The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [46]
The Emperor Franz Josef had ordered a modern metropolis to be created around Vienna. The old medieval city walls were to be demolished, the old moats filled in and a great arc of new buildings, a city hall, a Parliament, an opera house, a theatre, museums and a university constructed. This Ring would have its back to the old city and would look out into the future. It would be a ring around Vienna of civic and cultural magnificence, an Athens, an ideal efflorescence of Prachtbauten – buildings of splendour.
These buildings would be of different architectural styles, but the ensemble would pull together all this heterogeneity into a whole, the grandest public space in Europe, a ring of parks and open spaces; the Heldenplatz, the Burggarten and the Volksgarten would be ornamented with statues celebrating the triumphs of music and poetry and drama.
To produce this spectacle meant colossal engineering works. For twenty years it was dust, dust, dust. Vienna, said the writer Karl Kraus, was being ‘demolished into a great city’.
All the Emperor’s citizens from one end of the Empire to the other – Magyars, Croats, Poles, Czechs, Jews from Galicia and Trieste, all the twelve nationalities, the six official languages, the five religions – would encounter this Kaiserlich-königlich, imperial and royal civilisation.
It works: I find that it is curiously difficult to stop on the Ring, with its endless deferred promise of a moment when you can see it all, together. This new street is not dominated by any one building; there is no crescendo towards a palace or a cathedral; but there is this constant triumphant pull along from one great aspect of civilised life to another. I keep thinking there will be one defining view through these bare winter trees, one framed moment glimpsed through my broken glasses. The wind sweeps me on.
I walk away from the university, built in its new Renaissance style, steps sweeping up to a great portico flanked by rows of arched windows, busts of scholars in every niche, classical sentinels on the rooftops, golden scrolls labelling anatomists, poets, philosophers.
I walk on past the Town Hall, fantasy Gothic, towards the bulk of the Opera, then past the museums and the Reichsrat, the Parliament, built by Theophilus Hansen, the architect of the moment. Hansen was a Dane who had made his name by studying classical archaeology in Athens and designing the Academy of Athens. Here, on the Ring, he built the Ringstrasse Palais for the Archduke Wilhelm, then the Musikverein, then the Academy of Fine Arts, then the Vienna Stock Exchange. And the Palais Ephrussi. He had won so many commissions by the 1880s that other architects suspected a conspiracy by Hansen and ‘his vassals . . . the Jews’.
It was no conspiracy. He was just very good at giving his clients what they wanted; his Reichsrat is one Greek detail after another. Birth of democracy, says the great portico. Protector of the city, says the statue of Athena. There is a little something everywhere you look to flatter the Viennese. There are chariots on the roof, I notice.
In fact, as I look up, I see figures everywhere against the sky.
On and on. It becomes a musical series of buildings, spaced with parks, punctuated by statues. It has a rhythm that suits its purpose. Ever since it was officially opened on 1st May 1865 with a procession by the Emperor and Empress, this had been a space for progresses, for display. The Hapsburg court lived according to Spanish court ceremonial, a severe code of ritual, and there were innumerable opportunities for complex court processions. And there was the daily marching of the City Regiment, and marches on major feast days of the Hungarian Guards, celebrations of the Imperial Birthday, jubilees, honour guards for the arrival of a Crown Princess, and funerals. All the guards had different uniforms: confections of sashes, fur trimmings and plumed hats and epaulettes. To be on the Vienna Ringstrasse was to be within earshot of a marching band, the drumming of feet. The Hapsburg regiments were the ‘best-dressed army in the