The setting: Kärntner Strasse (Vienna’s Fifth Avenue). The time: this winter. The picture: prosperity. I am sitting in a Konditorei (a combination pastry shop-coffeehouse), and the atmosphere is as gemÜtlich as ever. (There is a satirical song which goes: “In Mitel Europa, before the war, things were perfect — nein, even better.”) The passing girls, dressed in their gray, tan, and darkblue conservatively cut suits, look as if they were afraid to wear minis. Some red-cheeked schoolboys and a few fat elderly burghers wearing feathers in their green felt hats are practicing their favorite leisure sport: window-shopping for pastries and cream tarts. Around me, as out of a Molnar comedy of the thirties, are sitting caricatures of Viennese couples and small groups sipping their afternoon mocha, or espresso, or Kleine-Braune, or one of the other dozen different types of coffee on which Viennese pride themselves. Everybody is talking, but at a leisurely, nonaggressive pace. There is little laughter, there is little excitement, there are absolutely no raised voices.

What are these prosperous, content-looking Austrians gossiping about? Vietnam? No. Certainly not. “The venison is more succulent this year,” I hear a portly gentleman pontificate behind me. To the right, three carbohydrate-filled women are expanding on the latest scandals about a certain soprano who is carrying on an affair with an actor at the Burgtheater who is also carrying on an affair with a countess in Salzburg who is also . . . This has been going on for the last half hour, and there seems to be no end to their chain letter. The only thing they have agreed upon in passing is that Damiani’s sets for the opera’s new performance of Don Giovanni are simply scandalous — and that it should never have been permitted to travel to Expo at Montreal.

“Ilapsburg . . . Esterhazy . . .”

In front of me, two men are talk– ing quietly, almost conspiratorially. I am only able to catch snatches of the conversation: “Hapsburg . . . Klaus [the chancellor] . . . Esterhazy . . . South Tyrol.” They are skimming over the names which have figured in Austrian political gossip during the past few months. Hapsburg? Well, the name of “His Majesty,” Otto Hapsburg, still stirs numerous monarchist souls in the Austrian capital.

Otto, now a balding, mustached, and slightly frail looking archduke in his mid-fifties, is the son of Charles, the last Hapsburg emperor. Otto’s family ruled for more than 600 years until Austria became a republic at the end of World War I and he was forced into exile. Outside Austria, Otto is regarded as one of the leading players in what people like to think of as an operetta state. Inside Austria, a full 25 percent of the people consider the fate of the Hapsburgs more important than association with the Common Market. This past summer, when Otto decided to come out of Bavarian seclusion for a whistle-stop tour of Austria, the general secretary of the ruling conservative People’s Party felt obliged to comment: “The republic is not up for discussion. Austria is a republic and wants to remain a republic.”

Borderline war

Not less ridiculous in appearance to the outside world, but far more worrisome to Austrians, is the tragic and complex problem of South Tyrol, known to the Italians as Alto-Adige. All summer long, the Italian-Austrian border was beset by incidents, with carabinieri shooting at Austrian customs control agents and South Tyrolean provocateurs attempting to dynamite trains and Italian border stations.

South Tyrol was transferred to Italy by the Treaty of St. Germainen-Laye in 1919 as its reward for having entered the war on the Allied side. The German-speaking Austrians, who outnumbered the Italians by 250,000 to 7000, bitterly protested this absorption into Italy and the transformation of their province into the Italian province of Bolzano. Soon all the administration became Italian, German was no longer taught in schools, and the German language was played down to the point of being obliterated from tombstones. After World War II, Austria and Italy agreed to set up an autonomous area in which the Germans would have full rights and would enjoy free passage to Austrian North Tyrol. However, the Italians circumvented the agreements in 1948, and by an act of gerrymandering, were able to turn the German majority into a minority in the much enlarged province of Trento. Ever since, there have been acts of terrorism in South Tyrol.

Under the Austrian State Treaty, Austria is neutral and cannot join any bloc or military alliance, but this does not prevent it from having self-defense forces, and these were patrolling the Italian border. As SAAB-105 jet trainers were flying overhead, Austrian Jaegerbattalions were manning the Alpine outposts. Meanwhile, protests, verbal notes, and memoranda were constantly passing between Rome and Vienna. Northern Italy in July seemed like a staging area for a major military operation, and rearchitects, engineers, writers, doctors, moviemakers, painters, and even composers leave Austria. They go to Germany, to France, England, or the United States where there is a greater acceptance of the unconventional.

This is not really so much a matter of earning a living as it is of finding a creative environment. There are a few young rebels, like the cartoonist Erich Sokol, who have made their peace with Austria by trying to combine the best of both worlds. Sokol earns his bread through illustrations for Playboy, and satisfies his conscience through brilliant political cartoons for a socialist newspaper in Vienna. He likes the pleasant, easygoing way of Viennese life. “I cannot see myself living anywhere else than in this slow Balkan capital,” says Sokol in a gently selfmocking tone. “The pressure of life in Chicago would kill me.”

