The deep texture of Vienna's architecture makes many of its streets a pleasure to experience, but it can be a struggle to get from it a linear sense of history in the city. Unlike Rome, where history is often discernible by its layers, surface Vienna is a deceptive melange: classical, medieval, and Renaissance styles appear in abundance, often adjacent to each other or to modern structures; it is not immediately apparent whether a Gothic church dates from the Middle Ages or from the 19th century, and portions of some churches date from both. It is not just the architecture that imparts that jumbled sense of time. During our touring the past couple of weeks, we have found that, like the Danube, history runs through the city in different channels and sometimes seems to meander, pool, and eddy as it makes its way to the sea.
Beneath the Stone
Near the heart of downtown is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Roman settlement, known as "Vindobona" from the 1st to the 4th century A.D. The desk attendant, a grizzled, dark, and dour figure, was a modern Charon, requiring obols for the boat ride across the Styx, down his staircase. We paid and headed for the underworld. A 20' descent takes a visitor to the street level of 2000 years ago and an excavation of the foundation outlines, walls, and other elements of the structures that remain from a Roman fort and various living quarters. Allied bombs the last week of World War II uncovered coins and other artifacts from more than one temple from the Roman era. (Elsewhere in the city, and even out as far as Grinzing, there are other, though more meager, remnants of Roman buildings.) All in all, however, the evidence of the Roman world felt sparse. While we were in the excavation, we could hear the clip-clop of fiacres, the horse-drawn carriages, on the street above. It was as if the street noise itself was from another time--the 19th rather than the 21st century--while we gazed on remnants of the 2d century.
Beneath the Bronze
The Capucchin church in the city center hosts the crypt of the Habsburgs. There are many boxes, nearly all bronze and most of them ornate, holding the rulers and their families, except for the daughters who were married off to create political alliances and who are interred in other lands.
Once visitors have entered through large glass doors like those of a modern department store, there is a voyage into bare, gray, timeless sturdiness. From the doorway it is just a few steps to a toll booth, which sits at the top of stairs leading down to yet another underworld, one of several centuries. The glorious Habsburg past contrasts with a modern, Spartan setting. The crypt rooms and floors are gray concrete. The walls are bare, and the rooms are cold. Each room has geometrically arranged, ornate bronze boxes, some on concrete pedestals; the lids are covered with designs of family crests and weapons and skulls and crossed bones. The higher the rank, the more elaborate the decoration and the more likely the box is to be in the center of the room; lesser royalty are placed in rows along the walls--as if honor, or position, after death were something outside time.
Here lie my favorite Habsburgs, all from the 19th century, and all misplaced in various ways, including their century. The first, Emperor Franz Josef (died in 1916), most likely wished he could have ruled in an earlier time, or at least before the revolutions in 1848 spread so much democratic sentiment; the second, his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, wished he could have lived in a post-monarchy era; the third, Franz Josef's reluctant wife, Empress Elisabeth (whom I referred to in an earlier posting as Sisi), apparently wished she were living in a time when all women were liberated. If the dead could have opinions about where they ended up, Franz Josef is probably the only one of those three who would be pleased. His body rests in the center of a room, between those of his wife and only son, and slightly elevated above them. (I thought of Arlington Cemetery, where flag-rank officers are buried high on the hillsides so that they have better views of the Potomac than the lower ranking officers and enlisted do.) Franz Josef's son, Rudolph, struggled under his society's and his father's constraints until, despondent over the choking artificiality of the monarchical system and his inability to bring about democratic reform, he shot his mistress and put a bullet in his own head. Because of the nature of his death, a great deal of civil and ecumenical manipulation of the rules was required to inter him on holy ground. His wish to be buried next to his mistress was ignored, and Rudolf wound up for eternity next to and below his father, in an arrangement that leaves him paternally dominated--visually, at least--for the ages, and many miles from the grave of his beloved. And poor Sisi. She hated the monarchy and she hated Vienna even more. The Empress spent nearly all her final years away from the city, loathing its court society and complaining often and bitterly of Vienna's winters. The bronze sarcophagus keeps her not just in a subordinate position to the emperor, but in the city she loathed, where for the remaining winters of eternity she will be "rolled round the earth's diurnal course."
Behind the Brass
We recently had a tour of the history of the Jewish community in Vienna. There is little physical evidence of it, mostly as a result of events during the Hitler era. Instead there are 1950s structures built on sites where once stood beautiful, centuries-old synagogues that were burned down by mobs, and other modern buildings atop bombed-out, one-time Gestapo and SS offices. Mostly the tour was a chilly walk from one somber brass plaque to another...signs of the times.
-- Car stuff. The process of getting the car made legal seems to be endless. We are through with the safety inspection, and this morning I dropped the car at the Toyota dealership to have our turn-signal light lenses changed to EU specifications and to have snow tires mounted. (There is a hefty fine for driving without snow tires after November 1.) Yet to be scheduled is the "technical inspection," which seems to involve a team of mechanics dismantling the vehicle and sniffing and licking each part after examining each with a jeweler's loupe. Since both of us has have good distance-vision, there is one regulation we can ignore: a driver who needs glasses is required to carry a spare pair in the vehicle. Yesterday we purchased the required orange caution triangle, first-aid kit, and four safety vests (for the driver and as many passengers as the car might hold). All this for a country with the second-highest accident rate in the EU. Having finally gotten around to buying our 2-month highway-use decal, we did a reconnaissance drive to the airport on Sunday morning, and once on the autobahn were passed regularly by cars going 100 mph and more.
