Cousin Don praises the Weissbier at the 7 Stern Brau brewpub in Vienna.

I haven't had the pleasure of visiting Vienna's 7 Stern Brau brewery since 2006, and this needs to be rectified, although the sheer excellence of my last time there probably cannot be topped. It involved beer, spareribs, sauerkraut and camaraderie, each in huge portions.

My first experience at Sieben Stern probably was 1997, so I'm delighted they're still going strong after all these years. How do I know? Because my cousin Don recently wrote. He goes to Vienna each year in late July, meets a friend, and spends at least one evening at the brewpub.

For at least fifteen years, Randy and I have been in search of the world's best Weissebier. It is a quest more worthy and valuable than the discovery of the Holy Grail, which actually never existed at all.

Yesterday we might have found that Weissebier in Vienna. We decided to have an early dinner around 4 P.M. at the Seven Stars (Siebensterngasse) brew pub/restaurant. Their food is superb, and their beers are excellent, especially the Marzen and Rauchbier -- but they now brew an eighth draft beer, a wheat beer!

So of course, we had to try it.

The beer had a beautiful golden and opaque color, a robust and delicious flavor that included a distinct but not too strong hint of banana. Randy took a photo which he is sending to you.

Our quest for the world's finest wheat beer will continue for the remainder of our lives, but so far we have discovered the best wheat beer in Vienna. However, we will await your judgmental expertise.

I offered no such expertise in my reply.

I'm happy to hear this. There was a time when I'd turned against German-style wheat ales, primarily because I could not move customers past them. But everything's a pendulum, and I'm really into them now.

Don, the bicyclists and I found a good one in 2003 in Passau, which is a place worth visiting. Up on the hill, place called Anhofer or something like that. The house wheat ale is heavy on the clove, but still balanced.

I looked it up, and the name of the brewery in Passau actually is Weissbrau Andorfer. Passau is a wonderful place, and I regret only having been there once.

Overall, it's still hard for me to choose against Schneider Weisse, and I know better than to attempt selecting "the best" of anything.

As Don recognizes, it's not the kill that matters -- it's the thrill of the chase, and as it pertains to Europe, I just need to figure out a way to get back.

Maybe 2016.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Twelfth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

Three decades have passed since my first visit to Vienna, and in many respects that “first time” feeling still lingers. I think about it regularly, and perhaps the aura owes to the ultimate success of the Viennese in reinventing their city (and country) for success in the modern world following a string of catastrophes that began when Franz Ferdinand’s death in 1914 was seized upon as an excuse to go to war.

Bad, bad idea.

Today’s world seems far more complicated than the pre-internet Reagan era, and yet by all accounts the Austrian capital still ladles out pre-World War I history as a staple of the tourist trade. Nostalgia usually sells fairly well anywhere, but arguably Vienna has an advantage in the person of Stefan Zweig, an otherwise forgotten historical figure who has enjoyed an amazing renaissance 70 years after his death.

As a case in point, director Wes Anderson’s 2014 film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was inspired by Zweig’s life and writings. The movie depicts an imaginary version of a pre-WWI epoch previously articulated by Zweig, who felt a distinctively Viennese nostalgic yearning for something that may or may not have existed, and wrote about it only a few years after the period in question.

Before I leave Vienna in 1985, trundling onto a train at Westbahnhof bound for Salzburg, it’s worth a brief survey of Zweig. Three decades ago, I was barely aware he existed. Now, in spite of a few misgivings about his writing style, it’s hard to make sense of it all without his first-hand testimony.

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Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, and a veritable monolith of the written word. He wrote poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries, which were translated into numerous languages and sold all across the planet.

Today Zweig is remembered primarily for his strange end. Displaced and disoriented by the conflagration of anti-Semitism unleashed by Nazi Germany, he fled Europe and wandered from place to place, eventually settling in Brazil. There, in 1942, in a famously documented final act, Zweig and his wife committed suicide together.

Among Zweig’s final achievements was to complete his autobiography, which he originally intended to call “Three Lives,” in reference to the three distinct periods in his life: Birth and youth to the commencement of World War I; from war’s end through the advent of the Anschluss (Austria’s forced absorption into Nazi Germany); and finally, exile.

