The Ways a Hearthfire Burns: A Trip to Graz

[Jubal]

The Ways a Hearthfire Burns: A Trip to Graz

It takes about two and half hours to travel between Vienna, Austria's capital, and Graz in the southwest. Graz is the capital of the Steiermark: its name is reduced to the latinised Styria in most English forms, which loses the fairly important aspect of it being a mark, a marchland, somewhere on the frontier of the German-speaking part of Europe, facing the imagined wilder areas to the south and east. Graz was for many centuries the seat not just of Styria but of 'Inner Austria', the part of the Habsburg realms south of the Semmering Pass from which a junior branch of the family ruled a population as much Slovene as German and stretching down towards Italy. The edge of the Germanic world was under their rule: that imagination of a borderland has had resonances throughout the region's history.

The Semmering Pass itself was somewhere I had visited previously, and it was resplendent in a covering of snow as the train climbed over it and headed down into Styria. Upon arrival, I didn't have the best welcome to the city: an extremely persistent man asking for money got very uncomfortably up in my face and started following me around persistently until I gave him more out of my wallet than I'd originally done: I didn't especially begrudge him the money but the experience left me feeling very rattled as I finally got on the bus and rumbled across the city. I had been to Graz some years earlier for work, but this was the first time I was going to have some time to look around.

The mountain passes on the way to Graz.

The theme of the conference was burial and exhumation, so it was probably a bit appropriate that I felt a bit like death between the early morning and uncomfortable human interaction. Nonetheless the talks, despite my own being rather a chaotic information-dump of an affair, were fascinating, looking at everything from the intricacies of when different laws applied, to the problems of pre-assuming answers and circular logic in historical genetics. There was a talk which involved tales of God being angry at sinners being buried in His church and responding by, as a modern person might put it, throwing the whole man away – literally hurling the sarcophagus and corpse out of a window multiple times until the dead man's family got the picture. It was the story element where, this having happened once, the man's family reburied him in the church only for it to happen a second time, that felt a particularly human touch: the irrepressible human instinct to pretend something didn't happen and get back to normal is at least as old as history.

Dinner that evening, it should also be noted, was excellent. Not that Graz would wish anyone to expect otherwise: it has carved out a very specific set of food specialisms within broader Austrian society and cuisine over the centuries. Its renown for particularly well-fed chickens apparently goes back at least a couple of centuries, and it's the part of the country that most seriously commercially produces apples, with eighty percent of the country's crop coming from the region. Pumpkin seeds and meat cooking are also especially important in Styrian food culture, and back in Vienna, a Styrian stall at my local farmer's market is one of the only places I can buy a decent cider (apfelmost) on a regular basis.

There's much to be said for Graz as a city even beyond the food. It's built much lower than Vienna and with a slightly more Italianate hint to its styles, and it feels homely, in a way the tourist traps of Vienna and Salzburg fail to achieve. There's a sense, too, of it being in a bit of a goldilocks zone, not too big and not too small. Whilst for British people our imaginary of Austria is very Tyrolean, all alpenhorns and skiing and lederhosen, as someone living in Austria it is Graz that feels the most painstakingly quintessential Austrian city, from its architecture to its cuisine to the spectacular forest and mountain backdrops.

Apple strudel punch - surprisingly good!

That Austrian-ness adds a certain complexity to the place's identity. Styria, whilst it certainly has its own cultural traits and cuisine, is in other ways a sort of middling microcosm of Austria: it's been described as a 'swing state' electorally, with some areas where all the major parties can compete. Graz itself is the greatest modern stronghold of the Austrian Communist Party, though beyond the city most of the rest of the province is conservative leaning, fought between the centre-right and far-right with occasional pockets of post-industrial red blotching the map. The Communists have largely built their base in Graz with a relentless focus on housing affordability – it's the thing they're known for well beyond the city's boundaries. Perhaps this, too, is an emanation of the city's sense of homeliness, reinterpreted through a more hard-left lens.

The end of the evening was spent at the Christmas market in the main square – already well underway, for the market season extends well back into November for the tourists' sake – and there I had a single-drink dessert in the form of an apple strudel punsch. This was something I had a certain trepidation about, given the possibility that it would be far too sweet for my generally savoury-toothed palate, but I was pleasantly surprised: it tasted very much like a good, and not overly processed apple strudel, down to the correct sugar balance, artful use of cinnamon, and as a nice touch the addition of some rum-raisins besides what was probably a generous initial alcohol shot of the drink. It was warming, and just the right level of sweet.

