the Turkish eatery a block down from the Ruthensteiner.
Another Viennese afternoon started with Serbian-style bean soup and draft Gold Fassl consumed at a dark, edgy Balkan tavern, then after a long walk, a huge meal of plate-sized schnitzel, potato salad and Zipfer beer came at the Schnitzelwirt Schmidt on Neubaugasse. The waiter asked if I’d save space by joining a table of Americans, who were students at Dayton University. It transpired that one had briefly been roommates with a high school basketball teammate of mine, and heads promptly exploded.
Coming to grips with the Habsburgs would require many more beverages and a few additional decades – most recently 2022, when I visited Emperor Karl’s burial place on the Portuguese island of Madeira, this coming soon after a 2019 journey to Trieste and a tour of Miramare, the chateau of ill-fated Mexican emperor Maximillian (brother of Franz Joseph), perched dramatically on the Adriatic.
Karl’s eldest son was Otto von Habsburg (1912 – 2011) is another link between old and new Habsburg. He spent the first half of his life renouncing any remaining claims on the throne, then became an advocate for European unity and a parliamentarian in the European Union. Otto didn’t even set foot in Austria until he was well into his 50s. As a student in Berlin, he had been invited to lunch by that poorly mannered Hitler fellow, and begged off.
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The Habsburg dynasty reigned in various European configurations and locales from the 1400s through its train-wreck finale in 1918, famously stockpiling its geographical components more adroitly through marriage than armed conflict, and eventually occupying a large chunk of Central Europe from the Alps to what is now Belarus and the Ukraine, and from Poland to the Adriatic.
The leveraging of wedding banquets seems preferable to the bloodshed of war, although this lesson was frequently forgotten during Franz Joseph’s reign, with the emperor losing most of the wars he entered.
Just after the American Civil War, one of these military defeats forced Franz Joseph to rebrand his realm as Austria-Hungary at the behest of the quarrelsome Hungarians, who sought greater autonomy for themselves and a freer hand in subjugating minorities in the lands Hungary controlled. Interestingly, Franz Ferdinand cultivated annoyance with his future Hungarian subjects, planning to thwart them some day by granting limited self-government to the empire’s Slavs.
As we’ve seen, Austria-Hungary’s varied ethnic groups, languages and religions were held together by force of habit and Franz Joseph’s personification of “divine right.” However, Franz Ferdinand was a wild card, and a complicated individual. In order to learn more about his life, I began with his death.
This brought me to Vienna’s military history museum (1), appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. Upon my arrival from Venice, and after a cursory stowing of gear at the Hostel Ruthensteiner (as well as a quick espresso), the Arsenal was my top priority. I also was ready for a lunchtime bite, and happily the museum boasted a small, efficient canteen operated by its citizen support arm.
An elderly, mustachioed gentleman manned the counter, serving fat local sausages with a roll and mustard, accompanied by the workingman’s Schwecator lager, all of it available at a very reasonable price. Restored to metabolic equilibrium, it was off to the exhibits.
First came the obligatory suits of armor and medieval skull-busters, followed by racks of muskets, Napoleonic-era uniforms and affiliated ephemera. Modern times drew steadily nearer, and then I spotted the relics that occasioned my visit: Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained tunic, the restored Gräf & Stift automobile in which he rode to his murder in Sarajevo in 1914, and numerous photographs taken before and after the assassination.
One of these images triggered a lasting obsession.
Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are seen exiting the town hall in Sarajevo. Twenty minutes later, both would be dead, dispatched by two improbably well-placed gunshots from the youthful and highly motivated terrorist Gavrilo Princip. But the royal visit to Sarajevo already had slipped the rails when this photo was taken.
The Archduke has come to us as a blunt, obnoxious, violent and generally unlikable human being, who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the flimsy rubric of “hunting.” But had Sigmund Freud been asked, the Viennese doctor surely would have pointed to deeper currents. While not exactly enlightened, Franz Ferdinand’s views on the future of the empire were out of sync with those of his uncle’s conservative coterie. He had his own ideas and advisers, and chafed at waiting his turn.
The most improbable aspect of Franz Ferdinand’s character is that he was a stubborn romantic, bucking the norms of his aristocratic class by falling (and remaining) madly in love with his wife, a woman of minor nobility declared by the hidebound royal court’s wedding officialdom as inadequately marriageable for a man of his esteemed position.
Franz Ferdinand snorted and married Sophie anyway, triggering drastic sanctions from his own family, among them being humiliatingly compelled to endure a morganatic marriage, thus renouncing the path of succession for his two young children, and explicitly acknowledging that Sophie could only rarely participate in the intensively choreographed trappings of Habsburg life.
The otherwise indefensibly temperamental Franz Ferdinand proved to be the very model of a loving family man at home, while at “work,” dynastic protocols were daily slights to be resented ― in effect, unceasing, insulting and mocking suggestions that his beloved did not exist as a person. Unsurprisingly, the Archduke nursed a smoldering grudge.
In the summer of 1914, Franz Ferdinand had the opportunity to attend military maneuvers in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a disputed region of mixed ethnicity once occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and recently annexed by Austria-Hungary to the growing dissatisfaction of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, where there existed a body of opinion that all Serbs should be united under Serbian rule (and especially those in Bosnia).
In such a highly charged atmosphere, the war games were viewed by some as a provocation, and Franz Ferdinand might easily have declined the trip, but among his reasons for persisting was that Bosnia-Herzegovina, as defined geographically by the royal court protocols so detested by the heir, was a territorial loophole, situated outside the reach of official etiquette, and allowing a pleasure trip on the Habsburgs’ groschen for both heir and spouse.
In short, he’d be able to treat his wife to perquisites otherwise denied her. No doubt he chortled at the turnabout as her servants began filling the trunks.
Concurrently, royal nuances meant nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators, who were being surreptitiously financed and trained by the Black Hand, a covert group of Serbian army officers. As Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo drew near, a motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted their ambush, managing to position themselves as planned as Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade rolled into the city.
The terrorists’ discipline immediately frayed, but Nedeljko Čabrinović kept his wits and tossed a bomb, which bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and ignited on the vehicle behind it, injuring a subaltern. Čabrinović sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into a knee-deep river; thwarted by the shallowness, he next tried to ingest poison that wasn’t poisonous enough.
Čabrinović was arrested, the remaining conspirators dissolved in panic, and Princip ― a true believer if ever there was ― adjourned to a coffee house to morosely consider his next move. Expecting the police to arrive soon, Princip kept his handgun tucked into his pocket, stewing over the group’s failure.
Meanwhile, in spite of the failed assassination attempt and numerous warnings that security was little better than a coin toss, the supremely agitated Archduke elected to make his planned visit to town hall, where his epic “heads will roll” tirade ended only after soothing words from Sophie.
That photo again: the bedecked Austrian royal, veins still visibly bulging, descending the stairs while minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in grainy black and white; a bad moon is rising, and everyone present sees it…except the two prospective victims.
Confusingly, the motorcade resumed. Franz Ferdinand’s staff altered the return route in an effort to make it safer, and naturally these changes were not communicated to the Gräf & Stift’s driver, who made a wrong turn and was told to halt and back up, bringing the car to a stopping position in the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now coincidentally emerged to find his original target, seated stock still 20 feet away, thrust into the crosshairs as surely as the thousands of animals chased past his Bohemian hunting stand.
Princip fired two shots, each inexplicably perfect, and within moments both the royals were gone.
Franz Ferdinand’s death provided the ideal excuse for European hawks of all stripes to settle their accounts, hence this map at The Onion.
Franz Joseph regarded all of it as God’s will, willingly initiating the fighting and turning the empire’s management over to the general staff. Six weeks after the Archduke’s death, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia as a heavy favorite, but was mauled repeatedly by the outnumbered Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. The consequences of what followed are still being felt more than a century later.
In retrospect, ironies abound. Franz Ferdinand was an unsympathetic and disagreeable figure, yet a genuine love for his wife was in part responsible for their passing. Moreover, he understood perfectly what so many of his royal compatriots did not: Austria-Hungary was not at all equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Counter-intuitively, the first casualty of war might well have been a prime voice for peace.