The Austrian state provides sculptor Rolan Goeschel, thirty-five, with a magnificent studio for life but restricts his international recognition. Goeschel, a serious and Germanically intense artist, creates large wood laminations which he paints in primary red, yellow, and blue stripes. A sample of his recent work is now exhibited in Vienna’s Museum of the Twentieth Century. However, the conservative Austrian jury was unwilling this year to send his work to the Venice Biennale. For, while there is a lip-service feeling among Austrian cultural experts and selection committees that Austria must be in the avant-garde, there is a more dominant tendency to reject everything that does not fit the accepted mold. Figurative painter Georg Eisler, thirty-eight, one of the most talented representatives of his generation, finds that he must sell his paintings in Munich, Amsterdam, Zurich, and London. What sells in Vienna is the surrealist school, which finds acceptability in enlarging upon the dreams of Hieronymus Bosch.

Sokol, Goeschel, and Eisler all feel slightly isolated from Western “decadence,” but they like it this way. LSD is almost unknown in Vienna. There are no hippies or flower children to be seen in the streets. Pocket-book pornography is unheard of. Homosexuality is banned by law. Whereas an Allen Ginsberg passing through Prague causes a riot, in Vienna he would not even create a ripple. “It’s not that we’re blasé,” says Sokol, “it’s just that we are not with it.”

“The English disease”

Despite this treadmill of arrested development in the area of culture, Austria’s current economic development, while not dynamic, has not been stagnant either. The gross national product has doubled in the past decade, there has been a comparable increase in the standard of living, and in this country of just 7 million people there are close to a million cars on the streets. However, because of the mounting gap between imports and exports, there is talk of the “English disease”: the deficit this year in the balance of payments may reach $300 million. There has been a sharp drop in capital expenditure for industry, and there is no growth in industrial production.

Austria’s economy needs a heavy infusion of capital to develop an industrial sector which is far too heavily concentrated in basic materials such as iron, steel, wood, and aluminum, all of which have suffered from severe price competition and declining markets in the past few years.

However, the Austrians are not eager for West German capital. German business already controls an inordinately large share of Austria’s economic activity, and almost half of Austria’s imports come from West Germany. Austrian memories of the thirties are still too raw to permit any extension of German influence which would endanger national sovereignty, claims the foreign editor of Vienna’s daily, Kurrier, Dr. Hugo Portisch. And Common Market capital is almost unobtainable. Even associate membership has been secretly vetoed by France, and the Italians are in no rush to help as long as the South Tyrol question remains unsolved.

One of the difficulties facing both political parties in Austria today, and in particular the ruling conservatives, is the fact that 20 percent of the gross national product is going for social insurance. Austrian employees receive a generous children’s allowance, housing allowances, and a month bonus at Christmas in addition to a month of paid vacation. This paternalism is so infectious that everyone expects ever increasing bonuses. However, the real bite comes from the 700,000 people who are receiving pension checks this year. Austrian workers are content to receive slightly less in salary if they can guarantee their prospects of an early retirement in a little suburban house. Gemütlichkeit in the Grinzing pubs, beer-drinking, long vacations on the Black Sea, and the easygoing trade-union way of life ultimately are incompatible with rising expectations — especially in a country whose total work force is only 3.4 million people.

Kaffeeklatsch

In 1966 the conservative People’s Party won a clear parliamentary majority for the first time since 1945, and the twenty-year-old Red and Black coalition formed of the Socialists and the People’s Party came to an end. Austrians have had the opportunity to see that one-party rule changes very little. The budget deficit is in a greater tangle than ever. Chancellor Joseph Klaus, with his big-dimpled chin, gives the comforting impression of being a capable high-school principal, and there is plenty of Kaffeeklatsch about his Cabinet: a peculiar mix of youthful technocracy and old parochial wardbossism.

What is certain today is that the radicalism is going out of both parties. The ruling conservatives find that they can live quite nicely with nationalized industry; the socialist opposition under Bruno Kreisky has gradually been disassociating itself from Austro-Marxism. As for the very small Communist Party, it has been slipping in strength in every election since 1953, and because of its own internal strife and confusion, is even losing its gadfly role.

Because Austria’s immediate past has not exactly been filled with glory, there is a tendency among Austrians to look nostalgically backward to the era of Johann Strauss waltzes. This refusal to examine their own consciences (“It would be too painful,” says Josef Wechsberg) or to study the immediate past goes a long way to explain the limbo into which Austrians have placed Dr. Sigmund Freud today. Although an international psychoanalytic association placed a commemorative plaque on the middle-class apartment building on Bergasse in which Freud lived and worked for some three decades, there is hardly any other remembrance to be found in Vienna: there is no Freud Street, no Freud Place, no Freud statue. Austrians quite openly wonder why such a fuss is made over him. It’s not only that he was a Jew, but also that the ignorant masses still regard his success as that of a dirty old man. Far more attention is given today to graphology than to psychoanalysis in Vienna. Significantly, few Viennese artists or intellectuals consider themselves sufficiently disturbed to undergo analysis — even when they can afford it. Viennese don’t attempt to live with their problems; they try to suppress them in the beer gardens of Grinzing.

