Auf Wienersehen

Like an Italian Renaissance artist--perhaps a third-rate one--unwittingly filling in the Tuscan countryside as the background for a scene from the life of Jesus, after two years here I see more clearly the extent to which I brought my own context for the reality of this city.  In general, the picture now is quite different, and brighter and richer.  Still, we are eager to be home...and we hate to leave.

"...the icy Pannonian wind scattered the barren leaves of the faded year across the paving-stones; they found no more peace here than the poor souls in the storms of hell; no hat was safe on my head....

 -- Reinhold Schneider on winter in Vienna, as quoted in Blue Guide Austria

It is the winter, miserably cold, that brings out so much of what is enjoyable, even admirable, about Wiener World.  Perhaps my strongest memory of Vienna will be its gray-canopy November-March sky and the long black nights, the noon sun so low that my shadow on the sidewalk seemed early-evening length.  Stepping from our apartment building onto the cobbled walk and into air like crackling blue-black ice was initially bracing, even enjoyable as it filled my lungs and tightened the skin and muscles of my face to the ceramic hardness of a Thuringian garden gnome.  I remember well how at first I could feel the cold penetrate my gloves and then my glove liners, and then my fingers, and next my feet would begin to feel like cold lead until I could get striding at a good pace and feel my body regain its warmth from the inside.  The winter cold and dark gave a stunning contrast to the gold and white lights and hum of the Christmas markets and an appreciation for warming up with hot glühwein, enough so that I thought being an alcoholic in this climate would clearly have its advantages.  Yet the damp cold and the winds that explode into eddies of snowflakes do little to slow social life here, indoors or out.  Linda and I both experienced frozen bone marrow our first January as we stood at the edge of the ice-solid Neusiedlersee watching parents strapping training skates on well-upholstered toddlers.  In the background the sails of ice boats and bright kites moved in rainbow colors on the gray-white horizon.  Winter here is the bright and colorful ball season, and it is the season of music, with one exquisite concert waltzing along after another almost before the first one's notes have faded.

We Could Be Wieners

For many reasons, we could happily stay here.  We arrived expecting a rigid society, but orderly is a better descriptor.  In general, the common-sense social behavior here results, it seems, from a will to get along more than from fear of authority.  The respect that the people here show for each other and for their city extends to the environment, evident above all from the ubiquitous recycling bins.  I find it fun to shove our empty wine bottles through the bin's rubber portals as hard as I can to hear the glass smash, but even people less inclined than I to such benign vandalism make routine use of these bins.  The seasonal markets and frequent village and regional festivals also contribute to the social cohesion:  green vests with white shirts, leather shorts, green felt hats with bling and huge inverted typewriter erasers in the bands; pink and green dirndls; yodeling, slap-dancing, whoo-hoos, and syncopated whipcracking; accordions, fiddles, tubas, trumpets; grilled potatoes, roasted chestnuts, smoked brats, thick beer, thin wine. 

Yet life here is not life in a modern Paradise.  Cigarette smoke rolls from restaurants' huge smoking sections into nonsmoking areas, and at our neighborhood grocery store it billows from the employee breakroom into the aisles.  More than once I have come home from grocery shopping reeking like I had been in a bar, without the fun of actually having been in one.  Crumpled packs and smoldering butts litter the sidewalk in front of the middle school I pass on my morning walk.  More than once I have seen a car speed through a pedestrian crossing while a mother and her stroller are in the lane, though most drivers are observant of the zone.  Drivers in the city seem particularly impatient, though on the autobahns with their traffic cameras and radar traps driving feels saner than it does on US interstates.  Although we have appreciated Austria's environmental concerns, they have, ironically, also led us to a new appreciation of the American chemical industry:  the absence or low level of preservatives or other additives in food means a lack of vitamin D in milk and a local population of elderly humpbacks; bleach is not available, and perhaps that is the reason Austrian men wear black socks only, even with shorts and sandals; dentists do not like to use anesthesia, though that may be for sadistic rather than environmental reasons, and they profit from the lack of fluoride in the drinking water; lawns, private and public, get little or no chemical treatment and have an abundance of dandelions, among other weeds, though no one seems to mind, and, truly, we don't either.

