Max Brod: Tycho Brahe weg zu Gott
Franz Kafka: Investigation of a dog
Franz Werfel: The song of Bernadette
Karel Capek: Rossum Universal Robots
Milena Jesenska: Alles ist Leben
IWM target="_blank">Milena Jesenska Fellowship for journalists
Egon Erwin Kisch: The Roving Reporter
Johannes Urzidil : Prager Trypticon
Aperture with Cornel Capa: Robert Capa Photography
Michael Palin: Hemingway Travels
Ernest Hemingway: A farewell to arms
Martha Gellhorn: a stricken field
F.Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the night
Walter De la Mare: Poetry
Graham Greene: The Third Man
Marie Francoise Allain: A conversation with Graham Greene
Joseph Kessel: The Lion
Mohandas K Gandhi: The story of my experiments with truth
Guillaume Apolinaire: Poems
Antoine de St Exupery: The little prince
Paul Tabori: Epitaph for Europe
Simon Winchester: The professor and the Madman
Ashley Montagu: A study in Dignity
Joy Kuhn: The Elephant Man - film of the story
Isabella Rosselini: This is me, then
Federico Garcia Lorca: Poetry
Leonard Cohen: Love and mercy
Life and times of Paul Leppin by Dierk Hoffmann
Mairtin Crawford: Poetry
zebras54 poems
John Kenneth Galbraith: The culture of contentment
Lewis Caroll: Alice in Wonderland
Julia Donaldson: the Gruffallo
Robert McCrum: Story of English
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Kenneth Williams: Just Williams
Marlene Dietrich: My life
Rainer Maria Rilke: Two stories of Prague
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhiwago
William B. Yeats: Selected poems
Sean O'Casey: I knock at the door
Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost
Sam Hannah Bell: December Bride
Alexander Irvine: Love is enough
Alice Taylor: Quench the lamp
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Arthur Conan Doyle: A scandal in Bohemia
Frederic Sudre: The European Court of Human Rights
Vaclav Havel: The Memorandum
Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
Oliver Goldsmith: The vicar of wakefield
J.G. Ballard: Concrete Island
Agatha Christie: The hound of death and other stories
W.G. Burley : Wycliffe
Friedrich Duerrenmatt: The Pledge
Krysztof Kieslowski/Krisztof Prziesewitcz: The Decalogue
Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu: The second chance
Pavel Kohout: The end of the summer holidays
Heinrich Boell: The Train was on time
Alexander Solzhenitzyn: A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch
Michael Stavaric: Tagwerk Landnahme ungelenk
David James: Straightpoet
Sergio Campanale: The Red Hat
Milan Kundera: The Joke
Klaus Deinet: Deutsche in Pariser Exil
Heinrich Heine: Winterreise
Ardal O Hanlon: The talk of the town
Yann Martell: The Life of Pi
Francis Wheen: How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the world
Will Hodgkinson: Guitar Man
Barry Hines: A kestrel for a knave
Doolee.com website that lists all plays produced in Britain
Federico Zanatta: The writer and his spy.
A.J. Cronin: The northern light
recommendation:
( Brett Anderson from The Tears)
Authors;
Foucault,
link
Sartre
link
,
Michel Houllebecq-Atomised,
link
Zadie Smith–White Teeth
link
,
Camus-The Outsider,
link
Martin Amis-Time’s Arrow,
link
Kurt Vonnegut-Mother Night,
link
John Fowles-The Collector
link
,
William Burroughs-Junkie
link
,
Primo Levi-If This is a Man
link
,
Nietsche-Ecce Homo
link
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
link
Popular Music - Mikael Niemi
link
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
link
Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise
link
Saturday - Ian McEwan link
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst link
The Human Stain - Philip Roth link
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Jean Dominique Bauby link
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:15 pm Post subject: favourite all time read
Atomised - Michel Houllebecq
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
The Outsider - Albert Camus
Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Bauby
Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
The Magus - John Fowles
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
If This is a Man - Primo Levi
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Rebel - Joseph Roth
Concrete Island - J.G. Ballard
The Rotters Club - Jonathan Coe
Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kareshi
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
Norwegian Wood - Murikani
London Fields/ Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
1984 - George Orwell
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
Whatever - Michel Houllebecq
Hamish Brown: Travel books on mountains
> List of books
Michael Howard and Peter Ford: The True History of the Elephant Man (a study in human dignity" John (Joseph) Merrick (1862-1890)
'Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.
(Poem used by John Merrick in a pamphlet accompanying his freak show, and later when he wrote to thank people for their generosity in caring for him.)
Kenneth Williams Just Williams
Hermann Mostar : Weltgeschichte
Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickled and Dimed - Undercover in low-wage USA
Naomi Klein: No Logo
Hans Pretterebner: Ship Lucona (good book, by a good (slightly confused) journalist
John Kenneth Galbraith:
The Culture of Contentment
Klaus Deinet : Deutsche im Pariser Exil
Aperture with Cornell Capa : Robert Capa Photographs
Kate Adie: Kindness of strangers
Joy
Kuhn : The Elephant Man - Book of the film
C.S. Lewis : Surprised by Joy
Constantin Virgil Gheorgiu : The Second Chance
Hugo Pepper : Der Rote Hund
Mogg Williams: Mogg's People (also go to page 2 of Bohemian Library)
John
Campbell: The Docks
Rolf Hochhuth: :
Alan Turing
Max Buettner: Romantik der Briefmarke
Simon Winchester : The Professor and the Madman, the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Matthew Parris: Chance Witness - An outsider's life in politics
Agatha Christie: The Hound of Death
George Orwell : Animal Farm
Gustav Meyrink : Geschichte vom Loewen Alois (Alois the Lion), from Des Deutschen Spiesser Wunderhorn
Infos about Germany with Pictures of Mr Bean
Jiri Kollar : Tydenik 1968 (Newsreel 1968)
Michael Stavaric : Fluegellos (without wings)
Sergio Campanale: Gods of Stone/A Tree
falls
Patricia
Highsmith: Strangers on the Train
Heinrich Boell : The Train was on Time
Daphne du Maurier : Rebecca
Erich Kaestner : Lyrische Hausapotheke
Loved
it?
So you want more?
gimme a yeah!
louder, I can't hear you
Okey: let's go on - but before let's mention this for the record:
the linked homepages are intellectual properties of their author/designer/whoever, as I don't write those, I don't necessarily agree with every dot and comma.
involved, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.
More
books:
&
In the library/In der Bibliothek:
Many
roamed about Austria, the Czech Republic and Northern Ireland, and others
elsewhere...
This is how the Czech language looks like - hence the choice of English as a default language, as most visitors of cyberspace understand this language.
Is English the new Latin?
our selection is truly international
and eclectic
many are tales
most are suitable for all ages and mostly post 1900
Milena Jesenska: Alles ist leben
Franz
Kafka: Der Prozess (The Trial)
Max Brod:
Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott - (Scroll further down on this page!)
Graham Greene: The Third Man
Paul Tabori: Epitaph for Europe
(about Third Man Director Alexander Korda
G.E. Gedye: Introducing Austria
) The Third Man's Vienna
also go to
William B. Yeats: Poems
Jaroslav Hasek : The good soldier Svejk
Josef Svorecki: The Cowards
Erich Fried : Kallender fí²Ší°¤en Frieden
Alice Taylor: Quench the lamp
O.Henry: The gift of the magi
Zelda Fitzgerald: Save me the last waltz
Thomas Mann: Felix Krull
Klaus Mann: Symphonie Pathetique (Biography of Peter Tschaikovsky)
Edna
O'Brien : Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Also see: Twentieth-century Women Novelists, ed. by Thomas F. Staley (1982)
Phoenix
Park by Charring Cross Road in London
Charring Cross Road is famed to be London's book street
The park is sponsored by Michael Palin, Monty Python man
writer and traveller from Sheffield
Michael Palin signing his book about Hemingway Belfast 1998
Michael Palin: Hemingway adventure
Ernest Hemingway: A farewell to arms
Friedrich Torberg: Die Tante Jolesch
Sam Hannah
Bell: December Bride
Johannes Mario Simmel: Niemand ist eine Insel
Brian Moore: The Torn Curtain
Else Lasker-Schueler : The Black Swan
Karl
Kraus: Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht
Marcel
Reich-Ranicki: Mein Leben (The Author of Himself)
Martha Gellhorn: A stricken field
Eduard Moericke: Mozart Reise nach Prag
Ludwig Anzengruber: Der Meineidsbauer
Peter Innerhofer: Schoene Tage
Werner Schneyder: Ansichten eines Solisten
Hannes Swoboda: Mein Europa
Andrew Rawnsley To the left the spoils of the war (The Observer)
Jiri
Gruza: Gebrauchsanweisung fí²Ší°”schechien
Andre Malraux : La Condition Humaine
Liz Curtis:
Nothing but the same old story
Helene Carrere d'Encausse : Le Grand Frere (The Big Brother)
Leopold
Sendar Senghor : Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Magache
(Anthology of New Black-African and Magache Poetry)
Wilfried Loth: Stalins Unbeliebtes Kind - Warum Moskau die DDR nicht
wollte
Frederic Sudre : La Convention Europeene des Droits de l'homme
(If you can read French you find a mention of a colloquium in Montpellier 1993:
Le Droit franç¡©s et la Convention europ饮ne des droits de l'homme, 1974-1992 : actes du colloque de Montpellier, f鶲ier 1993 / sous la direction de Fr餩ric Sudre, organisé £onjointement par l'Institut de droit europ饮 des droits de l'homme (IDEDH) de l'Université ontpellier I et l'Institut des droits de l'homme du Barreau de Montpellier. - Strasbourg ; Kehl ; Arlington : N.P. Engel, [1994] I, the ed, was there - put up the posters . Highly recommended by Mr Sudre is:
Council of Europe:
The European Convention of Human Rights
Council of Europe: The Social Charter of Turin
The United Nations: Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Peter Orthofer: Uns bleibt nichts erspart (we are spared nothing)
Jean Giraudoux: La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (The Trojan War
won't take place)
Jean
Anouilh : Beckett oder die Ehre Gottes
Vaclav Havel: The Memorandum
Bohumil
Hrabal: The Impostors
Erasmus of Rotterdam: Adagia
h.c. artmann: Im Schatten der Burenwurst
Ardal O'Hanlon : The Talk of Town
Stephen Jones (aka Babybird): The Bad book
Barry Hines: A Kestrel for a Knave
Spike Milligan : Puckoon
Irina Ratushinskaya: Dance with a shadow
Krzysztof Kieslowski/Krystof Piesewicz: Decalogue
Arthur
Conan Doyle: A scandal in Bohemia
Egon Erwin Kish: Der Rasende Reporter (The Roving Reporter)
Carlo Gebler : Plain tales from Northern Ireland
Robert McCrum : Story of English
Julia Donaldson: The Gruffalo
Johannes Uzbichil: Prager Triptychon (nothing about him, so we also refer to the above mentionned link
instead…)
James Hilton: Goodbye Mr Chips
Odon von Horvarth: Jugend ohne Gott
Robert
Musil: Verwirrungen des Zoegling Toerless
Rainer Maria Rilke : Zwei Prager Geschichten (Two stories of Prague)
Heinrich Mann: Professor Unrat
Lion Feuchtwanger: The Purpose of the historical novel
Alexander Solzhenitzyn: A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch
Boris Pasternak : Doctor Zhiwago
Alessandro
Bassani : The Garden of the Finzi Contini
Ivan Klima: My Golden Trades
Karel Capek : Kampf der Molochen
Gene Roddenberry: The menagerie
Stephen Fry : Columbus was English
Oscar Wilde : Picture of Dorian Gray
Albert Camus: La Chute (The Fall)
Friedrich Duerrenmatt : Das Versprechen (The Promise)
George Simenon
: Maigret
Antoine de Saint-Exupery : Le Petit Prince (The Small Prince)
Joseph Kessel : Le Lion
Michael Wollaston : Red Rumba
Sara Paretsky: VI Warshawski
Pavel Kohout: The End of the Summer holidays
Sean O Casey (aka Johnny Casside) : I knock at the door
Raymond Chandler : The big sleep
Arundhati Roy: : The God of Small things
Gertrude Drack/Suzana Namcova: Die Fidelen Rabentaler
Edgar Alan
Poe: The Raven
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped - the adventures of David Balfour
Robert Burns : Auld Lang Syne
Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The rhyme of the ancient mariner
Herman Melville : Moby Dick
Joseph Conrad:: Lord Jim
Emer O'Sullivan/Dietmar Roesler: It could be worse, oder ? (in English-Deutsch)
Monika Ptak: Come and visit Vienna - published by the Austrian cultural institute New York 1977
manuals/reports/biographies/articles
When the rain falls
David Barnett: Love and poison
Mark Sturdy: Truth and Beauty
Kate Adie: the kindness of strangers
Hans Pretterebbner: Ship Lucona
Matthew Parris: An outsider view of politics
Andrew Rawnsley: To the left the spoils
Hugo Pepper: Life and times of Robert Owen
Wilfried Loth: Warum Stalin die DDR nicht wollte
The China City
Dominique Lapierre: City of Joy
Michael Scharang: Charlie Tractor
... : Love on the dole
Ivan Klima: My golden trades
Wordsworth edition: German-English dictionary
Reuters News Agency
APA news
Swyssen: geopolitical atlas of Europe
The Economist: World statistics
Merian Geography: Prague (1992)
Nase Praha: Prague City Guide
Riga - A guide
Belfast Millenium Edition
G.E. Gedye: Introducing Austria
Peter Orthofer: Uns bleibt nichts erspart
Jiri Gruza: Anleitung fuer Tschechien
Czech language guide for the library
http://www.czech-language.cz
And since we are at work, let's visit a factory. As I was researching on another article for a Bohemian tale, I came across Bata. What started as a pun got me into a factory in Zlin/Moravia (the region west of Prague) and there we met a friend of Mr Brod. Text in Deutsch by Jan Tabor, born 1944.
