District XV, Wien

I arrived in Vienna after a two day train journey across Europe. The owner of the apartment I’m staying in met me, explained how everything worked and handed over three keys, to the front door, the main door, and the letter box. He was friendly and welcoming and made me feel at home.

I cooked, wrote up notes, unpacked, arranged books, pens and notebooks on the desk. Then I sorted out photographs taken from the train as it travelled through European landscapes. The big agricultural fields of Flanders, the forests of the Ardennes, wide rivers sometimes with long barges full of raw materials, gentle hills with a village church surrounded by houses, as it might have been a thousand years ago.

Into Germany and smokestacks and factories and warehouses; it is the fourth largest manufacturing country in the world. And through the alps to Austria, and so to Wien, and this apartment.

It faces to an inner courtyard, full of large trees that still hold summer’s abundance of thick leaves that cause each branch and bough to drop in heavy heatwave lethargy. The earth spins further on, and each day now a new cohort of leaves is slightly changing colour and more gold, bronze, cornfield yellow and deep tan brown hues appear.

As my eyes adjust to these new surrounds, I notice a small set of books upon a shelf. The Arabian Nights, The Jungle Book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Macbeth.

I feel as if I have landed but not yet found my feet. It was a busy time before arriving here in Wien. Finishing off the first phase of research into Amsterdam, organising a memorial walk for a friend who died earlier this year, keeping up with the grim news of the history of these times.

Time rushed by and there didn’t seem to be enough of it to plan what I would do when I arrived. Now I’m here, it seems that subconsciously I didn’t want to plan too much; perhaps I didn’t want to plan at all. Instead to experience how time and place might develop if left to their own device, what potential there could be for accident and change, how serendipity may tangle things together.

There had been a vague idea that I would move rapidly across the city trying to take in everything at once. Instead I just explored in the detail the immediate domain. I walked the same streets at different times of day and with changing light and climate, aware of the ebb and flow of people in relation to work, schools, playtime, early morning and late at night.

From an anonymous crowd, individuals started to appear; a barber smoking a cigarette each morning, sat on a wooden chair outside his salon, the municipal workers cleaning the door handles and windows of the entrance way to the housing blocks. A small woman with a huge wheeled suitcase with three large bags a-top of it. A mass of matted hair, a thin blue anorak, black skirt, wild, hex like, pushing her load across Sechshauserstraße. The pedestrian light has changed to red long before she reaches the other side but the traffic waits.

Some of the first impressions of Rudolfsheim Fünfhaus, District XV.

There are scatterings of worn cobble stones from the age of hand production, scuffed buildings from the military occupations of the 1950s, older housing from the Biedermeier time, modern designs that seem to date more quickly, grand impositions from the Habsburg Empire.

The whole history of the city, of Europe can be traced within these streets. Each phase of fashion, style and taste leaves its mark; imperial eagles, the eyebrows above windows, concrete faces attached to bright facades, they introduce a note of doubt; the opening of a mouth that is about to scream.

On the way to buy some rolls for breakfast I discover, on the corner of Rauchfangkehrergasse and Heinikegasse, what I’ve really come to study, one of the Gemeindebau from the time of Red Vienna. Built in 1925 to a design by Anton Brenner it is a fascinating addition to the streets scape. It is modern, but not eccentric, powerful of mass, but not oppressive. It exudes a Bauhaus style which is done tautly and it holds its corner position well.

Brenner came from a modest background and as a young man went off to war. That ended with captured and time spent in a Russian prisoner of war camp. There he attended informal lectures in architecture and design by prisoners who had once taught these things in technical colleges and universities. Upon release he trained with Peter Behrens and Josef Frank. Both paid attention to technical foundations and the importance of learning from the past. Before the modern could be developed the classic had to be studied, understood and synthesized.

Brenner does this well. There is a quiet, subtle and powerful definition in this building. It announces the arrival of the modern in District XV based on quality and style. Brenner paid attention to the interior as well. The apartments included fitted cupboards, a considered floor plan and furniture design.

While I am looking at this, two maintenance workers from the municipal housing service are making small adjustments to the streetscape. It is noticeable how unrushed they are. They take time to notice things. They stand and measure the elements of the street with all their senses. It is a different approach to the penny pinching tick box delivery of the private sector.

Instead of performance monitoring indicators, they are being watched from a window by an elderly woman with an oblong face and square grey hair. She will be a better judge than a spreadsheet as to whether the street has been improved.

Several of the buildings have plaques upon the walls. These mark earlier buildings that were destroyed in the violence of the Second World War.

These local excursions were interspaced with the luxury of reading in the autumn afternoon. I selected Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and for hours followed the adventures of Captain Nemo, Professor Arronax, Conseil and Ned Land as The Nautilus explored the seas and oceans.

When it was time for light and air and space and food the local streets were explored once more. One day I walked along Gumpendorferstraße and discovered Antiquariat Bücher Ernst.

Everywhere are books. On the shelves in horizontal and vertical positions. In odd cracks between the shelves. On counters and tables and in boxes on the floor. In boxes on a table near the window are piles of Playboy magazine. A collection of old newspapers; posters declaring war, peace, revolution, strikes, a royal birth. The drama of the headlines seems reduced when collated here in the atmosphere of this timeless shop.

I don’t really know what I’m looking for and simply drift among the narrow spaces between the shelves. Something holds my attention. A pamphlet by Karl Donitz on Submarine Warfare. And then I notice there are rows of books from the 1930s and 1940s.

Children’s books which have been forced to express the ideas of the Nazi times. Indeed all books must now follow certain lines. Here is the totality of dictatorship in printed form, a power adjacent to the truncheon. As the books are opened the pages gasp a deep, traumatic sadness. These are not only books of time of war and murder, but books that helped to create the time of war and murder.