Gods and Goddesses:  the superlatively good

"...like whatever else is superlatively good--was perhaps better appreciated in the memory than by present consciousness."  --Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

The Garden of Eden from which Austrians are in exile lies not in a place but in a time, in the decades of Franz Josef, the days that preceded World War I and the dissolution of the empire.  Wiener World is full of reminders of that.  Numerous busts and commemorative plaques show a special affection for their last emperor, even though by the standards of history the people should perhaps be less proud.  Close-minded, anti-democratic, and conservative, Franzy led the nation into destructive alliances and unnecessary wars; to the minds of some historians, he bears a fair measure of responsibility for the onset of World War I.  His chief occupations seemed to be pedantic review of diplomatic communications and killing animals.  Biographer Brigitte Hamann documents that as a young man Franz Josef proudly wrote to his mum of having shot "72 herons and cormorants" one morning.  One of our guide books mentions the thousands of animal heads from Franz's kills mounted on the walls of his hunting lodge near Salzburg.  But hanging around for many years and being the last, in effect, to head the empire was enough for his status as a civil saint.  Augmenting his reputation was his marriage to the beautiful Bavarian princess Sisi, a relationship that has been romanticized in books and in numerous films that Austrian television has broadcast repeatedly during our two years here.  As Rome adores Mary, so does Vienna revere the vain, anorexic, melancholy Sisi, who spent millions on race horses while invalid veterans of Franz's wars begged in Vienna's streets.  Still, she is the incarnation of the glory days and inspiration for decoration on handbags and coffee mugs, posters, snowglobes, and (my favorite) "Sisi Pizza" on Nussdorfer Strasse, where I would have repaired had an attack of anorexia come upon me.  

...and superlatively bad

World War II was part of the background in the picture of Austria that I brought with me, and--visits to the dentist aside--this has in many ways remained a blank or a blur.  Despite the government's preservation of Mauthausen concentration camp, I have a sense that Austria has to a great extent paved over World War II and its Nazi past, literally and figuratively, or left it like a neglected cemetery in the social memory.  There are few signs of a once-vibrant Jewish community, and no signs of Hitler--a would-be god in a religion of the state--or of his life here.  Austrians, we suspect, would prefer that the world remember Hitler--born near Linz--as a German. 

Losses incurred as a result of the war are well in evidence, however.  Vienna's architecture still shows the war:  strips of modern buildings in old downtown define where American bombs fell, and a memorial sculpture rests atop a bomb shelter that became a tomb for the hundreds who died when it took a direct hit.  Every town that we have visited in Austria has a memorial at a church or town square listing names of "Gefallen"--from both world wars--from the community or the parish, and many a time we have seen family tombstones marked with the Maltese cross and dates from the war years, reminders that the men swept up in the conflict were, like their victims and their enemies, sons and fathers and brothers.  Hatred of the Russians persists:  guide books and tour guides mention the Russian occupying forces stripping the factories and looting estates and castles in their zone of control; more than one downtown restaurant menu offers in the front a history page noting Russian vandalism and looting of their establishment at the end of the war.  Russian occupation soldiers in Vienna were, it is noted, responsible for most of the street crime in the city.  No mention, however, is made of the millions of Russians who died in the war or, in particular, the thousands of Russian POWs who perished in Mauthausen.  St Georgen and other slave work sites and concentration camps have disappeared under parking lots and apartment houses, and tracts overgrown with trees and vines and clumps of weeds--like those on the Napoleonic battlefield and burial ground I visited at Wagram a year ago. 