Soon millions of others would perish, although initially, only two funerals were required. In death as in life, Franz Ferdinand went his own cantankerous way, albeit with a little “help” from his royal family. His final resting place is not among the Habsburg brood within the Kaisergruft because protocols forbade the presence of Sophie in the crypt. Consequently, the Archduke’s testament stipulated the couple’s burial at his family’s castle in Artstetten, a half-day’s bicycle ride up the Danube from Vienna.
I learned a lot in 1985, but was just getting to know Franz Ferdinand’s story. By 2003, I’d visited several other places connected to him: his opulent “hunting lodge” in Benešov, Czech Republic; the official archducal residence at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; and Sarajevo itself, where I followed the motorcade route and reflected at the scene of the crime.
In 2003 while bicycling the Danube route, my friend Bob and I rode up the heights where the Artstetten castle lies. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the museum attendant that in 1985, I’d come to Vienna looking for Franz Ferdinand, only to find he wasn’t in the Kaisergruft, and for this reason I’d finally made it to Artstetten in order to pay my respects.
I knew there was no public access to the crypt, and I didn’t ask the attendant for favors. As I turned to leave, she cleared her throat, smiled, and slid a key across the counter to me. It unlocked the gate, and I had my moments alone with Franz Ferdinand and Sophie after all, feeling as if a long quest had finally been completed.
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Vienna has never ceased to resonate in my mind, and today the city’s nostalgic aura persists amid all the modern twists, the Viennese having brilliantly updated their city. The results are noteworthy. In 2024, the annual index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of British publication The Economist, declared Vienna the “world’s most livable” city for a third consecutive year.
The EIU assesses “livability” through a rating system of zero to 100 looking at 30 factors, all under one of five categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Each factor is designated acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.
For me, Vienna’s pre-WWI history remains a tangible facet of the city’s charm despite the great distance between those lives and ours, and as such, I’m led to Stefan Zweig, an otherwise forgotten literary figure whose life and writings inspired director Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which conjured an fictionalized version of Zweig’s pre-WWI epoch. Appropriately, the film expresses nostalgia for things that didn’t exist in the first place.
Zweig was barely known to me 40 years ago, but I’m older now, and his life and work merit a brief survey in closing this installment.
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Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears any longer in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, writing poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries that were translated into many languages. He often is remembered for his sad end. Displaced and disoriented by Nazi Germany’s virulent anti-Semitism, Zweig fled Europe with his wife and drifted from place to place, eventually settling in Brazil, where in 1942 they committed suicide together.
Among Zweig’s final achievements was to complete his autobiography, originally intended to be called Three Lives in reference to three distinct periods in the author’s life: Birth and youth to the commencement of World War I; war’s end through the advent of the Anschluss (Austria’s forced absorption into Nazi Germany); and finally, exile. The proposed title is chilling in light of Zweig’s sad demise, as apparently he was unable to envision a fourth life.
Given the eventual choice of The World of Yesterday as the autobiography’s title, the “yesterday” of most relevance to me is the period immediately preceding WW I. How did a seemingly “progressive” continent erupt into an orgiastic bloodletting?
Zweig witnessed the implosion at age 33. His explanation of war’s arrival was standard; societal dynamism had been constrained by top-heavy monarchies, leading to what can only be described as boredom on the part of the masses ignorant of war’s true costs. When the pent-up demand for action of some (or any) sort was released by inbred royal dunderheads scheming at the top of the societal pyramid, disaster was the result.
Reading Zweig’s pre-war ruminations is an exercise in the elegiac. He lovingly documented what seemed to be the permanently settled, hierarchical, and ordered nature of Viennese society (something obviously easier to enjoy nearer the heap’s top than its bottom); exalted the abundant theatrical and musical scenes (which fascinated ordinary citizens like sports do now); and dwelled on his favorite cafés, newspapers and luminaries. Life passed, and change seemed unlikely.
Zweig’s own background was conspicuously absent the “poor waif makes good” storyline; in fact, his family was well to do. His autobiography conveyed his assumptions as a young adult that the world was a rosy place for bright young men like him, who were far too busy sifting through limitless opportunities to be much concerned with messy everyday disagreements.
This halcyon life would not have been altogether noteworthy if not for one small point: Zweig was Jewish. Granted, he practiced the faith largely in the breach, but pre-war Vienna is famed as the place where modern anti-Semitism in Europe found its (non)-intellectual vocabulary and violent bearings.
