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Chapter 2: Switzerland and France by bicycle 1962

2.1 The Way from Salzburg to Paris

I love cities. Whenever I visited my aunts in Vienna in the 1950s and early 1960s I was fascinated by the historical layers one could walk through in a very short time. The great cities of Europe are preserving our history in stone and brick, in paintings, institutions, and customs etc. In Vienna one finds Europe’s history compressed into a few square miles. With her glorious architecture, Vienna is also very pleasing to the eye. So are other European capital cities, most of all Paris. Apart from dreaming of the Adria I had always wanted to see the City of Light. After finishing high school I did not want to wait any longer. Since I had nobody to accompany me, I decided to cycle from Salzburg to Paris on my own.

I left Salzburg at the beginning of July. Cycling through the Tyrol and Vorarlberg was tough as I had to cross the Arlberg Mountain Pass. It took me a few days to get to the Swiss border. My first destination was Dornach near Basel. There was (and still is) the Goetheanum, the world centre of anthroposophy. A school friend, Mario, was an anthroposopher and had a summer job in the Goetheanum. He had said I could stop in Dornach en route to Paris, work in the Goetheanum for some time and earn money for the continuation of my journey.

Before I arrived in Dornach I knew nothing about anthroposophy. During my stay I learned that the Waldorf schools were run by the anthoposophic movement on anti-authoritarian and holistic principles, that anthroposophy favoured organic farming or biodynamic agriculture, that there was an alternative anthroposophic medicine that treated not only the physical side of the illness but considered the patient as a totality of mind and body. There also was an anthroposphic architecture of which the Goetheanum was a prime example. It influenced some important architects of the 20^th century such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Henry van de Velde, Eero Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn and Hans Scharoun. The founder of the movement was the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925).

Mario introduced me to Mr. K, who was the head of the cleaning brigade and who agreed to take me on. He was a short, slim man who permanently had a thick cigar in his mouth. He ran the cleaning of the Goetheanum like a military operation. The cleaners were paid according to how many hours they spent on their knees scrubbing the floors of the innumerable rooms. Hard working cleaners were rewarded with lots of cleaning time and thus given the opportunity to earn good money. Lazy cleaners got less work and thus less pay.

Every day Mr Kumm made a delicious muesli. He put sour milk, fruit, nuts and oats into a big open barrel and stirred the mixture while holding his burning cigar in his mouth. If a bit of ash was added to the mush it did no harm. Whenever we felt like it we dipped our mugs and spoons into this mixture. All modern day rules of hygiene were completely ignored. Mr K’s muesli tasted out of this world. Never again have I tasted one like it.

The cleaners were accommodated in the boiler house whose chimney stack was shaped like a flame. We slept there and we had a kitchen where we could cook our meals. There were about ten cleaners, all in their late teens and early twenties and of many different nationalities. A Dutch guy called Theo did most of the cooking. He was a good cook unhampered by worry about health and safety. He wore an apron that was never washed and he used the same cloth for mopping up the floor and drying the dishes. Nobody ever got ill.

All the anthroposphers I met in the Goetheanum were lovely people. They displayed a gentle and tolerant nature and were committed pacifists. Most of them were spending a few weeks there to take part in courses or attend concerts, theatre performances and lectures. Once I attended a concert. A string quartet by Mozart was performed and simultaneously translated into movements by a dance ensemble. The holistic world view held that everything is connected to everything. Thus, for example, the musical movements had their counterpart in the movements of the body.

On another day I saw a performance of Alexanders Wandlung, a play written in 1953 by Albert Steffen, who after the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1925 became president of the Anthroposophical Society. It is a very long four-act play of which I did not understand a word. Later I read that the play depicts the journey of Alexander the Great, after his death, through the regions of the spirit till his return to earth. Parallel to Alexander’s journey through these higher regions we are shown the ever changing events on earth. What made an impression on me was the way the actors spoke. They did not speak “normally” nor in a manner in which actors emphazise the lines of elevated prose in classical drama. What I heard was something between the spoken and the sung word. But it was not recitative either. Some vowels were lengthened inordinately, important passages were cited in higher pitch, others in lower pitch, some loud, some almost inaudible. Language was not just language as we normally use it. It was an expressive (or expressionist) language of music, rhythm, emotion and movement. I was told that on certain occasions Goethe’s complete Faust was performed in this way.

