G.I. Metamorphosis

"The G.I. has, it good in Austria." So says the G.I. in Austria, and he means by comparison with the lot of U.S. soldiers stationed elsewhere in postwar Europe. Soldiers would grouse even if detailed to the Garden of Eden and last week, as usual, the G.I.s in Austria were grousing at having to attend a series of high-minded but boring Army lectures. But in their time off, the far from sad young men went on having a good time.

Mozart & Chamois. Most of the 15,000 U.S. occupation troops in Austria were boys between 18 and 22. Weaned on ice cream sodas, they had known little except the good life of high-school dances and corner drugstores. The U.S. Army helped to transplant much of that life to Austria. It set up replicas of U.S. drugstores where G.I.s could take their Austrian girls for a soda (daily ice-cream consumption of the U.S. Army & friends in Vienna now runs to 60,000 scoops).

Among venerable establishments like the Three Hussars, the Crooked Lantern and Aunt Resi's, Broadwayish nightclubs sprouted. Racily named Esquire, Zebra and Heidebo, they offered in neat, cultural synthesis U.S.-style jazz and Viennese-style wine (instead of hard liquor).

Better than Vienna, G.I.s liked Salzburg with its mossy stone and patinaed copper. The Red Cross had moved into the Mirabell Casino, and G.I.s listened to symphony concerts in the Mirabell Castle's gardens.* Then, oblivious to the echoes of Mozart's minuets, they jitterbugged in the old, staid Hotel Pitter, which had suddenly acquired something known as the Sky Haven Garden.

Near by, built directly against the rough mountainside, was the Festspielhaus, through whose cavernous yard had boomed the theatrical damnation of Dr. Faust. The G.I. metamorphosis had turned it into a movie house, nostalgically named the Roxy. And around Salzburg's steep Bierjodelgasse (Beer-Yodel-Street) G.I.s noisily scouted for beer gardens.*

The favorite outdoor sport was chamois hunting in the mountains hovering over the city--where the game poacher has always been a highly respected member of society, and where one of Austria's most important bits of national philosophy originated: Warst net au fig'stie g'n -- warst net abag'fall'n (If you hadn't climbed up you wouldn't have fallen down).

Krauts & Cokes. Although Americans had made a better impression on Austrians than on any other people in Europe, the Gemuetlichkeit was riddled by flashes of bitterness. Usually broadminded, the Viennese grew jealous, called girls who fraternized with the chocolate-bearing G.I.s "chocoladies." The sprinkling (5%) of combat veterans among U.S. troops called the Austrians just plain Krauts, only softer.

Last month, soldiers in the U.S. zone were booked for 32 assaults, five rapes, three disorderly conducts, and one housebreaking. Cracked an MP officer: "Now that we're getting quantity supplies of Coca-Cola, maybe our boys will get back to behaving." But most G.I.s in Austria already had passing marks for behavior; and many were living up to their orientation slogan, "Soldier, you are helping Austria." The first crop of Austrian babies fathered by helpful G.I.s is sizable.

*The Castle, like many of Salzburg's most famous buildings, was erected by Wolf Dietrich, a worldly Renaissance archbishop and fiery descendant of the Medici. There he housed his mistress, pretty, witty Salome Alt and her children (eleven, according to the best guesses). Besides Salome, Wolf Dietrich loved boar hunting, foreign languages, and pomp. He spent the last five years of his life in the Salzburg Fortress dungeon after a bad neighbor, Bavaria's Duke Maximilian, turned against him. His Salome was exiled to Wels, a dreary town in Upper Austria, where she died of boredom (complicated, according to some authorities, by heartbreak).

*Of famed Beer-Yodel-Street, Count Ferdinand Czernin observed in his definitive treatise This Salzburg: "In Salzburg the combination of beer and yodeling (Yodel: a strong guttural noise emanating from a native's throat when happy or in love) certainly isn't too farfetched, as the one in a vicious circle always leads to the other. Beer via happiness to yodeling, and yodeling via thirst to beer."

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