Austria

Paddy’s first memorable stop-off point in Austria

Paddy ‘s visit would have taken place in early 1934. His description of the conversation at dinner with the old Count brings the ending of the Austrian Hungarian Empire into focus, a reminder of how the political, social and cultural world was undergoing truly undermining shifts, not unlike those we are experiencing

Paddy didn’t realise that he was walking into a civil war which started with an armed uprising in February 1934. After parting company with a sweet girl who gave him a present of a dozen eggs knotted into his handkerchief, he writes:

“The sooty and rain-pocked snow, banked along the pavements, showed in pale lines. Once or twice the beam of a searchlight moved beyond the roofs. The distant rumbling, interspersed with the crackle of small arms and a few continuous bursts, was unmistakably gunfire now. At another road block, I asked a policeman if there were a Jugendherberge in Vienna where I might sleep for the night. He conferred with a colleague: the Heilsarmee, they said, was the only place. I didn’t understand the word – something Army? – and I got in a muddle about their directions. One of them came along with me for a furlong or two. He knew Vienna as little as I did; he had only arrived from the country that afternoon; but he knocked at lighted windows and asked the way. When I asked him whether it were a Nazi putsch, he said no, not this time: in fact, just the opposite. It was trouble between the Army and the Heimwehr on one side and demonstrating Social Democrats on the other. He didn’t know any details. No papers had appeared. Trouble had started early that morning in Linz and then spread. There was martial law, and an outbreak of strikes, hence the darkness and general chaos. I said it didn’t seem fair to use weapons against unarmed political demonstrators. At the word ‘unarmed’ he stopped and looked at me in surprise, and repeated the word: ‘unbewaffnet?’. He gave a grim laugh and said ‘You don’t seem to know much about things here, young man. They’ve got thousands of weapons that they’ve been keeping hidden for years. Rifles, machine guns, bombs, everything! All over the country. It’s an armed battle over there in the Nineteenth District!’”

A video showing a happy Vienna in 1934: