I used to write a blog, a little life observations, travel, and pictures. The last blog was written before the COVID disaster, after we traveled to Russia for the last time in 2019. And then life stopped with the pandemic, and then it came back, we moved to NYC, and we started to travel again, but for whatever reason, I had nothing to say to the world about it. I don’t know why, we had some interesting trips, and I took a lot of pictures. Maybe because I was oversharing my reactions to the world on social media, in the end, I had nothing to say. And now Vienna happened. Not exactly a super exciting destination, but the place somehow inspired me to go back to writing.
The first impression was that somehow everything you touch works. Bathroom fixtures, door locks, public transport, websites for museum ticketing, and trash cans with separate cigarette butts compartments.
All of that creates a low-stress atmosphere where, instead of being often irritated by misbehaving little things, you suddenly can turn your sight outwards. The first impression was auditory, I listened to the language that sounded and felt so foreign, but not at all how I imagined German would sound. Viennese people speak in a soft murmur, almost like French. I have no deep insight into why Austrian sounds like pleasant German, but it was one of the first impressions.
At the beginning of our stay in Vienna, we went for a couple of days to Budapest, but that is a separate experience. The only things I can bring up here are that Budapest felt far more exciting in spirit, far more interesting architecturally, but also more disorderly. Many beautiful buildings were in a dangerous, emergency condition and falling apart, and this somehow brought a sense of temporal change and mortality, almost similar to Venice.
Budapest is stunningly beautiful, and it is heartbreaking to see that much decay.
The contrast with NYC, which recently installed military-like additions to turnstiles, is a powerful reminder of how much the cultural differences matter.
This serenity gets you ready for the museum experience. Vienna is loaded with great art. The Austrian and Austrian-Hungarian empires were blessed with art-loving and industrious leaders who, in a relatively short time, about 160 years altogether, managed to build stunning imperial cities, with parks, palaces, and advanced urban infrastructure, collect great art, and enable local diverse populations to be creative and productive. That made Vienna the center of European culture. Science, art, and the humanities were blossoming with great names that in many ways defined modern Western civilization. Remarkably, all of that happened under a monarchy, with great income inequality, but in a society that valued achievement and creativity as the most important factors for human advancement. The greatest contribution of this civilization is now in several stunning Viennese museums, which are also run as smoothly and efficiently as most other businesses in Vienna.
Two historic museums gave us valuable insights into the forces of rot and destruction within this great civilization, which eventually led to the tragedy, to the end of Vienna as a center of Western civilization, and destruction in WWI and WWII. Vienna bears a lot of tragic evidence of the distraction. The Freud museum is an empty apartment with a few exhibit stands. At the age of 82 and ill with cancer, Freud was forced to flee his beloved city after the Nazi annexation of Austria. All his life's work and belongings are now in his London apartment, where he spent the last year of his life. Even more terrifying than an empty apartment were the names of his neighbors on the wall in the hallway, almost all of them who perished in the holocaust.
These are the lucky ones
The Jewish museum left me in a state of bewilderment and almost terror. What I see in the NYC now echoes the Vienna story so closely that I felt I wanted to scream. I will bring here just a few stories based on museum documents as an example.
In no other major European city did Jews play such an important role in the 1848 revolution as they did in Vienna. The revolution strengthened the self-awareness of the Viennese Jews, even if real civic equality was still a long way off. They put their faith in a German culture and nation set free by the revolution, within which they could consider themselves as equals among equals. This trust soon proved illusory. The German nationalists became more radical and soon excluded the Jews as "aliens" from their world of equals. Even during the revolution, the Jews experienced a foretaste of this new anti-Semitism. Freedom of the press not only produced emancipatory writings but also gave a wider readership to anti-Semitic sentiments.
Vienna 1900 has become established as a tourist brand portrayed as a triad between Modernism, decline and fall, and the last glory days of a fairy-tale city. Somewhat ineptly, this image often talks of an important "Jewish contribution." Vienna at that time did indeed bear the stamp of Jewish intellectuals, musicians, writers, and artists, but also of businessmen and tradesmen, peddlers and cobblers.
In 1893 Karl Lueger founded the Christian Socialist Party, and from 1897 to 1910, as mayor of Vienna, reformed local politics. He used rabid anti-Semitism as a political weapon. Historians widely agree that Lueger’s brand of political antisemitism, populism, and use of propaganda left a deep impression on the young Hitler. He lived in Vienna from 1908 to 1913, mostly impoverished, and absorbed the city’s turbulent politics. Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that Lueger was “the greatest German mayor of all time” and praised him for using antisemitism as a political tool.
Vienna 1900 was an anti-Semitic city. The optimism of the Jews following the 1848 revolution had completely disappeared, and new possible identities presented themselves: national Jewish movements and their exhortation to combat anti-Semitism; Zionism, which offered dignity and safety for the Jews in their own state; and finally integration in the Social Democratic workers' movement.