The proposed title is chilling in light of Zweig’s sad demise, for apparently he was not able to envision a fourth life. Given the eventual choice of “The World of Yesterday” as the book’s title, one might reasonably inquire: Yesterday according to which of Zweig’s lives?

The “yesterday” of most relevance to me is the one prior to World War I. How did a continent seemingly so progressive and at peace with itself erupt into such a bloodletting?

Zweig is right there on the scene at 33 years of age in the summer of 1914. His explanation of the events leading to war isn’t unusual: Societal dynamism constrained by top-heavy monarchies, leading to what can only be described as boredom on the part of those ignorant of war’s true costs.

When pent-up demand for action (any sort of action would work) was released by inbred dunderheads scheming at the top of the societal pyramid, disaster was the result.

There is an undoubtedly elegiac tone to Zweig’s pre-war ruminations. He lovingly documents the seemingly settled, hierarchical, perennially ordered nature of Viennese society (though easier to enjoy nearer its top than its bottom), exalting the abundant theatrical and musical scenes, which fascinated ordinary citizens then much as sports do now.

Zweig dwells on favorite cafés, newspapers and stage luminaries. Life passes. Change seems unlikely.

The writer’s own background is conspicuously missing the usual rise from hardscrabble poverty by sheer force of will. In fact, it emerges that he is fairly well off from the very start, and a pattern is established: The world is a rosy place for bright young men, and bright young men are far too busy reaping their effortless opportunities to be very much concerned with messy everyday disagreements. Zweig’s is a halcyon life, and this wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy if not for one small point.

He is Jewish.

Jewish -- though not ardently so in any duty-bound sense of religious ritual; nonetheless, identifiably Jewish in pre-war Vienna, and pre-war Vienna is famed as the place where modern anti-Semitism gets its (non)-intellectual bearings. Two decades hence, this will lead to the gates of Auschwitz.

In fact, none other than Adolf Hitler, who spends his Vienna period as an underemployed, angry and starving artist, lives in a miserable flophouse not far from Zweig’s cultured block, and takes his formative ideological cues from the stridently anti-Semitic Viennese mayor, Karl Lueger.

What’s more, while the multi-ethnic and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire functions with charm and aplomb at the heap’s top, working class Vienna is by most contemporary accounts a seething reflection of the empire’s considerable intramural tensions.

Zweig apparently notices little of it. Rather, in his view the citizenry is united in respect for the elderly emperor Franz Joseph, and even Lueger isn’t always such a bad chap, after all. Vienna’s relative smallness means that pastoral picnics or woodland strolls await at the end of the tram line.

Is everyone happy in his or her place? It seems so to Zweig, who emerges as the effortless prodigy, forever insulated from the unseemly. School is a lark, and everything he touches turns to gold. He churns out flawless copy, and everyone wants some of it. He writes plays and coyly hints at their presumed existence, and immediately there come offers to stage them come from directors at renowned theaters.

Thus, Zweig embarks upon a lifetime of happenstance brushes with the famous and powerful. Zweig eerily presages “Zelig”, title character of Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary, by means of always being where someone famous is about to stumble past and ask for a cigarette, or directions to the loo.

In 1914, all is well. Then, all of it crumbles.

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The onset of World War I provides a wrenching transition in Stefan Zweig’s comfortable, predictable Viennese world. One lifetime passes, and another begins.

It starts calmly enough. Zweig observes that the death of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo barely causes a stir in his own social milieu, and why would it? After all, the heir was the objectionable sort, cranky and scowling, and nowhere near as trustworthy and seemly as the ancient whiskered Emperor and other reliable royal court figures like Karl, the new and far more youthful figurehead in waiting.

Significantly, Zweig’s summer holiday in 1914 occurs in the vicinity of the Low Countries. He is right there, watching, as troop trains roll forward near the beach. Mobilization of the European armies is in full swing, according to secret plans written to the rhythm of railway timetables. The writer barely makes it back to Österreich before the national borders slam shut, ending the blissful era of peace and passport-free travel.

