A Day in Vienna

As I walked along Sechshauser Straße to the local shops I noticed a Stolperstein in the pavement in memory of Salomon (Sigi) and Ottilie Reinstein. It did exactly what it is designed to do. It made me stop and think. I stood there for some time looking at the stone and the door and the building and the street.

Imagining the army trucks arriving, the SS and Gestapo in the street, troops with machine guns and rifles. People being pushed and punched and humiliated as they were forced from their homes and driven to collection centres. Their last views of the street; the Jugendstil buildings, the school with the Habsburg ornamentation. Happy memories dissolved in terror.

It is likely that Ottilie and Sigi were part of Wien Transport 3, one of five deportation transports from the city in October 1941. Each contained around 1,000 Jewish people. They were first deported to the Łódź Ghetto and then to Chełmno were they where probably murdered in mobile gas vans.

It is only now a memory and yet it seems so close and real. And that if we reach out a hand it might take us back in time, and when we arrive at that past, hands may reach out to us, and pass a message through time and space; stop this from happening again.

I gently sweep away the debris from the street that covers their memorial. The light now seems sharper, the day more vivid as I continue on my way.

In the large Billa Plus supermarket a woman loud in voice and dress appears behind me in the queue. She carries a plant so large it almost hides her. She points to a pile of biscuit boxes and makes a remark in German that I don’t quite catch. Noticing my hesitation she switches to English and explains that the biscuits look so fancy they could be used as Christmas decorations. I tell her that I’m trying to learn German but Christmas decorations are not yet in my vocabulary.

She loudly replies, ‘Elizabeth, the wife of the Emperor could only speak three languages. French, English and High Viennese’, and adds, ‘high – hoch Viennese – is unlike any other language’.

I’m not sure I’ve heard this version but I have come across the local working class accents which are gravelly, full of bass notes, with strong intonation and spoken deeply and with deliberation. I have encountered this language in the local bakers, on the tram when I offered an elderly man my seat, in the community centres when I have been exploring the housing of the Red Vienna time.

After Billa Plus, I go to Denns Biomarkt. They offer different things. Billa is better for bratwurst and large packets of Manner biscuits; Denns is my choice for potatoes, apples, yoghurt and things that I want to be fresh and organic. The potatoes are yellow and when cooked they don’t blacken when drained of water. Sometimes I eat them with bratwurst and sauerkraut and other times with pickled herring and salat.

The packaging on the yoghurt jars claim that it is farm (as opposed to factory) produced. It is cleverly done and it convinces me. I imagine an Alpine farm with mountains rising in the distance and freshly painted grass and healthy people cavorting towards the pine forests. Each morning I add a spoon or two to a bowl of granola and chopped up apple.

I arrive at the till at exactly the same time as two women wearing jilbabs who insist with smiles and movements of their hands that I should go in front of them.

The woman at the till wears a hijab and is helpful and friendly. On the first night I arrived in Vienna she helped me by counting out the exact change from the coins I held in my hand. Today she speaks to me in English for the first time. I continue to reply in German, and she smiles, sort of to herself.

The area around the till and conveyor belt she works at is a single space but there are two separate dimensions. One of these is the sphere that she is in, her workplace, where she sells her labour and helps turn the commodities into money; the bags of potatoes, pots of jam, bottles of juice, bars of soap.

The other sphere is where the customer stands, that’s where I am right now, and I hand over my money and it’s transformed into commodities. What should be a relationship between people, becomes a relationship between things.

Still we try. She asks if I want the receipt and wishes me Schönen tag.

On the way back from the shops I consider the workplaces I’ve encountered in Vienna over the past couple of weeks. Shops, supermarkets, trams, U and S-Bahn trains and stations, art galleries, museums, the dental teaching hospital, opera house, bars, restaurants, market stalls at the Naschmarkt.

And then the places where I’ve seen people working. On the streets repairing roads, collecting rubbish, sweeping up litter, delivering letters, parcels and food. Construction sites, the municipal housing estates – maintenance workers, community development workers, cleaners. Anonymous office blocks full of software developers, accountants, project managers, IT support workers.

I walk past a shop doorway and inside I see an elderly man repairing clothes. He looks up momentarily with a garment in his worn and crinkly-skin hands. Next door a woman is selling flowers. The scent wafts into the street. And next to her are two young men. One is making pizzas and the other is slicing an inverted cone of meat with a long sharp knife.

I see no immediate evidence of factory production but everything that surrounds me and fills the city is factory produced. The vehicles on the streets, the planes flying overhead, the cables and pipes and wires underground, the clothes that people wear, the great range of commodities in the shops, the materials used on the construction sites.