After WWI, the Social Democrats had an absolute majority and implemented extensive reforms in housing, welfare, education, and health policy. The public housing projects ["Gemeindebauten"] still epitomize Red Vienna today. After the war, a lot of people were left homeless and needed to be housed cheaply and quickly. This urgent situation led to the creation of a massive public housing infrastructure. To pay for the construction of these projects, finance city councilor Hugo Breitner and parliamentarian Robert Danneberg introduced a highly acclaimed but also much vilified housing tax in 1923.
Breitner managed to escape to the USA in 1938; Danneberg was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Pioneers like Käthe Leichter worked in Red Vienna for the social, economic, and legal equality of women. From 1925 to February 1934 she was head of the department for women's employment in the Vienna Chamber of Labor. She was also murdered in the Shoah.
During Austro-Fascism in 1934: The section of the Ringstrasse between the university and the Burgtheater was named Dr.Karl-Lueger-Ring. In the years before, anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish students had increased. In 2012, the city of Vienna dismantled the street signs and renamed the section Universitätsring. This does not by any means mark the disappearance of Lueger's name from the city. There is still a square named for him with a monument, as well as a church, a fountain, a park, other monuments and busts, altar pictures, countless inscriptions, a Lueger oak, Lueger-Hof, and Lueger bridge, Straßenschitd Dr.Kerl-Lueger-Ming Street.
When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, the Nazis immediately began persecuting Jews. It was called “Aryanization”. Jewish businesses were seized, thousands were forced to emigrate. The notable but little-known exception was Johann Strauss' story: Frequently broadcasted over radio stations as examples of "German music," the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March remained popular melodies during the Nazi era. While it was already uncomfortable for the regime that many of the librettists of Strauss's operettas were Jewish, the revelation of the Waltz King's partial Jewish ancestry would have been highly inconvenient for Nazi leadership. The original parish register of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna with the marriage record of Johann Strauss's great-grandfather Johann Michael Strauss to Rosalia Buschinin on February 11, 1762 was classified as top secret by the Nazi authorities.
As noted by the then pastor of St. Stephen's Cathedral, the reason behind this unprecedented action was that Johann Michael Strauss was "a baptized Jew." The records book was locked away, and a copy was made in which the incriminating entry was simply deleted.
The Nuremberg Laws were the primary legal basis for the persecution of Jews under National Socialism. Since classification as "Jewish" was based on the religion of a person's grand-parents, countless individuals - even those who had long since renounced Judaism - were arbitrarily labeled as Jews. Apparently, in exceptional cases, the reverse was also possible: Johann Strauss's Jewish family ties were "Aryanized."
Moving on to the Leopold Museum. The entire wall of artists, musicians, scientists, and intellectuals, people who made Vienna and Europe the most exciting and modern place, many of them Jewish, many had their lives tragically cut short or had to be exiled. Here is just a small sample.
Unfortunately, the studies of the Holocaust don’t include the prelude to the tragedy. What was happening all over Europe, and Austria in particular, made the Holocaust not a singular, unexpected event, as many people believe, but rather a climax of a terminal disease that was brewing in emancipated Europe for at least 50 years before the tragedy happened. There is no surprise that 50 years before WWII, when the poison of Jew hatred was all over Europe, a prominent member of the Viennese elite, Theodor Herzl, came up with the idea of the Jewish state.
Vienna suffered greatly after WWI, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and after WWII when it was bombed by Allied forces. The public housing infrastructure started by Hugo Breitner and Robert Danneberg helped to house majority of the people left homeless after WWII as well. Today, around 60% of people in Vienna live in this housing, and the rents are very reasonable, about 30-40% less than in any other Western capital city. Affordable housing is a subject of major pride for the Viennese, and it is definitely a serious achievement, but like everything else, it comes with a price. The taxes in Austria are almost the highest in Europe; they are not exactly progressive, meaning that even people with a median income, taxed at a very high rate. And while some of the public housing looks amazing, like a little Gaudi-like island in the middle of Vienna, designed by the famous architect duo Hundertwasser-Krawina.
The large majority looks like this:
Most restaurants have this sign on. Austrians don’t like noise and are very sensitive to observing the rules. And they go to bed early. A habit that is strange and foreign to me.
And finally, one more thing. There’s a long-standing stereotype (especially in the Anglophone world) that Germans “don’t have a sense of humor.” The stereotype was totally broken by the tired waiter in the busy and fancy coffee shop with beautiful Viennese pastry.
Over the course of our stay, we had a few casual interactions with locals, and most of them were friendly and surprisingly more pleasant than I ever expected. I feel like I want to return, I think Vienna still has a lot more secrets and enlightening stories to tell.