One day I was cheerfully cleaning away while whistling the tune of Papageno’s song Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja of Mozart’s Magic Flute. I was approaching a corner and stopped whistling because I had run out of breath. Next moment I heard someone round the corner taking up the tune. It was Tony, an English student who was there with his friend Phil, also from England. Their plan was to get to Salzburg and attend some of the performances at the Salzburg Festival. They had stopped over in the Goetheanum in order to earn enough money so that they could carry on with their journey. As Tony and Phil were not very hard workers Mr K had little time for them and thus gave them little work. He always referred to them as die Tommies. As a consequence they did not earn enough money to go to Salzburg. Although their work ethos may not have been up to Swiss standards, Tony and Phil were lovely fellows and we became good friends. They were students of history and on the path of becoming teachers.

The following year Tony travelled to Salzburg and spent part of the summer holidays with me, (or rather with Aunt Friedl and Uncle Erich). In the same summer I went with him to England and spent the rest of the holidays with his parents in Littleport near Ely. Tony was very interested in local history. He knew a lot about Ely Cathedral and could show me parts of that wonderful building that were not normally open to the public.

Travelling between Britain and Central Europe was cumbersome compared to today. Those were the times before cheap flights. England and Austria were connected by rail and ferry. As students we could avail of reduced fares through the Anglo-Austrian society. It took two days to get from Austria to England. I lost contact with Phil after a while, but Tony became a lifelong friend.

2.2 The way back

I had another experience on my way back from Paris that made a lasting impression on me. After a day of cycling away from Paris in an easterly direction I came to Fère Champenoise, a small village in the Marne region. As night was approaching I looked for a place to stay. No hotel or hostel was anywhere in sight. In my poor French I asked a woman who was passing by if she might know where I could stay. She very kindly offered me a place in her house. Because of my poor language skills we could not strike up a lively conversation as we walked to her house. After a few minutes of silence she asked me where I was from. When I said Autriche her eyes lit up and she exclaimed: Ah, Österreich, ich bin aus der Tschechoslovakei! She was Czech by birth, spoke good German and was pleased to meet somebody from a country that shared so much history with her own. She treated me with the same enthusiasm as she would have treated a Czech compatriot. Her husband was French and they lived in a very comfortable house. I was given a great dinner with wine, a room for the night and a good breakfast. Madame D told me that she owned a small flat in Neuilly sur Seine very near Paris and that I would be welcome to stay there if I wanted to return in the future. When I left in the morning, she gave me home made Powidltascherl, a Czech-Austrian sweet speciality, and a bottle of wine for the journey.

I stayed in contact with Madame D for some time. When after a few years I thought of visiting Paris again, I wrote to her and asked if her offer still stood. A letter came back from her husband telling me the shocking news that a few months earlier my kind hostess had been hit by a car outside her house and died.

My time in Paris fell between these two unforgettable events. Paris had been my destination, but my memories of this wonderful city are vague. However, I remember vividly my time in the Goetheanum and the beginning of my friendship with Tony that ended only a few years ago when he died. And the kind Madame D will always live in my memory. The way to Paris and the way back home left a deeper impression than Paris itself.

There is no need to describe that city and praise her cultural monuments and her wonderful urban flair. I visited as many of the famous sights as I could pack in with the result that my memory of what I saw is somewhat blurred. I stayed in a hostel run by UNESCO. We got a breakfast of café au lait and a baguette with butter. As money was tight I used public transport sparingly, instead, I cycled and walked a lot. I often had to ask for directions, which gave me the opportunity to practice the little French I had. Contrary to what many travellers say about the Parisians, I found them extremely friendly and charming. Sometimes I teamed up for my sightseeing tours with other guests of the hostel. I remember a young man from India who wanted to know what constituted the difference between a Romanesque building and one from the high middle ages. I was always hungry, as all I could afford was hot dogs and pommes frites. No wonder that after a week I was totally exhausted and felt that it was time to start the arduous journey back home.

I had planned to visit Versailles but lacked the energy to do so. My lovely Czech hostess in Fère Champenoise expressed great surprise when I told her that I had not seen Louis’ XIV architectural extravaganza: What, you have been to Paris and you have not seen Versailles?! Perhaps this was the reason she offered me her apartment in Paris. Many years later I visited Paris with Ursula. It was November and we took the train to Versailles where we got a guided tour in English. The guide was excellent and we were only five people in the group. What a privilege it was to get a tour of that palace through which thousands of tourists are normally pushed every day!

After leaving Madam D it took me two days to reach Strassburg and there my resolve to carry on left me. I went to the railway station and found out that a train to Salzburg was leaving in the morning. After spending the night on a bench outside the station I boarded the train. Thus ended my first journey to the City of Light.