Bella Ciao in Margaretenstraße

There is a large window in the apartment I’m staying in which faces south. I leave the blinds up and early in the morning light appears from the rising sun. It starts with a deep crimson line and slowly brightens into yellow, gold and orange with a pink tinge. And then it’s daylight.

I walk to Rodaun and catch the number 60 tram and read the second essay in Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts. It covers the changes in expressions of the human body, landscape, subjects, objects. How pictorial arts changed from the planar style of the Egyptians, through the capture of images by medieval monks in illuminated manuscripts to the three dimensional imagery of forms in the Renaissance.

If I read Panofsky correctly, Egyptian imagery is one dimensional because those depicted could only be objects. The characters had no subjectivity. And therefore these changes in expression are partly driven by the emergence of the human subject as a source of study. Humanity becoming itself. There are millennia of oppression and it continues still.

I select words and phrases to put into the pocket of my shirt. I will take them out and turn them over as I walk the streets; harmonistic cosmology, microcosmography.

The tram stops at the Hietzing U-Bahn station and a crowd of people leave and another crowd of people get on. On the U-Bahn towards Heiligenstadt a man steps into the carriage and starts playing Bella ciao on an accordion and then sings along.

There’s a changing atmosphere. Bella ciao is being sung on the streets again. By the thousands upon thousands of students and young people on the streets of France. Their teachers and local workers have linked arms to surround them and to try to prevent the riot police attacking them.

Thousands upon thousands are on the streets of India. Half a million march in Madrid, the same number on the streets of Italy, weeks of protests continue in Albania, thousands protest in Belgium, thousands upon thousands take to the streets of Argentina. They all confront the power of capital.

The busker walks through the carriage with his cup; many hands contribute.

The screen is a flat representation through which are shown three-dimensional moving images. A young girl in Gaza, no older than ten years has her arm amputated without an anaesthetic. A girl of six is inside a car asking for help. Can’t the world hear? Can’t anything be done?

With so many guns and planes and bombs and tanks can’t some army save her? A woman journalist is badly beaten by masked illegal settlers. They bulldoze the olive trees and smash up the homes and burn the cars of the Palestinian farmers.

More and more the protests and demonstrations fly the Palestinian flag.

If the rulers of the world won’t act, then the people must.

I leave the train at Kettenbrückengasse and step into the ebb and flow of the crowds in the Naschmarkt. Here is a collage of reality, the commodity-image-objects that shone so bright on the production lines and conveyor belts, consumed and done, the colours washed out and sun drenched, the edges worn, the metal rusted, the cloth torn, the paper brittle, the wood rotted, the books foxed and musty and the words now faded.

Watches stolen from the corpses in the last days of the street fighting, gold teeth in boxes, a portrait of an Emperor the world forgot. Avant garde music from a tape-cassette machine. Gas masks, gas canisters, bullet cases, photographic albums with the haunting ghosts of another time.

Boxes of postcards ordered by country and region. District XIX of Wien, the Balkans, Russland. St Petersburg of the Tsars and knout, a private palace, gardens in early polychromatic colours.

Postcards from the First World War. On one side, bucolic images of soldiers in a wood with full-leaf trees and singing birds. They wear well pressed uniforms and sit around a table full of food and wine. On the other side of the postcard official condolences to a mother; a picture of a body, the uniform is now covered in blood, the head blown off. No one remembers now what that war was all about.

Black and white photographs from Ukraine. Some of them are voyeuristic pseudo-anthropology; Ukrainian peasants as the Untermenschen, men with unwashed and uncombed hair, naked children with pot-belly malnutrition, women in garish poses who grin with mouths that lack teeth.

Dehumanization is the first phase. Once people are stripped of their humanity then they can be marched towards the abattoirs.

I am searching for clues, anything from that time and place. I look at the postcards carefully and turn them over trying to read the addresses and the faint hand written script from long ago. But all they show are villages burning and people hanging everywhere. Forced to dig their own graves before being massacred with machine guns.

My grandparents were from Ukraine. Might I find something here about their lives? My grandfather was taken from his home and shot in the street by a Nazi officer. Whether my father witnessed this I do not know. He only told me this story once, in great distress.

This took place during the first scorched earth assault. When the Red Army eventually counter-attacked the second scorched earth was implemented. My grandmother and two aunts, for the crime of being Ukrainian under Nazi occupation were sent to the Gulag. They were released in 1961.

I posses a single photograph of my grandmother, taken when she was elderly, sitting on a wooden chair in a garden, holding a flower. Apart from this there are no other physical objects which connects us.

There are gold and silver chains hanging from the hand of a wooden puppet, diamond rings flash fire in the sunbeams, a sword, a dagger, medals that are of no use once the hero’s gone; a man is walking through the market with a stuffed deer’s head in a box. The sun on the asphalt of the ground, the stalls, all the world is here and all the trinkets left behind, the liquid science of reality.

It’s easy to leave the crowded market to find streets with empty pavements and closed doors and shutters across the windows. Lemon coloured leaves have fallen from the trees. A shop with nothing left to sell. It closed when the occupying powers withdrew their tanks and planes.

In the empty street a jogger rushes past wearing a sweatshirt that bears the slogan, ‘getting deals done’. A real estate developer, property speculator, land hoarder, volume house builder, crypto-currency dealer. He operates in prediction markets, making bets on wars, where the next hyper-sonic missile will strike. He is a cypher for the profits of war.

I walk along the Linke Wienzeile to find the building that was once the offices of the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts. It’s still there, the rooftop statues covered in thick cloth to protect them from the building site below.

And then along Pilgramgasse to Margaretenplatz. It’s an echo of a favourite walk, and now it’s changed. New shops appear, posters advertising rock and roll, the way the buildings slant has changed; the people now flow from east to west.

I’ve been thinking about walking along Margaretenstraße for some days. There was once a temporary bookshop along here, an individual selling off part of their collection. It was small but had a good selection of books, in the way a well curated bookshop has. I found a book with a photograph of a nude woman on the cover although her head could not be seen. I didn’t buy it at the time, nor make a note of who wrote it or what the title was. I just remember the cover. And I can’t remember where the bookshop was.

Why didn’t I buy the book? Was I being prudish? The content was engaging. I read some sentences and paragraphs while holding it in my hand inside the shop. The words were magnetic in a way that only reading in a bookshop can be.

Was it a dream? Did I dream about the book, and the shop, and that afternoon of another year? The memory has the vividness of a dream-memory that feels more acute than life itself.

A woman is taking a photograph of some posters that have just been pasted to the window of an empty shop front. I stop so I don’t get in her way.

From somewhere far away I hear a woman’s voice, it’s the woman who was taking the photograph. The image has been captured, she’s smiling and thanking me for waiting. It feels like I’m stepping back into my body. In the moment of the photograph being taken I had been travelling on an astral plane. It was strange to be back inside my body.

Time stops.

I feel the loss of motion. A snapshot, a picture postcard, a frozen moment; the entire universe ceases to move. Everything is primed and ready to crash together. In that frozen moment a gap appeared and through that gap was the year 1941 and total war. Everywhere was terror.

Into a shop that sells this and that; old books, vintage clothes, wedding rings and corsets, films that have never been seen. I buy a single tarot card. The fate it reads unknown.

Each side street creates its own sight lines, passages to antiquity, the whole history of the world. Habsburg pomp, ceremony and swords, a raging fashion for Baroque, a Biedermeier interlude, soldiers lives within the trenches untold stories, revolutions in the east, revolutions in the streets, workers’ councils, barricades, deportations, mass murder, air raids, military occupation.