PAGE FOUR THE MICHIGAN DAILY WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 1952 ,..._ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ __-_ _ _ _ _ Report from Vienna EDITOR'S NOTE: The writer of this article, sthe first in .a series of three, is at present tour- ing Austria and Italy as a Fulbright scholar. A former teaching fellow in the English department, Gross wrote music reviews for the Daily last year. HERE WE STAND at the midpoint of cen- tral Europe. From the Kahlenberg and the Leopoldsberg, which are slightly north of Vienna and make up a part of the Vienna woods, you can see the borders of Czecho- slovakia and Hungary. Directly below, the Danube turns west to Duerrenstein and Linz, and east and south again to Budapest. One of the Danube bridges is still down: from these heights this is the only evidence that the war touched Vienna. y The feeling of history is strong, and familiar place-names evoke memories of things you read about a long time ago. Duerrenstein is where Richard the Lion Heart sat on his hands while Duke Leo- pold nearly bankrupted England with his ransom demands. Heiligenstadt, which is about a mile south from where we are standing, was Beethoven's home for a while: it was there that he wrote the agonized suicide note, the "Heiligenstadt Testament." Turning around, and looking north, we see the green domes of the church at Klosterneuberg. The church is baroque and characteristically ornate: all gold and copper-green, winking and glist- Sening in the afternoon sun. Consecrated In the twelfth century (it was completely rebuilt in the eighteenth century) it is a symbol from the time of Hapsburg Empire and from the time when the Emperors of Austria were Holy, Roman, and Imperial. On one dome sits the imperial crown, and on the other sits the archducal hat. Our eyes strain toward the east and south. From he're The Iron Curtain is only a meta- phor; the guarded and mined frontiers ap- pear only as soft hills and green river val- leys. From behind these frontiers about sixty refugees a day come into Vienna. You see refjigees everywhere, on trolleys, in the streets, huddled in corners. They carry all their belongings on their backs; none of them seem young and all are lost and home- less. The lucky ones reach an American re- fugee center, and they manage to escape to the non-Soviet sectors of Austria, to West- ern Europe-and the luckiest ones-to Can- ada and the United States. But some of the unlucky ones blunder into the Soviet zones of Vienna and are seized by the Russian authorities. It has been reported to us that the Russians pay the Viennese police a bounty of five hundred schillings (about twenty dollars) for every refugee they turn in. Those who are caught are sent back to serve long prison terms, or "rehabilitated" in labor camps. The police here are eminent- ly corruptible: Erst kommt das Essen, dann die Moral. So says Bert Brecht in the Drei- groschenoper. We walk down from the Kahlenberg through the Vienna woods. At various places along the path there are signs in four lan- guages-English, French, Russian, and Ger- man-which warn us not to enter the Rus- sian sector. America ns are not Allowed out- side of the city limits of Vienna; anyplace outside of Vienna is Soviet territory. At the foot of the Kahlenberg is the wine-making village of Grinzing. It was in Grinzing that the citizens, through an incredible sacrifice contrived to preserve the virtue of their women and girls from the oncoming Rus- sian armies. They emptied the wine casks into the streets until the cobble-stoned pavements became rivers of sweet flowing grape. So drunk and diverted were the he- roes of the Soviet Union that the girls man- aged to get off unscathed. It is said that some of the citizens came out with pickle jars, milk bottles, and old rubberbootssto join in the celebration. Others were seen with their heads in the gutters, lapping it up as it went by. We ride the street car back into town. On our left, on the Nussdorferstrasse, we pass the house in which Schubert was born. This is the genuine Schubert Birth House; since we have been in Vienna two other houses have been pointed out as Schubert Birth Houses. We have also seen a number of linden trees reputed to be The Original Linden Tree (Franz Schubert Composed Here). Vienna takes its great men very serious- ly, and its attitude toward them may be described as sentimental necrophilia. We spent the very first morning of our offi- cial sight-seeing trip in the Kaiser Gruft or Imperial Burial Vault. Here, in the cellar of a Capuchin church, are crowded the bodies of a hundred fourteen (or was it a hundred forty?) Hapsburgs, all done up neatly in copper sarcophagi. The sar- cophagi are ornate, very baroque, and decorated with death's-heads and rotten armor. In the middle of the vault is the immense bronze sarcophagus of Maria Theresa. Ranged around it, and in testi- mony to her enormous fertility, are the tiny sarcophagi of those of her sixteen children who died in infancy. Other kings and queens are here: Maria Theresa's oldest son Joseph II (The Enlightened Monarch), Franz I, and the greatly loved Franz Joseph. But though all of the kings and queens are in the Kaiser Gruft, not all of them are altogether there. The hearts, lungs, and entrails of the more celebrated ones were distributed among the more im- portant churches. Each church got its cut, so $o speak. Of course some of the Hapsburgs are still walking around: in New