Back home in Vienna, Zweig finds himself too old to enlist and too young to die. He nabs a sinecure in the library of a military branch, all the while continuing to write, to be published and to get paid as the world around him falls to pieces.

Zweig’s eyes finally are opened (or so he reports) during a public relations junket to the Eastern Front, during which he nominally performs his official duties by subcontracting them to local Jewish “factors”, later sharing a filthy hospital train with the dying flower of Austro-Hungarian manhood in route from the hellish trenches to lovely Budapest, where the juxtaposition of death’s gritty squalor and the Hungarian capital’s seemingly unchanged quaint urban ambience moves him.

Reckoning that he’s seen enough, and despairing of the increasingly impoverished atmosphere in Vienna, Zweig elects to wait out the conflict in neutral Zurich, Switzerland, from which VI Lenin travels to return home for the revolution.

The writer continues to ruminate, addressing his own work, as well as the nature of art and culture in wartime, and how the international fraternity of writers comes to be as conflicted by patriotism as the workers abandoning the socialist international. Zweig expresses pain and disappointment … and he watches the clock.

With the war over and the Central Powers in degraded shambles, Zweig heads for Salzburg in the now emasculated Austria, pausing at the border to observe ex-emperor Karl heading for exile in the other direction. The first few post-war months are hard. They’d get easier for a while, but across the valley from Salzburg, up atop Berchtesgaden, is the man who’ll soon be taking it all away from Zweig.

It’s that same former resident of Vienna, Hitler.

---

Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Eleventh in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

The Habsburg dynasty reigned in various European configurations and locales from the 1400s through its finale in 1918, famously stockpiling its geographical components through strategic marriage ceremonies more often than armed conflict.

There’s something to admire in wedding banquets as opposed to bloodletting, although unfortunately, hard-learned lessons were forgotten in the very end.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire had been rebranded as Austria-Hungary, and occupied a large chunk of Central Europe – from the Alps to what is now Belarus and the Ukraine, and from Poland to the Adriatic.

The empire was populated by numerous ethnic groups speaking just as many languages, representing most major religions and a few minor ones, and held together largely by a steadily eroding inertia, otherwise known as “divine right” in the person of the venerable emperor, Franz Joseph, who was 84 years old in 1914 and had ruled since 1848.

His own son having committed suicide, Franz Joseph’s heir was his nephew, Franz Ferdinand – and Franz Ferdinand was a complicated individual.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

Upon arrival in Vienna, and after the cursory stowing of gear at the Hostel Ruthensteiner and a quick coffee, the Arsenal was my opening afternoon attraction. Happily for an inexperienced tourist often too disorganized to eat, the museum boasted a small, efficient canteen operated by its citizen support arm.

The counter was manned by an elderly mustachioed gentleman who served fat local sausages with a roll and mustard, accompanied by a blue collar Schwecator lager, and all of it available at a very reasonable price. Restored to metabolic equilibrium, it was off to the exhibits.

First came the obligatory suits of armor and medieval skull-busters, followed by racks of muskets, Napoleonic-era uniforms and affiliated ephemera. Modern times drew steadily closer, and then I spotted the relics that occasioned my visit: Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained tunic, the restored Gräf & Stift automobile in which he rode to his murder in Sarajevo in 1914, and numerous facsimiles of photographs taken before and after the assassination.

This was one of the images, and it triggered a lasting personal obsession.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are shown exiting the town hall in Sarajevo. In little more than ten minutes, they’ll be dead, dispatched by two improbably well-placed gunshots from a youthful terrorist, Gavrilo Princip.

When the photo was taken, the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo already had careened far off the rails. It was about to get even worse, with misfortune ranging far beyond the shortened lives of the royal couple, to victims all over the world about to be claimed in an unprecedented conflagration.

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The Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to us as a blunt, obnoxious, violent and generally unlikable human being, who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the flimsy guise of hunting.

But had Sigmund Freud been asked, the Viennese doctor surely would have pointed to deeper currents. While not exactly enlightened, Franz Ferdinand’s views on the future of the empire were not in sync with those of his uncle’s conservative coterie. He had his own ideas and advisers, and chafed at waiting his turn, at least in part because of an under-appreciated aspect of his character.