Jan Tabor (Essay) Otto Wagner (data Falter Verlag; Wien; book 72 pages)
http://home.t-online.de/home/daetlef/start.htm
links will follow soon.
NO ICE CREAM FOR A JACKDAW
A bohemian tale
novelette published by DKAV
radioevropa@yahoo.co.uk for enquiries about printed version
copyright 1982-2006 DKAV/radioevropa (a copy of which has been deposited at the copyright library england)
This story is the concluding part of Red White Blue - Monokrom, a series of twelve stories published as novelettes, some of which narrated by Karel Skodacek, a photographer born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1936. (compiler’s notes – edited by DKAV (london, october 2005)
Narrator: Karel Skodacek
photographer and book-shop assistant
born Ceske Krumlov, 1936, resident in Vienna since 1969
November 1982, Vienna
What a feeling to get back home! You end your holidays in a faraway place - like the coast of Northern Ireland and you are homeward bound - via half of Western Europe! Summer was over. It was the 24th of September 1982 to be precise. It was time to go. I pondered whether I should spend a few days and visit Dublin and check out if it really looks the way James Joyce has described… However, I had never read any of his books, although I have been told that Ulysses, masterpiece of modern literature, which defined the stream of consciousness idea, contains quite a few risque passages. When I arrived with the Blue bus from Millisle to Belfast, the rain was lashing - worse than what I had experienced until now on the Emerald Isle, The first impression you get about Belfast, is going to Bohemia and ending up in some industrial town with all the heavy fumes, functional building and traffic. When you go to Ireland and you end up in Belfast, it's just the same feeling. Having said that, it started life as a port and merchant town, after all didn't these yellow cranes called Samson and Goliath not build the Titanic?
Belfast is a big city. At one time it was quite small, even worse, there has been an occasion where there was no Belfast city at all. Thank heaven, those days are gone and there is now of plentiful supply of Belfast. Ugly and grey it spreads out, drab, dull, lack-lustre streets, crammed with the same repetitive, faceless, uninspired, profit taking, soul-breaking buildings. The only edifices worth seeing are those erected long before the coming of the local council and the builder. Beautiful buildings seemed to taunt them. "Pull them down!" was the cry "The highway must go through!". The world, beauty, tranquility and fresh air were being sacrificed to a lump of compressed tin with a combustion engine. Stately trees were felled as a "danger to lightning", and when one questioned them, the answer came from a faceless thing called "the spokesman said". Here safe in its bureaucratic cocoon, we had the new vandalism of authority, power without conscience or taste, as if it was with Belfast so was it with other cities, for now and ever after it seemed. In this metropolis lived many citizens. Most of them poor with an additional burden, nowadays it costs more to be poor than it used to."
Spike Milligan (born 1919) Puckoon (1963)
I remember that back in Prague, many dissidents were condemning the fact that ruthless industrialisation was going to destroy the old identity of our country whilst the real-socialist posters were forging a new one. It seems to me that in the West, a similar process has been undertaken. They want to take their places out of the dark ages of peasantry and superstition and lead it towards progress. And this is how the spokesmen justify felling trees and beautiful buildings. This house is condemned, they say. Didn't Le Corbusier at the beginning of this century advocate functionality by claiming that a house is a machine to live in? Belfast was not only bearing the scars of intensive industrialisation, it also was a place mutilated by the violence that had taken place since 1969.
I also know that Belfast has forged a name for itself thanks to a minority of IRA and Unionist terrorists and if in their statements. All of them pretend to be some kind of modern day partizans, then I have to disagree with that. To me, modern day terrorism has nothing to do with all people who fought for their integrity, because modern day terrorists have no moral code, they kill indistinctly by throwing bombs amidst busy centres. A partizan, on the other hand did only fight with an armed enemy, and even some partizans fight an armed enemy without weapons, and in the modern days they are called dissidents.
I condemn terrorism and sabotage, just as I condemn punitive medical practices. In my opinion, terrorists are on par with medical executioners, KGB agents and dictators of all persuasions and varieties. The fact that they happen to be on different sides is a matter of chance. Their moral principles are similar, their logic and types are at the same end of the spectrum. At the other end are considerations of conscience, ethics, and spiritual values
Alexander Podrabinek (born in Russia 1953) Punitive Medicine (1971)
I unfolded my umbrella, went out of the Ulsterbus station in Oxford Street, glanced at the cranes in the East over the Lagan River, now the landmark of the town, and walked towards the Glengall Street bus station to take my coach for the ferry port of Larne. Because I had some time on my hand, I decided to dry out in a Belfast pub called the Crown, which featured in a movie made by Carol Reed with James Mason as the leading man. Odd Man Out dating from 1947, sees James playing a character who is a member of a gang. (note: many film critics say it is the IRA, but Carol Reed does not want to specify it). The barman served me and confirmed that the film was made in Belfast but that the director either had no real notion of Belfast's geography, or wanted to give the film a surreal touch. If I watched it, I would notice a slightly leaning clock-tower, - the Albert Clock near the Lagan River -not far from Oxford Street bus station. You see James' character, who is wounded and tries to escape. It is impossible, Iain said, that one can see the Albert Clock from any of the angles and settings Carol Reed uses. I hazarded the theory that Carol Reed probably wanted a landmark in order to show that, no matter where he was running, James was doing so in circles plus that he did not want Samson and Goliath to be the landmarks. Billy who worked in the shipyard said that the cranes are Belfast landmarks, the Albert Clock is just so tiny. I thought that it is strange that both landmarks have a German connection. The clock tower is named after the German born consort Albert von Sachsen-Coburg Gotha and the two cranes were manufactured by Krupp in Essen. I said to myself that the Ferris wheel in Vienna was built by the English engineer Booth, who designed the Blackpool Tower and that the statue of liberty in New York was designed by the same person responsible for the lions of Belfort in the Savoyard area… Famous landmarks have little to do with nationality, and this is a good thing. Anyway, I drank a Guinness to James' health in my compartment pondering Belfast in the rain, which looked like any sodden town and listened to the radio as a man called Hugo Duncan was playing his favourite songs from Nashville, a few red rose classics and some old shamrock favourites like the Wild Rover, Whiskey and Yeats' Down by the Salley Gardens and Billy, Sean, Jimmy and Iain have great craic. I didn't understand much what they were saying.
In a field by the river, my love and I did stand
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow white hand
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears
W.B. Yeats - Down by the Salley Gardens
Good bye remote island, I must haste, and I will arise and go, and go to... not to Innishfree but to my ferry for Scotland in Larne… As I looked back to the island I remembered that both Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson the man who sentenced him to Reading Gaol came from Northern Ireland. Oscar went to primary school in Fermanagh and because a famous playwright in London. Edward Carson is petrified in front of his Orange parliament for Orange people – and theatres in the west end play oscar wilde’s plays and know so little about his family, especially his mother who wrote Irish folklore tales…
The sea was choppy, so I spent the journey lying down thinking that whatever happens I would never enrol in the merchant navy. It was night when we reached mythical Scotland so much praised by Robert Burns who lived in a place called Drumfries. I heard someone say once that the melody to Auld Lang Syne originated in the plains of Israel and that dancers brought it to Scotland. Oh the riches of folklore. There is such diversity of culture in the world, one wish to see it all and yet folks like me just don't take the opportunity on the silver plate. Instead, I get a crash course within a few days by talking to random strangers and I feel that there is so much I have to know and that I should have researched. A scholar’s work is never ever done. I knew from my history that the lowland Scots who were of Presbyterian (Calvinist tradition) made the opposite journey as the one I was doing and that they brought their culture to Northern Ireland, and this is why many Protestants identify with Scotland, rather than with Celtic Ireland. But there was not much to be seen of lowland Scotland. It was night and all the remaining visibility was washed down by the pouring rain. It was autumn over those hills and those roads.
In the morning, as I found myself at Victoria Coach Station, in London I was pondering the names of the destinations. Suddenly it hit me: why don't you get a ticket to the place you called home for the past thirteen years, but HOME, the real home? There was a coach going to Prague via Pilsen - I just had to get on it. Not on the one going to Vienna, two platforms down. What is Vienna anyway, but a crossroads of nations? Honeymooners fall in love with Vienna, but they wouldn’t want to spend their domesticity there. It’s the history. When you live there you feel like you have been left behind with the memories of those who have emigrated, those who have become independent and those whose bones rest six feet under. All what remains there are the maelstrom of politics and literature, the Vienna opera ball, the universities and for the likes of me, the café. Unless you are Simon Wiesenthal and that warrants a stay. Unless you are like me, a matlosa – what Simon and I have in common is this: the memories serve for a better future. Didn’t Elie Wiesel say: Without Rememberance there can be no future?
I went to the information desk and asked them "Do you have any seats left for Prague?" the girl spoke English in a Czech accent and said yes. Did I have a visa for the CSSR. Ach, no, but sure - if they don't let me in at the border, I can always get off the bus. The girl who was called Anita thought this to be a good idea too especially because she realised that I was a fluent Czech speaker. Austrian, she asked. Oh, yes, I said. Well, I'll talk to the driver and see what they can do for you. - Fine. Obviously that one likes the James Mason charm.
I made my way to the coach, and the driver looked at my passport explaining: it won't be easy to get into the country without a visa. And I reiterated the offer that if they didn't let me in, I would get off the bus. Pan Jan Malacek and his co-driver Michal Hoffman were satisfied and let me on. They must have thought: Those Austrians, really! I couldn't believe it: I was on a Czechoslovak coach!! A few minutes later it departed, and I made a little wave at the Austrian coach feeling sorry to snub Austria that way. The coach drove to Dover - there the immigration asked me all sorts of questions and detained me for about half an hour asking me what I had been doing in Northern Ireland. Then I remembered that the day before some bomb had gone off near an army barrack in South Armagh. That was the work of the IRA armed with CSSR made Semtex and Eastern European equipment.I thought of that teenager David deClare and hope that he did not get harmed. Immigration didn't detain me as long as the other passengers who didn't have the privilege to be citizens of free Europe. I at least, was an Austrian – Austria is member of the EFTA. If I had been Swiss, perhaps I would have felt more special. I studied the time-table, thinking of the idea that I was going to be in Pilsen at 15.45, I imagined how I would take the train to Krumlov and from there the bus to Kostelec and the look on the face of my family!! My cousins Rudolf, Ferdinand and Martha and my aunt Jana… We passed the Belgian-German border at Eynatten, paused at a Raststaette (= Service station). I was now very excited because the language was familiar. Even though, German is a default language… German signs, Czech and Slovak voices on the coach - ah, I was at last finding my cultural references back after three months immersed in an English speaking world… but at the same time, I felt apprehensive… We crossed Germany, I tried to picture where Austria was in comparison.
The bus stopped in Munich where it picked up a bearded American called E.H. Hemingstein, who used to be in the US army but was treating his depression by travelling through Europe and writing short stories for his magazine. Oh you are a writer, I said. Are you a writer yourself he asked. Oh yes, I said, I am an Austrian writer and I've just completed a novel. I wrote it in ENGLISH . Your English is very good, you can call me Eddie. Yep Eddie, you speak Czech? No I don't speak Czech. My name is Karel I said . So, were you in London, Karel? Oh, no, I just passed London, I said, I was in Northern Ireland - researching. That really did turn on Eddie: Only macho men go and survive in Northern Ireland (and ordinary Northern Irish people too!). I explained that my publisher was in Northern Ireland.
