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reaching plague proportions in the high season, even in this year of economic distress and political threat, with the ominous shadow of civil war spreading over nearby Croatia. The streets are a babel of all the tongues and dialects of the world—after the first hour or two you don’t register surprise at hearing a nasally Australian intonation expressing delight and astonishment or insisting that it’s not all that different after all from Melbourne.
    Vienna at the end of the twentieth century is a theme park par excellence; its citizens seem to have been carefully drilled to exhibit their culture and national characteristics (including their sneering disdain and contempt for foreigners). As recompense, it would seem, they may enjoy their traditional way of life in considerable affluence—animals in zoos are, after all, almost always well fed. Admittedly, other European cities are theme parks as well. In parts of London or Paris, Amsterdam or Rome it is often impossible to move for the waves of gawking sightseers jamming the footpaths, pedestrian malls and great civic spaces that once upon a time gave ample room for ladies and gentlemen of quality to stroll, to nod to each other in polite acknowledgment and to pursue the other civilised pleasures of the promenade. Life in those cities is obviously accompanied by the irritations of attempting to pursue an ordinary existence in the midst of the aimless wanderings of the jet-age ‘barbarians’. There are, nevertheless, some remnants of an everyday life left in those places—at timesgrumbling and disconsolate, it is true, when people find themselves incapable of travelling on the Metro or the Underground, yet an ordinary life, for all that. In Vienna everything and everyone seem to be elements of the decor in a gigantic, staged extravaganza.
    The place is, of course, wonderfully well maintained; in better shape, to be truthful, than Vienna’s own funfair, the Prater, which is looking decidedly grotty by comparison. The city is, nevertheless, just as much a place of illusions and even perhaps of cheap thrills, a bold pretence that this dead city is still vibrantly alive. There is no cogent reason for the existence of Vienna except as an essay in sentiment and nostalgia. In the patterns of late twentieth-century political, social and even perhaps cultural life Vienna and Austria are both irrelevant, both victims of a grand predicament.
    Austria’s predicament is that it has lost its Empire. The scope and style of Vienna are ridiculously inappropriate for its population of a few million. Its grandeur may have impressed the inhabitants of Kakania, perhaps dampening their envy and restlessness by the assertion that this was their city too, a part of their proud heritage. Yet Kakania has been dead for many years—only the outward signs of its existence remain in this city as reminders of a vanished world. The result is an ever-present yearning for the past and an ugly cultural xenophobia masked by a welcoming smile. Austrian nostalgia, the pursuit of
Gemütlichkeit
visible in the streets of contemporary Vienna, did not exist so blatantly in the days of the Empire, when this small duchy stood at the centre of a vast and polyglot conglomerate of often unruly subject peoples. The transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into the Austro-Hungarian by the adroit House of Habsburg ensured that Austria could continue to enjoy its essential centrality, its conviction that it, and it alone, represented the essence of ‘Europe’, having successfully resisted those anarchic waves of republicanism and liberalism that flooded over many other states of the continent. The history of Austria throughout the nineteenth century reveals a striving to maintain such an insistence in the face ofPrussian ambition and energy. The disintegration of the Habsburg world in the years leading up to the Great War, observed with such malicious relish by Robert Musil