Improbably, Franz Ferdinand was a closeted romantic, and he did something decidedly uncommon among his royal brethren: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman of minor nobility who was decreed by the hidebound royal court as inadequately marriageable for Franz Ferdinand -- and so of course, he married her anyway.

Doing so triggered sanctions from Franz Ferdinand’s own family. He was humiliatingly compelled to endure a morganatic marriage, renouncing the path of succession for his two young children, and explicitly acknowledging that Sophie could not participate in the intensively choreographed trappings of royal life.

To the otherwise indefensible Franz Ferdinand, a perfect family man at home, dynastic protocol became a daily slight – an unceasing and mocking suggestion that his beloved did not even exist. It isn’t surprising that he nursed a smoldering grudge.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand had the chance to attend military maneuvers in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a disputed region of mixed ethnicity once occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and recently annexed by Austria-Hungary to the growing dissatisfaction of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, where there existed a body of opinion that all Serbs should be united under Serbian rule.

In such a highly charged atmosphere, the war games seemed a provocation to many people in the region. It was not necessary for Franz Ferdinand to make the trip, but (of course) he did.

Among the reasons for Franz Ferdinand’s decision was this: As defined geographically by the royal court protocol the heir so detested, Bosnia-Herzegovina was outside the reach of official mandated etiquette. It was a veritable loophole, allowing a pleasure trip on company expense, and a chance for the heir to treat his wife to perks otherwise denied her. No doubt he chortled at the turnabout, and her servants began filling crates.

Meanwhile, the background meant nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators, who were being trained and financed by the Black Hand, a covert group of Serbian army officers. As the days passed prior to Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo, a motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted a tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

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As Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade rolled through Sarajevo, one of the inexperienced terrorists managed to keep his wits and toss a bomb, albeit inexpertly. It bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and ignited atop the vehicle behind it, injuring a subaltern.

The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the knee-deep river; thwarted, he then tried to ingest poison that wasn't poisonous enough. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip – a true believer if ever there was one – adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

But he kept his gun safely in his pocket.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, the supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish his official visit at Sarajevo's town hall, where his epic tirade ended only after soothing words from the always helpful Sophie.

Hence, the photo: A bedecked Austrian royal, veins still visibly bursting, descends the stairs while local minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in ancient black and white. A bad moon is about to rise, and they all seem to know it.

Confusingly, the motorcade resumed. Although Franz Ferdinand’s staff had altered the return route to make it safer, the changes were not communicated to the drivers. The Archduke’s Gräf & Stift made a wrong turn, and its driver was told to halt.

The car stopped on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target, seated and stock still only 20 feet away, as though serenely posing in the crosshairs. He fired just two shots, each inexplicably perfect, and within moments both heir and wife were gone.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination provided the pretext for European hawks to settle accounts. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia as a heavy favorite, but was mauled repeatedly by the outnumbered Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the consequences of which endure a century later.

In retrospect, irony abounds. Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure, and yet his genuine love for his wife was in part responsible for their passing.

Moreover, he understood perfectly what so many of his royal compatriots did not: Austria-Hungary was not at all equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Counter-intuitively, the first casualty of war was a prime voice for peace.

Soon millions of others would perish, although initially, only two funerals were required. In death as in life, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary went his own cantankerous way, albeit with a little “help” from his royal family.

That’s because as noted previously, Franz Ferdinand’s final resting place is not among the Habsburg bloodlines deep within Vienna’s Kaisergruft. Protocol forbade the presence of Sophie in the crypt, so Franz Ferdinand’s testament called for the couple’s burial at his family’s castle in Artstetten, a half-day’s bicycle ride up the Danube from Vienna.

In 1985, I was just getting to know Franz Ferdinand’s story. By 2003, almost two decades later, I’d visited several other places connected to Franz Ferdinand: His chateau in Benesov, Czech Republic; the official residence at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; and Sarajevo, where I followed the motorcade route and saw the scene of the crime.

