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Chapter 1: First travels and early dreams

1.1 Vienna and Salzburg after World War II

I grew up in Austria in the years following the Second World War. My mother died in June 1945 from diphtheria in a camp in Bavaria a few months before the war ended. Mothers with young children had been moved there from Vienna, to escape the bombings by the Allies. My father was unable to take care of his children. My sister, Ilse, who was four years old, was taken in by our father’s sister, Aunt Hanna in Vienna, and I, who was a year and a half, was raised by the brother of our deceased mother and his wife in Salzburg. There I lived with Uncle Erich and Aunt Friedl until I was ten and finished primary school. After that our father decided to look after us. My sister and I lived with him in Vienna for a few years. When I was fourteen, our father died unexpectedly. My sister was taken back by Aunt Hanna and I returned to my uncle and aunt in Salzburg.

The post war years were hard times. Austria regained her independence in 1955 and the economy was in a poor state. My foster parents had enough income to provide for the necessities of life. I was dressed and fed very well. Aunt Friedl was a good seamstress and made most of my clothes, and she was an excellent cook. Our apartment was rented, and it was in a house that dated back to the first half of the 17^th century. It had been, so I was told with a certain pride, in the possession of the archbishop of Salzburg during the time of the Thirty Years War. It was spacious and comfortable. Although we lived well enough there was no money for anything beyond the essentials. My foster parents would have liked to own a car but could not afford one. They also dreamt of buying a piece of land and building their own house. Uncle Erich spent many evenings designing our future house, which never became a reality.

During the summer vacations we went either to the nearby mountains or to the lakes. Both were nearby. Salzburg is blessed with a splendid environment. It is surrounded by the Alps and the lakes of the Salzkammergut. My uncle was a passionate alpinist and my aunt loved the lakes. Her favorite was the Wallersee just half an hour’s busride from Salzburg.

The first memories of travel I have are the rail journeys to the alpine town of Werfen, 30 km south of Salzburg, where we were picked up by a mule-drawn cart and transported to the Mordegg, a mountain hotel at the foothills of the mighty Tennengebirge. I still remember the smell of the spicy alpine air and the marvellous view from the wooden terrace across the valley to the rugged peaks of the Steinernes Meer. I can still see the fat cows grazing in front of the hotel.

Another early memory is that of a trip to Bad Gastein where I spent a few weeks with Aunt Hanna and Ilse. Once we went for a ride in a horse-drawn coach. I had a windmill made of paper, which I dropped from the coach. I started such a terrible row that the coachman had to stop so that my aunt could rescue the precious object. I have a vague memory of the blue walls of the hotelroom and the whistling of a train passing nearby. For a long time to come the whistling of a train would awaken in me the desire to go to faraway places. Another day we went on a chairlift. Aunt Hanna took me on her lap and I found it very exciting to see the pastures and the trees gliding by below.

Several times I travelled from Salzburg to Vienna to visit my Viennese family. I was always accompanied by an adult. Austria was then still occupied by the victorious allies. The country was divided into four zones: French, British, American and Russian. Salzburg was under American occupation. The East of Austria was controlled by the Soviets. Vienna was in the middle of the Russian zone and divided into four sectors each of which was under the rule of one of the four allies. Vienna’s situation was like that of Berlin. East of Linz, at the city of Enns, the train crossed from the American into the Russian zone. The train stopped at the checkpoint and Russian soldiers, in brown uniforms, scrutinized our passports. To this day I remember the air of fear that gripped the passengers when the Russians boarded the train. It seemed that everybody was afraid to be ordered out and God only knew what might happen then. As far as I know nothing ever happened. In fact, the Russian soldiers were mostly very friendly to me, they seemed to like children.

My father’s flat in Vienna was situated in the British sector, Aunt Hanna’s lived in the Siebensterngasse in the American sector. Opposite her apartment was a cinema, the Kosmoskino. American soldiers and their Austrian girl friends went there to see Hollywood films in the orginal language.

A few blocks away, as one walked along the Siebensterngasse towards the nearby city centre was an abandoned sports hall. It had played a crucial role in July 1934. A gang of Nazis assembled there before they went to the Ballhausplatz and assassinated the chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. The putsch failed, however. It was to take another four years before the country fell to the German invaders. When the Nazis finally took over in 1938, they renamed the Siebensterngasse to Straße der Julikämpfer (Street of the Fighters of July) in memory of the members of the assassins, who were then worshipped as heroes. After the end of the war the street got its old name back.

