by (unknown) Austrian illustrator
New Year’s Eve Dinner Menu
circa 1915
Held in honour of the ‘Austrian Army of the Field’, this New Year’s dinner made way for a menu featuring not only delicious dishes (including, of course, the irreplaceable Wiener Schnitzel), but also a deliciously quaint illustration. Classically block-printed and slightly blotchy in parts, its colour vignette beautifully portrays an anglicised blue-cloaked figure clutching a pine branch (?) and a slung ribboned wreath, while knocking gently at the door of whomever’s stepped entrance she stands on. From behind her looms a family of poised shadowy trunks, probably those of an Alpine species, with their earthy brown skins adding to the young girl’s wide-eyed glance a heightened sense of the relentless, ever-changing reformation of one’s outer shell that each new year requires. Charged with the complementary presence of Nature herself, the figure seems to knock more brusquely against whatever stubbornly stands between she and her quest, while at the same time looking out to us (to those who seem to follow in her wake) with a silence that says, Why not - what if? At the time, this illustration served as a symbol of hope to those on the final night of December 1914, with the figure’s inviting stance and gentle gestural knocking suggesting, perhaps, the inevitable oncomings of the unseen, the brutal truths and, finally, the recycling of peace - and how one must endure the pain of knocking down doors in order to truly see what lies ahead.