I stayed at a hotel overnight, and the next day, I had some time to actually explore. This meant starting by crossing the shallow, fast-flowing river Mur and heading back to the main square: it was a day with occasional sun, but also a lot of low cloud and fog in places, so that when I set out there were still wreaths of mist around the Schlossberg hilltop that overlooks the centre of the city. The market was not yet open, and the buildings around the city hall still had their wooden shutters closed. Cosiness, after all, to some extent demands contrast with the colder, less world beyond. Beneath the Graz goldilocks effect as a whole this fact lurks, the out-of-sight reminder of a particularly vicious twentieth century legacy. As one of my colleagues had noted the night before, some of the nicest city-centre architecture was built or spruced up during the fascist period to claim homes for Austria's Nazi aristocracy. Vociferously left-wing as the city may be today, Graz's charms are no less charming to the extremes of the right.

After the main square, I walked past some buskers singing Sound of Silence: one of those songs that, while hard-hitting when one thinks about it even a little, has sort of faded into the popular psyche of background sound. My next stop was the Cathedral, which feels a rather squat sort of building for someone used to impressive towers being a major feature of such constructions. It is mostly a single large nave with a rather minimalist tower poking up as if unsure whether it is safe to emerge from the belly of the building below. Inside, it has a very quintessentially Catholic interior full of early modern paintwork and gold, built with a sense of oppressive drama that feels unfamiliar to the city beyond. A row of confessionals lurk holding whispered secrets, at the back and various side-chapels are sealed off with fancy ironwork doors. One of them was the Kinderkapelle, and I wasn't sure that intricate ironwork and overbearing early modern art were quite the aesthetic that a children's chapel brought to my mind. Behind the church's mother-hen exterior, there was more complexity to the inside. On the other side of a small alley, a large mausoleum sits next to the Cathedral itself: this was closed when I visited.

The Nazi-era Schlossberg tunnels.

My next plan was heading up the Schlossberg (literally, castle hill). Halfway up, one can find an entrance to the old tunnel systems. These are more visible signs of the fascist period, built during the war in order to provide shelter from allied bombing raids. I probably find rough-carven tunnels more calming than some people: these were not square-cut, but fairly roughly hewn from the rock and old now, giving them some pleasantly natural shaping. These were a reminder, however, of another Graz, one assailed by force from without and moral terror from within. The town was one of the most heavily bombed in Austria, and the Nazi elites who had purged the place of its minorities found themselves sheltering not long later from repeated aerial attacks as the Soviet forces moved closer at the end of the war. Most of the tunnels today cannot be entered, but a direct tunnel line through the hill is open to foot visitors and other sections open for events.

The Nazis had relatively little to do with the castle itself, for its loss pre-dated them: it was demolished by Napoleon's forces, with the parklands around the city centre being laid out at that point in the nineteenth century. Graz resisted Napoleon's army quite effectively, and when the rest of the Habsburgs' defences crumpled after defeat in the field he did not forgive the city for its defiance. Its defences gone, the city turned quite rapidly from a heavily fortified bastion, constructed with heavy walls to stand against the Ottomans in the seventeenth century, to having a much more genteel exterior. Later suburbs sprawled further out – but the ring of parks around the first district remains to this day. 

Some remnants remain of bastion walls and, most visibly, of the clock tower, parts of which date back to the middle ages and which is now the most visible landmark on the Schlossberg from across the centre of the city. The tower has three bells – the oldest one is for the hours, but there is a second that was traditionally the fire bell, and a third that was apparently used for curfews and executions. A rose garden below the tower occupies the position of an old bastion, with a small building built as a gift to bastion's commander from that last Napoleonic defence – it now serves as a residence for writers and artists being recognised by or seeking refuge in the city. Here, one can look out over the city itself. For me, it sat under a dappled mix of late autumn light and brooding cloud, as if uncertain under which of the two it really belonged.

