Outer space in Währinger Strasse

By Pippa Goldschmidt:

It was a weekend of dissonances. I’d gone to Vienna to talk about outer space at a symposium held in an arts centre called WUK; a complex of dilapidated brick buildings which started life in 1855 as a railway locomotive factory. This soot-stained evidence of Vienna’s industrial past contrasted sharply with the fancy Baroque palaces for which the city is famous, their gold-and-white decoration gleaming in the early March sunshine.

Amongst the topics for discussion at the symposium was the Outer Space Treaty, a utopian attempt by the United Nations in 1967 to declare that no nation state can stake a claim to any object in ‘outer space’ – wherever that may be exactly, the treaty avoids having to define its location. But in the decades that have passed since it was originally drafted and ratified, many companies have decided they want to stake a claim to objects in outer space, such as asteroids, in order to mine them for metals which are rare on Earth. The symposium agreed that outer space should be accessible to all, and not colonised for the purposes of making rich people even richer and we shared a hope that the future of space exploration might be profoundly different from its past; more egalitarian, less connected to military and imperial aspirations.

The symposium had an online audience, perhaps connected to us by those invisible satellites we were discussing, and I was constantly distracted by my image on a screen just off to one side of me. As I read out part of a short story, so did my on-screen doppelgänger, but she was always half a sentence behind me. When I finished, I watched her mouth move silently before she too stopped and we regarded each other.

The speakers at the symposium discussed the origins of satellites and rockets in metal that has to be dug out of the earth, and described how workers in some of these mines have gone on strike over the dangerous conditions and environmental damage. This juxtaposition between shiny rockets soaring apparently effortlessly into the sky and people working underground was mirrored by the half-imaginary entity of outer space – a legal no-place far above us – contrasting sharply with the post-industrial spaces of WUK and its rusting iron pipes.

Once the capital of a vast empire, Vienna now feels like a city out of time, not quite sure how it can fit into the 21st century other than presenting itself as a theme park with endless statues of emperors and empresses, with the percussive clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages taking the tourists for rides around the Ring, and where these tourists (after their carriage rides) can queue outside traditional cafés to eat Sachertorte or Kaiserschmarrn. Cafés where everything, even the strong and bitter coffee, is covered with a thick layer of whipped cream.

But there is yet more juxtaposition for me personally, and on much smaller scales. WUK is situated in Währinger Strasse, a long street that juts like the spoke of a bicycle wheel out of the city centre towards the woods in the north-west. I had heard of this street before I came here because it is where my grandmother was born and grew up. She left in 1938, one of the few Jewish adults able to get a visa to enter Britain, possibly because she was young and could speak English. Her parents, who had no savings, and were neither young enough to work nor able to speak English, were left behind in Vienna. She never saw them again.

So for me, Währinger Strasse is not a place associated with nostalgia or coffee served with Schlagsahne. When I was young, my grandmother repeatedly told me to visit Vienna, to see the imperial art collections and the architecture; the magnificent churches with shining domes and steep patterned roofs, as well as the Modernist Secession building and the Bauhaus-influenced house designed by  Wittgenstein for his sister. She did not tell me to go to Währinger Strasse and see the apartment block where she spent her childhood, and from where her parents were evicted in 1939 before they were forced into an overcrowded ghetto in the city centre. There her father died, and her mother was deported east.

My grandmother didn’t tell me to go there because she never talked about this part of the family history, but she had written down the address and so I went there anyway.

There was nothing to see, of course. There never is anything to see at these places, their very anonymity heightens the horror. If it could happen here at this four storey apartment block on a bend in the road and with a tramline running past the front door, it could – and did – happen anywhere. I stood and watched the building from the other side of the road, perhaps wanting to see a sign of life. But nobody inside gave me any such sign, the windows remained blank and dark, and so I left.

I returned to my hotel near the busy shopping street Mariahilfer Strasse, and just across the road from the Westbahnhof, the station from where my grandmother would have caught that train in 1938. There is a memorial in this station to the Jewish children who escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1939. But it says nothing about the adults who also escaped. Given how large it was, the destroyed Jewish community of Vienna has remarkably few memorials, the city apparently prefers to dwell on more distant events. And perhaps I do too, after all my main reason for coming here was to talk about outer space, rather than be confronted with what happened to my grandmother and great-grandparents. But the buildings dragged me back down to earth.

When I left Vienna to return home I caught a train from the Hauptbahnhof, which was crowded with refugees from Ukraine. Hundreds of people waited on the main concourse to travel further west; exhausted women, children, old people and pets were all being given food by volunteers. My train, advertised as nearly empty when I booked my ticket at the beginning of February, was now full. I sat next to a teenage girl who slept almost the entire six hour journey to Frankfurt, her pet rabbit in a travel carrier at her feet. I thought of my grandmother and great-grandparents, and cried.

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Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books), and most recently she’s co-editor (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) of Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press) an anthology of work inspired by Freud’s uncanny as it reveals itself in the human body, the forest and the city. She’s recently completed a memoir/family history The German Lesson about what it feels like to ‘return’ to Frankfurt, the city her grandfather fled in 1938.

Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk