Letters from Vienna #106
Billy Wilder and Galicia
Why the Viennese didn’t like Galicia
„Sucha, Billy Wilder’s birthplace, was in the southwest portion of Poland, then Galicia. Throughout the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, no province was more scorned and ridiculed by the Viennese elite than Galicia, with more than a soupçon of anti-Semitism thrown in.”
“The Viennese especially didn’t like Galicia,” Billy Wilder once related. “It was full of Poles, Gypsies, Jews, Bohemians, and a lot of other untouchables the people in Vienna looked down on. They told Galician jokes in Vienna. I remember one: It is winter, and a young Austrian army officer is stuck in a snowed-in Galician garrison. He has fallen in love with the daughter of the town’s mayor, Annemarie. One night, when his love for her won’t let him sleep, he gets out of bed and goes to the mayor’s house and stands outside his lover’s window. Feeling the need to somehow make his feelings clear to Annemarie, and feeling another need more urgent as well, he pisses a message in the snow: “I love you, Anne… only he cannot complete her name.”
“So, he runs back to the barracks and awakens a young Bohemian soldier and orders him to come back to the mayor’s house with him. Fortunately, it hasn’t snowed anymore. When they get there, he points to the unfinished message and says, “Here! Piss “Marie” in the snow.” But the soldier stands there, not able. “What’s the matter, Prohaska? Aren’t you even able to piss?” “I piss well, Herr Lieutenant,” he says, “but I don’t know how to write.” “This is not a true story but it gives the idea of how people felt about Galicia.”[1]
““To know me,” Billy Wilder once stated “you must think of me in terms of what Austria was like in 1906, when I was born. Austria in those days was a huge monarchy of 56 million people – the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The monarchy seemed indestructible. People in Vienna thought they were really something. It was a world of whipped cream and cream cakes. I have never tasted cream like that since.”
“The town where I was born is still there but the country is gone. I can’t remember anything about it but I guess my mother pulled my baby carriage on a street that is now called Billy Wilder Avenue, or something like that. If I had stayed there, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale, and they wouldn’t have been naming a street after me.””
“His father, Max,” Charlotte Chandler relates, “owned railway cafés in towns along the line to Vienna, and he, his wife, and their baby son were passing through Sucha, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian crown province at the moment Billy Wilder was born. It wasn’t at all where Eugenia Wilder, Billy’s mother, had imagined she would be. She’d wanted to be in New York.”
“At the turn of the twentieth century, before Max Wilder had come into her life, Eugenia Baldinger had stayed for a time in New York with her uncle and his family. The uncle owned a jewelry store on Madison Avenue.”
“Genia, as she was called, was born in Nowy Targ, Galicia, in 1885. Nowy Targ had been Eugenia’s world, and nothing in it prepared her for what she found in New York at the turn of the century. All of her expectations were surpassed. Eugenia especially loved to see the ladies promenading in their finery. Someday, she promised herself, she would be one of those ladies…”
“…Eugenia was determined to return to New York just as soon as she was of age. This made going back to Galicia bearable…”
“Not long after Eugenia returned, she met Max Wilder, an ambitious headwaiter who dreamed of a better life…”
“Max proposed, and against Eugenia’s mother’s wishes, they married in 1904.”
“Max wanted to own his own restaurant, maybe even several restaurants. “It wasn’t a matter of money,” Billy Wilder once related. “He probably could have made just as much money working for someone else but he wanted to have control over what he did. Maybe I got some of that, wanting to be in control, from him.””
““My father became the owner of a chain of railway restaurants at stations where the trains from Vienna stopped. These were extraordinary snack bars. This was the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Everyone couldn’t eat like the Emperor Francis Joseph but they tried. They said the old emperor, as they called him, ate chicken consommé which took twenty-four chickens to make.””
