During my stay in Rome in 1985, a veteran Australian wanderer taught me a “wedding crasher” trick he claimed to have learned in Greece when not otherwise preoccupied with devouring skewers of souvlaki, cradling drams of ouzo, and ineffectually pursuing love near the Aegean (or was it beer?) beaches.
The Australian said that he had undertaken a careful study of tour groups.
Allow me to interject that Australians were fine teachers when it came to learning how to save money. They seldom departed Down Under for a European stay without remaining away for months, preferably years, often finding temporary employment with fellow Anglophones. Employed or not, every drachma, mark, pound and forint counted for them.
Not only that, but Australians were invariably friendly, easy-going and impossible to dislike, and they appeared to have been gifted with a cultural “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Hypothetically, an American or Englishman drunkenly urinating on a beloved civic monument would prompt protests, denunciations and immediate arrest, culminating with expulsion from the locale, and likely the entire country.
But if an Australian did the same, odds were that he’d be regarded as no more than an overly exuberant lad on holiday, soon to be merrily sharing drinks with the same policeman who’d misplaced the key to the jail cell housing the American or Englishman. At least this is the way it looked to the rest of us, who sensed that our own margin for “nationality error” was far slimmer.
I thought about the Australian when I saw the obligatory Vienna souvenir t-shirts: “There are no kangaroos in Austria.”
His strategy for frugality at museums and historical sites was based on the simple observation that while solo visitors (or pairs, or trios) typically bought tickets and were controlled individually, groups generally were ushered straight past the checkpoint as a unit; seeing as the group’s guide typically was busy with administrative tasks at entry, the counting of heads often became delayed until everyone was inside.
By waiting patiently in the shadows for an aggregation of fellow English speakers to arrive, solo travelers like us could artfully feign membership in the group, discretely sidling over to join the crowd just as it entered the site. Then, once safely inside, there’d be an artful detachment and the resumption of one’s individual identity, although still hovering close enough to hear the guide’s explanations in English.
After all, he added, what’s the worst that could happen? You’d be kicked out, and free to circle back later after the employees changed shifts, this time with an improved accent.
My opportunity to test the Australian’s group tip came at the Kaisergruft, the imperial crypt, where I merged seamlessly with a mass of New Zealanders and followed them down the stairs at a respectful distance of several yards to the ornate graves of the Habsburg dynasty rulers and their immediate families, which contained some, but not all, of their body parts, owing to the macabre custom of removing hearts and entrails for interment in selected churches elsewhere (presumably to mark imperial and ecclesiastical territories with near-canine precision).
When it came to obscure, arcane and obtuse rituals, no other royal house in Europe ever came within a country mile of the Habsburgs. It was at the Kaisergruft that I learned to my surprise that Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma, widow of Karl, the last Habsburg emperor, wasn’t yet dead. She was 93 years of age that summer of 1985; having witnessed the beginning of World War I, Zita would die only eight months prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
My mind was suitably blown.
There was another significant omission that day in the Kaisergruft. Absent from eternal duty in the Habsburg crypt was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the empire, whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo came three years after Zita’s and Karl’s wedding, and proved to be the impetus for a seismic, dynasty-toppling war.
From the moment I saw Vienna for the first time, stepping off the train from Venice into the slightly battered Sudbahnhof (now replaced by a space-age Hauptbahnhof), a steadily evolving fascination with the history of the Habsburgs kept percolating in the back of my mind. It was shaded mustard yellow and dark green in the fashion of the government buildings in the era preceding the Great War, and although I didn’t yet realize it, my subsequent travels would be similarly colored.
A get together with the Habsburgs, whether fact or fiction, brought me to Vienna, but there were may other reasons. For one, I was ready for immersion in classical Central European beer culture. I yearned for schnitzel, sausages, dumplings and the many vaguely Teutonic types of lager I’d read about in the beer writer Michael Jackson’s books.
Additionally, I harbored cultural bucket list expectations derived from 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 (where I subsequently paid a visit in 1997). Rudolf was Emperor Franz Joseph’s only son; his death shifted the imperial succession to the emperor’s nephew, Franz Ferdinand.
The Third Man with Orson Welles was viewed in preparation, and Strauss waltz cassettes duly queued up during preparatory sessions at home consuming an Austrian beer called Kaiser (available at Cut Rate Liquors). I imagined the old man with the mutton chop whiskers, Franz Joseph himself, would have approved. It was said he allowed himself a single beer each Sunday afternoon to unwind.
Kaiser was available in Vienna on draft, and I couldn’t help pondering its namesake, whose chronology was lengthy and eventful. Like Zita, Franz Joseph’s life spanned crazily disparate eras, from the immediate post-Napoleonic era to World War I. He became emperor in 1848 at the age of 18 and occupied the throne for 68 years, until his death at 86 in 1916.
