Late Summer in Wiener World

Sleeping and Waking

Vienna is waking from its summer slumber.  Traffic is already picking up, and life will be back to frantic normality when school starts next week.  Lots of businesses have been closed, although grocery stores (half stocked), restaurants, and tourist sites have all remained open--and sometimes busy.  It has seemed odd to be on the 38 Tram to downtown and see so many vacant seats, and then to get into the heart of the city, particularly the museums and galleries, and find it crowded with tourists.

-- "Much art--much mythology, indeed--stems from exile.  Exile (from the Garden, from Zion) is a central myth in the Bible, perhaps in every religion.  Exile, of course--and perhaps, though hugely transformed, a sort of nostalgia... "  Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars 

In July, with the death of Otto von Habsburg, the direct imperial line went to its own final sleep.  Although some 800 Habsburgs survive, after World War I family members had to renounce claims to the monarchy or else have their property confiscated and go into exile.  A huge state funeral for Otto was held at Stephansdom downtown, and spectators by the thousands spilled out beyond the packed cathedral, a show of public nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the pre-Nazi past.  The downtown Habsburg palace, the Hofburg, and the summer palace, Schönbrunn, have been fossils for decades, furnished and refurbished for tourists, creating a dreamworld and mythology like antebellum Southern plantations do in the US.  For a few days in late summer, Vienna seemed to reach back past two world wars to the pretty days of the monarchy.

-- With a few exceptions, provincial festivals and folk events have been on vacation, and we will be glad to see the oompah bands, singers, and dancers reawaken as harvest days approach.  Recently we were in nearby Neustift, a village that, like Grinzing, has been incorporated into the Vienna suburbs.  Also like Grinzing, its main street is lined with heurigers (wine gardens), but this Sunday the scene was a street fair, with cotton candy, kiddy rides, and vendors selling locally produced wine, honey, and other goods, along with the diet staples of beer, sausages, and roasted potato slices.  Instead of an oompah band doing folk songs, the sole live music group was playing "Guantanamera" as we strolled by...it did not feel like Cuba, but it did not feel like Austria, either.

-- If the side roads are sleepy, the Autobahns are awake and the hills are alive with the sound of traffic.  Although plenty of Austrians have bad driving habits, most of the numerous drivers who tailgated us while we were at the speed limit had license plates from Germany and Italy, many of the former purposeful and aggressive, many of the latter paying no attention to drifting lazily out of their lanes or following too closely.  In mid-August we found the rest plaza parking areas overflowing with cars, the restaurants overflowing with diners, and the gas pumps with lines but not overflowing.

-- We again went to Puchburg, which we had visited in June, this time to ride the Salamander steam train to the top of Schneeberg (Snow Mountain).  Although the forecast was for a sunny day, when we arrived in Puchburg the mountain was in a blanket of clouds, but the town parking lots, including that at the train station, were jammed to capacity.  Deciding to skip the $100 train ride and thus miss seeing the interior of a fog pillow, we headed on to the town of Semmering.  The weather there was better, and we could see chairlifts conveying bicycles and their riders to a mountain top, from which they would ride down following the ski paths.  The main street was too modern for our tastes:  it is lined with hotels and guesthouses for skiiers, hikers, and bike riders.  On the edge of town, a tiny 19th-century church--paradoxically with a huge, ornate crucifix on its exterior and a small, simple one on its altar--rests among high hedges and long flower beds.

-- A couple of weekends ago we traveled the Styrian Wine Road in southeastern Austria--a winding route across the tops of green hills and mountains, in and out of valleys, past vineyards and forests.  Dinner in Heimschuh was a sleepy scene:  our table at an outdoor restaurant was adjacent to a pond well stocked (better than the grocery shelves in Grinzing).  Old men leaned back on benches drowsing off, sleeping with the fishes, and young fathers with little boys set up around the pond, engaged in a cycle of catch-and-release.  We subsequently noticed similar arrangements--fishing ponds next to restaurants--in other villages in the region.