““At important stops, a guy would ring a bell and announce, “We’ll be here for one hour.” It was a hungry, captive audience. They would rush for the printed menu. They expected the service to be fast but good. My father, who had been a successful headwaiter, understood exactly how to please them. Service was important but the food had to be good, too. And it was.””
““Timing in life is everything,” Wilder said, “and my father had perfect timing. But not for success. Wrong time, wrong place.””[2]
“The Wilder family was constantly on the move,” Charlotte Chandler tells us, “visiting one railway station café after another until Max Wilder had saved enough to buy a hotel with a restaurant in Kraków, which he named Hotel City. “My father wanted my mother’s family to see that, after all, she hadn’t made a mistake.””
““My father was an entrepreneur. Maybe not a very successful one, but our family had plenty to eat. I had a wonderful childhood going around on the trains and my parents to visit my father’s train station restaurants.””
““He was disposed to be a happy person with high spirits. He tried to look at the upside of things, but life did not cooperate. He was always trying for his little family but it was all too hard for him.””
““My father was a dreamer, a kind of adventurer, though not the kind who climbed mountains. He was always searching for something without knowing exactly what, only that he knew he wanted to change his fortunes overnight and become rich. He was like Don Quixote, except that Don Quixote fought windmills and my father bought them. And then, as soon as he bought them, there was no more wind.””
““It is easy to go on when you’re successful. But to go forward in the face of failure – that is valiant. My father had pride, and I would say he had a certain nobility.””
““He specialized in things he knew nothing about. One day at lunch, he announced. “By the way, Monday, I’m going into a new business. I’m importing Swiss clock works.” Two rooms of our apartment in Vienna became the offices for “Fränkel, Pytlak und Wilder.” I have no idea what this firm actually did.””
““As soon as my father went into that business, I think clocks went out of fashion. My father was a backwards alchemist. He could turn gold into sawdust.””
““Then, he invested in a trout farm. We didn’t find out until we had to move. “What in God’s name do you know about trout” my mother asked him.””
““What’s to know?” he said. “It’s just another fish.””
““It turned out there was a lot to know about trout, and my father lost the trout farm. My mother was very unhappy. We had to move from our comfortable home at Fleischmarkt in the First District of Vienna to a tiny flat on the Billrothstrasse in the Nineteenth District. I never order trout in a restaurant.””[3]
“After the war began in 1914, Billie spent August with his grandmother. It was hot, and he stayed indoors much of the time, sitting in a Thonet rocking chair, reading and thinking. “I had never stopped my active life just to think. At the age of eight, I discovered thinking. I liked it quite well.””
“Then, suddenly, they had to flee Nowy Targ because the war was getting too close. Billie insisted on taking his “thinking” rocking chair with him. A horse and carriage were waiting to transport them. There was no time and no room. His grandmother told him that he had to make a choice: the rocking chair or her. He chose the rocking chair.”
““For that, I got a slap, a light one. I was only joking but she did not have my kid of sense of humor. I looked for a rocking chair like that for many years after I was a grown man. I found Thonet furniture, but I never found a rocking chair like that one.””
“It was the beginning of Billy Wilder’s life as a refugee, though for a small child, it seemed like an adventure. They went to Hotel City in Kraków.”
“Hotel City was successful enough to enable the Wilder family to find a place in a Viennese neighborhood, generally thought the best, the First District. Then, the seemingly unchanging world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire changed.”
““I was in my father’s hotel in Kraków in June of 1914, and people were sitting on the terrace eating and drinking while the orchestra played von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture. My father walked to the music podium, and he signaled to the orchestra to stop. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen: There will be no music today. Our Archduke Ferdinand has been murdered in Sarajevo.””[4]
It would not be long before the Russians attacked Galicia and four years later the seemingly permanent Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved.
[1] pp.19-20 Nobody’s Perfect, Billy Wilder, a personal biography, Charlotte Chandler
[2] pp. 15-18 Ibid
[3] pp.20-21 Ibid
[4] pp.22-23 Ibid