ABSTRACT
I was born in Vienna, the Vienna that history and stupidity have transformed from a metropolis into an overpopulated provincial town, its dullness being one of the most closely guarded secrets of the travel bureaus. Notwithstanding its antiquity and healthful climate, Vienna once had more in common with New York than any other European town. At that time it drew its airs and peoples from a score of races. Its tailors, bookmakers, and pastry cooks were Bohemians whose tongue had not lost the rasping twang of Czech; its nobles hailed from every comer of Catholic Europe, including the Hapsburgs’ lost domains in the Lowlands, in Lombardy, Umbria, Silesia, and Spain, in the lands under the colonial rale of heretics and heathens, such as Wallachia, Greece, the Levant, Ireland, and Scotland; its most beautiful women and its most openhanded hosts had left their native Hungary and Poland to grace an uninterrupted succession of official and private festivities; and its most colorful soldiery was recruited from Bosnia, Hungary, and the Tyrol.
