A great Trump escape by night train to Armenia: across the Alps to Vienna

This is part two in a series about overnight train journeys across Europe and the Middle East to Armenia – to spend time in worlds beyond the president-elect’s pathological obsessions Donald Trump. (This week, his nominee for Secretary of Defense is trying to dodge rape allegations.)

The dining cars on Austrian trains are hybrid affairs, neither white linen-tablecloth restaurants nor standing diners. For those wanting a nice meal, there are seats near large windows and a menu of various schnitzels and wurst (as you would expect). I ordered soup, bread and a beer and settled into my booth with a European rail card open to the Alps.

I was particularly looking for the small Austrian town of Flirsch, which I remembered from my first trip to Europe in March 1970, when my parents took their three children by train from Luxembourg to Belgrade, Yugoslavia (then in dawn of the Iron Curtain.)

Along the way, we took an Austrian train along the Alps, from Basel to Innsbruck. At one point the train unexpectedly stopped next to Flirsch station, which for some reason greatly amused my father, as if it were a symbol of nowhere .

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My mother and two sisters were sleeping in the compartment (there were six seats), and my father and I had the compartment window down and were looking at the scenery wondering why the Trans European Express train wasn’t moving.

Above the station, in the distance, were snow-capped mountains. I don’t remember how long we were stopped in Flirsch, but it was long enough for my father to remember the summers of 1935 and 1936, which he spent cycling through Germany, occasionally crossing the Austria near Salzburg.

The first summer, at 16, my father was a camper and loved the European summer and the easy life of bicycles and intercity trains. He discovers the taste of cold beer after long travels and says that Germany seems prosperous and self-satisfied. But the following summer, when he was one of the leaders of the group, everything had changed.

Instead of exchanging greetings with Guten labelthe Germans greeted each other with “Heil, Hitler!” “, and at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, my father saw Hitler turn his back on the gold medal runner, Jesse Owens, who was black.

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In late summer the group of cyclists traveled to Obersalzberg and there the mayor of Berchtesgaden insisted that they join a local parade that Hitler himself would supervise.

The American Dragoons joined the rest of the townspeople in solemnly passing Hitler on his reviewing stand, about five feet from the demonstrators. My father’s memory was that he looked “gray and pale, almost ghostly.”

Before returning to the United States, the cyclists spent a night at a local hostel, where some German students called the Americans “Jew lovers.” Words were exchanged and it was decided that an American would fight one of the Germans to settle their national differences. It looked like a medieval joust.

As my father joked (given the size and strength of his Aryan opponent), “I had the ‘honor’ of being selected to fight alongside the Americans.” » They clashed and fought until the hostel manager and the American advisor heard the commotion and broke up the fight. Leaning out the window at Flirsch, my father said, “I’m glad they did it.” He was big.

When he began his studies in New York that fall, he was amazed how few of his classmates sensed clouds of war on the European horizon, but in Jacques Barzun’s course on contemporary civilization , he came across a phrase, attributed to Leon Trotsky, which he later used often. in life: “The war may not interest you, but the war is interested in you. »

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From my Austrian Railways dining car, I returned to my seat, hoping that some of the crowds of weekend travelers standing in the aisles might have diminished, but nothing had changed.

I wanted to continue with Stephen Zweig (“Austria was an old state led by an old emperor, governed by old ministers, a state which, without ambition, only hoped to preserve itself intact by rejecting any radical change in Europe.…”), but stuck in my cramped seat, I lost my reading attention span and spent the long afternoon staring out the window at the high mountain scenery.

Mid-afternoon the train stopped in Innsbruck, where, on the same family trip in 1970, we spent two nights in a hotel. In the meantime, my sister and I decided to go skiing and, after renting some equipment, we followed the crowds to a nearby lift, where, to our horror, we discovered that the only way to going down was one of the Olympic runs (black…double diamond). …) ski slopes which were full of moguls. I remember it took us a good hour to get down the hill.

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Closer to Vienna, I remember my first visit to the city, in January 1975, when I was in my first year of university. I had spent the first semester of that year in London, in a program affiliated with the London School of Economics. The semester ended with ten days of classes in Freiburg, Germany, “to get a continental perspective,” as one of our professors liked to say.

