Vienna Contrasts

Hokitika Guardian, 28 May 1921, Page 1

Vienna Contrasts

VIENNA, March 10. Last night I called at a Viennese bar that in the old days was one of the deal cross-roads of Europe. East met West there, and Wilhelmina, the lofty lady at the counter, used to know by name most of the habitual wanderers of the Continent. With misgivings bred by experience of the strange drink-substitutes now sold in Central Europe under familiar names, I asked the barman what one could have to drink, and in reply, he passed me a little hook containing enough alcoholic information to serve as a “Complete Drinker’s Manual.”

Exclusive of wines of various character and vintage, (his thirst-provoking work begins by dividing drinks into eighteen main categories. Each of these classes contains the titles of from five to forty concoctions with which the depressed Austrian can slake his thirst and raise his spirits (provided he has money enough for each drink, at the old rate of reckoning exchange, costs the equivalent of £2l.

Along with names familiar to an amateur drinker T find strange species of which few Britons, at any rate, have ever heard. Outside, the snow lies slushy and uncarted in the Vienna streets; what better comfort could one have than to turn to the chapter, “Hot-Drinks” and (choose between a “Blue-Blazer” and a “Tlot-Lokomotive” (I give the spelling as T find it), or a “Tom and .Terry” and a “Sportmnn’s Drink”? “Hell-Punch”—under its appropriate rubric —is a suggestive name. “Turkish Blood.” and, further on, “Blood Blister,” are unpleasant German realism.

These bars, these busy restaurants, dancing saloons, and cabarets are an odd islands of wastefulness in the midst of this bankrupt city. Out of the two millions population of Vienna several hundred thousand struggle daily to keep their heads above the line of sheer starvation. Their Government itself has no assets but an overworked machine for printing almost worthless paper-money. Yet in tiie midst of private suffering and public despair the lavish self-indulgence of the profiteering class of Austrian goes on flagrantly and unrestrained. Vienna, once aristocratic beyond all cities, has queer sights to-day. The little traders from the muddy eastern towns, regarded as the dregs of the old Austria, are now its powerful plutocrats. Effulgent in their first dresssuits they make strange play with knife and fork in places that were the most brilliant social scenes of the old Europe.