York, Paris, Lisbon, Vienna. None of them will escape the Kaiser Gruft, our guide assured us: they will get them all and pop them into their bronze kimonas. Soon all the Hapsburgs, will be sleeping together in that damp cellar, tend- ed by nervous little monks wearing the san- dals and cowls of their order. The guide did not say whether they still cut out the hearts, lungs, and livers. -Harvey Gross MATTER OP FACT By JOSEPH and STEWART ALSOP WASHINGTON-An extraordinary human drama is now being played out in the Governor's mansion at Springfield, Ill. Ever since President Truman's surprise withdraw- al at the Jefferson-Jackson day dinner, Gov. Adlai Stevenson, in the intervals of attend- ing the 14-hour-a-day task of governing his big state, has been wrestling with his soul. Will he or will he not cooperate in the strong movement to draft him for the Demo- cratic nomination? Such is the question he is seeking to answer. According to personal friends who have witnessed Stevenson's private wrestling match, it has been downright painful to watch. Gov. Stevenson has gone through a series of phases. Immediately after the President's announcement, he was about ready to "chuck the whole thing," by an- nouncing that he was not a candidate and would not accept the nomination if offer- ed. Twenty-four hours later, after a day in Washington in which he was showered with assurances of support from important poli- tical leaders and cogent arguments from friends that it was his duty to run, he seem- ed to have changed his mind. On the tele- vision program on the Sunday night after the President's announcement, he certainly sounded like a receptive candidate, if not like an active one. Back in the huge, rambling Governor's mansion in Springfield, however, torturing indecision again seized Stevenson. At first, he was very strongly inclined to pretend, in effect, that nothing had been changed by the President's withdrawal. He intended m'erely to sit tight, to get on with his busi- ness as governor, and to say nothing at all about the party nomination. Then he found himself besieged, by telephone and in per- son, by hoards of leading Democrats, all urging him to make the race. His close friends advised him that he must somehow clarify his position, and to this he has now agreed. Again, his first in- clination was to make a statement on the famous General Sherman pattern. Last week, he was actually within a hair's breadth of removing himself once and for all from con- sideration. Only the importunities of friends and admirers, who have been rather in the position of men hanging on the coattails of a would-be suicide, prevented him from doing so. * THE REASONS FOR these hesitations are understandable. Stevenson is a man cursed with an excess of imagination, only too capable of foreseeing what would await him if by chance he should be elected Presi- dent. Moreover, he has what he considers a "difficult moral problem." He has persuaded all sorts of able men to throw up their pri- vate jobs in order to serve the Illinois state government, on the explicit understanding that he would run again for Governor. He fears-and here most Illinois politi- cal observers agree with him-that anoth- er Democrat cannot beat the powerful and well-financed Republican machine owned by Col. Robert R. McCormick. Thus he thinks his withdrawal may mean turning back the state government, in which he has become passionately interested, to the sleavy crowd which ran it before his elec- tion in 1948. He has, also, little desire to .run against General Dwight D. Eisenhow- er, whom he admires, and whom he con- siders the most probable Republican choice. Finally, he is in some ways a rather diffident man, and he has a mortal fear of seeming presumptious, of other people thinking that he considers himself "an indispensable man." Because of these strong feelings of Steven- son's, there is little or no chance of his be- coming an active candidate in the manner of Senators Estes Kefauver and Robert Kerr. The issue involved in the drafting of his forthcoming statement is not whether to announce he will chase the nomination, because he has no intention of doing so. The issue is, rather, whether to discourage the major state leaders who desire to draft Stevenson, or to encourage them. As these words are written, the betting is reported as 50-50 either way at Springfield. PERHAPS IT IS A straw in the wind, how- ever, that the Illinois Governor has now decided to attend the New York dinner in honor of W. Averill Harriman, after first sending his regrets. At this somewhat fan- tastic rally on April 17, all the major Demo- cratic Presidential hopefuls will gather and will speak under the possibly amused eye of Harry S. Truman himself. Stevenson, who can be a very moving speaker on occasion, is now hard at work preparing his own speech, as is his old- fashioned habit. The contrasts should be curious between Sen. Kefauver's rather rambling, good-tempered endorsements of virtue; the strident, rousing partisanship of Sen. Kerr, and the mixture of friendly humor and thoughtful seriousness which is the Stevenson specialty. It will be the first time Stevenson has done his stuff in public before a really attentive big league audience. The Stevenson admirers go so far as to hope the effect may be comparable to that produced by the first major New York speech, at Cooper Union, by another famous ,What Ever Happened To That Code Of Ethics, Anyhow?' I. 2 \ - y if r T-- ,- 5 ~ *