At some point during the first semester – although it may have been on the night train from London to Freiburg – I decided to stay another semester in Europe and applied to two programs: one at Lüneburg, in northern Germany; the other in Vienna.

After a sad Christmas (my first away from home), I decided to visit both cities, starting with Lüneburg, which seemed bleak and isolated. (What’s not bleak about northern Europe in January?) That left me with no choice but Vienna.

I arrived there in mid-January with a letter of introduction from my dean in London. He said I would have no problem once I presented the letter; keep in mind that these were the times even before faxes.

To get to Vienna, I took the night train from Zurich, which served as a Viennese Waltzalthough no dance lessons were required to board. In fact, it was a long series of coaches being applauded. If there were sleeping compartments or berths, I couldn’t afford them, and I spent an unsteady night dozing against a filthy window.

Along the way, there were no glimpses of Flirsch, Innsbruck or the snow-covered Austrian Alps – just the stale smell that accompanied European trains in the mid-1970s, something between cigarette smoke and spilled coffee.

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It was just after dawn when we arrived at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, and I was relieved to get there, even though I didn’t really know how to find my school.

Lugging a duffel bag full of clothes and books (the luggage didn’t yet have wheels), I followed the “Centrum” signs as they came and went in a thick morning mist.

Everything seemed foreign to me: the cars, the streetlights, the trams and the stores that had just opened. With little sleep and slightly lost, I began to wonder why I hadn’t just gone home with the rest of my program participants in London and returned to university, where I had a meal voucher, a dormitory and friends. Physically and emotionally, I was in a fog.

What changed during this walk was crossing the Ringstrasse as the clouds parted enough for me to see that I was in the middle of an imperial city.

All around me were Habsburg columns, formal gardens, palaces and museums, the likes of which I had never seen, except perhaps in books. I appreciated Vienna as a place where I could live happily.

As Stefan Zweig wrote about his Viennese childhood: “Nowhere was it easier to be European, and I know that I have Vienna in part to thank, a city that already defended universal and Roman values ​​at the time. he time of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learned very early to love the idea of ​​community as the highest ideal of my heart.

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Back in Vienna on this trip, almost fifty years later, I was not lugging a sports bag but I was riding my unfolded bike. In the meantime, the city had built a gleaming new Hauptbahnhof (central station) on the ruins of the old and shabby Südbahnhof, which was perhaps what Prince Metternich had in mind when he joked: “the Balkans start at Landstrasse.

I had chosen a hotel near the station and, after unpacking, I went for a few loops by bike in the first district (Vienna inside the Ringstrasse), eager to reunite with some of my old friends. haunts.

The hot day had turned into a cold night, but I had a gaiter around my neck and lights on my handlebars. Additionally, Vienna at night is a well-lit city. When cycling, the only Viennese annoyances are the tram tracks, in which it is easy to get a tire stuck and fall, and the cobblestones, which tend to loosen both the teeth and the bolts of the bicycle. I did my best to navigate around the obstacles.

In less than an hour, I saw everything I wanted to see: the outline of the Hofburg (lit up at night), the Kinsky Palace (where we had our classes and, yes, our dance classes), the Café Bräunerhof (where I read the newspapers and met my friends in the afternoon), the Hotel Graben (where my father stayed when he visited me), the Grand Hotel (where, in the summer of 1914, when the world war broke out, my grandmother was stuck behind the German lines), the Kärntnerstrasse (the main shopping street which is now pedestrianized) and the Ringstrasse (the imperial boulevard around the old town which now has tram lines, cycle paths and of sidewalks under a canopy of maples).

On a cold Sunday evening, few people were walking around at 10 p.m. The illuminated facades showed Vienna at its best, although what stood out most to me was my brief encounter with my previous life, which reminded me of another passage from Zweig’s memoirs. He writes: “But it is only in youth that chance seems to be the same as destiny. Later, we know that the true course of our life is decided within us; our paths may seem to deviate from our wishes in confusing and unhelpful ways, but ultimately the path always leads us to our unseen destination.