All the machines in use across Vienna; tills in shops, pile drivers on building sites, computers and monitors in offices, washing machines, fridges, air fryers, hand held electrical tools, electrical equipment. It is all made in factories and much of it will arrive by train and lorry at the Port of Vienna container terminal at Freudenauer Hafenstraße. It is trimodal, handling traffic arriving by rail, road and river. The names of the global shipping companies are painted on the steel containers; CMA CGM, Cosco, Evergreen, Hapag Lloyd, Maersk, MSC, ONE, and more.

Vienna was once a great manufacturing city, as were London, Paris, Berlin and many other European capitals, transformed by steam and electricity and the processes and techniques of mass production.

Over time a certain form of capital has flowed to where the concentrations of cheaper labour are. Rosa Luxemburg identified this process at the beginning of the 20th century and it continues to this day. And now at an international level there are more factories than ever before, more factory workers, greater accumulations of capital and an ever expanding mass of commodities.

I turn into the street in which I’m staying. There were once two slave labour camps here. I think one of them may have been located where the small local park now stands. Over 100,000 slave labourers were involved in the military production in and around Vienna during the Second World War, making Panzer tanks, aircraft, artillery pieces, components for guns and army vehicles. The slavery, arrests, deportations and murders have left pockets of distressed energy.

In the park today, on the side of an apartment block, the mural of a young woman.

Back into the apartment, unpacking the shopping, tidying up, wash the dishes, listen to the radio news in German. It’s mid morning and I make tea, put some biscuits on a plate, pick up The Red Vienna Sourcebook and read debates from the 1920s about the relative merits and disadvantages of tower blocks, apartment buildings, terraced housing and garden cities.

Then I create a hand-made map of the Floridsdorf area to mark out the Gemeindebau of the Red Vienna period.

I was once taken on a guided tour of the area by a local resident who has an ancestry of relatives once active in the socialist movement of Vienna. Two of his friends accompanied us. A shop steward in one of the largest car factories in Germany, and a psychiatrist who had worked with Viennese survivors of the Holocaust.

Our guide showed us the fire station which fought for three days against the fascists, the railway line where the fascists brought up a train with cannon on it and started shelling the workers’ housing. ‘And along this street’, he said, pointing to an imaginary line on the ground, ‘they pulled a machine gun and then started shooting down this road’. And there we were, standing on the very corner.

Then he explained the history of a relation who was one of the last people to leave the barricades in the district in February 1934.

‘He went home and changed from his factory overalls into his best suit’ (the workers fought in their work clothes), ‘put on a red tie, and a red rose in the lapel of his suit and put his head into the gas oven’.
There was a long pause.

‘And an hour later, he thought, ‘why am I not dead?’.

And then he realised that in the street fighting all the windows of his flat had been blown out and the gas had been replaced with the circulation of fresh air.
This relative survived the fascists, air raids, the Russian invasion, military occupation and lived into his late eighties.

We went for lunch, ate well and drank beer. That was a different day in Vienna but still vivid in my memories.

Now it’s past mid-day and time to go out into the world. I have no plan as such, instead a yearning to just move through the city on a whim, turning a corner when the time feels right, spontaneously jumping on a tram to see where it will take me, walking through the galleries of antiquity in the Kunsthistorisches Museum for the immediate sense impressions that this will bring.

As I walk along the street I notice bookcases in the doorway of an empty shop. They are full of free books and magazines and on the ground are boxes of commodity-image-objects from another time. A cable for a long lost technology, the wheel of a pram, a doll that lacks an arm.

One of the books is by a well-known author from the 1930s. It’s in good condition and worth about 40 euros on the second hand book market. It feels better that I leave it for someone local, a down at heel book seller or a local communist activist. It belongs here in Vienna, an object from the radical past that might help to build a radical future.

I jump on the first tram that comes along, the 52 heading towards the Parliament and Volkstheatre. It rattles and rolls through District XV towards Westbahnhof. There’s an IKEA here, a portal to the world of global production that so often just seems to be a grey shadow in the background.

I sometimes go there to look at the labels of where all the commodities are made; Japan, China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, USA, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Peru, Romania, Poland, Morocco, Tunisia and many countries in-between.

This mass of commodities are all expressions of the exploitation of labour, the accumulation of capital, the flow of money, the output of a global working class based in factories, workshops, ports and transport systems.

Obviously IKEA wasn’t built as a laboratory to study Marx’s Capital but I can’t think of many better places to do so.

It’s possible to eat cheaply there too, perhaps Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, peas, gravy and cranberry sauce. It tastes exactly the same in Stockholm, Paris, Vienna and Brent Cross, London.

This level of standardisation is quite a thing to organise. A million data points are needed, fibre optic cables, satellite systems, microchips smaller than a pin head, food processing on an industrial scale, the exact mixtures of ingredients and flavourings, precise temperatures.

There’s something of this world in Capital too.

Today I stay on the tram 52 until it reaches the Parliament building and all the passengers are instructed to leave by an automated electronic voice. I will walk along the Ringstraße, a vast boulevard conjured up in the imagination of Emperor Franz Josef 1 after the Revolution of 1848 and taking near fifty years to complete.