What is your novel about? he asked. I said that one of the main characters is my cousin from Vienna who used to be in the Third Man. Is it your first novel? Yes, I said, I'm a virgin as far as writing books is concerned. - Now, man, take it from the horse's mouth, I am an acclaimed published writer: if you wrote a story in English about a guy who was in the Third Man then you definitely wrote a best-seller because everyone knows and loves the Third Man. Therefore you must like Graham Greene. I explained to him that my landlady Frau Lidia Sebesta met him in 1949. Man, you have definitely written a classic. You must, I insist, write to Graham Greene: he will be thrilled to meet such a talented person like you! That cousin of mine, Eddie, I said now getting carried away to dizzy heights, he made a film with Yul Brunner. What?! he exclaimed You are travelling by coach and you are such an important person? I admire the way you keep touch with the common life. What is the name of your good cousin who played in the Third Man? - Stefan Votova, I said. He pondered hard, and he pondered harder, Mister Hemingstein, but he had never heard of Stefan Votova.
"Sorry... I am not well acquainted to Austrian cinema.
- No, don't be sorry. That's understandable because Austria is such a faraway country.
- I used to ski in Austria in the 1950s with my wife Hayley. A place called Schruns.
- That's in the Vorarlberg.
- Yes, some famous American writers used to like that resort. Do you know any American writers, Karel?
- I once met a writer called Scott Zelazny.
- The famous science fiction writer?
- Err... I think he is a travelogue writer.
- The travelogue writer Scott Zelazny? I might have heard of him.
- And I also know a German-American director called Wladek Jankovski. He makes conceptual art movies.
- Oh, Hollywood tried to film my stories, but they are such arseholes. Let me tell you you have all what it takes to be a bestselling writer. You are well-connected and one foot in the movie world too. You are well-travelled. And you have visited a trouble-spot too. Fantastic. I used to be in 'nam. War correspondent and I got wounded by those commie vietcongs just where it hurts a man most.
- You mean... urgh!
- But I was married four times. Shows you that my manliness recovered thanks to the tender loving care of MASH nurse Cathy. Now all I'm left with are my ten cats and my wife Mary. One is no longer young.
- True... What takes you to Prague? Have you been there before?
- No, I haven't but my wife Marsha did. Hey, man, if you feel like keeping company to an old sailor like me, you could be my guide in Prague.
- With pleasure, Herr Hemingstein."
I used to do that a very long time ago. Wandering around in our Bohemian capital... The coach wandered through Bavarian rural landscapes, the houses looking tidy. Pilsen - the first road sign showing Pilsen. Of course, the Germans write it like the Sudete did Pilsen - but it's called Plsen now. No matter, home - soon! Then we arrived at the border. Out of nowhere emerged a giant monster of grey concrete and a queue of cars. The co-driver collected the passports, which he gave to German police when they came onto the coach. The planned anticipated or dreaded holiday in the Lands of Saint Wenceslas had to be postponed because when the coach reached the border, reality caught with us. The German custom officer shouted: Passkontrolle, so Jan the driver gave him the basket where he had collected the passports. When the officer saw that I had no entrance visa for Czechoslovakia, he told me to get off the bus. I assured him that if I told the authorities I was only going to Pilsen then they surely wouldn't mind. But they did mind. The German sentry told me that no visa for the CSSR meant no entry. Eddie Hemingstein tried some good US diplomacy (and God do we know how good the Yanks are at that!) and told him that he knew Colonel Abram Krudermeister who was stationed in Nuremberg. Custom Officer Paul Leuchtengruber was not impressed and repeated that without a visa there was no way I could get out of Germany. Jan and Michal smiled at me with a I told you so smile as I made my way out of the coach followed by Eddie Hemingstein. The other passengers looked at me, some of them with a glum expression others with a bit of schadenfreude. Michal got my little suitcase out of the boot. Eddie straightened his back and said with a solemn expression:
"Well my friend Karel Skodacek, a man has to bow in front of uniformed authority. But here is my address in Prague, and that's my address in Key West, in the United States of America.
- Machen Sie schon." Officer Leuchtengruber said, Eddie went back into the coach
- Cheerio Eddie!" I said waving at him as he sat down on his seat and looked out of the window.
I went back into the grey monster and tried to explain the situation to a Bavarian police officer called Alois Hinterhuber, who was taking it easy, reading his Bild Newspaper and eating his sausage sandwich. I studied the map and saw that when you are in Munich, if you go South you end up in Austria, if you go East, you'll go to Bohemia. He looked up, smiled and told me that I was best off going back home to Austria. I tried to reason him and then I asked him how on earth would I get home after he explained to me that the next village in Germany was after a five kilometres walk, and that the next railway station was forty-five kilometres away. But there I was in a place called Rozenau, and because I had no map I couldn't picture where I was. The notice behind policeman's desk said it all: Bavaria so far away from Germany, so far away from Austria - that is why I love it here in Bavaria!
Bavaria, you see, despite belonging to West Germany, is a semi-autonomous region that calls itself Freistaat Bayern (Free State of Bavaria). I waved goodbye at the coach at it drove off, thinking that those Czechs and Slovaks must have had at hearty laugh at that naive Austrian they had been travelling with. If they knew Karel Skodacek. Maybe they were right, I had my doubts about my Czech identity. Exile had transformed me into a different man. I did not want to move back: I just wanted to visit my hometown and go to Prague for a day trip and then go to Vienna. I intended nothing more than that. It was just this spontaneous idea to have a look at what I had left behind. But fine, if that was not possible then I had to get back to Austria - somehow.
I stood there like a mug because I could not phone (all lines internal) and the Bavarian authorities, well, they don't like being hassled. The good-natured officer Alois Hinterhuber told me that it was safer for you Austrians people to stay in Germany rather than embarking on an adventure in Commie land. That’s why we have an Iron Curtain. It’s its very raison-d’etre. It is meant to protect the commies from decadent westerners, and decadent westerners from Commie easterners. I stood outside the building hoping that somebody was going to pick me up and drive me to a more civilised place. I went to the trailer park and chatted to a few lorry drivers but they didn't know when they were going to get their go-ahead. A Dutch bus refused to take me. Finally, as I was contemplating calling for a taxi and spending a fortune - I managed to find some Czech people driving to Stuttgart willing to take me. Hanna and Ivan who had been living in the German town that was closer to France than Austria or Czechoslovakia for fifteen years told me about life in Germany and how much they hated the Soviet propaganda at home. They were really surprised at how well I spoke Czech, and when I mentioned that I was just coming back from Northern Ireland, they whispered I hope you're not a terrorist.. - Oh no, not a terrorist, a tourist. I am an Austrian tourist. I wanted to visit Czechoslovakia on my way home to Vienna but I didn't have a visa. - But of course you need a visa. - Okey, I said, I'll apply for one at the Czech embassy in Vienna.
We parted company in Stuttgart station. From there I took the midnight train to Vienna. I was surprised to see that it was the Orient Express. So now, I thought, that's the train that arrives at the Westbahnhof at 10.30! The one that Stefan and I used to watch arriving every Sunday before going for a drive or whatever. The Orient Express. It evokes a luxury journey on Pullman coaches between London - via Paree - and Istambul. Graham Greene, our favourite novelist. He knew what made his readers tick. Nothing makes us tick more than modern adventure stories in style. In modern 1982, it's only second class from Paris to Vienna. Never mind, exotic enough. The train made its way through the area of Baden Wurtemberg and Bavaria via Munich. As I woke up, I saw the morning rise over Salzburg (this area always looks picture perfect) and the train passed the less picture perfect Linz and Sankt Poelten and arrived in Vienna Westbahnhof. Just like in the opening scene of the Third Man. And I felt like Joseph Cotten, a writer tired and broke, ready for a drink and a cigarette, looking for his friend. Don't be silly Karel, you won't find Stefan Votova neither on the platform, nor in the Cafe Lago Maggiore. It is just so silly when you go to places and expect people to be there and make you feel welcome. Stefan like many before him in Vienna, just took of and sailed in the sunset. And he was right to do so because he has a vibrant and modern personality and he really deserves to live a life of a human being. My cousin was one of these people who worked in a nondescript place without hope for reward or gratitude, devoted to his parents to the point of being their servant and all the enjoyment he had was undercover because he was brought up to be quiet and humble. None should live like that, he would have died of a broken heart if he had stayed in this place.
I remember that it was also the same train that took me from Linz to Vienna in April 1969. The 10.30 Orient Express. I felt weary, because it was raining. I thought I would have spent a few days in Czechoslovakia, talking to my friends. Ach, forget about it.
When Carol Reed returned with me to Vienna to see the scenes I had described I was embarrassed to find that between winter and spring, Vienna had completely changed. The black market restaurants, where in February one was lucky enough to find a few bones, described as oxtail, were now serving legal if frugal meals. The ruins had been cleared away from in front of the Café Mozart, which I had Christened "Old Vienna". Over and over again, I found myself saying to Carol Reed "But I assure you, Vienna was really like that three months ago."
Graham Greene: The Third Man (Introduction) 1950
When I got off the train I had suddenly a feeling. I rushed down the platform but the man I had spotted turned his startled unknown face to me.
"Oh sorry, I mistook you for someone else." I said – this is not the first time, that this happens to me. That teenager in Armagh looked very much like Stefan too.
Marelene was glad to see me and asked me to tell her all about my holidays. I told her that I was in Northern Ireland. And she went Northern Ireland?! And you survived?! That made me smile. Of course, I'm a tough one, me. I told her about the little red wooden cottage I stayed at in Millisle, about the people I met. A man from the Orange Order called Billy Windsor who invited me to a barbecue with his wife Ethel. I told her about the bomb scare at the library. I told her about those Italian immigrants Desano who brought ice-cream parlours to Northern Ireland in the nineteen thirties, and the Hungarian mill built in the last century for the Andrews bakery in West Belfast. I told her that I was writing a novellette called No Ice Cream For A Jackdaw and that I even had a publisher for it. Apple Blossom Press in Holywood. God, was she impressed: Hollywood? - No not Holly-wood. Holy-Wood. Sankt Wald. - Oh, that's good enough for me she said, you are going to be a famous writer, Karel. What is your book about? - Oh, I said, it's a story about friends and families - you know a bit like Graham Greene, a bit like Vladimir Nabokov, very much like sixth form essay writing. I think Marelene must have got the idea that boring Karel Skodacek would have merely managed to write a short story. No, it wasn't a short story. It was a long story all typed up on Franz Werfel's old typewriter. I hope old Franz doesn't mind some wannabe to use his tools.
So now, I thought. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Forty-five I am now. I have nobody to talk to. You know, in the way I used to talk to Stefan. I always used to say that I was happy to be on my own. Yes, true. But I was also glad to get disturbed in my loneliness by that crazy guy. I listened to him and would forget about the void that was my soul. Now I am in charge of my life. So I took the tram to the cemetery and for three hours I walked past the gravestones of the departed. I saw the Orthodox church that looks just like the one on the Nevada river in Russia and the names written in Cyrillic of the immigrants many of whom had fled Bolshevik Russia in 1917. I saw the monuments for the great composers - Lehar, Strauss, Mozart, and Beethoven who gave a sound to that city which prides itself of old fashioned elegance – and I, I still prefer listening to Paul Hoerbiger when he sings. He should get a monument too, after all didn’t he say: a man who doesn’t say anything has perhaps nothing to say. So true of me, most of the time. I saw the final resting places of famous personalities and I saw the monuments for the partizans. I saw the commemorative monument for the victims of Auschwitz, and I visited the Jewish cemetery. I saw the monument of the workers rebellion of Floridsdorf and I saw the monument to the civilians who died during German occupation. I saw the field where they bury the bodies given to medicine, and I saw the paupers' graves - rows and rows of names written on wooden boards stuck in the wild grass. I heard the wind through the leaves of the trees, after all it still was a forest. A quiet one. All forests are quiet. And secretive. And anonymous like the graves of the anonymous common people. And this is how people are remembered.
The snow was falling like petals of white roses. Snow? In early October? Experts say that because mankind has messed with the ozone layer, it is no longer uncommon that such freak weather conditions occur. That added to my weariness. Rimanere a mani vote.
White snow on the cold hill
Above has blinded me
And Soaked my clothes
By the blessed God,
I had no hope
I should ever get to my house!
Gwerfyl Mechain (Welsh poet 15th C) The Snowfall
I took the tram back to the Karlsplatz, and made my way to Pension Mahler on the Rilke Square in the Wieden District. Lidia was happy to see me and we had dinner. I told her about my holidays in Northern Ireland, and she said that she was glad that I was safe and well. My dear Karel, she said, why did you go to such a dangerous place? Oh, Lidia, I didn't go on purpose to a dangerous place, and you see after a while you realise that there is no danger at all - or that danger is real just like everywhere. You see, nothing happens to tourists in a war, they take great care of that because it's bad propaganda for terrorists to kill bystanders. Of course it happens. No question about that. Nobody ever promised us safe life journeys. I told Lidia that I had another journey planned. I didn't want to frighten her and tell her I was going to get a visa for the CSSR. Then we watched television. By then rain had replaced the snow.