In 2003 a friend and I bicycled to Artstetten. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that in 1985, I’d gone to Vienna looking for Franz Ferdinand, only to find he wasn’t there, which was the reason I’d finally made it to Artstetten. There was no public access to the final resting place of the Habsburg heir and his wife, and I didn’t ask.

She handed me the key, anyway.

I had my moments with them, alone.

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Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Tenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

There was a “wedding crasher” trick I’d learned in the company of a veteran Australian traveler, who between beers had undertaken a careful study of tour groups in Greece.

Note that when it came to ways of saving money, the Aussies were among the very best teachers. They didn’t bother departing from Down Under for a European tour unless they could manage to be away from home for a very long time – and every Greek drachma or Austrian shilling obviously counted.

Not only that, but Australians were invariably friendly and impossible to dislike, and were blessed with a cultural get-out-of-jail-free card.

As an example, for an American or Englishman to drunkenly urinate on a beloved civic monument surely (and rightly) would result in protests, denunciations and arrest. Let an Australian do the same, and he was just an exuberant lad on holiday, soon to be merrily sharing drinks with the very policeman who’d hauled away the American or Englishman.

At least this is the way it seemed at the time.

My savvy fellow traveler’s frugal strategy was borne of simple observation. He had noticed that at museums and historical sites, single visitors bought tickets and were controlled individually, while groups generally were ushered as a mass, straight past the checkpoint.

Therefore, by waiting patiently nearby for an aggregation of fellow Anglos to arrive, solo wanderers like us could artfully feign membership by blending amongst them, sidling over just as they entered the site.

Then, once safely inside, the objective was to detach, but hover close enough to hear the guide’s explanations in English, without being identified as spongers.

After all, what was the worst that might happen? You’d be kicked out, and compelled to circle back later after the shift change, better to try it again – after spending a few minutes perfecting your mock Australian accent.

Just remember: There are no kangaroos in Austria.

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This tactic worked perfectly in Vienna at the Kaisergruft, the imperial crypt, where ornate graves of the Habsburg dynasty rulers and their immediate families contain some, but not all, of their body parts.

In a macabre custom, hearts and entrails customarily were removed for interment in selected churches elsewhere, presumably to mark imperial and ecclesiastical territory, because when it came to obscure, arcane and obtuse rituals, no royal house in Europe could touch the Habsburgs.

Merging with a mass of New Zealanders, I followed them down the stairs, learning to my surprise that Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma, widow of Karl, the last Habsburg emperor, wasn’t even dead yet.

In fact, Empress Zita was 93 years of age that summer of 1985, with almost four years yet to live. She had witnessed the beginning of World War I, and passed away eight months prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

There was another significant omission that day in the Kaisergruft, one I’ll get around to explaining. Absent for eternal duty in the Habsburg crypt was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, whose assassination in Sarajevo came three years after Zita’s and Karl’s wedding, and proved to be the impetus for the wartime horrors to follow.

From the moment I saw Vienna for the first time, stepping off the train from Venice into Sudbahnhof station, changing money and buying a transit pass, a steadily evolving fascination with the history of the Habsburg dynasty kept percolating in the back of my mind.

It was colored with mustard yellow and dark green, in the fashion of the government buildings in the era preceding the Great War. The life and death of Franz Ferdinand struck me as important, although there were many other reasons why I was keen to spend time in the Austrian capital.

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For one thing, I was ready for diligent instruction in classical Central European beer culture. The wine- and spirits-oriented Mediterranean had been quite grand, but an eager, youthful palate yearned for schnitzel, sausages, dumplings and the many Teutonic shades of lager I’d read about in the beer writer Michael Jackson’s books.

Naturally, there were cultural bucket list expectations derived from my immersion in written sources, as with absolutely essential texts like Frederic Morton’s “A Nervous Splendor”, which tells the story of Crown Prince Rudolf’s 1889 murder-suicide pact with his mistress in Mayerling.

Rudolf was Emperor Franz Joseph’s only son, passing the imperial succession to his nephew, Franz Ferdinand.

There was the testimony of previous visitors to Vienna, like my cousin Don, and a handful of PBS documentaries I’d watched. “The Third Man” with Orson Welles had been viewed in preparation, and Strauss waltz LPs duly queued.

