The Italian Decade and the New Vienna
Fyvel, T.R.
Traveler's Notebook —3 The Italian Decade and the New Vienna By T. R. Fyvel MILAN IN MOURNING: The nylon shirt rinsed the previous night and hung to dry over the hotel-room basin has become not...
...Theaters, motion picture houses, and most of television and radio T. R. Fyvel recently spent more than a month traveling on the Continent...
...An hour or so later the trickle of cars and pedestrians suddenly quickens again and before long the night life of Milan is again flowing in full spate...
...Today the municipality of Vienna is again under Socialist control, but under the present unchanging Austrian twoparty coalition this means little more than the British Labor party majority on the London City Council...
...After all, Austria was between the wars a seething intellectual caldron of all Europe's conflicts...
...The amputation of Italy's colonies with defeat in war (or was it defeat...
...For days the newspapers carried almost nothing but Vatican news...
...A story goes that on one occasion he dressed in the uniform of a Russian major to collect money due him from a theater manager, which the man paid with shaking knees...
...The first instruction of the Swiss is: "Now don't be so servile, don't go running to the Russians every time they whistle...
...Milan went into official mourning...
...But you Austrians also have plenty of Alps...
...I found more biting wit at the Marietta Bar Cabaret, whose star artist, Helmut Qualtinger, is a satirist of astonishing versatility...
...he was due at a television rehearsal...
...In popular culture, the espresso bar has already made inroads into the territories of the Viennese cafe and the English pub...
...The evening I arrived, Pope Pius died...
...Germain de Pres...
...typewriter industry...
...A prominent joke in the show at the Simpli is that the Austrians, having become permanent neutrals, must now learn how to be Swiss: how, for instance, to hold a nuclear disarmament conference—for if this can be done in Geneva, why not in Vienna, too...
...Having first taught Hollywood all it needed to know about social realism, the postwar Italian film industry has next proceeded to outdo it even in glamour and fabulous movie queens...
...I can still, myself, recall the heartbreak of the February days of 1934 when the Socialist workers of Vienna, defending their apartment blocks against the troops of a clerical government, were defeated and crushed and their leaders executed...
...Having said this, he had to go...
...The previous evening I had still been in St...
...But alongside the queue, newspaper vendors were shouting themselves hoarse, publicizing their extra-edition headlines: "American Rocket on the Way to the Moon...
...In Vienna, since the departure of the Russians and the proclamation of Austrian neutrality, one can imagine perhaps more easily than elsewhere that the whole of Europe this side of the Iron Curtain may be entering upon a long period of material advance without much history or politics, as in the decade that followed 1948...
...Around eight o'clock all is suddenly quiet...
...Young men all over Europe are taking to Italian-style shirts, shoes and haircuts...
...Now in the morning sunshine I looked from my hotel window at the brashly colored new skyscrapers of Milan, round which pulsated the noisy life of this fast-growing Italian city...
...might have been mourned as a blow in 1945, yet through this very loss the Italians now saw themselves promoted in the all-important Afro-Asian eyes to the front rank of those enlightened Europeans who understand the spirit of the age...
...This is his final report...
...I asked Qualtinger whether the present peaceful Austrian scene lacked targets for his sharp satire...
...VIENNA WITHOUT PAST: In the Austrian newspapers, whose reduced format and editorialized news pages did little to recall the days when Vienna once boasted the best-known journalists of the Continent, the brief wonder of the American moon-rocket sounded muted, almost like a feuilleton...
...An Italian friend, an economist and Anglophile, told me that whatever they might claim in public, in their hearts few realistic Italians hankered for any return to a quasi-big power past...
...There was always some local scandal under Austria's static two-party rule...
...These were, of course, not the same targets for political satire as in the stirring old days, Qualtinger admitted, but then what could one do about this...
...his first two articles appeared in the issues of December 22 and December 29...
...One scene therefore shows an Austrian headwaiter being instructed in this art by his Swiss colleague...
...Unhampered by conflicts like those of Britain in the Middle East and France in Algeria, Italian enterpreneurs have been introducing and pushing forward their trade in Asia and Africa at a rate which has surprised even themselves...