While there is much to be said for remembering, there is much to be said for letting the vines and grass grow.  I am put in mind of the many grim Cold War scenes that took place at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin...and the adjacent McDonald's...and the urban version of vines and weeds--the amazing amount of litter, crumpled cups and wrappers and cigarette butts and flattened pink-black gum on the sidewalks.

Splendor in the Grass

Our favorite walk has been from Grinzing through the vineyards and Vienna Woods to Kahlenberg, a low mountain on which the Polish forces marshaled when they arrived just in time to save Vienna from the Turkish siege in 1683.  Near the top and off the trail lies a very small cemetery, heavily overgrown and more than a bit mossy.  Among the dozen or so graves in this neglected, out-of-the-way spot is that of Karoline Traunwieser.   According to 19th-century newspaper accounts, at 17 she was a lovely rose, acclaimed as the belle of Vienna's ball season; she reportedly fell in love with a French officer who died in the retreat of Napoleon's army during the Moscow winter in 1811.  Her brief life, 1794-1815, ended unpoetically from consumption rather than--as I had hoped--from an excess of romantic sensibility.  Though less well-known than Saint Sisi later became, Karoline, too, was for at least a short time a mythic local goddess embodying the theme that beauty and love are fleeting.  That she has been forgotten, as has her grave, rather drives home the point.

Winter to Summer and War to Peace

Another rose, commonly called the rose of this century, perhaps the greatest rose of all time, is 'Peace.'  It has no fragrance to speak of, it has huge flowers that should please anybody who has always longed to grow the largest turnip in the world, and it has good foliage indeed.  -- Henry Mitchell, Essential Earthman

The Wiener Schnitzel, much revered here, is the Peace Rose of Austria.  Hammered thin as a euro, breaded, and deep fried, it is as large as a dinner plate and always served with a potato, which goes with it like a yodel with an accordion.  As there is a uniformity to schnitzel in this city, there is a uniformity to the menus of Wiener World.  Yet we love the food here as long as we have to eat it only once in a great while--not just because the various forms of pig, salt, and starch ball become monotonous but also because of what this diet must do to a person's arteries.  Mostly, though, we have loved the settings for the Teutonic cuisine that we have indulged in--the little guesthouses, the beer halls, the Grinzing heuriger gardens.  Our favorite dining experience in Vienna, if I may speak for Linda, has involved finding a bench in Schwedenplatz on a sunny summer weekend afternoon after a long walk along the Danube canal, and then at a wurst stand ordering foot-long pepper sausages in buns with sweet mustard, and a half-liter can of Ottakringer for me and a Coke Zero for her.  Between bites we hum "The Radetzky Marsch" while bobble-headed pigeons and the denizens of Wiener World mill and eddy and flow past like the Danube, and the sun, golden as the Ottakringer, makes us present to the absence of chill December and to the privilege it has been to live in this city.

Auf Wiedersehen...

We shall both miss the pageantry at Schwedenplatz...and much else:

We have loved getting to know our American colleagues and many of the kind local people we have met--Sam Little Wolf, our Cheyenne cat sitter; Gaby, our generous and thoughtful German teacher; Freddy, who went to Herculean efforts to get our car through EU inspection; the kind, lovely, gentle Dr Saam, who came to our apartment that first bitter February to assist Earl the Cat into eternal sleep; and many another.  We have loved the art museums, the architecture, and the history.  We have loved the music, the folk festivals, and the balls.  We have loved the scenery, not just the dramatic mountains but the sweet drive through the Danube Valley vineyards and castle ruins along Route 3, the pastures and meadows and lakes, and the elegant storks alighting in the rooftop nests of Rust.  We have loved our travels throughout Austria--especially our weekend trips to each corner of this beautiful country--and our forays into Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France.  We have loved summer Sunday evenings in the garden of Nino's, a little Italian restaurant in Grinzing.  We have loved having company, every minute of it, and our only wish as we close out our time in Wiener World is that we had had more friends and relatives visit to share what has been for us two years of happy discovery.

"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."