I went to the WestBahnhof to get a train bound for Pilsen. Such a strange feeling, one last look to the station looking for a time that wasn't there, then a last look to the post of Gmunden to and the memories of April 1969 came back. And I thought of the forest behind our cottage.
My family, despite living in Kostelec, despite their attachment to the place, they had always felt like strangers in that part of the world, so maybe they emigrated. Probably to Germany. Maybe that, or worse... I did not dare to utter the thought that flashed through my mind. I had to blank it out and quickly walk away. That forest always made me paranoid. I remembered tales of people getting shot in there by mistake as patrols thought they were trying to cross the Iron Curtain. And the recurrent vision of Heinleinist militia dragging Maco Toni Skodacek into the deep of the woods and killing him became clearer than ever. And despite this, it is a popular lookout point for birdwatchers. One day, those birdwatchers or those hunters, or more likely a mechanical digger will unwittingly stumble across a pile of dry bones and locate the shallow grave as the industrial estate will eat up the forest. I need to get out of this train!
So I got out of the train and it took me back along the Franz Joseph Bahn. I was scared being on my own in Lower Austria. My fears were only relieved when the train had passed Klosterneuburg, Nussdorf, Heiligenstadt and I got off at the Franz Joseph Bahnhof which used to be very elegant in the old days but looks now like a concrete monster erected by someone who designed a grey depressing hall.
From there I took the D-Tram towards the Schwarzenberg Fountain, and there I stood in front of the red army soldier of freedom asking him mutely if he knew all the sorrows that I know – and then I remembered that his body is made of molten watches. Who is this unknown soldier who stands proud in every town? He probably wanted nothing at all. One shouldn’t ask questions to a monument, you might as well ask a wall, wall of lamentation or walls of your own home, your choice. The figures never answer my questions, all what they tell me are historical information or anecdotes that none remembers. I went into the Polish church even though I am not a catholic because I like the sound of their prayers but I cannot pray. Religion has always confused me and I have never been good at metaphysics anyway…
And so I would ask a writer why they do such things like indulging in vampyring real life - for doesn't a story suck the essence of real life? And the writer would reply, that writing is an art form. A conceptual writer would say that they don't want to teach anything, some writers are in it for the money of course, and then you have those who can't resist exploring the world of fantasy. And so they follow the guide. A figure in white holding a rose that hovers through time and names....
Prague. I wiped the condensation to looked out of the window and saw the station. All railway stations are the same... Praha - the sign said. The Matlosa had found his country and it seemed like nothing has changed. An old woman whom I helped carrying the suitcases asked me if I was from Praha. I said oh no, I am from Cesky Krumlov near Budejowice.. Talking to that woman made things suddenly real. If earlier in Kostelec I still had felt like an Austrian tourist visiting a long-forgotten Heimat, now thanks to the miracle of the sound I had become Karel Skodacek, citizen of the CSSR. I felt I was going back to something. It seemed to me as if my life had been re-recorded over and over again obliterating the memories of Kostelec. But now I was home, I was home after a long holiday in Austria. Austria vanished into a dream. Prague was the city where I first became aware and alive. Just follow the memory, just follow that figure in white holding a rose that hovers through time and names...
I dreamt of the Golden Town of the Thousand Spires like I left it. I was relieved: changes were made in the Nowe Mesto. Corbusier style building showed modernity, but I had never lived in those airy places. I lived within the living history of the Stare Mesto. I recognised the Karluv Most (the Charles Bridge) and on top of the hill the Hradcani Castle, which obsessed Franz Kafka so much. He could see it from his windown at U Minuti. On top of the hill I watched the sun go down like a pale yellow disk in the misty sky. Tomorrow I would go and see my former landlady, Lea Kovac, who used to come from Hungary and forbid me to have girls in my room. Lea with her hawk eyes, and her maternal bosom. She did look after the boy of the country! Yes, I would go and see her...
A room 405 was given to me. I left my suitcase there and decided to go for a walk I sat down in a cafe and ordered a budweiser, the Budweiser from Budweis not the exile beer from the USA. And I looked around me. I had this feeling of deja vu.
What happened, still happened. The ghost, it had taken me by the hand to show me the town. Oh no, that's why I tried to escape from Prague in the first place - how could I ever find happiness in that town again? I am alone. Where shall I go? I looked up, and saw the Castle in the evening sky.
A workman told me that I should not have gone into that condemned building. Didn't I see the sign? He pointed at the words. They are going to build a new modern building for the water-board. Finally after all these years. This house was condemned, and so it should be put down. It was a liability. A liability? I used to live there. When I left town in a hurry all these years ago, I left everything behind. And now they are going to erase every trace of it. No blue plaque, no museum. But then, I am so deluded.
I hurried away and ended on the Mala Strana and only when I reached the St Wenceslas Square, I was able to breathe normally. I walked down the Stepanska and entered the Jungmannovo (Maria-Snow church), and I still wasn’t a Catholic. It was more like the anarchist way of searching spirituality. I was told that Graham Greene when he visited Belfast took confession from a Catholic priest for the same reason apparently. A string quartet was playing the first movement of Polish composer Hendrik Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful songs. A modern tribute to the victims of the war, the lamentation of a nineteen-year old girl who knows she is going to die at the ends of her tormentors. I realised that the string quartet was rehearsing for a funeral that was going to take place the next day.
"The second movement sets a prayer to the Virgin Mary inscribed by an 18-year old woman prisoner incongruous by brings a switch to a beautiful idiom. Sweeter and lighter with the soprano solo radiantly."
Anthology of classical music
I had a soup to eat and had another beer. Then I went back to my Hotel, collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. It was a deep sleep, not the semi-unsconscious nightly experience I had all my life. The night without stars covered the city in darkness after a grey and tired day.
The words woke me up:
"Police. Open the door!"
My blood froze instantly. I got up. Stunned by sleep. I slipped into my trousers and put on a shirt, my heart was pounding. It was five o'clock in the morning. What was going on? I opened the door, two policemen wearing pale raincoats and hats stood in the hall. The inspector showed me his wallet with his Statni Narodni Bespecnost card.- S.N.B.
"Are you Karel Skodacek?
- Yes, Comrade Inspektor?
- Can I see your ticket please?" the conductor said
- My ticket?! Of course, here is my ticket." I said.
And because I felt asleep in that tram, I wowed never to get on a tram again. So now I am safe, I am hiding in that bookshop and everything is fine.
11.11.1982
Vienna, a town where I shall always feel a stranger because of my funny undefinable accent. This is the eleventh of the eleventh, not far away to go till the end of this year 1982. I am forty six and I shall be fifty in four years' time. I am becoming one of these elder statesmen forever selling books at the Votova Bookshop and telling stories to passing eccentrics or hear stories from passing eccentrics, reminiscing at old photographs, songs or films - this is how writers with a poetic touch end . I am also very good with my hands and at using tools - a type writer for example. An Austrian clergyman invented the type-writer, he never made money out of his invention. Visionaries never get the recognition they deserve but deep down do they bother? It’s about following your vision.
This old underwood type writer used to belong to F.Werfel.
Not Franz the writer but Ferdinand Werfel the accountant from the Nussdorfer Strasse…
My own effort is a Vienna City Guide of a different kind:
… THE THIRD MAN
. Now that you
know how Vienna looks like, it is easier to picture our favourite
film.
The Cast of the Third Man
Carol Reed (1906-1976) b. England. - director
"Carol Reed, upon graduation from school was interested in theatre and made a career as an actor from the mid 1920s, and later as a stage manager. He moved into film as a dialogue director to filmmaker Basil Dean and became a director himself in 1935, specialising in modestly budgeted dramas.
He joined the British Army's documentary film unit during World War II, making training films. However, it was with the end of hostilities that Reed came into his own as a director"
source
Films include:
The Stars look down
Odd Man Out (made in Belfast) 1946
The Fallen Idol 1948
The Third Man (1949)
Trapeze (1956)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Oliver! (1968)
Graham Greene (1904 – 1991) - Screenplay
Henry Graham Greene was born on October 2,
1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Shy and sensitive, he did not like mixing with people. After a troubled time at school and college, and a career as a reviewer for the Times, he took interest in spirituality and politics which he admit caused him much moral turmoil. After graduating from Balliol College in Oxford with a B.A. in 1925, Greene was employed as a subeditor at the Nottingham Journal after two abortive positions at other companies. His dislike of
Nottingham's seediness manifested in his later novel Brighton Rock, the style can be called “Moral anxiety” Later, he became a reviewer for the Times and the Spectator. His first novels were rejected by publishers but the success of Stamboul Train enabled him to earn a living out of his writings and he began his travels partly to satisfy his lust for adventure but also because he wanted to get informed about subjects that mattered to him. From Sweden to a 400 mile trip in Liberia, then he worked for the secret service in Sierra Leone, travelled through Mexico, visited Prague and Vienna (and witnessed the 1948 Communist changeover in Prague which disillusioned him about communism, after this he travelled to Vietnam during the Indochina War, Kenya during the Mau Mau outbreak, Stalinist Poland,
Castro's Cuba, and Duvalier's Haiti. When he was physically unable to travel from the seventies on, he remained in the UK and later moved to Switzerland. He also visited Northern Ireland in his later years. He died in Vevey Switzerland in 1991
Brighton Rock (set in Brighton)
The Man within
The Fallen Idol,
The Third Man (set in Vienna)
Rumour at nightfall, The Name of the action
Stamboul Train
England Made Me (set in Sweden)
Journey Without Maps (set in Liberia)
The Heart of the Matter (Set in Sierra Leone)
The Lawless Roads (set in Mexico) (1938)
The Power and the Glory (Hawthornden Prize
winner in 1941)
The Comedians (set in Haiti)
Our Man in Havanna (set in Cuba)
Travel with my aunt
Interview with Marie Francoise Allain.
Graham Greene was portrayed in a judgmental way in a few books, which I recommend not to read, not that I would recommend any of these books anyway. The best way to get informed about Graham Greene is to read his interviews, and fortunately “Interview with Marie Francoise Allain” is available.
Orson Welles (1915-1985) (on the right of picture)
- Harry Lime
Actor, stage actor, director (film and radio)
Drama course in USA, first engagement in Dublin, as a director he was a pupil of Austrian director Joseph von Sternberg (married to Marlene Dietrich) who made “The Blue Angel” and later emigrated to the USA.
Radio play: 1931 – War of the worlds
Films:
Citizen Kane (incl. Director) 1941
The Magnificent Ambersons (incl. Director) 1942
The Stranger (1946)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Macbeth (1947)
The Third Man (1948)
Othello (1951)
Confidential Report (1955)
Touch of Evil (1957)
The Trial (after Kafka): (1963)
Casino Royale,
Malperthuis
Joseph Cotten (born 1905 died 1994) USA. (on the left of the picture) plays : Holly Martins
Stage actor in Miami and New York, 1939 member of the Theatre Guild, recruited by Orson Welles for films.
Films:
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Gaslight (1944)
Love letters (1945)
Duel in the Sun (1947)
The Third Man (1948)
Portrait of Jenny (1949)
The Steel Trap (1952)
Did a TV programme for Yorkshire Television and read a poem called “Desiderata” 1975)
Trevor Howard (born 1916- died 1988) England. Plays: Major Calloway
Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Started playing on stage in 1933
Films:
The way ahead (1943)
The way to the stars (1943)
Brief encounter (1946)
The Third Man
The Outcast of the Islands (1953)
The Heart of the Matter (1954)
The Key (1957)
Alida Valli (born Alida Maria Altenburger in Pola). Italy. - Anna Schmidt
Attended the Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico in Rome, own theatre.
Films:
I due sergenti (1936)
Manon Lescaut (1939)
Luce nelle tenebre (1941)
Le due orphanelle (1942)
Circo equestre Za-Bum (1943)
T'amero sempre (1943)
Il canto della vita (1945)
The Paradine Case (1947)
Walk softly stranger (1950)
Les Amants de Tolede (1952)
Senso (1953)
Il Grido (1957)
Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (known as The Night Heaven fell)(1957)
La grande strada azzura (1958)
Arsene Lupin et la Toison d'or (1959)
Eyes without a face (1960)
El valle de las espadas (The Castillian) (1963)
La primera notte di quiete (1972)
Ernst Deutsch (born in Prague 1890, died Vienna 1969) - Baron Kurtz
Educated in Prague, acquainted to Max Brod and Franz Werfel . Theatre in Prague (Kafka, the Trial) and Vienna. Emigrated to the USA in 1938 via London. Moved back to Austria in 1947. Vienna National Theatre (Burgtheater, Vienna) and Schillertheater in Berlin).
