On May 16th this year the market town (Marktgemeinde) of Kaltenleutgeben, pop. 2,500, on the edge of the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald) some 12 miles 20 km.) SSW of the city limits of Vienna, celebrated the centenary of the "Sommerfrisch" sojourn the Samuel L. Clemens family spent there (May 20BOctober 14, 1898) with a public lecture and a small informal reception in the house where the family lived and where Mark Twain did most of the writing he accomplished during his nearly two years in Austria (1897B99).

I was the invited lecturer for this commemorative occasion and I chose for my topic the rather fanciful title "Mark Twains 'Geschichten aus der Wienerwald'" (Mark Twain's "Tales from the Vienna Woods")Ca word-play on the title of the famous waltz by Johann Strauss, Jr., with whom Twain had struck up a friendship while in Vienna. My subject actually was a discussion of the several pieces Twain wroteCthat is, worked on, actually completed, or started and left unfinished in Kaltenleutgeben. I concentrated mainly on the polemical essay "Concerning the Jews" (which he wrote there in July 1898), the sketch "The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again" (June), "What Is Man?@ (JulyBAugust), "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (SeptemberBOctober), "Christian Science" (AugustBSeptember), and some of the work on the Mysterious Stranger fragments (though the summer). As was his wont, Twain did most of his writing during summers (in the States at Quarry Farm in Elmira, NY), and the summer of 1898 in Kaltenleutgeben was no exception. It was made more productive by inclement weatherCcold and rainy in June and JulyCwhich prevented him from doing the walking and cycling he intended.

My lecture was in German. In May 1995, at the invitation of the vice-mayor Dr. Wurst of Kaltenleutgeben (who also serves as its "Kultur Referent"Ccultural affairs officer) I gave a public reading there of the Kaltenleutgeben chapter of "Unser beruehmter Gast" (the German translation of my "Our Famous Guest": Mark Twain in Vienna), so I thought this time it would be better to describe the writings (almost none of which have been translated into German!) rather than recapitulate the events of the Clemenses' residence there. I meticulously wrote out my lecture, but, alas, the ocular difficulties that have overtaken me in the past three years (macular degeneration) made it impossible for me to read, even with magnification. So I threw away my text and ad libbed the whole thing in my rather Twainish "amerikanisches deutsch" which the audience of 50 or so didn't seem to mind at all. As Mark Twain remarked, the Austrians are nothing if not super-polite and hospitable!

Of course, since this is also the "Sissy Jahre" (Sissy Year), in which Austrians and Hungarians are observing the centennial of the assassination in Geneva on Sept. 10, 1898 of their beloved Kaiserin Elisabeth ("Sissy"), the consort of Franz Joseph I, I dwelt at some length on "The Memorable Assassination," the rather maudlin article Mark Twain worked up from his notebook after witnessing her funeral cortege and burial in the Kaiser Gruft (imperial crypt) in Vienna's Capuchin Church. He was unable to sell the piece at the time and, posthumously published, it has never been translated and is, therefore, little-known in Central Europe.

My lecture took place in the "Professor Villa," a community center that was once the home of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Winternitz (1834-1917) whose "Wasserheilkur" (hydrotherapy cure) made Kaltenleutgeben a magnet for European aristocracy as well as for Olivia Clemens and her daughters. The fact that Dr. Winternitz's palatial residence is now a center for civic events is a measure of how much Kaltenleutgeben has changed in this century. No longer a health resort (at least since 1917), it is now a rather crestfallen bedroom community for commuters who work in Vienna and for those employed in the ugly stone quarry and cement works on the edge of the village itself. In 1898 Clemens complained about the slow train service from Vienna's south station (Sudbahnhof), but today one can get there only by bus to and from the commuter train at Liesing at the city's edge.

Still, the fresh country air and mountain scenery has the same charms the Clemenses must have found attractive a century ago and the furnished house they rented there, Villa Paulhof, then less than two years old, is now owned by Kapitan (Capt.) Herbert Wurzel and his family, who bought it in rather dilapidated condition in 1985 and have since restored it to something like the condition it was in when the Clemenses lived there. Capt. Wurzel is a veteran pilot and deputy director of operations for Austrian Airlines and he frequently flies the AAL planes on direct runs from Vienna to New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Frau Wurzel is an antiques collector who has furnished the Villa Paulhof with many of the same kinds of furnishings and decor that must have been there when the Clemens family rented the villa. In 1985 a local antiquarian and Mark Twain enthusiast, Dr. Peter Nics, succeeded in getting the town and the provincial government of Lower Austria to declare the house an historic monument and attach a brass plaque near its gate memorializing Mark Twain's residence there (see MTJ, 24:1, pp.43-44).

The commemorative celebration ended with an informal reception hosted by Capt. and Frau Wurzel for the official party, myself, and a few of my Austrian and American "ex-pat" friends who had come out for the day. Good Niederoesterreichischer (Lower Austrian) white wines flowed freely and the accompanying "belegtes Brot" (open-faced sandwiches) and pastries Frau Wurzel and her daughter prepared for their guests were superb. Mark Twain himself would have delighted in the occasion. One almost felt his presence there and it made the day and its events doubly unforgettable.