Walking further towards the centre of Vienna, one soon enters the Ringstrasse, the glorious architectural monument of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I and from there further into the centre and into the past of Vienna: the baroque buildings, the medieval cathedral and the remnants of the Roman period. Between the Ringstrasse and the city centre one passes the splendid Heldenplatz (heroes’ square) with the statues of the military leaders Prince Eugen of Savoy and Archduke Karl. On the balcony of the Imperial Palace, flanking the Heldenplatz, stood Hitler on 15^th March 1938 proclaiming Austria’s return into the German Reich in front of a huge and enthusiastic crowd.

Walking two or three kilometres one passes through many layers of Austrian and European history. Very early I learned to associate travelling with experiencing different ways of life, political situations and historic memories.

Aunt Hanna owned a weekend house in Essling, East of Vienna in the Russian sector. The journey from the Siebensterngasse to Essling was an odyssey. First we took the tramway number 49 as far as the Bellaria on the Ringstrasse. From there we continued with tram T as far as the third district to very near where my father lived. There we had to change onto number 25 that brought us as far as the Prater, Vienna’s legendary fairground. We changed tram once again and passed through the village of Aspern. There stands a monument representing a lion. It commemorates the battle of Aspern in 1809, where Napoleon lost the nimbus of invincibility. Archduke Karl inflicted the first, albeit minor, defeat on the Grande Armée in the swamps near the Danube. From the final tram stop we had to walk for about twenty minutes across a Russian military airfield to the weekend house. War planes thundered above our heads as they landed and took off.

The journeys between Salzburg and Vienna were the furthest I undertook in my childhood. But, even small train journeys were an adventure. Aunt Friedl had relations in Bad Ischl whom we sometimes visited. In the early fifties we travelled by the famous Ischler Bahn, which was a narrow-gauge railway that had been built by Uncle Erich’s father. A few years later the Ischler Bahn was dismantled in spite of heavy protests and replaced in the name of progress by a bus service. The preparations for the journey had started the day before our departure and there always seemed to be an incredible amount to be done before finally taking the tram to the railway station. We had tons of food with us as if we were to set out for an expedition into the unknown. Sometimes the preparations for these momentous journeys caused so much anxiety to my poor aunt that she woke up with a terrible headache in the morning and decided that she could not face the journey to Ischl, so that we all ended up staying at home.

1.2 Sun over the Adriatic

After finishing primary school I moved to Vienna and lived with my father and my sister in a flat beside the Großmarkthallen. These two enormous halls of iron structures housed an abundance of food stalls. One was the Fleischmarkhalle that sold meat products, the other, the Gemüsemarkhalle, sold fruits and vegetables. They were similar to Les Halles in Paris, which were known as the belly of the French capital. Neither the Großmarkthalle nor Les Halles exist any longer. Les Halles were replaced by an underground shopping and amusement complex, the Großmarkthallen had to give way to an enormous shopping mall of no architectural merit.

Our father was always short of money. He had so little that there was no point in even dreaming of buying a car or drawing designs for a future house, as Uncle Erich in Salzburg did. He had other dreams, however. He had grown up in Banja Luka and in Bosanski Novi in Bosnia where his father, my grandfather Eduard Herzmann, was head surgeon. Our mother was born in Sarajevo. She met our father in Belgrade, where she gave birth to my sister Ilse in 1941. A few days after Ilse’s birth, on 27^th March 1941, the Germans bombed Belgrade. Our parents fled with Ilse to Vienna, where I was born two years later.

When they lived in Yugoslavia before the war our parents spent many holidays on the Dalmation coast. Whenever our father talked about the Adriatic Sea, which is called Adria in German, his eyes lit up and he put all the enthusiasm of his bygone youth into the word. He extended the a-vowel thus giving it a magical sound. Very soon this caused in my sister and myself a desperate longing to see this wonderful blue Aaadria.

Our father often took us to the cinema. Once we saw the film Sonne über der Adria (Sun over the Adriatic). In one scene René Carol, a popular German singer of that time, was sitting on a stone wall, the blue sea behind him, and accompanying himself with his guitar to a song that contained the words: Sonne über der Adria, das ist Sonne für uns zwei….. (The sun shining over the Adriatic is the sun for the two of us). My sister and I became determined to visit the Adria and pestered our father to take us there in the summer holidays instead of taking us for long walks in the Vienna Woods or for a swim in the Alte Donau, a still side arm of the Danube.

Ilse came up with a brilliant plan. Why not save a small amount of money, say ten Schillinge, every day? After a year or two this should amount to enough to pay for a family holiday in Dubrovnik or Split. Immediately this plan was put into action and every day ten Schillinge were placed into a special box which began to fill up promisingly. Unfortunately, our father was forever in financial difficulties. He owed money to many friends whom he sometimes had to pay back, there were nasty bills to be paid for such trivial things as gas and electricity and there was the rent. And on top of all this we had to eat. When a financial crisis arose, our father was forced to borrow some money from our box. He promised to repay it, but somehow this proved to be impossible. In time the box was depleted and no more money was put in. A beautiful dream had come to an end.

