What Happened in Vienna (1920)

Nobody knows what happened in Vienna in 1920, even those who lived there at the time, because they’re dead and didn’t write anything down. Those who did write something down, however, often got everything wrong – perhaps intentionally, to trick posterity.

The truth is: absolutely nothing happened in Vienna in 1920. On the other hand, everything happened. Each minute of each day, everything happens, the wide world over. And, equally, nothing happens. Only at rare moments do historic, memorable, recordable things happen. Fiction, too, only describes the remarkable, never the unremarkable.

There was a small boy in Vienna in 1920 who saw Sigmund Freud in the street but, to the boy, the person he saw was an ordinary person who walked the streets; only one head, only two legs, one nose, eyes that looked at the boy then looked away, about to forge on towards some unimportant errand. Except this was the Sigmund Freud who probably did more to change the world than anyone else. You see, he suffocated Adolf Hitler. If the boy had not mischievously tripped up that ordinary gent, who was upon an unremarkable errand that 1920 day in Vienna, then that gent couldn’t have later suffocated Adolf Hitler, because he (Sigmund Freud) would have been in a different place at a different time, by the strange laws of chaos theory.

Or was it some skewed law of averages that simply allowed people like Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler to meet at odd anachronistic moments during impossible cross-sections of their two respective lives?

The boy – oblivious of such concerns – was scolded by his parents for tripping up that bearded gent who was otherwise minding his own unremarkable business walking the streets of Vienna that special day in 1920. A special day among a number of other special days. But not a day anyone knew about.  Even fiction missed it.

The boy echoed his parents’ scolding words back at them in a sneering tone: “That was very rude!”

A clip round the ear ensued, as the father (a man of some standing in Viennese society) applied a fitting punishment for such backchat. I have translated what was said into English, for the benefit of my English readers, and I shall continue to do so. Many things were said, and I haven’t bothered to translate everything.

The boy started bawling – in Austrian, no doubt. But there were secret messages between the words, signs and symbols that indicated he was more than just a child. It was a commentary in code upon the clandestine forces at work during inter-war Europe. Warning of this and that, and the onset of an even bigger war than the one just finished. Wars were often warnings in themselves, hence their names.

In any event, an observer in the street noticed this and recognised the signs. This observer was one of those known as a History Seeker, one who was hiding in a doorway: a single example of the many History Seekers masquerading as ordinary Austrians of the day. Indeed, peppered throughout the population of Vienna in 1920 were at least one hundred thousand History Seekers from other times, although most of them thought they were ordinary Austrians. Despite being History Seekers, their minds were planted with an ordinary life in 1920 Vienna. Only their dreams hinted at something beyond their normal day-to-day concerns. Dreams that seemed inexplicable, even surreal, on the surface. The stuff of art movements.  Or fiction.


The parents with their child wandered off into the crowds, to be lost forever from the keen observation of most History Seekers, knowing and unknowing alike.

I managed to follow the family, however, as I had been primed to do. My own history antenna was sufficiently sensitive to sense the sensitivities of other antennae a mile off, even with the interference from the heightened life-and-death concerns of ordinary Austrians running amok among the History Seekers.

The dark survival of the Mittel-European masses was a force that did blur our keen machinations to change the course of History. Had they but known, these common folk would have stepped aside, scuttled off to their dark steamy kitchens where their interference would be less apparent. After all, we History Seekers were a definite force for good, desperately trying to divert the rivers of blood into other less dangerous sluices of Time, where minimal harm would be done to the ordinary populace.

The family arrived back at their own dark steamy kitchen, with their love for each other still intact, despite the scolding words that echoed between them. The child – the one who had tripped up Sigmund Freud – was now rather more mature (even if still small in stature), as if he had grown up rather suddenly, during the hike home through the Viennese streets. The conversation had become muted, as if they actually now suspected they were being observed.

I wasn’t the only one. I had spotted several dark shapes and shadows being towed along by this family behind them. I could also hear Strauss waltzes, interspersed with what I considered to be a very strange section of music, a more modernistic sounding anthem that intoned the name of Vienna in English, with an outlandish wireless beat prefiguring scientific inventions that had no place in 1920. The child sang along with this version of Vienna, a sound system that blotted out the more familiar orchestral music of Mahler and Strauss. Where the music was coming from was quite a mystery. There was no sign of baton or criss-crossing bows in the nearby bandstand in the park. Indeed, the music sounded far too streamlined and rehearsed – quite beyond the abilities of our usual bandstand buskers. The modernistic anthem of Vienna was quite disturbing. It made me feel the band was alive, yet invisible. The vocalist was wildly unoperatic. Ultra weird. Beyond the scope of any song that I had ever experienced: with English vowels quite out of the reach of the normal Viennese warbler of 1920. Yet vaguely amateurish and unrefined.

