The new movement that has gripped city dwellers like a fever, the estate movement1, calls for new people. People who, as Leberecht Migge2, the distinguished landscape architect, rightly says, have modern nerves.
For us it is easy to describe a person with modern nerves. We do not need to stretch our imagination. They already live in a state of exhaustion, not in Austria but a little further west. Our descendants are those who will receive the nerves that the Americans already have.
City dwellers and farmers are not divided around us as sharply as they are in America. Every farmer is half a city dweller, and every city dweller half a farmer. America’s townspeople have not become as estranged from nature as their European counterparts, or more or less their continental3 counterparts, because the Englishman too is a farmer at heart.
Both the English and the Americans feel that living with other people under one roof is not a very pleasant state of affairs. Everyone, rich or poor, wants a house of their own, even if it is only a hut or a ramshackle shack with a flimsy thatched roof. And in the city they build places for play-acting4 and revenue houses5, in which each apartment is laid out on two floors connected by their own wooden stairs. Huts set on top of one another.
And here I come to the first point in my programme. A person in their own house lives on two floors. They clearly divide their life into two parts. The day part and the night part. Dwelling and sleeping. One should not imagine that living on two floors is easy. By our standards it certainly is not. For this the second is very small and not very homely6. The only furniture is a white-painted iron or brass bed. It is futile to look for a bedside table. Nor is there a wardrobe. The “closet”7, the wall cupboard8, in effect a “closure”9, takes the place of the wardrobe. These bedrooms are meant for sleeping. They are easy to tidy. But they have one advantage over our bedrooms: they have only one entrance and can never be used as a walk-through10 room. In the morning all the members of the family come downstairs at the same time. Even the child is brought downstairs and spends the day with their mother in the living room.
In every family there is a table around which everyone gathers at mealtimes. So, like farmers. Because in Vienna only 20 per cent of the city do this. What do the other 80 per cent do? Well, one sits by the stove, one holds the plate in their hand, three are at the table, others occupy the windowsill. And now every family that comes to own its house is to receive a table which, like the farmers’ table, stands in the corner of the living room. Like the peasant’s house. This calls for a subtle revolution! Voices for and against are heard. “Well, well, we don’t do that. I have seen it among the farmers of Upper Austria. They sit around the table and all eat from one bowl. And, well, we are not used to such things. We sit one by one.” And a worried father said: “What, around one table? My children will get used to going to the pub!”
When I tell this story, people laugh, but inside I weep.
We do not quarrel at the table. It soon becomes clear that eating breakfast together saves money. The Viennese breakfast, a gulp of coffee standing by the stove and a piece of bread eaten half on the stairs and the other half in the street – calls for goulash at 10 in the morning, a way of fooling the stomach, and since rather a lot of pepper is put on the goulash, with a glass of beer. This meal, for which the Americans and the English do not even have a name, is known among us as Gabelfrühstück – fork breakfast. For the simple reason that only the fork comes into play. It is accepted that the food is not to be eaten with a knife – “but then with what sauce are we to eat it?”
Perhaps the father of the family should be given this second breakfast for as long as he stays at home for his cup of black coffee. But his wife soon realizes that for the same money the whole family can have the feast of an American breakfast, which fills one up so well that one can eat nothing until midday. In the American family, breakfast is the best meal. Everyone is fresh from sleep; the room is comfortable, has fresh air and is pleasant. The food covers the whole table. First everyone eats apples. Then the mother puts the oatmeal11 on the table, an excellent food to which America owes its energetic people, its greatness and its prosperity. But the Viennese pull a face when I tell them that oat means barley and meal means food. But in Lainz12 they serve us travellers’ porridge13 prepared in the American style, and we hope to persuade the whole of Vienna to eat it. What use to us are beautiful horses whose food is oats and of which we are so proud? People too must have “well-levelled” heads and expressive faces.
Whether we are rich or poor, farmer or billionaire, porridge appears on every breakfast table. Everything else, cheap fish or an expensive veal cutlet, depends on circumstances. There is also tea and bread, of course, which surprisingly is served at midday and at sunset as well.
Lunch is a very simple matter. The father is not at home, and the mother is busy all morning tidying the house. Because she has no servant. And the absence of servants in the house means that the food is prepared in the living room. Because the woman of the house deserves to spend her time not in the kitchen but in the living room.
But that arrangement means that cooking is divided into two parts: the work is divided into two distinct parts. One part is the work over the fire, the work at the stove. The other is preparation and washing up. The first part takes place in the living room, where the stove stands. But for this the stove must be hidden from the residents’ eyes as far as possible.
All the things they have arrived at in America to solve this problem! Just recently I saw a photograph, or rather two photographs, I saw a magazine, one picture showing a stove set in a corner of the wall, the second a table. It was the same corner of the wall: the press of a button, and as if in a sacred tabernacle14, and this mechanism, which runs on electricity, turns as required.
But such arrangements call for people who are not afraid of cooking. We, who are all afraid of cooking. A feeling the farmers, the English and the Americans do not have, we are astonished at these strange creatures, who are offered dining rooms in which the food is cooked in front of the guest. In wartime this room was known as the frying15 room; now it is once again called the grill16 room. But the simple dweller calls it the living kitchen or the cooking room and feels as aristocratic as an English lord. Or as commonplace as an Austrian farmer.
Whoever wants to settle must learn anew. We must forget the urban revenue houses. If we want to go to the country, we must go to the school of the farmer’s house and see how the farmer does it. We must learn a new way of dwelling.
Footnotes:
1- estate movement
2- Leberecht Migge
3- continental
4- play-acting
5- Zinshaws: revenue houses: forerunner of the rental block.
6- homely
7- closet
8- cupboard
9- closure
10- walk-through
11- oatmeal, barley porridge
12- Lainz, a district in western Vienna
13- porridge
14- tabernacle
15- Roast
16- grill