In Austria-Hungary, obeisance to the emperor’s many-titled royal personage served to greater or lesser extent as the 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 its capital.
Ironically, as Franz Joseph presided over the empire’s inexorable decadence and decline, Vienna experienced a blossoming of intellectual and cultural life, of which the loftier social classes weren’t always truly cognizant. These times are chronicled in another must-read book by Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914.
Among those with connections to the imperial capital city during those pre-war years were artists (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele) and musicians (Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg); academics and scholars (Sigmund Freud and his retinue); writers like Robert Musil and Karl Kraus; future world political figures (Adolf Hitler, Josip “Tito” Broz); radical Zionists (Theodor Herzl) and hyperbolic anti-Semites (Georg Ritter von Schönerer); brewing descendants of the pioneering lager master Anton Dreher (namesakes of the Italian lager we’d consumed previously in Pecetto, Italy); and not one, but two actors who bizarrely appeared on the 1960s American television show Hogan’s Heroes: John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter).
Banner came to Vienna from the Ukraine, but Askin was born in the capital nine years before Franz Joseph’s demise, and like Zita, he was living in 1985 (he died in 2005). The rest were ghosts, and they crowded into my thoughts during the four nights I slept at the Ruthensteiner, an unaffiliated youth hostel owned by a native of Vienna and a woman from Pittsburgh, who married after attending college together in the States, and catered to generations of backpackers.
The Ruthensteiner started operating in 1968, and it remains open for business in 2025; that’s 57 years, almost as long as Franz Joseph reigned as emperor. The price for a bunk bed in a male dorm room was the schilling equivalent of $6 during my stay in 1985. That’s how I managed to finish the trip under budget, and all it took was learning to tolerate mass snoring.
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Of all the activities I pursued in Vienna in 1985, and considered repeating in 2026, the one I was least interested in doing again was the descent into the Kaisergruft. But I leaped at the chance for a “do over” when it came to a ride from the Ringstrasse aboard Tram D, north to Nussdorf in the 19th district (Döbling).
Taken as a whole, Vienna’s public transit system is a stunning testament to urban living without the expense and hassle of an automobile. Small wonder that the city is a consistent winner or runner-up in The Economist’s “most liveable city” rankings.
The 7.29-mile-long Tram D line dates to 1907 and runs between Absberggasse and Beethovengang (to learn more about trams, go here).
The route might have been constructed only with visitors in mind; many of the sights, excellent restaurants and watering holes are within a short walk of it.
Nussdorf is the gateway to Vienna’s wine district, Grinzing, famous for urban vineyards and Heurigen (wine taverns).
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Not only does a ride on Tram D give passengers a view of the imperial Habsburg architecture along the Ring; it also takes in the kilometer-long, 1,600-unit Karl Marx Hof public housing project, erected from 1927 to 1930 during the period known as Red Vienna. The KMH seemingly occupies a couple of time zones.
From 1991 through 2003, I usually exited Tram D at its next-to-the-last stop in Nussdorf, then strolled a few minutes to Brauhaus Nussdorf: 40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty-Two: Vienna’s “Old Whisky Malt Waltz,” a precursor of beer revolutions to come.
Wien Info waxes cerebral about the Tram D experience, and they’re pretty much on target.
Ommm. Let’s meditate. The venue may be a bit unusual – we invite you to climb aboard the famous tram line D at the Vienna Main Station and join us for a 40-minute meditation trip around the city. Nothing could be more relaxing than to head out of the hurly-burly of the station hall, passing the city’s most beautiful sights on your way to the vineyards of Nussdorf to enjoy a glass of wine. Don’t forget to buy a ticket, otherwise this might be the most expensive meditation you ever experience … but we digress: take your place in the D tram, close your eyes, take a deep breath and enter a new level of meditation.
Zum Renner, an eatery since 1899, is just down the street from Tram D’s terminus at Beethovengang, but we liked the pub called Einkehr zur Zahnradbahn, which means “rest stop by the cog railway.”
Tram D’s turning loop completely encircles the building housing the present-day pub, which used to be the station for a cog railway to the top of Kahlenberg hill; all this came to an end after World War I.
It was a gorgeous spring day, and after walking around the woods and vineyards, a few midday appetizers and beers hit the spot (we’d unknowingly arrived too early for the Heurigen, which open later in the afternoon).
The beer brands Gösser (Austria) and Starobrno (Czech Republic) both are owned by Heineken. For my money, the latter is more evocative of classic Central European pilsner-style beer, so I enjoyed a couple of half-liters before we reboarded Tram D for the trip back into the center.
Neither of us needed to be concerned about driving. That’s priceless.
“Edibles & Potables” is Food & Dining Magazine’s Sunday slot for news and views that range beyond our customary metropolitan Louisville coverage area, as intended to be food (and drink) for thought.
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