Until quite recently I clung to the naive and childish belief that the Mediterranean — with its olive oil, burning sunshine, gloomy baroque churches and world-famous art galleries — was the apogee of culture and the home of the good life. But as my train plunges deep into craggy Czech forest — Vienna behind me, next stop Prague — I suddenly understand that I’ve had things backwards. Italy, Spain, Greece and the south of France can get stuffed. Central Europe is not — as western European prejudice has long held — a quaintly visitable (or stag-do-able) backwater. We are the backwater. Central Europe — I am only slightly exaggerating here — is the hub of the universe.
My journey starts with a Eurostar to Paris. Then another train to Munich. The miles of blandly forgettable French countryside (“Doesn’t that bit look a lot like Surrey,” I remark to my girlfriend about every five minutes) are more than redeemed by the absurdly slick European trains. I will never now board an English train without weeping softly to myself at the memory of big comfy chairs, wood panelling and private booths full of slickly ruthless German businessmen doing Zoom calls. After three days in Munich (consisting of spring sunshine, an exclusively sausage-based diet and gawking appreciatively at the Rembrandts and Dürers in the Alte Pinakothek (£8, pinakothek.de) our next train hauls us up past snowy mountains, across Alpine meadows through Salzburg — and into Vienna.
I am extremely excited about Vienna. For about three years all my interests have been converging here. The case for the city’s world-historical importance is well put by the psychotherapist Frank Tallis in his new book Mortal Secrets in which he credits Vienna with “the discovery of the modern mind”. His argument, roughly, is that in the anxiety and turbulent creativity of the late 19th century, Viennese writers, artists and scientists invented the fidgety, nervous, doubting modern condition which still afflicts us today. With Sigmund Freud, Vienna gave us the modern understanding of psychology with its mysterious unconscious and alarming “drives”. With Gustav Mahler it gave us yearning, heartbreaking, hopeful music that sounds more like the modern condition than anything else I’ve heard.
Then you’ve got the art of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Fast forward a couple of decades and you can add Werner Heisenberg (one of the architects of quantum physics) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (the greatest modern philosopher). And in the 20th century, central Europe — with its steamrollers of wars, genocides and totalitarian repression — was the pioneer of modern mechanised savagery too. If you’re looking for the roots of everything that is most cruel and frightening in the modern world, you can trace them here too.
It is very hard to imagine this side of things as we walk through spring sunshine from the station to the beautiful Hotel Motto where we’re staying for the first couple of days of our visit. I leave my girlfriend recuperating amid the tasteful wallpaper, lovely lamps and plump sofas to roam through central Vienna listening to Mahler’s second symphony and thinking melancholy thoughts about the decline of the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburg Empire — whose territories once stretched from the Balkans to Ukraine — is undoubtedly history’s most glamorous, loveable and (in its last decades at least) reassuringly liberal empire.
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I love the melancholy gigantism favoured by the Habsburg architects who built central Vienna: the massive domes, porticos, carved angels and super-size Austrian generals astride enormous sad-looking horses. It may all be slightly unloveable were it not for the knowledge that this massive effort at permanence owed more to insecurity than self-confidence. The Kunsthistorisches Museum which dominates Maria-Theresien-Platz was opened by Emperor Franz-Joseph I in 1891, only 27 years before the Habsburg Empire collapsed and the 1,000-year-old dynasty ended forever (£18, khm.at).
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At the same time Franz Joseph’s architects were constructing these superbly reactionary elegies in stone, other parts of Vienna were hurtling so far into the modern world you almost suspect a quantum bug in the code of the universe. The best place to get a sense of it is the Leopold Museum which, along with its superb collection of Schieles, Klimts and Kokoschkas, displays the fashion, furniture and graphic art of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In every room you have to rearrange your sense of history as you are confronted with minimalist chairs and groovy posters that look like they date from the 1960s, not the last days of the Habsburg Empire (£16, leopoldmuseum.org).
