Free The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer

was the place where you relaxed the strict standards of good taste that governed your essentially provincial life, to buy questionable objects like the silver
Riesenrad
that occupied pride of place in my grandmother’s china cabinet.
    Despite their looking towards Vienna as the centre of their civilisation, as the measure of elegance, culture and learning, my family did not have anything more than a mild sense of exile in the cities and towns of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia or Slovakia where most of them had lived for generations. They had a complex, layered sense of patriotism. They felt more or less at ease among those ‘nations’; they identified with many of their aims and aspirations; they observed their customs and rituals—my mother loved to dance the
csardas
—and they felt that they had put down roots in that world, despite ominous rumblings from ultranationalist groups which consistently questioned that right. Above, but also including, that sense of local patriotism was another level of allegiances and sentiment—symbolised by my grandmother’s purchase of the silverwheel—which made them see themselves as the inheritors of Habsburg civilisation, a way of life that transcended the national and racial diversity of this world and embraced peoples and nationalities within the ample bosom of the Empire.
    In this dual citizenship, which allowed my family to look to Vienna as their cultural and social home, but also allowed them to regard themselves as fully-fledged citizens of Hungary, the question of race played an essential and yet in one way entirely insignificant part. The urban bourgeoisie of Vienna, Budapest, Prague, as well as of course of the great German cities, contained sizable Jewish elements. Many practised the ceremonies of Judaism—as the great synagogues erected in those cities witness—but just as many had lapsed, or at least continued to observe its stern dictates only in a superficial and half-hearted manner. Though there were exceptions to be found everywhere, in general for these people Judaism had decayed from an all-embracing social, cultural and personal structure into a mere religion, something to be tucked into a corner of your daily life, or even to be abandoned entirely. Many intermarried with people of other faiths.
    One of my father’s cousins, a Roman Catholic, succumbed to religious mania in a way that proved embarrassing for her acquaintances and disastrous for her children. She was one of the family eccentrics. When she visited my parents in Budapest, she usually caused a sensation by falling on her knees outside every church she passed in the inner city (and there were many) whenever she accompanied my mother on her ritual shopping expeditions. So thoroughly had she been absorbed by Gentile society that she forced her children into the two great institutions of the Habsburg world. She connived and cajoled until her son was accepted by one of those brutal military academies Musil evoked in the terrible pages of
The Young Törless
. He committed suicide in his second year. The daughter was packed off to an upper-class convent where she was raped by the invading Soviet forces in 1945.
    Many of these people suffered the inconveniences of beingJewish or, perhaps more precisely, of being deemed Jewish. But they were all adept at clever footwork, at those arts of survival which all—Jew as well as Gentile—had to practise in that world of hurdles and barriers, a world where a ‘Keep Out’ sign always implied that there was a way round. Many, Mahler is the most celebrated example, formally embraced Catholicism in order to gain entry to restricted professions, others merely avoided pursuits not open to them. Before the long disaster that began in 1914 and came to a fiery climax in 1945, this world offered plenty of opportunities for intelligent, resourceful and cultured people. They shut their eyes to the dust rising from the advance of