None other than Adolf Hitler spent parts of this same period in Vienna, curating his feverish dysfunction in a boarding house not far from Zweig’s cultured block, and cultivating the aura of a starving, persecuted landscape artist even though a small inheritance guaranteed regular meals. Hitler took formative ideological cues from anti-Semitic Viennese mayor Karl Lueger’s cult of personality, and formulated megalomania.
What’s more, while the multi-ethnic and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire functioned with charm and aplomb at the top, working class Vienna by most contemporary accounts was a seething reflection of the empire’s considerable intramural tensions.
Zweig noticed little of it. Rather, in his view the citizenry was united in respect for the elderly Franz Joseph, and even Lueger wasn’t always such a bad chap; after all, Vienna’s relative smallness meant that pastoral picnics or woodland strolls always awaited at the end of the tram line.
It seemed to Zweig that everyone was happy in his or her place, and in retrospect he emerges as a prodigy, forever insulated from the unseemly. School was a lark, and everything he touched turned to gold. He churned out flawless copy, and everyone wanted some of it. He wrote plays, coyly hinted at their presumed existence, and immediate offers to stage them would come from directors at renowned theaters.
And so the protagonist embarked upon a lifetime filled with success, gracious living and happenstance brushes with the famous and powerful. Zweig eerily presaged Leonard Zelig, title character of Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary, by means of invariably positioning himself where someone famous was about to stumble past and ask for directions to the loo, or maybe bum a cigarette.
It all went swimmingly until 1914. The onset of World War I brought wrenching transition to Stefan Zweig’s comfortable, predictable Viennese world. One lifetime passed, and another began, although it started calmly enough.
Zweig observed that the death of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo barely caused a stir in his own social milieu, and why would it? The heir was an objectionable sort, cranky and scowling, and nowhere near as trustworthy and seemly as the ancient whiskered Emperor and other reliable royal court figures like Karl, the new and youthful figurehead in waiting.
Significantly, Zweig took his summer holiday in 1914 in the Low Countries. He was right there, observing, as the first troop trains rolled past the beach. Mobilization of the European armies was in full swing, according to secret plans written to the rhythm of railway timetables. Zweig barely made it back to the dual monarchy before national borders slammed shut, ending a blissful era of peace, prosperity and passport-free travel.
Back home in Vienna, Zweig found himself too old to enlist and too young to die. He nabbed a sinecure in the library of a military branch, all the while continuing to write, to be published and to be paid as the world around him fell to pieces, never doubting that he’d somehow come out ahead.
Zweig’s eyes finally were opened (or so he reported) during a public relations junket to the Eastern Front, during which he nominally performed his official duties by subcontracting them to local Jewish “factors,” later sharing a filthy hospital train with the dying flower of Austro-Hungarian manhood in route from the hellish frontlines to lovely Budapest, where the juxtaposition of death’s gritty squalor and the Hungarian capital’s seemingly unchanged quaint urban ambience moved him greatly.
Reckoning he’d seen enough, and despairing of the increasingly impoverished atmosphere in Vienna, Zweig elected to wait out the global conflict in Zurich (neutral Switzerland), from which V.I. Lenin was being escorted back home by the Germans to foment revolution. The writer continued to ruminate, addressing his own work as well as the nature of art and culture in wartime, and how the international fraternity of writers was as conflicted by patriotism as the workers abandoning the socialist international. Zweig expressed pain and disappointment, and kept his eyes on the clock.
When the Great War concluded with the collapse of the Central Powers (I’m prepared to argue that it continued to be fought until the 1990s in Yugoslavia), Zweig departed Zurich for Salzburg in the rump state of Austria, pausing at the border to observe ex-emperor Karl headed for exile in the opposite direction. Those first few post-war months were hard, then things got easier, for a little while, but across the mountains from Zweig’s home in Salzburg, somewhere in Bavaria, was the man who’d soon be taking it away from all the Jews, Zweig included.
It was that other previous resident of Vienna, Hitler.
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Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 8: At long last, glorious beer in Salzburg and Munich.
(1) You may recall my meeting with an older couple named Butz while on the boat from Greece to Italy. They debarked at Corfu. Two weeks later, I rounded a corner at the military museum and almost knocked them over.
And, a song that was heard often around this time.