Films :
Rache der Toten (Revenge of the dead) 1916
Geisha und Samurai
Das alte Gesetz (1923)
Gildi eine von uns (Gildi, one of us) 1932
So ends our night (1941)
Der Prozess (1947)
The Third Man (1948)
Sebastian Kneipp
Theatre:
Nathan der Weise (written by G.E. Lessing)
Siegried Breuer (Vienna: 1906-1954) - Popescu
Member of the Vienna Volkstheater, the German Theatre in Prague, the Aussig Theatre, Josefstadt Theatre in Vienna.
Films:
Anushka (1941)
The Third Man (1948)
Unter den Sternen von Capri (1953)
Paul Hoerbiger (Budapest 1894, died 1981 in Vienna) plays: The Porter
Reichenberg Ensemble in Vienna, and Vienna. Was arrested in 1945 by German police for espionage and sentenced to death. His sister in law Paula Wessely intervened in his favour and the liberation the sentence to be carried. Actor, newspaper editor and singer
Films:
Spione (1928)
Der Kongress tanzt (1931)
Liebelei (1933)
Petersburger Nächte (the nights of Petersburg) 1934
Opernball (1939)
Wiener G’schichten (Viennese stories) 1940
Der Liebe Augustin (1940)
Wen die Götter lieben (1942)
Der alte Sünder (1951)
And many others
Music: Wienerlieder
Editor of „Neues Osterreich“ (1945)
ANTON KARAS - Film score
- b. July 7, 1906 in Vienna; d. January 9, 1985 in Vienna
“Raised in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, he began studying the zither at the age of 12. The story goes that one day he found an old zither in an attic. His father allowed him to take lessons. This started with Professor Spiegel at Musikschule Horack and ended studying under the zither virtuouso Adolf Schneer. Karas began playing at wine gardens at the age of 17. This he continued to do for the next 28 years, until his meeting with Carol Reed. As the fame of the music from The Third Man spread, he began performing all over Europe, including a 32 week tour of the United States in 1951. In 1952, he opened his Weinschenke Zum Dritten Mann in the Sievering district of Vienna. He continued playing at his wine garden, which had varying degrees of success, over the years. In addition, he made special performances and recordings. He retired from the wine garden when it was bought out by a chain. Directly after his success with the movie The Third Man, Karas had his dream zither made. This zither use acoustic amplification of the accompaniment and base strings (often overpowering the melody strings). This amplification was achieved by leaving the instruments thickness on the fretboard side of about one inch. However, the thickness on the opposite side was increased almost two-fold! Several of this type were made, and were known as "Karas-zithern" by the Austrian music trade. The attached photo shows him at one of these zithers. He did not play this type of zither until after the advent of The Third Man.”
. ”.
His compositions include:
"The Third Man Theme"
"The Second Theme",
"Café Mozart Waltz",
"Keine Ahnung",
"Zither Man",
"Mein Herz Binkerl-Waltz",
"Visions of Vienna",
"Danube Dream",
"Wien, Weib, Wein",
"Karasitaten".
Robert Krasker, director of photography
Born: August 21, 1913 in Perth, Australia, died 1981)
Australia born cinematographer Robert Krasker joined the film industry in France; in 1930 he moved to England where he began working as a camera operator on such films as The Four Feathers and The Thief of Bagdad. Soon he rose to become a prominent lighting...
Director of Photography: Henry V (1944), Brief Encounter (1945), Caesar and Cleopatra (1946), Odd Man Out (1946),The Fallen Idol 1948, The Third Man (1948) Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) Another Man's Poison (1952)Never Let Me Go (1953) Romeo and Juliet (1954) Senso (1954) Alexander the Great (1956) Trapeze (1956) The Quiet American (1958) Romanoff and Juliet (1961) El Cid (1961) Billy Budd (1962)The Heroes of Telemark (1965)The Collector (1965) plus: Great Expectations Brief Encounter, Thief of Bagdad, The Four Feathers, The Fallen Idol,
Other members of the cast include:
Erich Ponto: Dr Winkel
Bernard Lee: Sgt. Paine
Wilfrid Hyde White: Mr Crabbin
Hedwig Bleibtreu: Anna's landlady
Alexis Chesnakov: Commander Brodsky
Annie Rosar: Porter's wife
Herbert Halbik: Hansel
Photography: Robert Krasker
Produced: Alexander Korda
The Third Man and Vienna
Pasnakomtis Pajalusta. Herzlich Willkommen in Wien!
Ia ie gavariu pa-russki – I do not speak Russian. It is difficult to stand for a personality who has made a name with numerous readings and speeches. Comrade Professor Kulyakin is unable to attend this evening because he was invited to a symposium at the eminent Cambridge University, and will make his speech in fluent English. I am sorry that I speak so little Russian, and I ask our guests for forgiveness in the spirit of friendship. Please take the impression of this day back home with you, and if Voina I Mir – Sergei Bondarschuk’s cinematic version of Leon Tolstoi War and Peace means something to you, then it was right to make the effort to reproduce every detail in pictures.
The subject of the evening is called „Relationship between History, Literature and Film”. Professor Kulyakin disserted on it with an English writer called Graham Greene. Just like Heinrich Mann, Graham Greene possesses the skills of an observer and the idealism of the witness. Now, many people know that Graham Greene was in charge of the screenplay for “The Third Man” a film made in 1948 and set in our city of Vienna. The piece that I played on the piano earlier on was the Third Man Theme composed by Anton Karas for the Zither. When Graham Greene did his research work and visited Prague, he became a witness of the Prague Revolution of 1948. Very few writers wrote about central Europe, but Martha Gellhorn, was in Prague ten years before in the time between the Austrian Anschluss and the Treaty of Munich, inspired by this, she wrote “A stricken Field”, which was dedicated to her then husband Ernest Hemingway. Graham Greene wrote a document of our times, not about Prague in 1948, but about Vienna in times when the four allies appeared in public as a quadriga. The Four Men in a Jeep. Things changed in 1949, the world split up and the Cold War started. So the Third Man is a so-called historical tableau, a picture of times past. I wonder what Tolstoi would have made out of this… It is a Viennese film, and everyone who wants to get acquainted to our town, should watch it.
As a Viennese I love this film and I hate it at the same time. But why? Let me explain.
I love this film because of Orson Welles. He IS the Third Man. The author Graham Greene, the director Carol Reed and Orson Welles, who learnt his craft from Austrian-born director Josef von Sternberg. The ones amongst you who read Heinrich Mann will know that not only was he a good friend of the roving reporter Egon Erwin Kish, but also might know a film called “The Blue Angel” with Marlene Dietrich based on a novel by Heinrich Mann. Orson Welles learnt a lot from Sternberg – and that is the multilayered pictures, less the historical tableau. So you don’t end up with a finished painting but with pictures that ask questions. Orson Welles gives a grand and enigmatic performance to a role, which he wrote himself. One of the layers is about friendship and betrayal. It is easy to betray when things are clear and one knows that one trusted the wrong person, or served the wrong cause, but what happens when what is wrong is part of us – or our best friend? This is not easy to answer. To put such a dilemma in pictures, you need to tread lightly with an empathy that Carol Reed possesses. Casting Robert Krasker as the director of photography and Anton Karas for the music score, a score so simple and yet so compelling, that makes him in my eyes one of the best directors. Think of these suggestive photo-realistic pictures and you might be reminded of Sergei Eisenstein’s scene with the pram falling down the steps. In the Third Man, you will remember the scene of Orson Welles fingers which desperately reach out for freedom from the sealed canal grid as the wind blows. No, you can’t open the grid and he lost his freedom. We should hate him, and we must what is to do. And now we understand how his friend Holly Martins aka Joseph Cotten feels – the novelette novelist whom Graham Greene regards as his alter ego. Harry Lime did an evil thing, Officer Calloway played by Trevord Howard showed him the proof, and the film shows us the proof as it makes us follow them into the ward of the Preyr’sische Children Hospital and see a nurse throwing a teddy bear away into a basket. You don’t see the victim but only these suggestive images. To me a dignified way of showing tragedy.
Joseph Cotten (Holly
Martins) & Orson Welles (Harry Lime) in Vienna
Am I complaining about the story? It is the story of drifting writer Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten who comes to Vienna to visit his friend Harry lime – Orson Welles – to learn not only that he might have died under mysterious circumstances, but that he also was a black market racketeer. Holly is dismayed and wants to know the truth about his friend. This can’t be! So he finds out that Harry is alive but he has really become a ruthless black market racketeer. In the famous wheel scene, Harry explains that his idealism and maybe faith have long gone and that people do no longer matter to him, perhaps only his girlfriend Anna. Holly who has met Anna and has fond feelings for her wants to save her life, so after he learns the truth about Harri from Officer Calloway he co-operates with the military police to get Harry arrested. Anna wants to decide herself about her life and as she is in love with Harry she warns him and he manages to escape the first arrest and disappears into the canal, after a frantic pursuit in the canal, Harry shoots Sgt Paine played by Bernard Lee whom Holly got to know well, and Holly shoots Harry who knows he cannot escape and realises that he had done wrong. So in the end, this is about a man who saves his friend in what is an utter tragedy. What makes the actors credible is that Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten were good friends in real life and they did two films together “Citizen Kane” and “Amberson”, it was Cotten who had suggested Reed to cast Orson Welles as the Third Man, first choice would have been Noel Coward. Orson Welles has always impressed me. In a film called “The Stranger” he plays the role of a mysterious clockmaker in a small US town who betrays his Nazi origins as an evil doctor with a slip of the tongue “But Marx was a Jew too!”. In the Third Man you see the clock again, this time it is Harry Lime who praises the Borgias and mocks the fraternal peace in Switzerland a country that invented the cuckoo-clock. Later, Orson Welles explained that he wrongly attributed the cuckoo-clock to Switzerland whilst it is an invention from the German Black Forest. Orson Welles is a convincing villain, because in real life he was a convinced idealist, and that reminds me of a sentence I read somewhere “I speak the same language as my oppressors”.
And there it is. A story about friendship, love, betrayal. And emptiness. Anna walking past Holly out of camera is the strongest final cinematographic scene I have seen. This leaves us with a feeling of emptiness, whilst so many other films prefer a happy ending to round up things. I know, like many others, that life is not a fairy tale and so I don’t expect happy ends with trumpets and drumrolls, nor would I want a tragedy with melodrama where everything dies and wails in style like you find with Shakespeare and Goethe. Carol Reed did not want to make a melodrama, and that is why he did not want suave Noel Coward to play Harry Lime, who was suggested by producer Alexander Korda, nor did he wish for an orchestral score to illustrate his film. I do believe that he wanted to re-create the same atmosphere as his previous film Odd Man Out set in Belfast and shot on location. This is why you have Orson Welles as Harry Lime and Anton Karas who does the score. Greene and friends are no friends of operatic pathos, this false pain, so it is authenticity they want, it should flow like a river. They could not find a happy ending to this story that could have sounded true, and this is why the story ends up with a question mark.
Alida Valli (=Anna Schmid)
I also like this film because the local population is woven into the story. Do you know this sentimental schmaltz called “The Sound of Music”? I don’t like that film at all. In the Third Man, you can see that Vienna and the Viennese are part of the screenplay and the roles are cast with much detail. I avoid the synchronisation made for the German version of the film because in the original version everyone speak the way they normally do. When Holly doesn’t understand what the porter says, Anna explains to it to him, or you see the porter making an effort finding a way to explain things in English. It is nearly done in a documentary style. Calloway speaks English-English, Holly and Harry speak American-English, the porter speaks Viennese-German and struggles with English, Baron Kurz and Popescu speak English very well, whilst Dr Winkel does not at all. Mr Crabbin from the Cultural institute speaks with a posh language and Sgt Paine has a common way of talking. Only Anna’s role is linguistically not accurate. Alida Valli is supposed to play a Sudete German, a German from Czech Bohemia and in fact Ms Altenburger comes from South Tyrol. But I am not complaining about this, because she is the ideal cast. Watch her in a film called Senso made in 1953 and you will see her again in this role of a woman victim of passion.
Siegfried Breuer (Cooler the Humanitarian,
Popescu)
Greene did not want to make an Austrian film, this is what he says about our style: “> „An Austrian film and you know what that means: it means Magda Schneider’s deep-sunk eyes and porcine coquetry; courtyards where everyone in turn picks up a song as they mend cars, clean windows, wash clothes; a festival in a beer garden with old Viennese costumes. Balloons, slides, laughter, and driving home in a fiacre; Magda Schneider’ trim buttock and battered girlishness ; a musical tour of Vienna - no sign of course of the Karl-Marx-Hof, only palaces and big baroque dictatorial buildings.“. Oh yes, he is right, so many Heurigen wine restaurants, and so many stories about our precious heimat, with our darlings Paul Hoerbiger, Hans Moser, Anni Rosar. Cinematic fantasies, so many operettas were composed here. The Magic Flute music by Mr Mozart and text by Mr Schikaneder, dream pictures with waltzes, opera ball and costumes, and people who have such fantasies sing “Vienna, oh you city of my dreams” along a film by Willy Forst. And why so? Because we do not want to be reminded of the sorrow, or the sadness, or the past because only those who have a heart of gold will be shattered whilst the opportunist like Popescu Cooler the Humanitarian just go on with a cynical grin. Greene, himself a victim of his permanent sadness, was not able to find a way of cheering himself up and yet, because he articulates the despair of permanent sadness, the turmoils and the nightmares, he speaks to my heart and I understand.