The first half of our stay in Vienna is the modern bit: Hotel Motto, the Leopold Museum and the Freud Museum (which sells mugs reading “I love mum”). For dinner we eat at the uber-chic vegetarian restaurant Tian where quite virtuous vegetables (blushing radishes, virginal celeriacs) are manipulated into exotic combinations and made to taste profanely delicious — a relief after meaty Munich where one night I ordered a “sausage salad” that turned out to be just a bowl of sausages floating in some sort of vinegar (six courses from £140pp; tian-restaurant.com).
For the second part of Vienna we go full Habsburg and transition to the immensely grand Hotel Sacher, home of the famous Viennese chocolate cake sachertorte and where Franz Joseph I himself once stayed. The staff are all so elaborately courteous (when I ask for toothpaste a man appears outside my bedroom door with a tube of Colgate on a silver platter) I keep worrying that they’ve mistaken me for some minor Habsburg plenipotentiary. The hotel went bankrupt in the early 20th century when its proprietress Anna Sacher (pictured on the walls surrounded by her French bulldogs wearing diamond collars) pursued the whimsical but commercially disastrous policy of refusing to offer rooms to non-aristocrats and giving them instead to impoverished nobles who couldn’t pay.
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Any hotel that serves unlimited sachertorte and champagne for breakfast is going to be hard to leave, but — tenacious in my Habsburg-mania — I drag my girlfriend to Easter mass at the Augustinerkirche. The church is built into the Hofburg palace complex and is still managed by Augustinian monks. It houses the hearts of 54 Habsburg monarchs in silver urns. Napoleon married Marie Louise, the eldest daughter of Emperor Francis II, here in 1810. For Easter the church’s musicians perform Haydn’s Nelson Mass (originally titled the Missa in angustiis, “mass in a time of anxiety”) which was written in 1798 when Napoleon won four battles against the flailing Austrians. It is unbelievably atmospheric and Habsburg-y but it does go on for almost two hours so you really have to be committed to the Habsburgs (or, I suppose, Christianity) to endure it.
Rising above shallow nationalism and adopting a properly Habsburg mindset, Prague and Vienna should not really be thought of as occupying separate territories. Several Habsburgs ruled the empire from Prague (notably the occult-obsessed Rudolf II). Mahler spent some time as the conductor at the city’s Neues Deutsches Theater. Mozart premiered Don Giovanni here. The cities complement one another. Where Vienna is grandiose, Prague is whimsical. Where Vienna offers vast and echoing museum after vast and echoing museum, Prague offers a less onerous itinerary, leaving more time to wander around staring at gorgeous pastel-coloured apartment blocks, their doorways brooded over by huge, fantastical carvings of giants and nymphs.
We’re staying at the Andaz, a beautiful and airy new hotel in the old town, near the station which is famous for its Japanese-Czech fusion restaurant ZEM. This sounds fairly mad but turns out to be completely delightful. Czech is supposed to be one of those chronically irredeemable cuisines — all dumplings, off-putting brown sauces and bits of turnip — but we spend the evening cooing over the (yes) carrot schnitzel and svickova (a slightly sweet dish of beef, vegetables and bread dumplings) which here transcends its peasant origins and is sent, Cinderella-like, to the culinary ball tasting glamorously complex and cosmopolitan (mains from £15, zemprague.com).
I am especially pleased by ZEM as central Europe’s unpromising cuisine is the weak plank in my otherwise impregnable argument for its superiority over the south. Nutritionists will probably not be recommending the “mitteleuropean diet” over the tomatoes and oily fish of the Mediterranean any time soon but in that svickova I am sure I have glimpsed great things in the future.
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To the decent food, you can add — thanks to global warming — lovely sunshine. The Saturday after we leave, the temperature climbs up to 27C. In April! In northern Europe! Existentially terrifying from one perspective. But handy for my theory that Mitteleuropa is the new Mediterranean. Add to this the fact that for baroque churches Prague is almost unbeatable. Because the Habsburgs had to impose Catholicism on the recalcitrant Czechs by force, their religious architecture has a heavy-handed unsubtlety that must have seemed infuriating at the time but which is wonderful now.