In general the views from the top of the hill are excellent: the commanding position of the Schlossberg was one of the original appeals of the site of Graz, giving it a powerful view over the surrounding area. The name is probably from Slavic gradec, castle, and its medieval occupation by German settlers made use of the imposing view to create a new edge to the Germanic world. The centre of Habsburg Inner Austria it may have been, but Inner Austria was far from ethnically and linguistically Germanic outside the cities. In the 1940s, when the partisans and the Red Army closed in, that realisation of the Germano-slavic borderland sharply returned. After the war, Graz was no longer a bastion against the east, but its later twentieth century history was often that of a refuge from it, taking in political dissidents from Hungary, Jews fleeing to the former Nazi holdout to escape the new wave of Stalinist purges, and later Yugoslav refugees from the wars there in the 1990s. The outlook has seen many people come and go: and I, brief visitor from a far-off land myself, was just a speck in the long flow of the river, my coming and going as visible from the hill as anyone else's in the long years before.

The old Schlossberg clock tower.

The park at the top of the hill has a range of monuments, busts, and ruins. The few surviving parts of the fortress and bastions date from the 1550s, designed by an Italian architect for the Habsburgs. The counter-reformation was underway in this period, with Protestantism being often brutally suppressed across Inner Austria. An old bell-tower and parts of the castle stables from this period remain standing, the latter containing an interactive museum. A large hall that was once part of the storage cellars remains, too, now open to the air but been converted into a very fun concert and market venue with a modern retractable roof.  The one exception in period terms is the foundation of the St. Thomas Chapel, which dated back to 1271: it was spared from the razing of the castle along with the neighbouring bell tower but was too badly damaged to remain standing for more than another year afterwards.

The park features added since include hornbeam trees, a Japanese pavilion from the 1890s overlooking the city, and a small chapel-like building with a café on the site of the old powder storage. Like so many things in Graz, the delightful exterior has some discomforts if one looks at it too closely: busts of local poets and writers have signs that quite bluntly inform visitors that these paragons of literature all joined the Nazis in the 1930s, often enthusiastically.

It wasn't just nationalist poets flocking to Hitler's cause, for Graz wasn't just a city that the fascists happened to govern. It was a stronghold of Germanic ethnocentric thought under the previous Nationalist-Austrofascist regime, and its city hall was the first place in Austria to fly Hitler's swastika even before the Anschluss that brought Austria under Nazi rule. At the time, this was a source of some pride: Graz was known as the Stadt der Volkserhebung, the "City of the Popular Uprising", with postcards and a film produced. Hitler was given a painting of the city and honorary citizenship for his 51st birthday, and gave the city the official rights to use the "City of the Popular Uprising" title. If all cosiness requires some sense of the darkness outside, Graz's cosiness was directed against the Jews, Slavs, and other enemies of the Nazi state: painting these people, literally, as the bleak world outside the cosy home turned that gentle sense of food and good cheer into fuel for a weapon that could and did kill.

The Volkskundemuseum – the museum of folk culture – is perhaps one of the best places to get a sense of both how deep and how shallow the Styrian sense of home runs. It was founded before the fascist period by the folklorist Viktor Geramb – an ideologue whose seminal studies of German folklore were done in part to try and create a stronger sense of mythos and identity for his dream of a pan-German revival. He unsurprisingly folded in favour of fascism as it came closer and closer to home, first in Austrofascist and then Nazi sort, even if his German nationalism was by nature of a more traditionally conservative and Christian kind. The Austrofascist governor of Graz was a great supporter of Geramb's work: this perhaps did not endear him to the Nazis, but later, with the Gestapo headquarters in Graz located directly opposite the museum site, Geramb was allowed to continue his work under restrictions until the end of the war. Thereafter he slotted in neatly to Austria's quiet attempts to forget what it had been part of: he helped to rehabilitate the careers of several more explicitly Nazi academics, was feted by the local leadership, and still has an award for Styrian architecture named after him awarded regularly.

The Styrian sense of self is fully on display at the modern museum – a display shows wax models of apples made to help teach farmers about the different varieties, and another shows the political use of apples in Styrian politics, with politicians of all stripes adorning their election appeals with the fruit. Perhaps the thing that most stuck with me, though, was an exhibit on embroidery, wherein it is apparently the case that "traditional" embroidery, especially in Styria, is typically done in red and white, with a specific cherry red #47 being the idealised thread colour. The exhibit is an array of samplers through the ages going back to the 1790s or so – and the oldest ones are a riot of colour, with blues, yellows, greens, multicoloured birds and flowers and fruit. Around the 1880s though, the supposedly "traditional" patterns take over. The colour drains away, and the cherry red #47 takes its place, fuelled by a sense of harking back to a "simpler" "traditional" past. The Nazis further leaned in to this invention, promoting a sense of simplicity and hard work to be associated with the simplicity of the method. Even after the war, the concept of red-and-white as traditional was embraced by Austria too, and the older styles never re-emerged.