Nazi hangover

Americans have the general impression that Austria has a lot of fascists and anti-Semites. They are right: Austria may value its independence from Germany, but it too suffers from the Nazi hangover. Foreign minister Juju Toncic-Sorinj makes occasional vacuous declarations to pacify protests from abroad, but despite the fact that there are fewer than 12,000 Jews in Austria today, everyone is aware that antiSemitism exists here. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Eichmann tracker, says that all too many top members of both parties have guilty consciences about the past. “Both parties are chloroformed by the Nazis,” he claims from his Vienna office, and backs up his accusation with the statement that a full third of the Austrian judiciary was appointed by Nazis or has Nazi affiliations. Naturally, such judges are reluctant to sentence war criminals; they are even more reluctant to bring them to trial.

While the Nazis and the Nazi past are not subjects which one would ever hear discussed in coffee shops, neither are they basic political issues in Austria. However, the “neofascists are definitely on the rise,”says Ernst Winter, head of Vienna’s prestigious Diplomatic Academy. The reason is that at the end of World War II there were about 550,000 registered Nazis in Austria (actually, a higher percentage than existed in Germany) and far less than one percent of these were ever punished. For two decades, these Nazis kept quiet, but now they are beginning to flex their muscles. There are right-wing professors, for example, whose loyalty is still spiritually tied to the Third Reich and who lecture their students about the despised Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the “unproductive races.”

Youth on the right

Most Austrian youth groups, led by teachers who more often than not were exemplary Hitler Jugend, are exceptionally right-wing. In other Western countries, most of the youth are inclined toward socialism; in Austria, they are fiercely conservative.

Although Viennese youths may feel that American bombing in Vietnam is barbaric, less than 10 percent would go so far as to express such disapproval by joining an anti-Vietnam parade. These students view Americans as excessively wealthy, uncultured, and violent, but they are also blindly anti-Communist. Few of them really have any understanding or knowledge of the past few decades, and they share the view of their West German cousins that the real enemy in World War II was not the West but the East.

The Ring Freiheitlicher Studenten (RFS) is the type of student organization which exercises great appeal, but together with most camping and athletic groups, veterans organizations, and hunting clubs, it is dominated by neo-Nazis. The Austrian Turnenbund, for example, is a union of gymnastic societies whose 50,000 members are less concerned with physical exercise than with spreading pan-German venom. Such groups infect a public opinion which is traditionally narrow-minded and prone to nationalist

REPORT CONTRIRUTORS

Elizabeth B.Drew is theATLANTIC’SWashington-based editor.F. Yorick Blumenfeld has beenNEWSWEEK’SVienna correspondent: he now writes forNEWSWEEKin New York. Mary Ellen Leary is a longtime California political reporter. Joseph Lelyveld covers India for the New YorkTIMES.

diseases. The Anschluss may be dead, but the psychic denazification of Austria has yet to come. This can readily be seen by reading the Austrian press.

The most informative paper in Austria today, Die Presse, has made it a policy consistently to underplay Austrian war crimes trials. Its editorial staff, like so many Austrian bodies, is politically compromised by the past. About the only enterprising and oppositional publications in Austria today are Gunther Nenning’s Neues Forum (the Austrian equivalent of Encounter, it disassociated itself from the Congress for Cultural Freedom a few years ago) and Die WochePresse (This Week), a small circulation weekly which appeals primarily to the Viennese intelligentsia. The rest of the Austrian press is far too dependent for its foreign coverage on German correspondents and German press agencies. The mediocrity is so prevalent, in fact, that even the Communists are unable to publish a truly provocative sheet.

Neutral on paper

When the waltz with fascism will end, no one knows, but only foreigners seem to take it seriously. The Austrians themselves are more concerned about their role in Europe. As a former center of an empire at the crossroads of the continent, Austrians have tried their best to play a mediating role between East and West. But over the last few years they have been bypassed in their efforts, says Dr. Wolfgang Kraus, president of the Austrian Society for Literature. Kraus is disturbed that Poles, Rumanians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians are no longer coming to Vienna to meet Western European intellectuals and businessmen; they go instead to Paris, Frankfurt, and London. Partly this is because Austria is neutral on paper, but not in spirit. Foreign Minister Toncic, like his predecessor Kreisky, stresses that Austria is most definitely committed to the political ideas of the West. Indeed, until such a time as the Iron Curtain dissolves and there is some political regrouping of the socialist states along the Danube, it is hard to see how Austria can be anything but what it is right now, a pleasant, easygoing byway with a generous Schlag topping.

—F. Yorick Blumenfeld