It is easy to get lost in the Ringstraße, both physically and emotionally. The Parliament building is in the classical style to represent something to do with the forums of antiquity; the City Hall is in the Gothic style to suggest the democracy of the city burghers.

For some reason I have always imagined the Parliament and City Hall as being separated by huge distances in time and space. The City Hall in the centre of the city, the Parliament building far away from the city in a mountain stronghold of the Christian Socials. I was genuinely taken aback to discover they are next to each other. It made me completely re-think what I understand of the relationship between the socialist city council and the right wing national government in the 1920s.

I visit the Wien Museum and look at the exhibitions of photographs of a Vienna from a different age, the unreachable impossibility of the past. In the bookshop I notice Das Rote Wien 1919 – 1934. It’s a telephone directory size and contains large numbers of photographs I have never seen before.

Women studying to become secretaries, the modern interior of a bright, newly opened school, Sigmund and Anna Freud, propaganda posters denouncing poverty, proud images of the municipal housing which would re-house 200,000 people from slums into well built apartments with inside toilets, running water, supported by kindergartens play areas, mother and baby clinics, dentists, shops and pubs and much more.

A photograph of a demonstration in the city in 1930 with a great contingent of young people from Czechoslovakia; they are so vibrant and look so optimistic and enthusiastic.

I walk back into the air and the sounds of the city. The ringing of bells, the murmur of the crowds around the circus in the Rathaus square.

Outside the Parliament building there is shouting and a clamour. Those who marched for Red Vienna are now joined with people who are fighting racism, and in support of the people of Palestine.

I put my ear to the ground, like in those old fashioned films when people used this as a way to hear the rumbling of approaching trains. There are sounds of huge crowds in Paris and Madrid, people marching in the streets for better education, against the eviction of an 87 year old disabled woman; their voices are echoed in the Italian ports were dockers are planning more strikes against the sending of arms to Israel.

A young woman in this crowd wearing a hijab holds a sign up, ‘This is my identity’. Another holds a placard that states ‘Stop the Genocide’. The demonstration is young, feisty, global; for peace and unity and against war and hate.

Words are being turned around in new ways on the streets of France and Spain; educate, agitate, organise. These words are falling from the sky describing how French workers are defending the school students from the violence of the police. They are landing amongst the huge crowds in Spain who now declare for a general strike. They are landing among the demonstrators for peace and unity in Vienna.

I cross the Ringstraße to the Volksgarten. It’s full of people and I find a bench and close my eyes and listen to the sound of the conversations, bubbling away in the global village.

Outside the classical temple a large crowd of students assemble to have their photograph taken. There are several attempts but the best shot is when all the phones are put down and the photography session seems to be over.

A young man in the centre of the group who is very much alive makes a joke and the girl with the long hair next to him bursts into laughter and her hair swirls in a great arc and everyone is clapping and even the shy looking girl joins in.

No one captured it on film, but I wonder if that’s the image which will endure.

A large man with a gaggle of kids and a couple of adult women in tow walks past me as I sit on the bench. He shrugs his shoulders, points at them all and says, ‘familie’. Perhaps a descendant from The Good Soldier Švejk or a character from the cinema of the Czech New Wave.

A woman with blue trousers and yellow shoes and big sun glasses lies back on a bench with peeling green paint and absorbs the sun.

When I rise again to the surface of the day I read Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts. These pages cover the practical changes in how Judith and the Head of Holofernes are depicted in Western art. The story of Judith is an allegory of how those who lack power can defeat a much stronger enemy. Her sword represents justice, virtue and the triumph of good against evil. Panofsky teases out the elements of meaning, ideas, content, form, imagery and story.

The sun burns surrounded by fiery angels.

I walk towards the Kunsthistorisches Museum for the late night Thursday viewing. As the afternoon fades into evening the galleries start to fill with people who really want to be there. Some stand in seclusion on their own, others in small groups of two or three; all are glued to the paintings. Reading the stories they contain, interpreting the allegory and icons, studying the painters’ techniques and use of colour, form and imagery.

We are all gathering in the evening twilight, dressed in long cloaks with ermine trim, we have books by Erasmus in our pockets and wish to study the enigmatic worlds of Jan Massys and Albrecht Dürer. Back in time we go to the world of Hans Memling and Jan Gossaert; look how the dagger has been applied, already the flesh turns green.

I am pulled by the magnetic energy of a higher power towards the painting Judith with the head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, painted around 1530.

Judith holds the sword that represents virtue, courage and resistance. It will slay the oppressors and liberate the oppressed. Valour and virtue will conquer despotic power.

She steps out of the painting and on to the floor of the gallery and holds the sword aloft, prepared to fight for justice once again.

Where are the armies of the people that might follow this call?