TWILIGHT IN THE HELDENPLATZ

Paula Hoffman, a TIME researcher, took a trip home to her native Austria after an absense of eight years. On her return to the U.S. she wrote:

In Vienna, the tram conductors are cheerful. They are among the few people who know where they are going these days, and they proudly wear the Social-Democratic party flower on their caps--red tin carnations. The trolleys, which are just as red, again rattle through the streets with people hanging like bunches of grapes from the jammed cars. Lilacs and hyacinths are in bloom, white & rose candles stand high and firm in the chestnut trees. You don't have to remember the bodies still buried under the ruins to realize that all the flowers amid Vienna's dead-grey monuments make the city look like a big graveyard.

A Better World. In the nightclubs, songsters croon: "In a year, when Old Stephen will be as it once was. . . ." But it will be more like five years before the gutted cathedral will be rebuilt. Once, right after the liberation, hope of revival centered around Saint Stephen's, and men & women of all classes worked and carted away the sacred rubble. Now, foraging for food is more important.

Even the churches that still stand unscathed are not crowded. The Church has no practical suggestions for helping Austria out of its earthly mess. "Do not fear," was the gist of the Easter sermon in the Kirche am Hof, "even though another war seems to be brewing. Look toward a life in a better world after death."

Nevertheless, in the grey, red-&-gold Burg chapel, where once the Emperor followed Mass, Viennese still congregate every Sunday, and they are joined--in cosmopolitan peace--by some occupation officers who have a taste for prayer and music. There, violins and the sweet young voices of the Saengerknaben still make the most beautiful music in the honor of God that is made anywhere.

One of Vienna's most magnificent squares--the Heldenplatz (Square of Heroes), with its huge statues--is now the front yard of the Russian headquarters. Russian soldiers perch like drab birds on the base of Prinz Eugen's statue and little Russian boys in dark blue school uniforms fire slingshots at passersby. When Vienna's bluish-green dusk settles over the square and forms a backdrop for the lighted clock in the Rathaus tower, and the lilac smells especially sweet, a few moments of real peace descend. Then the Russians turn on their loudspeakers, which blare hit tunes.

The New Russians. Vienna is still plastered with red stars and pictures of Lenin and Stalin looking like stuffed dolls; but Viennese hopefully note that fading Russian street signs are not being repainted. Relations with the Russians have changed. Vienna boasts that it has civilized the Russians, has made them wash and pull up their pants, has taught them how to walk like Europeans (some Russians from the steppes had a curious gait, left arm and left foot swinging forward at the same time). Now, whenever shots are heard from Russian barracks, Viennese whisper: "Aha, a Russian who likes the West too much is being liquidated!"

Are the Americans in their turn influencing the Austrians? Austrians who work for the rich Amerikaner are well fed and think of themselves as a superior class. At the U.S. legation one day, an Austrian flunky approached a waiting citizen with the question: "What are you smoking there?" The man explained proudly that he grew his own tobacco. Cried the flunky: "In the American Embassy you can't smoke anything that smells as bad as that!"

The Black Women. One train a day ties Vienna with Salzburg in the "Golden West" (the U.S. zone). There, by the emerald-green meadows and blue lakes, you see forlorn figures --peasant women, not in the colored dress of Upper Austria, but in stark black. In their little black velvet shoes, they trudge along the limestone-powdered roads in quiet dignity. The mountains don't mean anything to them beyond the fact that this is no country to grow the good, rich wheat they grew at home. They are German-speaking D.P.s from the Balkans awaiting resettlement in hungry Germany, where they are not welcome.

"Now . . . please." Austrians themselves, like the solemn strangers from the south, are a displaced people. They have never been fiercely nationalistic. An Austrian's patriotism is an allegiance to the valley where his house stands or the songs he shares with his neighbors, not a sublimated loyalty to a flag.

Will cheerfulness and graciousness be enough for survival in a passionately nationalistic Europe? The tram conductors in Vienna epitomize their country's charm and futility. They say, wistfully: "Now come on, please buy your tickets; please don't try to ride free."

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