Every City Its Season

Gautam Patel

There are times in the lives of cities when the city seems suddenly to spawn great music, art, literature and architecture. At the turn of the 19th century, Vienna was such a place.

Decadence creeps stealthily into cities, often driven by demagogues and bigots, and Vienna was no exception for there was even in the earlier 1900’s, the menace of anti-Semitism: from 1905, it was the home of Adolf Hitler, the man who, three decades later, turned what was once the heart of an empire into a provincial backwater.

Two modern writers of historical fiction capture the soul of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist and a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry and at King’s College, London, is the author of the Lierbmann Papers series of historical fiction detective novels featuring Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt and his close friend and associate, Dr Max Liebermann. Liebermann is a young psychoanalyst, and a friend of Sigmund Freud, who appears in almost every one of the novels in the series. There is more to Tallis’s books than straightforward detective mystery. We see the many faces of Vienna at the zenith of its cultural pre-eminence and, too, its seamier, sleazier side of prostitutes and destitutes. There are wonderful descriptions of Vienna’s café culture (complete with loving descriptions of various coffees and pastries), but there is also the darker edge of an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism. Liebermann is, after all, Jewish and acutely aware of these undercurrents. In the latest novel in the series, Death and the Maiden (a reference to Schubert’s 1817 masterwork; Liebermann is an accomplished pianist and Rheinhardt a fine amateur baritone), the two protagonists meet Gustav Mahler, then the Director of the Vienna Court Opera. Classical music is soaked into these lives. It is for them, as Tallis says, “not so much a pleasure as a way of life.”

Requiem in Vienna is one of two detective novels by J Sydney Jones. Here too we meet Mahler, but we also meet one of the most colourful personalities of that age, Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel. The subject of a deliciously wicked song by the Harvard mathematician, Tom Lehrer, Alma Schindler was no stranger to scandal. She took as her husbands three of the greatest figures of the time: Gustav Mahler; the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the writer Franz Werfel, and had a legion of lovers and admirers as well (Klimt figured very early in her life).

Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel and her husbands
Alma Schindler	Gustav Mahler	Walter Gropius	Franz Werfel

The most intense evocation of the city, and the mapping of its decline, is in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, published posthumously after his suicide in 1942 near Rio. Zweig, famous for his novellas, including the near-perfect The Royal Game, was a native of Vienna, born in 1881 into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family. He first published at the age of 19. By the 1920’s and 1930’s he was world-famous. His circle included the who’s who of the time: Freud, Mahler, Toscanini, Rodin, Wells, Maxim Gorki, Joyce, Ravel, Strauss, Joseph Roth and Rilke. Romain Rolland was a close friend. His might have been a charmed life — he travelled a very great deal, including to India, and he had money — but WWI and its aftermath, and the rise of Nazism corrupted the Vienna he loved. He was himself persecuted, his books banned (and not easily available till fairly recently). Ultimately, before emigrating to England and then to Brazil, Zweig fled the city in disgust for a remote house near Salzburg. Shortly after, a man he did not then know took up residence nearby. The man’s name was Adolf Hitler.

The Bombay of the 1970’s and 1980’s in Pablo Bartholomew’s black and white photographs, now on show at the Sakshi Art Gallery, is almost unrecognisable. There are signboards in some of the images, but no hoardings obscure the buildings. We see city artefacts — steps, lamps — but most of all there are the city’s people, both famous and unknown. Some of the photographs are like those of mid-20th century Paris: a couple walking down a deserted curved lane between two buildings; a sudden downpour and the momentary scramble we all know so well. This is a Bombay — not Mumbai — lost to time. Bartholomew’s images evoke a city of an even earlier age: a Bombay of the 1950’s and 1960’s when young artists of the day, now all legends, came together to form the Progressive Artists Group, when film makers, writers, actors and theatre people were still driven by the idea of India. Delhi, too, must have been very like this. The deep contrasts of Bartholomew’s images show what we have lost: a once-bright confidence eroded by the despondency of mere hope.