My longing to see das Meer, the sea, remained unfulfilled for some time to come. When I was fifteen – I was again living with Aunt Friedl and Uncle Erich in Salzburg after my father’s death – I was determined to become a sailor. My dream was to be a captain and to travel round the world. Hamburg was das Tor zur Welt (the door to the world). I had read this expression somewhere, perhaps in a book by the then well known German travel writer A. E. Johann. My foster parents had given me one of his books that bore the title Große Weltreise: A Big Travel Round the World. On its cover was a beautiful oceanliner – this was still the time of the big steam ships. My desire to see the Adriatic Sea was replaced by an irresistable wish to visit Hamburg.

When I was sixteen I hitchhiked with my schoolmate Friedemann Bachleitner from Salzburg through Germany and Holland. Our aim was to get to Bremen and to Hamburg, cities whose names for me had an almost sacred aura. In Cologne on the Rhine, Friedemann had the idea to go to the harbour and try hitch a lift from one of the trawler ships to Rotterdam. If one can travel per Auto-Stopp why should it not be possible to go per Schiff-Stopp? To my surprise the strategy worked. The first skipper we asked was a Dutchman who agreed to take us to Rotterdam. The journey would take two days with one overnight on the ship. It was my first time on a ship. It was not an ocean going ship but it was a ship and I was in heaven. For two days and a night I was in my element as a future captain. In Rotterdam I saw a real harbour for the very first time in my life. The harbour of Rotterdam was then the biggest in the world. And then, in Scheveningen, I had my first experience of the sea stretching out into infinity. I was simply overwhelmed by all of this.

I was impressed by the views into eternity the sea offered and I discovered that a flat countryside, like that of Holland had its attractions. The sunsets are wonderful and there is a sense of expanse, which one does not get when surrounded by mountains. However, after a few days I began to miss the mountains. I mentioned this to a Dutchman who gave us a lift in his car. He told me that when he was in Innsbruck he missed the views into the distance. He felt hemmed in by the mountains. I never felt hemmed in by mountains. They were there to be summited! From the top of a mountain one could see even further than when standing on a Dutch plain.

All these sensations, impressions and experiences made me aware of my dependence on nature for my emotional wellbeing. For the past forty years I have lived in Ireland surrounded by the sea. I love the sea, but when I am back in Austria I do not miss it. However, I seek out the mountains wherever I am. I hike regularly in the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains, on the doorstep of the city, but I really love the mountains of Connemara and Kerry, in the West and Southwest of the island, for their alpine flair. The Maam Turks and the Twelve Bens remind me very much of the Tennengebirge where Uncle Erich brought me hiking with his schnautzer dog Puck. I am most happy in landscapes where there are mountains. I have not become a sailor.

A good few more years had to pass before I finally saw the Adria. I was studying German Literature and History at the University of Vienna when I fell in love with an American girl, who spent a year in Austria, in order to learn German. She was a student of Art History and it was a requirement, imposed by her course directors, that she would learn that language. Ann’s field was Byzantine Art and the University of Vienna had an internationally renowned Byzantinist, Otto Demus, under whom she hoped to study. Her parents had bought her a Volkswagen. With this small vehicle we undertook an epic journey, in the summer of 1966, to what was then still Yugoslavia. We spent two weeks in Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia in search of Byzantine monasteries with their fabulous fresco paintings of the 13^th and 14^th centuries. It was a wonderful world which I had known nothing of until then. And it was in that summer that I saw for the first time the Aaadria I had longed to see for so many years.

To this day the Dalmation coast to me is the most beautiful coast in the world. It is a rocky coast with the mountains rising steeply up to one side of the road. There are innumerable little inlets with small and pebbly beaches. Often one has to climb down to them with difficulty and then plunge into the water from some rockface. More than thousand islands line the coast.

But not only nature offers stunning sights. The cities are equally beautiful. There is the medieval gem of Zadar, the Roman city of Split with the palace of Diocletian and the wonder of the sea, Dubrovnik, founded by the Venetians. My father had often mentioned Dubrovnik. However, he did not call it by that name but by its former name Ragusa. Pronouncing Ragusa he lengthened the u vowel in a fashion similar to the one he extended the a in Adria, in this endowing the name of this city with all his Heimweh and Fernweh.

The North Sea had impressed me very much a few years earlier, but the Adriatic Sea was what I really had been looking for. It may well have been that being in love added to my emotional high. Be that as it may, all the dreams of my youth, my romantic Fernweh and Wanderlust found complete fulfilment.