Final Scene, Camera: Robert Krasker
When I read Greene I get the impression that he wants to protect the victims of sadness, or violence. “Violence is the occupational hazard of the weak” did he say. Or the occupational hazard of the idealists, the passionate. He was a socio-realist and this film should protect the hearts of gold, by taking the luring illusions away and show the truth. At least, you don’t get caught in traps. Truth is our salvation. There is no happy end to this story, because the story is unfinished, it goes on, some did survive the story and they must search for their answers, or search for love… And this is a good thing.
Und der Mann ist Arzt.
Ernst Deutsch (Baron Kurz)
And that is Vienna!
Vienna... what can I say about Vienna! If I spoke to a stranger I would say. We are not characters from operettas, we do not seduce our visitors with Mozart chocolate, nor do our horses do panto dancing, many of us are not professional musicians, and many of those cannot even play Mozart, and most people cannot dance properly or at all. Oh no, not all get comedy drunk and break mirrors and become poets writing odes to the wine. Most of the time punch drunken people look stupid, funny or obscene. The newspaper says that we sell our soul and the town because we are desperate for money and attention, hence we sell ourselves to tourists and we sell them kitsch. The newspaper is offensive, I sincerely hope that most of us avoid the red light district mentality and that the souvenir makes put some love in their craft. There is nothing wrong in doing the place up a bit and say that it is beautiful, of course there is something wrong when the come hither look is put on and the moneyless wayfarer ignored. I know that some people say red one day and blue the next, but can they do if they cannot decide, or if they don’t know the answers? I don’t know what happens in a single human heart, may I say, referring to a Graham Greene sentence from “The Heart of the Matter”. Because of this multilayered approach, the characters are not clear cut, you have the weak porter who is played by Paul Hoerbiger, an opiniated friendly well-loved actor. The shifty Baron Kurtz who has a charming but deadly aura is played by Prague born actor Ernst Deutsch who was very influenced by the writings of Franz Kafka and hence had spiritual interests. The most mysterious character, the one that frightens me in the film is the introverted Dr Winkel played by the enigmatic Erich Ponto.
Paul Hörbiger (Portier)
So why does this film upset me every time I see it. I should love it. I do love it. That film is part of me, I grew up with it. I belong to the generation that was born during the last war. Just like Greene I have never witnessed Vienna in the old days of the monarchy. I was born in 1942. Like Greene I can say: “I have never known Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and the fake superficial charm…” To him it was just a city of undignified ruins, which February transformed in a snowy landscape. I grew up in this city, and now they built up the ruins and I am twenty five. Sometimes I feel much older. Sadness, bitterness and memories have marked many people here and the frivolity on the Vienna streets or on colourful pictures is superficial. The snow in those films are icy sugar like a snowball from Hernals. Paul Hoerbiger, like a few Austrians, was sentenced to death because of his resistance against the NS regime, thanks to the intervention of his sister in law Paula Wessely he survived and then the town was liberated by the Red Army and he was free. So when Paul Hoerbiger entertains his audience you can feel that he has gone through sadness and tragedy and that is why many people love him so much. In the Third Man he plays a porter with a heart of gold who has seen a tragedy, and refused to testify, when he did so, he signed his death sentence. And everytime I watch this film, I get upset for that very reason.
And so this is the end of my speech. Many of you people do not understand the language of this town, but never mind many things are universal and do not need words. I would like to say this. When Graham Greene visited this town in 1948, he saw a place he did not know, he was commissioned by producer Alexander Korda, who, before the war was one of Austria’s most gifted directors at Sascha Films. Those very Sascha Films who produced Willy Forst the maker escapist fantasies who cheered up so many people during the war. When the war was over, Korda now working for“London Films” wanted to make a film about his old town as they had just repaired the Ferris Wheel in the Prater. The Ferris Wheel that was spinning again in 1948. So indeed we need social realism in film and literature to portray the present. And the present is today. Once we close an old book from a different time, Tolstoi for some, Kafka for some others, or the curtain falls after an old film like the Third Man, we look at the calendar, and see that today is May 1966 and I am in Vienna.
.
So we must live in the present, we must take charge of it. Everyone must take charge of their life, whatever origin and whatever creed, profession, income, whatever. We can be inspired by history or books, or films, or talks, but we must be in charge of our destiny. In that sense, I am closing my speech, and I thank everyone for listening to me. I don’t know what goes in your heart, as Greene would say, I don’t even know what goes on in his heart, so the best I can do is to follow my heart and be inspired by those who touch me. Sometimes I get fooled and it is a story of betrayal, and sometimes my passion leads me to my perdition, but sometimes I find my answers, a missing piece of the puzzle and then I am glad to have met this source of inspiration, and maybe found a new friend, or a new song, or a new book, or a new piece of information. All worth to be treasured with love
Thank you!
Stefan Votova
Librarian, Vienna, born 1942 - Speech made in May 1966 at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.
Guten Abend, Dobry Vecer
Pasnakomtis Pajalusta. Herzlich Willkommen in Wien!
Ia nje gavariu pa-russki (= ich spreche keinen Russisch), Ia gavariu Avstriski (= iche spreche österreichisch) Es ist sehr schwer eine Persönlichkeit zu vertreten, die sich mit Lesungen und Vorträgen einen Namen gemacht hat. Genosse Professor Kulyakin kann heute abend nicht hier sein, weil er in der eminenten Cambridge University zu einem Symposium eingeladen wurde, und seine Rede in einem fliessenden English halten wird. Es tut mir Leid, dass ich noch zu wenig Russisch kann, und ich bitte unsere Gäste um Verzeihung im Geiste der Freundschaft. Nehmen Sie Ihre Eindrücke des heutigen Tages mit nach Hause, und ich bin mir sicher, dass wenn Voina i Mir etwas für Sie bedeutet, dann war es richtig, sich die Mühe zu geben, das Werk derart wahrheitsgetreu in Bildern zu setzen.
Das Thema des heutigen Abends handelt vom Verhältnis zwischen Geschichte, Literatur und Film. Professor Kulyakin dissertierte im heurigen Jahr darüber mit einem Englischen Schriftsteller namens Graham Greene. Ebenso wie Heinrich Mann besitzt Graham Greene die Beobachtungsfähigkeit und der Idealismus eines Zeitzeugens. Nun viele wissen, dass Graham Greene für das Drehbuch des Dritten Mannes, ein Britischer Film aus dem Jahre 1949, das sich in unserer Stadt abspielt, verantwortlich ist. Das Harry Lime Thema von Anton Karas habe ich eingangs gespielt. Als Graham Greene für diesen Film recherchierte und sich in Prag aufhielt wurde er Zeuge der Prager Revolution von 1948. Wenige Schriftsteller haben über Mitteleuropa berichtet, doch Martha Gellhorn, hielt sich zehn Jahre zuvor in Prag in der Zeit zwischen den Anschluss und den Münchner Abkommen, daraus ist ihr Buch: „A sticken Field“ entstanden, Ernest Hemingway gewidmet. Auch Graham Greene schrieb ein Zeitdokument, allerdings nicht über Prag im Jahre 1948, sondern über Wien, in einer Zeit als die vier Alliierten noch als Quadrille auftraten. Ab 1949 ist alles anders, die Welt spaltet sich auf. Der Dritte Mann ist ein sogenanntes Historisches Tableau - ein Bild aus einer anderen Zeit. Was hätte Leo Tolstoj daraus gemacht, wundere ich mich? Es ist ein wienerischer Film, und jeder der unsere Stadt kennenlernen möchte, sollte es sich ansehen.
Als Wiener liebe ich diesen Film und ich hasse es zugleich. Warum ist es so?
Ich liebe diesen Film, wegen Orson Welles. Er ist der Dritte Mann. Der Autor Graham Greene, der Regisseur Carol Reed, und Orson Welles, der seine Kunst von Joseph von Sternberg gelernt hat. Leute die Heinrich Mann gelesen haben, werden wissen, dass Joseph von Sternberg der Blaue Engel mit Marlene Dietrich gedreht hat. Orson Welles hat vieles von Sternberg gelernt, und das ist die Vielschichtigkeit der Bilder und der Charakterisierung der Figuren. Im Dritten Mann gibt es vielschichtige Bilder und weniger historische Tableaux, und Orson Welles gibt eine grandiose und enigmatische Persönlichkeit einer Rolle, die er selbst geschrieben hat. Es ist ein mit vielschichtigen Themen, wie die der Freundschaft und des Verrates. Es ist leicht zu verraten, wenn Dinge klar sind und man weiss, dass man den falschen Freund getraut, die falsche Causa gedient hat, doch was ist wenn, was falsch ist, teil von uns ist - oder unser bester Freund? Da macht man es sich nicht leicht. Eine solche Problematik, ja Konflikt, bildlich verständlich zu zeigen bedarf viel Einfühlsamkeit, die Carol Reed besitzt, und dass dieser auch noch Robert Krasker an der Kamera hatte und den Talent von Anton Karas des Cafe Mozarts entdeckte, macht ihm zu einem der grössten Regisseure überhaupt. Denken sie an diese photo-realitische Bilder voller Symbolik, und sie erinnern sich an Sergei Eisenstein und diese Szene mit dem Kinderwagen und der Stiege, im Dritten Mann sind es wohl die Finger von Orson Welles die sich an den Gittern des Kanaldeckels verzweifelt klammern als der Wind weht. Der Deckel lässt sich nicht öffnen, seine Freiheit hat er verloren. Wir müssten ihn hassen, weil er doppelt und dreifach und vielfach verraten hat, und doch sind wir mit ihm solidarisch, wir wollen ihn retten... wir können ihn nicht verraten, und wir müssen es doch tun und abdrücken. So verstehen wir was sein Freund Holly Martins durchmacht - den Charakter den Graham Greene als alter ego sieht. Harry Lime hat böses getan, der englische Offizier Calloway, gespielt von Trevor Howard zeigt es ihm, und der Film zeigt es uns, als wir eine Station des Preyr’ischen Kinderspitals mit ihnen betreten und dort eine Krankenschwester sehen die einen Teddybären in einer Kiste wirft, man sieht nicht das verstorbene Opfer, sondern nur diese Bilder.
Joseph Cotten (Holly
Martins) & Orson Welles (Harry Lime) in Vienna
Sollte ich mich über die Geschichte beschweren? Es ist die Geschichte des treibenden Schriftstellers Holly Martins, gespielt von Joseph Cotten, der nach Wien kommt um seinen Freund Harry Lime - Orson Welles – zu besuchen und dort erfährt, nicht nur dass dieser mysteriösen Umständen ums Leben gekommen sein soll, sondern auch, dass der ein Schieber war. Es stellt sich heraus, dass Harry noch am Leben ist, und Holly letztendlich nach langem Gewissenskonflikt, und weil er Harrys Freundin - Anna Schmidt gespielt von Alida Valli, das Leben retten möchte, mit der Britischen Militärpolizei geleitet von Calloway, arbeitet um ihn zu fassen. Holly erschiesst Harry. Die zwei Freunde Welles und Cotten waren auch ein Team, das privat und beruflich viel zusammen war, denke man an Citizen Kane oder die Ambersons. Orson Welles hat mich in einem Film „The Stranger“ sehr beeindruckt – darin spielt er ein Nazi der sich in einer amerikanischen Kleinstadt als Uhrmacher versteckt, und sich damit verrät, dass er seinem Antisemitismus in Form der Bemerkung „Marx war doch auch Jude“ ausdrückt. Im Dritten Mann, spottet Harry Lime über die Kuckuckuhr, die er den Schweizern zuschreibt – später erkläre Orson Welles, dass die Schwarzwälder Kuckucksuhren machen. Harry Lime bewundert die Borgias, und spottet auf den brüderlichen Frieden der Schweiz. Welche psychologische Tiefe! Ich bewundere Orson Welles, denn er stellt das Böse sehr realistisch dar.