I talk to the book seller about some books I’m looking for. He guides to categories about the city, architecture, Marxism and social democracy. I select books and pamphlets, to gauge their look and feel and the measure of their weight as much as to explore their content. A copy of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Published in Vienna in 1919 and printed in the heavy type of High German.

It seems extraordinary, as if my hand when through a tear in the space time continuum and suddenly the shouts in the streets are news of the German Revolution and the declaration of the victory of socialism in the Vienna City Council.

The owner says he has a book in the store room I might like and disappears into dust and gloom; a mass of quarks and protons move around, having lain undisturbed for a thousand years or more. They reform and he reappears and lays a book upon the counter:

‘Album vom Rote Wien’.

This was published in 1947 and is a proud overview of the achievements of the Red Vienna period. Housing, kindergartens, open air swimming pools, libraries, dentists, clinics, no child will be born on newspaper in Vienna ever again.

We carefully turn the pages together, pointing to specific photographs, exchanging snippets of what we know. The content is in four languages; German, English, French and Russian. We assume it is aimed at the occupying forces of Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union (I check this later and that seems to be the case). It is not just what it says, but what it represents. It has become more than just a book; it is now also a historical object.

My hands rest upon the book, the shop worker rests his hands on the counter top. Time expands and contracts like a viscous substance.

A young man appears beside me. I point out a photograph or two to him. He opens a book with a purple cover he’s about to buy and shows me drawings by Albrecht Dürer.

I describe going to see an exhibition of the works of Hieronymus Bosch to mark the five hundred anniversary of his death. It brought together a great mass of his total work. It was weird and brilliant and the intensity of the drawings had a tremendous impact.

‘… there were drawings of people in the streets and villages and fields, and they looked like they might have been completed yesterday’. And how Bosch used a line here and there, and with ink and quill bought the people of the street to life.

“How long are you going to be in Vienna for?’ the shop man asks as he pays for his book.
‘I hope forever’, he replies, ‘I love it here’.
He’s just arrived from London, via New York and originates in San Francisco. It’s an unusual encounter.

I give him my card.

A couple of days later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m catching up with the adventures of The Nautilus and its voyage. I receive an email from that unexpected encounter inviting me to poetry, art and a gathering at a bookshop which refrains from being marked on maps. It’s only a short walk away, so perhaps that’s by chance as well.

A young woman is reading poetry from a book, the words drop into unusual spaces here and there. A piece of cloth, made up of painted squares is being held and while she speaks the squares are separated with scissors and lain out in a ragged edge line. People are sitting on the floor, on stone steps, low cushions on a bench. Pin points of light reveal books in stacks, towering in unlikely poses, accumulations of knowledge, manifestos of the revolutions yet to be, slogans on the walls, murals on the ceiling.

The phase changes. In one corner a young woman now reads a book. A film is being projected on a wall. There are bottles of wine and plates of food upon a table; a slice of quiche, someone breaks it into two, now it can be shared.

Conversations move like fractal patterns, the DNA helix made visible by words, the swirl of dark matter. All the ideas of human time are here, illuminated with intense and vibrant colour through the gifts that the Magi bring of frankincense, gold and myrrh. Sparkling threads weave together and the tapestry takes shape. The Book of Revelation described; gnosticism, mysticism, materialism, the teachings and the practice of the Sufis, Christ the prophet, Marx and the commodity.

The physical world become opaques and weightless, the Spirit is in the ascendancy. The words have formed streaming fireworks across the night sky. They burn out all too quickly and the embers fall to earth which becomes cold and dim again. Spirit dissolves.

It is as if the emergence from an opium dream. From mystic night the stone weight of the buildings become apparent once again. The darkness of the windows opposite, the way the street light touches the edges of the night, half flowing into unexpected corners, creating expressionistic shadows on the pavement. We have returned to the material world and are leaning against the wall of a Grunderzeit apartment block. Where have we been?

New music now jingle-jangles from the record player, it’s loud and vibrant, some European avant-garde. An index of people that might have been discordant seems to work when assembled in this way. A woman with a gold tooth, long hair, brown velvet dress, all bangles, straps and necklaces; she has a lot of presence.

A thick set man with a beard and wearing an fire-brick coloured sweater rolls and sways through the room. All his features are round, his face, his fingers, his giant belly. He moves with grace and and has a word or gesture for everyone. Before I know it, I’m having an effortless conversation with him in German, pulled towards his magnetism. He might be a facilitator of the secret integration.

Scenes shift as if in a dream, one is unaware of the continuity. More people appear, new introductions, a group of people from an unknown place, hesitation, caution. The world becomes a less trusting place; we must dig deeper into the social anarchism, work to find what might connect us.

‘…I’m a vegan’, she is saying.

‘I’m a hegan’, I reply, ‘I only eat male things. If I go to a restaurant and they offer lamb cutlets I ask whether they are from a ram or a ewe’.

She laughs and that conversation sparks along. As a group we side step into the Breughel gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and share stories of the paintings. The most popular is The Hunters in the Snow and examples are given of how it is not only a cultural object but has had widespread cultural influence.

The woman adds, ‘and a copy of it is on display in Solaris’. It’s important to feel alive at least once a day. That’s been the occasion.

I walk back through the night time streets busy with a lot of thinking, kept warm in the night time cool with a warm cloak of social magic. It is the colour of lapis lazuli and is flecked with golden thread. It was spun far in the east in workshops of wood and iron frames, carried by desert beasts across great sands, mountain ranges, wide rivers and flooded plains.

I’m not sure how it fell on me this night and it will soon be passed along again. And other words and other people will conjure up yet further dreams. For we must continue with these dreams. There lies the beginnings of our hope.