A "Flakturm" or flack tower--symbol of post-war Vienna
I am reprising this post I wrote for BookPage blog earlier this year upon publication of the second novel in my Viennese Mystery series, Requiem in Vienna. It explains, in part, how I came to use Vienna as a setting for much of my fiction. Vienna of the 1960s and 1970s was a schizophrenic city: living in both the post-war and Cold War era.
It took me two, maybe three weeks to figure it out.
At first I thought it might be a shopkeeper I did occasional business with. That would explain why he looked so familiar. The butcher on Langegasse or the wine merchant in the Altstadt. He had the same general features: slight build, medium height, light brown hair and eyes, gray overcoat. Nothing stood out. A figure that blends into the background.
I would catch sight of him across the Josefstaedterstrasse on my way to the language institute where I taught; see his reflection in a store window on Graben and he would quickly turn away; pass by him leaving the Stadtbahn station, his back to me, his head buried in a day-old issue of the Kurier. Once I actually came upon him talking with my building portier, a guilty look on both their faces.
This was the Vienna of several decades ago. It was still the Cold War. Foreigners living in Vienna fit into a risk
Graham Greene made the giant Ferris wheel another symbol of post-war Vienna
category for the state police, anxious to protect Austria’s neutrality. It did not help that a childhood friend, also living in Vienna at the time, had become involved in a nationalist cause in Yugoslavia.
Still, until I discovered that I had my very own watcher, I had been living in another make-believe Vienna of schlagobers and Mozart. I had believed the tourist propaganda of the city of dreams and waltz.
My watcher stayed with me for over half a year, until I moved on for a time to Greece. Returning to Vienna the next fall, I no longer saw him or sensed his presence. But it was a wake up for me. I began to look at the underside of Vienna after the watcher; seeing the city as not only beautiful, but also treacherous. It is a vision that has remained with me, informing all of my writing about Vienna.
Yeah, indeed, Syd. Compounded by the fact that all Viennese are watchers, watching for the slightest hint of strangerness; frank staring, long past the point when ‘normal’ courtesy makes other great city dwellers look away. The stranger’s and/or the Vienna citizen’s paranoia creates a mutual feedback system. Weird, but intriguing.
In Paris, people check each other out subtly, but quickly return to their own more pressing problems, like the conversation at hand.
Provacative subject.
GV
Monsieur Vance,
I seem to recall a further apercu you made about Vienna–this from the 70s when you declared the city to be in the Moose Lodge stage of development. I cannot tell you how many times I have used that description (always with citation, mind you). The long stare is most definitely Vienna’s contribution to urban whackiness. Ah, for a bit of the Parisian flicker of curiosity right now. Thanks for the contribution, dear friend.
Hi Syd,
That was interesting!
Thank you so much for sending me a signed copy of THE EMPTY MIRROR, I’ll treasure it always.
You’re a great guy.
Susie
Glad you like the post, Susie–and hey! You were the lucky winner. Take care.
Do you ever plan to turn this and your other experience there into a modern thriller about Vienna?
Hey Allen,
Funny you ask. I just got off the phone with someone who thinks I should do just that. Well, not so much modern, but one set during the occupation–the Third Man days–what the Viennese refer to as the four-men-in-a-jeep era, with the Soviets, Americans, Brits, and French all occupying Austria and also jointly occupying Vienna, which was in the Soviet zone (like Berlin at the same time). Incredible years from a novelist’s point of view. I’ve already written a WWII thriller set in Vienna and Austria during 1942 (about a Viennese police inspector who tries to get the secret of the Final Solution to the allies); a second set during the occupation would make an exciting sequel.
Talk about a waste of time, but I suppose it gave jobs to hundreds of people. I haven’t traveled outside of the US much, but this sounds like a spy novel, doesn’t it? At least you know you were deemed important and dangerous enough to merit watching!
Barbara, it did indeed give employment. And it was very like a spy novel–I did not go into the details so much here, but there were tells all over the place–a lost glove, for example. Or seeming lost glove, that would be placed on the spike of a wrought iron fence in a different manner at regular intervals–signaling what? The glove was convenient to my flat; a hand-off signal between watchers? I thought it was paranoia at the time, but a spook acquaintance later disabused me of such an easy explanation.
Four Men in a Jeep is an excellent title for a spy novel.