So es ist eine Geschichte von Freundschaft, Liebe, Verrat. und auch der Leere. Wie Anna am Ende an Holly vorbeigeht ausser Sicht der Kamera ist die stärkste Endszene eines Films, die ich jemals gesehen habe. Dieses Gefühl der Leere, wo doch viele Filme lieber das erbauliche Happy End bevorzugen... Ich weiss, genauso wie viele andere, dass das Leben kein Märchen ist, und daher erwarte ich keine Happy Ends mit Pauken und Trompeten und Tusch, oder gar, die melodramatische Version der Tragödie, wo alles stirbt und heult, wie bei Shakespeare oder Goethe. Carol Reed war strict dagegen, dass Noel Coward, der britische suave Melodram star die Rolle des Harry Limes spielt, und auch gegen eine orchestralische Untermalung seines Films, er stellte sich den Dritten Mann als das Nachfolgewerk seines Odd Man Out, den er in Belfast an Originalschauplätzen drehte. Daher Orson Welles als Harry Lime und Anton Karas als Musikverantwortlicher. Bei Greene und seine Freunde werden wir niemals den Pathos finden, dieses gekünstelte theatralische Schmerz, sondern Schlichtheit, nach dem Motto, alles fliesst wie ein Fluss.
Ich liebe dieser Film, weil die Lokalbevölkerung nicht in einer Tapete zu Statisten verblasst. Kennen Sie diesen sentimentalen Hollywood Schmalz „The Sound of Music“ ? Mir gefällt dieser Film überhaupt nicht. Im Dritten Mann ist Wien und die Wiener teil des Drehbuchs und die Rollen akkurat besetzt. Ich würde auf die deutsche Synchronfassung gerne verzichten, denn in der Originalfassung redet jeder so wie er sprechen soll. Beispielsweise, sollte unser Abend hier verfilmt werden, dann wird man Russisch und Deutsch hören, eine russische synkronisierte Version von mir oder eine deutsche Synkron von Genossin Loran klinge... unecht. Der Dritte Mann will realistisch klingen, es ist in der Originalfassung fast wie ein Dokumentarfilm. Hier spricht einer Englisch, ein anderer Amerikanisch, der Portier versucht Englisch zu reden, und der Baron Kurz kann English. Nur die Figur die von Alida Valli gespielt wurde folgt dies Prinzip nicht: Sie ist Österreicherin aus Südtirol und spielt eine Sudetin. Nur ein sehr kleiner Schönheitsfehler. Und die Filmmusik, gespielt von Anton Karas, schlichte Themen an der Zither, ist typisch wienerisch und passt zum kargen Film genau richtig.
Alida Valli (=Anna Schmid)
Greene wollte keinen Österreichischen Film machen, dies sagte er über unseren Kino: „An Austrian film and you know what that means: it means Magda Schneider’s deep-sunk eyes and porcine coquetry; courtyards where everyone in turn picks up a song as they mend cars, clean windows, wash clothes; a festival in a beer garden with old Viennese costumes. Balloons, slides, laughter, and driving home in a fiacre; Magda Schneider’ trim buttock and battered girlishness ; a musical tour of Vienna - no sign of course of the Karl-Marx-Hof, only palaces and big baroque dictatorial buildings.“ Oh, ja, recht hat er, so viele Heurigen und Heimatgeschichten, mit unseren Lieblingen Paul Hörbiger, Hans Moser, Anni Rosar. Filmische Fantasien, schliesslich wurden hier sehr viele Operetten komponiert, diese Filme sind nicht immer historische doch recht unterhaltsame sentimentale Tableaux , und keineswegs historisch akkurat. Es ist alles Walzer, mit Opernball oder Trachten, und die Leute, die an solchen Fantasien noch glauben, singen die Schlager „Wien du Stadt meiner Träume“. Wir erinnern uns nicht gerne an die Bitterkeit, die Traurigkeit oder die Vergangenheit, weil nur diese daran zerbrechen die eine gute Seele haben, während die Opportunisten einfach zynisch weitermachen.
Siegfried Breuer (Cooler the Humanitarian,
Popescu)
Final Scene, Camera: Robert Krasker
Ernst Deutsch (Baron Kurz)
Ja, und das ist das Wien
Also warum sollte ich diesen Film hassen? Ich sollte es lieben. Ich habe den Film als Kleinkind erlebt, und bin sozusagen damit aufgewachsen. Ich gehöre der Generation des Nachkrieges. Auch ich kannte nicht Wien so wie es früher war. Das Wien der Donaumonarchie, ich bin Jahrgang 1942. Wie Graham Greene kann ich sagen: Ich habe nicht Wien zwischen den beiden Kriegen gekannt, und ich bin zu jung um mich an das Alt Wien mit seiner Strauss Musik und falschen seichten Charm zu erinnern...“ Für ihn war es einfach eine Stadt in unwürdigen Trümmern, welche der Februar in grosse Schnee- und Eisgletscher verwandelte. Ich bin in einer solchen Stadt aufgewachsen, und nun sind die Ruinen aufgebaut und ich bin fünfundzwanzig. Mir kommt es aber vor, ich wäre viel älter. Traurigkeit, Bitterkeit und Erinnerungen haben viele Leute hier geprägt, und diese Unbeschwertheit auf den Wiener Gassen von heute oder auf bunten Bildern der Postkarten ist seicht. Der Schnee in diesen Filmen ist Staubzucker und Zuckerguss, in einer Stadt wie eine exquisite Schneekugel aus Hernals - Paul Hörbiger, wie manche Österreicher war in der Widerstand gegen den Faschismus und von der NS Diktatur zum Tode verurteilt, doch dank der Fürsprache seiner Schwägerin Paula Wessely und dann der Befreiung der Stadt durch die Rote Armee wurde das Urteil nicht vollstreckt. So Paul Hörbiger, wenn er unterhält, tut dies mit einer Wehmut in seinem Schauspiel. In der Tat, im Dritten Mann spielt einen gutmütigen Portier, der Zeuge war und nicht aussagte, - als er sich dazu entschloss, war es sein Todesurteil.
Paul Hörbiger (Portier)
Zum Abschluss möchte ich noch dies sagen: Und wie viele von euch verstehen unsere Sprache! Zum Abschluss möchte ich noch dies sagen: Als Graham Greene die Stadt im Jahre 1948 besuchte, sah er eine Stadt deren Sprache er nicht kannte, er kam im Auftrag von Produzenten Alexander Korda, in einem früheren Leben als der Starregisseur bei der Wiener Sascha Films bekannt war. Jene Sascha Films, die mit Willi Forst die träumerische Fantasien produzierten, welche viele Älteren in Wien durch den Zweiten Weltkrieg trugen. Unser Wien überlebte den Faschismus, weil wir eine Exiltraumwelt erschaffen konnten. Später war es Zeit, Wien neu aufzubauen und der Produzent von Sascha Films, der nun London Films betrieb, war da, nun dreht sich das Riesenrad, unser Wahrzeichen neben dem Steffl, und somit denke ich, dass wir den Realismus im Film brauchen, wenn er uns aufbauen kann. Wir können einen Spiegel auf die wahre Welt gebrauchen. Unsere neue Republik ist elf Jahre alt, und sie baut sich auf.
So we must live in the present, we must take charge of it. Everyone must take charge of their life, whatever origin and whatever creed, profession, income, whatever. We can be inspired by history or books, or films, or talks, but we must be in charge of our destiny. In that sense, I am closing my speech, and I thank everyone for listening to me. I don’t know what goes in your heart, as Greene would say, I don’t even know what goes on in his heart, so the best I can do is to follow my heart and be inspired by those who touch me. Sometimes I get fooled and it is a story of betrayal, and sometimes my passion leads me to my perdition, but sometimes I find my answers, a missing piece of the puzzle and then I am glad to have met this source of inspiration, and maybe found a new friend, or a new song, or a new book, or a new piece of information. All worth to be treasured with love
Nun müssen wir in die Gegenwart leben. Wir mussen Verantwortung übernehmen. Jeder muss Verantwortung für sein Leben übernehmen, egal woher sie kommen, woran sie glauben, was sie für ein Beruf, Einkommen, egal. Wir konnen uns von der Geschichte, Bücher, Filmen oder Reden inspirieren lassen, aber wir müssen unseren Leben und Schicksal leben. In diesem Sinne schliesse ich meine Rede und und danke allen, dass sie mich anhörten. Ich weiss nicht was in ihren Herzen vorgeht, würde Graham Greene sagen, und ich weiss nicht einmal was in seinem Herzen vorgeht. Daher ist es weise zu wissen was in meinem Herzen vorgeht und mich von denjenigen die zu meinem Herzen sprechen inspirieren zu lassen. Manchmal interpretiere ich die Dinge falsch oder es wird mir etwas vorgemacht, also ergibt sich eine Geschichte des Verrats, manchmal führt mich meine Leidenschaft zu meinem Verderben und ich bin froh entkommen zu sein, aber manchmal auch, finde ich meine Antworten, ein fehlendes Teil eines Puzzlespiels und dann freue ich mich diese Quelle gefunden zu haben, erfrischend, eine Quelle der Inspiration. Und dann denke ich mir, ich habe neue Freunde, neue Lieder, neue Bücher, neue Bilder, neue Fakten gefunden, ein Schatz welches ich mit Liebe hüten werde.
Einen herzlichen Dank.
Stefan Votova
(geb. 1942, in Wien, Bücherei-Angest.)
Mai 1966
Stefan Votova – Vienna 1966 – for Red White Blue Monokrom
Some people who might have heard of the "Red White Blue Monokrom stories I wrote in 1998 will recognize the characters. For the others who have never heard of it, I would like to say that Red White Blue Monokrom is a fiction about a Viennese librarian called Stefan Votova, whose father owns a bookshop near Rilke Square in Vienna. Mr Votova has a passion for books but also for cinema and the Third Man in particular.
Now a few pictures of Vienna before we go to our next batch of books - books I should have read...
The Wordsworth Concise Dictionary English-German/German English - A traveller's Student's and learner's lexicon. edited by Robin Sawyer
and last but not least:
Here we go again.... more books, first a list of the Dover Book Catalogue of general interests, and then a list of novels selected by the team at the Observer.
Books the Bohemian library should have
Wassily Kandinsky: Concerning the spiritual in art
Jim Harter (ed): Animals (with copyright free illustrations)
George Bain: Celtic Art (The method of construction) ill.