The highlight is Saint Nicholas, surely one of the grandest expressions of the baroque spirit in all of Europe with its pinky-brown marble, soaring trompe-l’oeil ceiling and gargantuan marble saints towering over the nave — statues so inhumanly large they look like they have been carved for a 20th-century totalitarian dictator.
In the Kafka Museum I resume — possibly to my girlfriend’s distress — my monologue about the Habsburg Paradox (£10; kafkamuseum.cz). How mind-bogglingly strange that Kafka, whose books seem so completely modern spent his life working in the bureaucracy of the Habsburg Empire, that great decaying monster state that seems as distant as a fairytale from the vantage point of the 21st century. Either the past is closer than we think. Or more modern than we think. Or …
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At this point I realise I can wear myself out with theories. I’m not supposed to be writing opinion columns on holiday. We repair to the Letna Gardens for a beer. From our café we can see right across Prague and out into the countryside beyond. Perhaps it’s pointless trying to argue the case but I really do feel like I’m sitting at the hub of the universe.
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James Marriott was a guest of Hotel Motto (room-only doubles from £138, hotelmotto.at); Hotel Sacher (B&B doubles from £519, sacher.com); Hotel Andaz (B&B doubles from £341, hyatt.com) and Austria Tourism (austria.info), Visit Czechia (visitczechia.com), and Rail Europe, which has a seven-day Interrail pass from £333pp including return Eurostar to Paris when an extra £52 reservation fee is paid(raileurope.com).
More cultural rail holidays in Europe
By Tristan Rutherford
Discover Poland’s history
A tour of Poland uncovering its political history begins in Gdansk, the gorgeous Hanseatic port that is also home to the European Solidarity Centre, where protests against communism helped to fell the Berlin Wall. On day three, travellers on this self-guided Polish Explorer tour with Fred Holidays ride a high-speed train south to the buzzing capital, Warsaw. Day five continues south to Krakow for a three-night stay. The only guided excursion, on day six, takes in the harrowing history of Auschwitz and the crystalline magic of the Wieliczka salt mines.
Details Seven nights’ B&B from £1,089pp, including rail transport within Poland and flights (fredholidays.co.uk)
Paris to Portofino in style
This June, for the first time, Paris and Portofino will be connected by a luxurious Venice Simplon-Orient-Express departure. The three-night break departs begins with a night on the sleeper train, kicking off with cocktails in Bar Car 3674, and dinner near Avignon, when a new summer menu will be served by the star chef Jean Imbert in the three art deco dining cars. On day two, there’s brunch before the train pulls into Santa Margherita Ligure, near Portofino’s Hotel Splendido, much loved by Elizabeth Taylor. Guests savour two nights here — and another Imbert tasting menu — overlooking the Mediterranean.
Details Three nights’ B&B from £7,920pp, including one night in a sleeper cabin with drinks, two nights at the hotel, and two dinners (belmond.com)
Art break in Basel
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Travellers on a self-guided Basel Short Break tour with the rail specialist ByWay start on the Eurostar to Paris for lunch, then take a train to Switzerland’s artsy city in time for dinner. On day two there’s time to explore one of the world’s oldest public art collections at the Kunstmuseum, including works by Monet and Picasso. Burn some energy on an ebike ride up the River Rhine or, if you’re there between June 13-16, visit the annual arts event Art Basel (basel.com).
Details Two nights’ B&B from £608pp, including rail travel (byway.travel)
Grand tour of mitteleuropa
If James Marriott’s piece has piqued your interest in the Habsburgs, a fully escorted Grand Imperial Cities tour from Great Rail Journeys could be just the ticket. Travelling to Brussels on Eurostar, guests are given lunch onboard, arriving in Frankfurt for dinner, then there are three days in Vienna touring the baroque palaces plus the prime Habsburg pile of the Schönbrunn. Day five involves a train beside the Danube to Budapest for an evening river cruise, and two days later there’s an onward train to Prague, where highlights include a tour of the castle. A final two nights are spent in Berlin, before the train back to London.
Details 11 nights’ B&B from £2,495pp, including excursions, five group dinners and train travel (greatrail.com)
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