-- The Potato Again. On Saturday. as we strolled through a crowd in the pedestrian shopping district of the inner city. we passed a man standing over a large black metal vessel with a bed of white-hot charcoal, slicing a potato, which he was grilling and selling to passersby.
Beneath the Stone
Near the heart of downtown is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Roman settlement, known as "Vindobona" from the 1st to the 4th century A.D. The desk attendant, a grizzled, dark, and dour figure, was a modern Charon, requiring obols for the boat ride across the Styx, down his staircase. We paid and headed for the underworld. A 20' descent takes a visitor to the street level of 2000 years ago and an excavation of the foundation outlines, walls, and other elements of the structures that remain from a Roman fort and various living quarters. Allied bombs the last week of World War II uncovered coins and other artifacts from more than one temple from the Roman era. (Elsewhere in the city, and even out as far as Grinzing, there are other, though more meager, remnants of Roman buildings.) All in all, however, the evidence of the Roman world felt sparse. While we were in the excavation, we could hear the clip-clop of fiacres, the horse-drawn carriages, on the street above. It was as if the street noise itself was from another time--the 19th rather than the 21st century--while we gazed on remnants of the 2d century.
Beneath the Bronze
The Capucchin church in the city center hosts the crypt of the Habsburgs. There are many boxes, nearly all bronze and most of them ornate, holding the rulers and their families, except for the daughters who were married off to create political alliances and who are interred in other lands.
Once visitors have entered through large glass doors like those of a modern department store, there is a voyage into bare, gray, timeless sturdiness. From the doorway it is just a few steps to a toll booth, which sits at the top of stairs leading down to yet another underworld, one of several centuries. The glorious Habsburg past contrasts with a modern, Spartan setting. The crypt rooms and floors are gray concrete. The walls are bare, and the rooms are cold. Each room has geometrically arranged, ornate bronze boxes, some on concrete pedestals; the lids are covered with designs of family crests and weapons and skulls and crossed bones. The higher the rank, the more elaborate the decoration and the more likely the box is to be in the center of the room; lesser royalty are placed in rows along the walls--as if honor, or position, after death were something outside time.
Here lie my favorite Habsburgs, all from the 19th century, and all misplaced in various ways, including their century. The first, Emperor Franz Josef (died in 1916), most likely wished he could have ruled in an earlier time, or at least before the revolutions in 1848 spread so much democratic sentiment; the second, his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, wished he could have lived in a post-monarchy era; the third, Franz Josef's reluctant wife, Empress Elisabeth (whom I referred to in an earlier posting as Sisi), apparently wished she were living in a time when all women were liberated. If the dead could have opinions about where they ended up, Franz Josef is probably the only one of those three who would be pleased. His body rests in the center of a room, between those of his wife and only son, and slightly elevated above them. (I thought of Arlington Cemetery, where flag-rank officers are buried high on the hillsides so that they have better views of the Potomac than the lower ranking officers and enlisted do.) Franz Josef's son, Rudolph, struggled under his society's and his father's constraints until, despondent over the choking artificiality of the monarchical system and his inability to bring about democratic reform, he shot his mistress and put a bullet in his own head. Because of the nature of his death, a great deal of civil and ecumenical manipulation of the rules was required to inter him on holy ground. His wish to be buried next to his mistress was ignored, and Rudolf wound up for eternity next to and below his father, in an arrangement that leaves him paternally dominated--visually, at least--for the ages, and many miles from the grave of his beloved. And poor Sisi. She hated the monarchy and she hated Vienna even more. The Empress spent nearly all her final years away from the city, loathing its court society and complaining often and bitterly of Vienna's winters. The bronze sarcophagus keeps her not just in a subordinate position to the emperor, but in the city she loathed, where for the remaining winters of eternity she will be "rolled round the earth's diurnal course."
Behind the Brass
We recently had a tour of the history of the Jewish community in Vienna. There is little physical evidence of it, mostly as a result of events during the Hitler era. Instead there are 1950s structures built on sites where once stood beautiful, centuries-old synagogues that were burned down by mobs, and other modern buildings atop bombed-out, one-time Gestapo and SS offices. Mostly the tour was a chilly walk from one somber brass plaque to another...signs of the times.
Filler
-- Response from the state rail system in regard to an email query:
"Dear Quentin Gehle!
This are your wished timetable:"
-- Car stuff. The process of getting the car made legal seems to be endless. We are through with the safety inspection, and this morning I dropped the car at the Toyota dealership to have our turn-signal light lenses changed to EU specifications and to have snow tires mounted. (There is a hefty fine for driving without snow tires after November 1.) Yet to be scheduled is the "technical inspection," which seems to involve a team of mechanics dismantling the vehicle and sniffing and licking each part after examining each with a jeweler's loupe. Since both of us has have good distance-vision, there is one regulation we can ignore: a driver who needs glasses is required to carry a spare pair in the vehicle. Yesterday we purchased the required orange caution triangle, first-aid kit, and four safety vests (for the driver and as many passengers as the car might hold). All this for a country with the second-highest accident rate in the EU. Having finally gotten around to buying our 2-month highway-use decal, we did a reconnaissance drive to the airport on Sunday morning, and once on the autobahn were passed regularly by cars going 100 mph and more.
-- The Potato Again. On Saturday. as we strolled through a crowd in the pedestrian shopping district of the inner city. we passed a man standing over a large black metal vessel with a bed of white-hot charcoal, slicing a potato, which he was grilling and selling to passersby.
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