The oldest exhibit in the museum that remains visible is the Trachtenhalle – the hall of tracht, traditional dress. This was made during the museum's early years, Viktor Geramb's work dating to back before the Nazi period. The dress styles go back deep into history, though with certain very particular leanings. Most of the figures represent Austrians: just two represent the region's Slavs, and these are presented barefoot in simple white clothing, as compared to the vibrant colour and modernity given to the majority of the Germanic mannequins. The unsubtle message of Slavic backwardness, placing them in a literally timeless, shoeless world, was a very deliberate construction. It was even something that Geramb was conscious of – his writings show that he knew the Slavic cultural traditions perfectly well to the point where he bemoaned the lack of similar displays of dance and colour among the Germanic ethnicities. This is a key part of the doublethink of ethnic traditionalists: wanting to show their preferred ethnic groups as being more advanced – and therefore changing, while less favoured ones remain stuck behind – whilst simultaneously presenting themselves as defenders of tradition and resistant to change. It's trivial to find similar outcomes in how people present Islam in modern Europe, wherein the same people who decry the whole religion as medieval and backward present themselves as the staunch defenders of nation and tradition against cultural concepts that they see as modern aberrations.

This was how, after all the tub-thumping for heimat and home, Graz found itself a marchland again: by closing its doors on Slavic and Jewish neighbours and the threats of the outside world and deciding that the power of fascism would protect that imaginary, it found that the least comfortable thing of all was existential conflict. The Slavic partisans of the Slovenian hills certainly proved capable of fighting back against the Nazis, and after the Allies and Red Army closed in, Graz found not only the Germanic world but Austria itself carved up. The hard-line Nazis fled Graz before the Russians arrived, hoping for better deals from the British and Americans who had been pounding the city from the air and advancing from the west. Styria was part of the British sector in the initial post-war quartering of the country: Austrian neutrality developed out of the subsequent complicated deals that made cities like Graz the first line of western Europe.

Heading out of the city centre and returning to the station, modern businesses in the city had a pretty wide mix of functions and signage as one got further out of the middle. A sign blared that a shop was called "Number One": those exact words, untranslated, not in German but in English. The noisy, busy streets are alive and mixed and messy in a way that would have horrified some of the people who built Graz but, perhaps, should give all of us some hope: that here, too, in this town named Fortress that has guarded the edge of empires and ethnicities alike, there is still much for people of all kinds to call home.


Homeliness and a sense of permanence are things that Graz has an uncanny ability to invent. It is cheery, warm, and Austrian to its core, with a sense of gentle solidity, warm hearths and good food, and a history of all of those things being weaponised in the darkest possible ways. In this, too, it is a microcosm of Austria's battles with itself, its earnestly welcoming sense of self wrestling with its fear of what lies beyond its doors, its local, Germanic, national, and European identities staring at each other through flames that stand in potentia – hearth warmth or bombing raid, heimat or burning books. Or both. It would be easy to decry all the cosiness as a sham, a façade to cover up past embarrassments, even as a subtle continuation of the exclusionary sense of homeland that past professors promoted through the Trachtenhalle. I don't think those elements are wholly absent, but nor do they tell the whole story. Part of the appeal of homely cheer and good food is precisely its perceived distance from the weighty politics of the day: it is a real comfort, the good food is genuinely good, the guileless warmth of a fire an idea that people can, generation after generation, easily and guilelessly sign up to.

That very lack of guile is its weakness. Not understanding that the Graz of today is a reinvention of a reinvention gives the space for each new turn of the wheel to happen subtly, unchallenged. Each turn changes the definition of who is inside, and what defines the outside with which the home is contrasted. The fire inside the cosy room will burn for whomsoever feeds it, and the door will shut out whatsoever those inside close it upon. Those are our choices, and we and our descendants must make them afresh each time they arise. So let the fires be warm for all whose weary feet reach the step, and the door be opened when they need it: perhaps then the food and cheer of Graz will at last have found that which can – truly – be called home.