Arthur Backer: Calligraphy Manual
John Montroll: Easy Origami
Scott D. Campbell: The complete book of birdhouse construction
Braun and Schneider: Historic costumes in pictures
Gustav Stickley: Craftsman furniture catalogue
Le Corbusier: Towards a new architecture
Jacob Riis: How the other half lives (New York slums in 1900)
Dr. Donald J Borror: Common bird songs
Rebecca Tyson Northen: Orchids as house plants
Dave Philips: Monster Mazes at four levels of difficulty
Gail Grant: Technical manual and dictionary of classical ballet
Antony Baines: The history of brass instruments
John Kobal (ed): Hollywood glamor portraits
Gleb Struve (ed): Russian Stories (dual language book) (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and others)
Elsie Clews Parsons (ed): North American Indian life
N.J. Berrill and Jacqueline Berryl: 1001 questions asked about the seashore
Dave Philips: Storybook Mazes
Abraham Cahan: Yekl (stories about Jewish immigrants in 1896)
Walt Whitman: Selected poems
E.T.A. Hoffmann: Tales of Hoffmann
Wallace Fowley: French Stories (dual language book) Voltaire, Balzac, Maupassant
Lewis Spence (ed) The Myths of North American Indians
Captain Joshua Slocum: Sailling alone around the world
Ananda K Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita: Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists
Benedict Spinoza: A theologico-political treatise
Frederick Douglass: My bondage and my freedom (on slavery)
Mark Twain: A Journey around the world
Edward D Andrews: The people called the Shakers
H.A. Guerbers: The myths of Greece and Rome
Kakuso Okakura: The book of tea
Adolf Erman: Life in ancient Egypt
Albert Waugh: Sundials – their theory and construction
Jacob Bear: Dynamics of Fluids in porous media
Rex Vicat Cole: Perspective for artists
Don X Solo: Gothic and Old English Alphabets
Mary White: How to do Beadwork
Charles Marshall Sayers: The book of wood carving
Henry B Culver: The book of old ships
Vitruvius: Ten books on architecture
Milo Miloradovich: Growing and using herbs and spices
Walter Shepherd: Big book of mazes and labyrinths
A.M. Nagler: A source book in theatrical history
Edward Lear: The complete nonsense of Edward Lear
Michael R Turner: Victorian Parlour Poetry (Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning etc)
James Joyce: Dubliners
Van Gulik: The Haunted Monastery
William Tomkins: Indian sign language
Marc Drogin: Medieval calligraphy
Sarah Whitlock and Martha Rankin: How to prepare Dried Flowers
Hervey Garrett Smith: The arts of the sailor
Margaret Grieve: A modern herbal
Wolfgang A Mozart: Letters
Aggripina Vaganova: Basic principles of classical ballet
William Shakespeare: Complete sonnets
Alvin Redman (ed): The wit and humor of Oscar Wilde
Emily Dickinson: Selected poems
Robert Van Gulik (translator): Celebrated cases of Judge Dee Goon An
Angel Flores (ed) Spanish stories/cuentos espanoles (dual language book) (Cervantes, Borges and others)
TW Rolleston: Celtic Myths and legends
Alexandra David Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet
Morris Kline: Mathematics for the non-mathematician
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The rhyme of the ancient mariner Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Eva Wilson: North American Indian design for artists and craftspeople
Jack Winocour: The story of the Titanic as told by the survivors
William B Yeats: Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry
E.B. Cowell and others: Buddhist Mahayana texts
George Gamow: One two three… infinity (fact and speculation of science)
Richard Shelton Kirby: Engineering in history (non technical survey)
Patricia V Rich: The Fossil book
Cennino d’Andrea Cennini: The craftsman handbook
Robert McCrum’s choice of novels (abridged)
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
John Bunyan : Pilgrim’s progress
Daniel Defoe : Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift : Gulliver’s travel
Henry Fielding : Tom Jones
Samuel Richardson: Clarissa
Laurence Sterne: Tristam Shandy
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: dangerous liaisons
Jane Austen : Emma
Mary Shelley : Frankenstein
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare abbey
Honore de Balzac: the Black sheep
Stendhal: The charterhouse of Parma
Alexandre Dumas: The count of Monte Cristo
Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet letter
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Wilkie Collins: The woman in white
Lewis Caroll: Alice’s Adventures in wonderland
Louisa M Alcott: Little Women
Anthony Trollope: The way we live now
Leo Tolstoy : Anna Karenina
George Elliot: Daniel Deronda
Fyodor Dostoevky: The brother Karamazov
Henry James: Portrait of a lady
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Jerome K Jerome: Three Men in a boat
Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray
George Grossmith: The diary of a nobody
Thomas Hardy: Jude the obscure
Erskine Childers: The riddle of the sands
Jack London: The call of the wild
Joseph Conrad: Nostromo
Kenneth Grahame: The wind in the willows
Marcel Proust: In search of lost time
D.H. Lawrence: The rainbow
John Buchan: The thirty nine steps
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
E.M. Forster: A passage to India
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Franz Kafka: The Trial
Ernest Hemingway: Men without women
Aldous Huxley: Brave new world
Evelyn Waugh; Scoop
John Dos Passos: USA
Raymond Chandler: The big sleep
Nancy Mitford: The pursuit of love
Albert Camus: The Plague
George Orwell: Nineteen eighty-four
Samuel Beckett: Malone dies
Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood
E.B. White: Charlotte’s web
JRR Tolkien: Lord of the rings
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Graham Greene: The Quiet American
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Gunter Grass: The tin drum
Chinua Achebe: Things fall apart
Muriel Spark: The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Harper Lee: To kill a mockingbird
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Saul Bellow: Herzog
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One hundred years of solitude
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
VS Naipaul: A bend in the river
J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the barbarians
Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
Alasdair Gray: Lanark
Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy
Roald Dahl: The BFG
Primo Levi: The periodic table
Martin Amis: Money
Kazuo Ishiguro: An artist of the floating world
Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda
Milan Kundera: The book of laughter and forgetting
James Ellroy: LA Confidential
Angela Carter: Wise Children
Philip Pullman: Northern Lights
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
at the theatre
Ludvik Kavin and Nika Brettschneider are running a small theatre in Vienna that shows some very strange plays... The review that dates from January 2002 has found a few friends and so we are including it in the library. After that, I think that we need some relaxing images from a wildlife documentary that just grows and grows on people because of its sheer beauty.
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Gustav Meyrink at the Czech Theatre Nika Brettschneider, Vienna.
Muenzwardeingasse 2
A-1060 Vienna Austra |
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Gustav Meyrink is known to the public as the screenwriter of silent movie "The cabinet of Dr Caligari". He was born in Vienna, and lived in Prague for many years at the turn of the century until the 1920s and was one of Max Brod's favourite story tellers. Meyrink was sceptical about hypnotists and spiritists and much of his work centres about the freedom of the mind, a freedom that is not always respected. He was also a master of surreal absurd humour. His collection of short stories are called "Des deutschen Spiesser Wunderhorn".
Stage play Walpurgis-Night tells the story of a nightmare. A doctor (right on picture) gets to a dinner party and drinks over the measure afterwards and imagines all sorts of evils happening to his town after a gloomy conversation with his hosts. The next morning he wakes up happy that all the horrors were a dream - until he realises that everything really happened because an evil spirit made everything he imagined true.
Meyrink message is that people can make themselves very unhappy by picturing the world in dark colours - this powerful and frightening tale written in the 1920s by the Vienna born author residing in Prague was put on stage with much imagination and minimal means to a maximal effect by the ensemble Nika Brettschneider, which include Czech born Ludvik Kavin (left on picture), who is also a writer who went into exile after the repression of the Prague Spring of 1968 - he is married to Nika, and both set up the theatre in the 1970s.
for Birgit Machaske , who recommended the place! |
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back to radioevropa pictures |
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Back to homepage: zebras54
Bohemian Tales |
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And
These were the Bohemian Library recommendations.
Jacques Perrin and the Travelling birds
Zweierlei Voegel
Strichv¡¦el Reflexion
Zugv¡¦el Poesie
Singt jeder andern Ton
Und andre Melodie
Nicolaus Lenau (Austro-Hungarian Poet, Published by Cotta, courtesy Walter Seggi, Vienna
Jacques Perrin – I love encounters
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winged migration (travelling birds) - Jacques Perrin interview with Universum Mag |
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april 2002
copyright
universum
at
orf.at
translation
in English below
pictures:
Gallatee Films
Picture by Galatee Films (Jacques Perrin), 92, Rue Jouffroy d'Abbas, F-75017 Paris, e-mail: galatee@club-internet.fr
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index page |
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feat.music by
Robert Wyatt |
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An interview with Oliver Lehmann, first translated into German by I. Haas for Universum Wildlife Magazine, Austria April 2002 ( www.universum.co.at )
Additional research by S. Muller
This translation DH for Bohemian Tales September 2003
Jacques Perrin – French director, actor and producer (Galatee films) his work include:
Films: Le Crabe Tambour, Z, Cine Paradiso, Il Lungo Silencio
TV: Le Chateau des Oliviers (series), La 25eme Heure (current affairs/human rights magazine)
Documentaries: The World of Apes, Microcosmos, Travelling birds
French producer-director Jacques Perrin about his motivation to dedicate three years of his life to migrating birds. His most surprising experience: what makes birds migrate has been barely researched at all.
The love of the French for travelling birds is evident even though not in spirit of wild-life protectors: every year, on average, according to official statistics 640.000 quails, 1.2 million kiebitze (?), as many larks and about half a million pigeons are shot for oven and frying pan. Jacques Perrin too went into position, however, the producer/director did not bring hunting trophies home after three years work but a fascinating film about nature for the cinemas. “Travelling birds” (le peuple migrateur) was scheduled as the big family film for the French festive season. In Austria, it is shown as a “Universum” premiere on April 12.
Perrin’s work as a producer/director for the past three decades is impressive even if at the beginning not in direct reference to wildlife. Political thriller “Z” by Constantin Costa-Gavras counts amongst them. Perrin made his first wildlife film in 1989: “Le peuple des singes” (the world of apes). Microcosmos (an adventure into the world of insects was his second feature documentary without human protagonists, and as the first one received many awards. Perrin closes the trilogy with “Travelling birds”. The effort can be compared with big budget movies: only for the film’s purpose, Canadian snow geese were reared at Perrin’s property in Normandy and got used to the flying equipment. Only by this method it was possible for the crew to observe the swarms of birds at close range and as light as a feather. The list of protagonists is long: herons (mating dance), geese and swans (in formation flight), storks (in home moors and the African dunes), birds of prey (hunting), seagulls and albatrosses (endlessly passing the seas), flamingos and pelicans (hunting in seas and lagunas).
Supported by a team of scientists, Perrin manages to convey the fascination of flying in general and the wonder of migration in particular, without any purpose of creating a didactic film made after a manual. That, as Perrin explains, would not have been possible as many components of the migratory instinct is an enigma to science. Instead of conveying vague hypotheses, Perrin concentrates on transposing the public in the life of the birds and let them marvel – successfully.
Question: At the beginning of the film we see a boy setting a goose free, are you that boy?
Answer: Absolutely not. My films do not necessarily show things that happened to me. I was simply asking myself whether one may be able to start a documentary feature in a poetical way. I then decided for the boy because children are best at observing nature. Before I went over to the reality of the birds, I wanted to take the audience by the hand. The scene with the boy encompasses the real matter in poetic estranged way.
Question: Did you fulfil the dream of flying whilst making this film?
Answer: In the beginning this certainly was the team’s dream, the first dream of humanity since the early times. This dream has in certain ways been confirmed when we contacted scientists who taught us more than their knowledge of ornithology. They showed us that even scientists dream to fly with the birds with their small airplanes. With one eye they looked through the viewer, with the other they looked around them maybe asking themselves: is this really true, what I am feeling right now?
Question: Did you always have a passion for birds?
Answer: No.
Question: So how did you get into the subject?
Answer: I love encounters. Encounters with life through the means of film, cinema. I live through cinema. As a maker of films, I am in fact a go-between: on one hand those who possess the knowledge and on the other, those who want to acquire this knowledge. Whether I like birds or not has nothing to do in this context. Of course, I did like birds in my childhood, however, whilst making the film, I met people who have a love for birds and that is more important.
Question: A film about birds and also about the scientists who investigate wildlife?
Answer: No, no. Not at all. Primarily it is a film about a different species than the humans. However, the film would not have been possible without those who know the birds they are protecting. They know how to talk about birds and search into the mystery of migrating. What is wonderful is that we simply know nothing about it. We met scientists who said after 30 or 40 years birdwatching: “Well, I can’t say much about migrating habits”. This is so incredible. Hence, ornithology is an incomplete science. There is no sure knowledge about migration, only hypotheses. One simply does not know how a bird coming out of the egg practically knows what direction it will have to fly to, how it will get to destinations which are 5.000 kilometres away. Where did it earn the knowledge? In the egg? According to constellation of the stars? The angle of sunlight? One simply does not know. One observes and tries to find explanations. Incredible.
Question: What can we learn from the birds? The interaction of the ecosystems?
Answer: yes. Dependence.
Question: Dependence between humans and animals?
Answer: In fact not between humans and animals but the mutual dependence of two places on the planet not dependent on the fact that how far apart we are. Nowadays, we now indeed what global consequences a so-called local ecological damage has. Fact is, we don’t live in France, don’t live in Europe but on this earth. Only, unlike the birds, we lack the perception and the understanding. Their garden is not limited by a wall, they constantly fly towards the horizon and to them the horizon has no ending, no border.
At the beginning I thought to make the film from the perspective of the birds. However, it is absurd to look at the planet as a bird because we cannot put ourselves into a creature that we don’t know. That does not work. We tried to get as near as possible to the creature and perceive what it perceives so we decided to make the film very close to the birds, close to a creature that remains a stranger to us, but now – after finishing the film – we can see with more sensitivity.
Question: Amongst other things, at the age of 27 you produced the legendary “Z” with Constantin Costa-Gavras. At first, it is surprising that someone like you makes wildlife films. Is the preoccupation with apes, insects, birds something like your escape from reality?
Answer: Maybe rather a search for utopia. I have not given much thought about it but what you say is certainly not wrong. I only live once but my profession enables me to enter spheres which were at first totally unknown to me. I have the possibility of travelling not only geographically but also in spirit therefore I should use the possibility of getting acquainted to other life forms than my own and marvel at them. I shall certainly make more politically engaged films. However, if I had only made such films, this would have turned into some sort of propaganda.
In the end it doesn’t matter if I make a wildlife documentary or a polit-thriller: the most important thing is to retrieve all opportunities from a project. I do not seek the good taste of the public, in fact that doesn’t really matter to me. It is not my mission to interpret what public thinks. One must work consistently and only by that one can get to a true work. Only when something is authentic, one might that it might please the public. However you should not orient yourself as a crowd pleaser.
Question: The beginning and end of film say that the birds give a promise, i.e. the promise of return.
Answer: The birds embody the dream of overcoming barriers and obstacles. The birds convey the concept of freedom in such a way that they take the liberty to come back. Only humans can prevent them from doing so. One of the scientists in the team told me nothing is more inhuman than a world where there would only be humans. And that is accurate.
Question: If you were reborn as an animal, which would you prefer. An ape, an insect or a bird?
Answer: I would say that I am preparing myself to a dog’s life! But seriously: Of course I don’t want to be a dog because this would certainly be a difficult life. Somehow we are stuck in our relationships, we live in a certain location and barely manage to break free of it. However, when you make films, you can dissolve all ties for six months, or a year. Every time, I notice that whilst so, I am able to interact with strangers in a different way, however, the birds have the possibility to constantly change their location, their natural habitat. Indeed, everywhere in the entire world.
Thank you for the conversation.
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