“Can I watch…?” asked the child, as the mother increased the steam in the kitchen with her attempts at infusing tea in a samovar. The father remained quietly stern, staring into the blue flames of some hissing jets with some faraway tune imperceptibly bubbling at the fat parts of his lips.

“Can you watch what?” the Mother asked, her tone of voice evidently conveying her annoyance at the child’s behaviour whilst outside in the street.

The child pointed at a black and white framed photograph leaning against the wall from where its edge rested on the draining board. Looking at something that was entirely static did not seem worthy of the word ‘watch’, but he insisted upon staring at it, his eyes following some hidden action of the frozen figures therein. It was a scene of bedraggled people being pushed and shoved towards wagons and loaded for conveyance elsewhere. Frozen in time. Not a single History Seeker in sight. Or none that made themselves obvious. There were a few bystanders but they seemed to be laughing. A real-life History Seeker – and I should know – would never laugh at such evil goings-on. History Seekers would never laugh especially while observing the dire straits of those poor people making History itself by being herded on to wagons. History Seekers were true to their beliefs, even if it meant being exposed and left in the open amid the most barbaric scenes of History. Some History Seekers were probably loaded in the wagons and became History themselves.

There was a knock on the door.

“I bet it’s that gentleman you tripped over come to complain,” said the Mother. I could tell she had been beautiful once. She still looked quite young under all the careworn wrinkles. I could easily visualise her being a teenager. She had that look of youth in her eyes and around the mouth. Unlike her husband – the child’s father – because his own careworn features were disguised by an unphotogenic horror movie mask paradoxically masquerading as the face of a Viennese man in 1920. He wasn’t being cruel to the child but I could imagine him being cruel when out of my observation.

It was soon to become a difficult period in the story to describe. History Seekers are supposed to be adept with words, to depict the logic of happenings and the consecutive events of History as they panned out or fanned out in a multitude of possibilities feeding off other possibilities ad infinitum and ad absurdum. So imagine my disappointment when events became out of control and too sudden for me to give due credit to their passing.

The gentleman had already been invited into the kitchen, even before I could blink … and the child was being made to apologise.

“Go on, say sorry,” shrieked the mother.

The man with the pointed beard and the look of learning was decidedly placid, like a plate of just tenderised beefsteak. His eyes followed every movement of these kitchen dwellers. The child’s father had faded into the background like a forgotten or ownerless shadow. The child’s mother kept repeating her refrain: “Go on, say sorry, go on say sorry, go on say sorry….”, this time mumbling rather than shrieking, as if giving up some ghost with each breath. Despair writ large in her eyes.

The gentleman who I assumed to be Sigmund Freud suddenly smiled, creasing the dead meat of his face above the pork bristles of his chin … and said: “No need to say sorry, young ‘un. It was an accident, I’m pretty sure.”

As to being sure, I’m actually unsure of the correct translation but that is as near as possible. Like events in 1920 in Vienna, who knows what happened for sure? None of us were really there. I like to think I was there. I know I must have dreamed of some of the events: the riots, the ceremonies celebrating the Anschluss, the other History Seekers I sought for comradely mutual support (but found none), the empty eyes of many real inhabitants, the monotonous beat of a modernistic anthem echoing on tannoys from street-corner to street-corner, the grey buildings scarred by warfare, worn by heavy weather, air raid warnings blotting out the music, and that dark steamy kitchen where, by now, even as I tell you these things, the mother as well as the father have already retreated, both of them dropping back as shadows into shadows, as if sinking below or should I say behind the vertical surface of what little shimmering light still remained.

Even I found it difficult to keep my eyes open, as I witnessed the residual human shapes in the kitchen, the larger one taking final purchase upon the smaller . The Child is Father of the Man, a poet once said, during Intimations of Immortality.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open on the monochrome scene that was now enacted between the margins of History’s frame … as the two shapes merged, either by murder or suicide, one killing the other by becoming the other.  More effective than suffocation. No, indeed, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, as they filled with tears as well as blackness behind the lids.

You see, I later discovered, by a retrospective piece of information in a supposed fiction, that I had been no History Seeker at all but Sigmund Freud himself.  A disastrous mistake to make, as it turned out.

The boy?  I assume he was nothing but the ghost child of a childless marriage, using their words in mocking echoes.

(unpublished)