Once I’d bought a brand of Austrian beer called Kaiser at Cut Rate Liquors, imagining that the old man with mutton chop whiskers, Franz Joseph himself, would approve of my choice.

Now it was available on draft, at my fingertips, and I couldn’t help pondering its namesake, whose chronology was lengthy and eventful. Like Zita, Franz Joseph’s life spanned disparate eras, from the Europe of old ruling houses to the post-modern destruction of the First World War.

Franz Joseph became emperor in 1848 at the age of 18 and sat on the throne for 68 years, until death belatedly claimed him at 86 in 1916. Many of the empire’s leading politicians and statesmen understood that the empire was not strong enough to survive a long, drawn-out war, and the savage continent-wide conflict relentlessly eroded the viability of Franz Joseph’s shaky domain.

He saw it as God’s will, signed the orders, and then died. As it turned out, he was the only force holding the system together.

In Austria-Hungary, obeisance to the emperor’s many-titled royal personage served as the only generally accepted bond between the empire’s many nationalities and their languages, customs, aspirations and diverse outlooks, with virtually every strain of the 19th and 20th century European experience eventually woven into the complex fabric of Vienna, the capital.

Ironically, as Franz Joseph presided over the empire’s inexorable decadence and decline, the world was rewarded with a blossoming intellectual and cultural life of which his own social class was barely cognizant.

Among those with connections to the imperial capital city were artists (Klimt, Schiele) and musicians (Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler); academics and scholars (Sigmund Freud and his retinue); writers like Stefan Zweig, who’ll be considered in a coming instalment of this travelogue; future world political figures (Adolf Hitler, Josip “Tito” Broz) radical Zionists and hyperbolic anti-Semites, the pioneering lager brewer Anton Dreher (namesake of the Italian lager we’d consumed in Pecetto), and even Leon Askin, the actor who played General Burkhalter on the television show Hogan’s Heroes, and who was born in Vienna nine years before Franz Joseph died.

Like Zita, Askin still was among the living in 1985 – he died in 2005 – but the rest were ghosts, and they crowded my thoughts during the four nights I slept at the Ruthensteiner, an unaffiliated youth hostel owned by a native of Vienna and the woman from Pittsburgh, whom he had married after attending college in the States.

The Ruthensteiner started operating in 1968, and remains open for business in 2015 – still not as long as Franz Joseph reigned. These days, the low season special for a bunk bed is a mere 10 Euros, or circa $13 U.S. The price was about $8 during my stay in 1985. That’s not bad.

Four days proved to be time for precious little save an overview of the city’s history; walking the Ringstrasse; taking a bus out into the Vienna Woods; listening to classical music in the imperial gardens: and one memorable splurge of an evening spent eating Serbian-style bean soup and drinking draft Gold Fassl at a dark, edgy Balkan tavern, then having a second meal of plate-sized Wiener Schnitzel (and more Gold Fassl), at an eatery nearby, dining alongside Americans students from Dayton University, and ultimately realizing that one of them had briefly been a roommate with one of my high school basketball teammates.

Compressed within the confines of a schnitzel restaurant in Vienna, generously plied with beer and conversation, the immensity of the planet seemed to keep shrinking until it was the smallest of interior worlds.

That’s another useful trick worth remembering, although coming to grips with the Habsburgs would require a little more time, as well as additional beers.

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Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

A new column at LouisvilleBeer.com: "The devil’s in the Wien tale."

I really wouldn't mind being back there right about now.

The devil’s in the Wien tale

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

When it comes to preaching the gospel of real beer, the truth can be revealed to you in the unlikeliest of places … and by the least expected of messengers.

Back in 2006, my hardy band of beer cyclists gathered our spare tubes, route maps and brewery addresses in preparation for an epic assault on Central Europe. Once on continental ground, our strenuous two-wheeled rides were strategically interspersed with drinking bouts and hangover-day rail transfers as we moved steadily east from Bamberg to Prague, where on the south side of the city, a 170-mile sign-posted Greenway path to Vienna originates. Indeed, the Austrian capital was our ultimate goal.