Europe in These Times: The Third Man
The Church of St. Charles
It takes about fifteen minutes by public transit to get from Vienna’s inner ring to the Prater, situated between the Danube and the Danube Canal. It’s an amusement park, open to anyone who chooses to walk through (ride tickets are purchased inside), and its most prominent feature is the Giant Ferris Wheel, or Wiener Riesenrad, which looms over the whole scene and serves as a convenient landmark to guide visitors emerging from the underground metro station.
The amusement park aesthetics contrast starkly with the rest of the Vienna tourist experience. The cartoonish chimes of the children’s rides produce a profoundly different feel from the evening Mozart and Strauss concerts held in St. Anna’s, St. Stephen’s, St. Peter’s (on our recent trip to the city, we actually attended a playing of the Four Seasons in St. Charles’; Vivaldi, despite being Italian, lived the last year of his life in Vienna, and is buried there on the grounds of a university adjacent to the church in which we attended the concert); the visual stimuli of the park could not be more distinct from the museums with their centuries-old imperial artifacts, the palaces with their grand gardens and chambers, the Capuchin Crypt with the ornate sarcophagi of the Hapsburgs.
On the ferris wheel, with the Prater below
For me, though, this giant Ferris wheel was unmissable: I wasn’t going to come here without taking a ride on it, without walking in the footsteps of the fictional characters Harry Lime and Rollo Martins. The two are, respectively, the villain and sort-of-protagonist (the story is told mostly in the voice of a police colonel recounting what Martins had told him) of The Third Man, a book by Graham Greene that was written as a treatment for the film version made by Orson Welles.
Friends since their schoolboy days in England, the characters Lime and Martins had remained in sporadic contact into adulthood, with Lime becoming (unbeknownst to his friend) a particularly vile type of criminal in the postwar Vienna underworld (he ran a racket selling fake penicillin, with devastating consequences), and Martins finding a career churning out B-grade cowboy novels.
Set in the dark winter of a Vienna devastated by the Second World War and divided into four sectors by the victorious occupying powers (the U.S., Russia, U.K., and France), the Third Man is a noir thriller that’s long stood as a singular achievement of the genre. As it was written by Greene, though, it’s also a morality tale with a deeply Catholic sensibility. Martins arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Lime, thinking he will be helping his friend in a legitimate enterprise, only to find that Harry is dead (Rollo attends the funeral). Investigating the circumstances of the death, Martins begins to discover the truth about Lime, including his criminal activity and, most importantly, the fact that he’s not actually dead.
The two old friends meet at last in the story’s penultimate scene, here, on the Giant Wheel, rising slowly up in a car with no one else in it, all the way to a height from which they could look out over all of Vienna. To Rollo Martins, it is a necessary confrontation to conclude his investigation; to Harry Lime, it is the Temptation in the Desert, a chance to take his adversary to a great height and convince him to participate in his deadly criminal enterprise by explaining everything he had to gain in so doing. “Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence” (Mt 4:8):
Martins said, “Have you ever visited the children’s hospital? Have you seen your victims?”
“Victims?” he [Harry] asked. Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,” he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving – forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money – without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.”
Again the car began to move, sailing slowly down, until the flies were midgets, were recognizable human beings.
As their car nears the bottom of the wheel’s rotation, Harry nears his point:
“How much do you earn a year with your Westerns, old man?”
“A thousand.”
“Taxed. I earn thirty thousand free. It’s the fashion. In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans and so have I.”
“You used to be a Catholic.”
“Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I’m not hurting anybody’s soul by what I do. The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils….”
It’s all preparation, of course, for the familiar proposition of Satan, “all these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me” (Mt 4:9). And so at last, Lime makes the offer: “I could cut you in, you know. It would be useful.”
Martins, although no Christ-like figure, declines, setting up the story’s conclusion (“At this, Jesus said to him, ‘Get away, Satan!’” Mt 4:10).
My summertime ride on the Giant Wheel was, of course, somewhat less dramatic, but nonetheless made worthwhile by the panorama, with the steeple of St. Stephen’s prominent in the skyline of the inner ring. It was a view, indeed, that inspired a rebuttal to Lime’s line of argument, one that I would not have been able to formulate had I not visited the city. Independent from his payoff bribe, Harry Lime had defended himself by asserting that individual lives were insignificant, and that in a world of suffering, the dead don’t miss much. But Vienna itself, seen so well from the commanding heights of the Wheel, stands as a stark refutation of Lime’s worldview. It’s a city in which the music and the churches (indeed, so much of that music made for those churches) reconcile the art and beauty—the good—of life with a sense or a glimpse of the eternal. To hold the value of sacrifice as transcendent defines the Christian, but only as that value is both non-transferable from the self and held in acknowledgment of the inherent good of creation. Beauty until Gethsemane. Beauty until Golgotha.
And so the visitor to Vienna today would be hard-pressed to choose Harry Lime’s cynicism over the wonder and appreciation inspired by the Baroque vaults and stunning altarpieces of St Stephen’s, St Charles’, St Peter’s, St Anna’s, or the Augustinian Church, by the Hapsburg crypt, by Mozart with his masses and requiem, by Strauss with his waltz paying tribute to his home city, by the evening sounds of the Four Seasons drifting from St Charles, out over the grave of a priest named Vivaldi. Lime and Martins may have strode through a very different Vienna, broken by war, populated by the desperate, beset by the nefarious, but Jesus Christ at the Temptation, of course, knowing the suffering to come, made a choice that left His followers only one option.
The Hapsburg Sarcophagus
In Greene’s story, shortly after his ride on the Great Wheel, Harry Lime dies in a sewer, shot by his old friend, whom he had just tried to murder. Rollo Martins recounts bending toward the dying Harry to hear his last words:
“Bloody fool,” he said – that was all. I don’t know whether he meant that for himself – some sort of contrition, however inadequate (he was a Catholic) – or was it for me – with my thousand a year taxed…? Then he began to whimper again. I couldn’t bear it any more and I put a bullet through him.”
You can still take a tour of the part of the Vienna sewer in which Harry Lime’s death was filmed for the movie version of the Third Man. I was unable to arrange that excursion for myself during my last visit, but intend to do so upon my return.