...Take motorization: with their darting little Fiats and motor scooters the Italians turned it into a new delight and it is an Italian designer like Pin in Farina who is today "styling" both the British businessman's Austin and the American businessman's Cadillac...
...About six in the evening half of the city's population seems carried in a torrent toward the squares, arcades, chocolate shops, espresso and super-espresso bars in the old city center—to drink coffee or those colored Italian aperitifs which seem hardly alcoholic, to meet, to display themselves, to chatter...
...Indeed, with his base in London, Paris or New York rather than Vienna, I could well imagine him a world figure...
...The busy Milanese, it seemed to me, flowed in the same undiminished tempo into their cafes and bars and out again...
...One piece of news I brought from London amused my friend greatly...
...The apartments in the Karl Marx Hof, once a model of Socialist housing, whose architecture now looks a little dated, are again occupied by trade unionists and trade-union and party functionaries...
...Not altogether, he thought...
...The green spaces around the buildings already have the quiet look of old gardens...
...What matter that the Iron Curtain is only 20 miles away...
...Set against the traffic-choked new Vienna which has been rebuilt partly with American aid, the Hapsburg decor of Hofburg and Heldenplatz seems already more remote in time than the Napoleonic pomp in present-day Paris...
...Even the mood of the closer past is hard to recapture...
...In literature, the writings of Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia and Carlo Levi have struck a distinct new note...
...It is said that Italian designs have even invaded the vast U.S...
...During this time Italy, unlike Britain and France, has been in the happy position of having no political history, or scarcely any...
...But now you tell me that English working-class youths, the Teddy Boys, have adopted Italian dress, that shops catering to them carry the inscription 'Italian style' and that these youths form bands and even carry stilettos—this seems hardly believable!'' Seriously, I thought, the astonishing impact of Italian style on international culture is a striking aspect of Italy's current non-big-power era...
...The Italians have certainly taken to that "Americanization" of life which weighs down so heavily on central Europe and has transformed it with playful ease...
...While this may or may not be the American century, in Europe this seems certainly the Italian decade—and we could decidedly have done worse...
...Qualtinger also looks back on a stormy past...
...To the remarkably well-dressed youngsters to be seen everywhere, the events of 1934 are already dry bones of history—before their time and that of Marlon Brando and jet aircraft...
...With its concentric layout round Dome, Scala and Castle, Milan really does seem to pulsate...
...there was Vienna's frantic new parking problem, pretentiousness at the Salzburg Festival, or the behavior of Austria's very obtrusive Teddy Boys, the HalbstarJcen...
...everybody is at home, eating...
...Traveler's Notebook —3 The Italian Decade and the New Vienna By T. R. Fyvel MILAN IN MOURNING: The nylon shirt rinsed the previous night and hung to dry over the hotel-room basin has become not only the badge of rapid air travel but the traveler's symbol of personal continuity...
...were shut down...
...THE ITALIAN DECADE: While in total industrial output Italy may still be well behind Britain, it has been insufficiently realized how steadily the buoyant industries of the Italian North have been narrowing the gap during the last ten years or so...
...In the field of movies, take the decisive Italian part in ending the domination of Hollywood...
...the echoing streets are deserted...
...That's all right for you Swiss—you live in an Alpine fortress...
...A last glimpse of the city on departing showed me the portals of the gray Dome draped in deep black while a queue of devout mourners filed in...
...After all recent shocks and convulsions, Austria in 1958 is more prosperous than ever before and at the same time it seems somehow cut off from previous history...
...But he left me pondering about the whole future of satire in an age in which there might be some subjects to be satirical about but really nothing to be satirical against...
...In 1945 there was an account to be settled with the Nazis, while during the Russian occupation he specialized in bold risks...
...Some echoes of the old Viennese satirical tradition can be heard in the cabarets...
...To be frank, while we have our admirers in England, we also knew that the British working classes liked to have their jokes about us...
...Yes—but on the wrong frontier...
...So why change from the delights of noninvolvement, no politics, no history, since this has suddenly also become the correct Western attitude for the second half of the 20th century...
Vol. 42 • January 1959 • No. 1
