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The Local Lens: Memories of Vienna


 

When people ask me, what is my favorite European city, I usually answer Vienna.

Vienna is similar to Paris, only people are friendly. And almost everyone speaks English. It is the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Haydn, Kafka and Sigmund Freud. What can be better?

I arrived at JFK Airport on a rainy afternoon in October, happy to have survived the reckless driving of a shuttle bus driver in treacherous weather.  The shuttle bus from my house clanked and shook as the driver sped past Mac diesel trucks the size of a small houses. I expected to arrive at JKF DOA as rain pelted the shaky van from all angles.

Onboard Austrian airlines, air traffic control problems caused a one hour takeoff delay, however the seven hour flight went reasonably fast. It didn’t hurt that Austrian airlines has a policy of distributing free wine, positively the best remedy for soiled “traveler’s” nerves.

At the Vienna airport, I hailed a cab and headed to the Hotel Aldstat in Vienna’s 7th district (the city is divided into 23), my temporary home for the next three days. I would later transfer to a hotel in Austria’s wine country.

The Aldstat is Old World grandeur, a step back into the 19th Century. My suite consisted of two large rooms and a private rooftop garden. The staircase to the rooftop was a precarious climb, three dozen or so narrow steps that zigzagged up to a small door that, once unlocked, led to a mesmerizing, postcard view of the city. In the United States, hotel steps like this would be prohibited because of potential lawsuits; here, occupants are expected to behave responsibly and not fall down steps. The suite also contained the largest roll top desk I’ve ever seen.

The weather, rainy and overcast, was just as it had been in New York; the lack of sunlight created an overall feeling of melancholy. My guide, Diane, a former au pair from London, suggested I put on an overcoat for our first venture out.

After an introductory walk around the 7th District and a ride on the subway, Diane pointed out a mammoth bunker built during the WWII Nazi occupation. The multi-story edifice, Esterhazy Park Tower, now home to the Vienna State Aquarium, was built by the Nazis in the west end of the city to impede the flow of American and British bombers. The fascist monolith is an imposing structure, with odd-shaped semi circles jetting out on each of the building’s top four corners. Guns were once positioned on top of this huge block structure.

“The Americans flew by day but the British had to fly by night because they couldn’t fly very high,” Diane told me, adding that smaller backup bunkers held generators, hospital beds and doctors –– everything that was needed to back up the main tower. During WW II, allied bombers destroyed nearly 30 percent of the city during the 56 or so major air raids of the war.

We headed over to St. Stephen’s Catholic cathedral. The massive church was built over two earlier churches –– the first established in 1147. St. Stephen’s is known as the church of Mozart. It was at this church where Mozart worshiped and was married.

“He never lived far from the cathedral,” Diane told me, “he was very, very religious, almost superstitiously so.”

The cathedral was nearly turned to ashes and debris by retreating German armies in WW II but a German officer ignored demands for its demolition. Unfortunately, when I was there, restoration scaffolding covered the front of the cathedral, although one could still see numerous bullet holes embedded into the stone. During the war, 90 percent of the cathedral’s 14th century Gothic, glass-stained windows were blown out, except for three long panels behind the high altar. Resistance fighters held regular meetings in the cathedral’s catacombs at this time.

Viennese Catholic churches are richly decorated treasures. Hanging chandeliers and clusters of votive candles give many of the churches here a Russian Orthodox look. The modernist altar tables, however — positioned as they are in many of the churches —  in front of the magnificent, old Romanesque-Gothic high altars, seem almost comical and out of place. St. Stephen’s is home to a reputed miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus. When the so called Maria Pocs Byzantine-style icon, painted in 1676, first shed actual tears in 1696, Emperor Leopold I had it moved to the high altar, where it remained until 1945. After 1945 the icon was moved toward the front of the church where it once again began to shed real tears.  I saw a large number of people praying before the icon as tourists made their way to one of the cathedral’s 18 side chapels. As far as I know, the icon shed no tears during my visit.

At the Vienna Opera House, where Beethoven was once employed, I was treated to an opera and then was told that underneath the grand old edifice there are secret tunnels and passageways that attract the city’s drug addicts. What would Beethoven say if he knew that underneath his old opera house, heroin users were shooting up?

When Adolph Hitler roamed the streets of Vienna as a young man between 1906 to 1913, he lived in several rooming houses but was primarily homeless, sleeping on park benches or staying in homeless shelters. While he didn’t carry a sign that read, ‘Homeless and Hungry,’ he did have shoulder length hair and a scruffy beard. The future German Chancellor was just an urban vagabond, spending all his time drawing watercolor postcards and attempting to hawk them to the affluent habitués of coffeehouses like Café Central — where Lenin and Trotsky once planned the Russian Revolution.

Coffee is a loadstar enterprise in Vienna. There are not only upscale coffee houses like Café Central and Cafe Imperial but cheaper, bohemian cafes where full meals and desserts can be ordered. At Café Central, sitting three tables away from where Lenin used to sit, we had a Melange: coffee with milk served on a small tray, a glass of water, a small spoon, balls of white and brown sugar and a small piece of chocolate. At this point, I imagined a scruffy, long-haired Hitler going from table to table trying to sell his art postcards. As a youth, Hitler was in and out of Café Central all the time.

Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard called this Vienna addiction to the “Viennese coffeehouse disease.” The Viennese take coffeehouses so seriously that patrons are free to sit all day reading or writing or staring into space. Incredibly, there is never a push to order additional cups.

Coffee was a positive legacy left to the Viennese by the Ottoman Turks, who attempted to conquer the city in 1529 and again in the 1600s. The threat of a second Turkish invasion in the 1600s (the first attempt failed because the Turkish cannons got stuck in the mud, the result of too much rain) forced the city to build impenetrable walls. The city poured so much money into the walls that they had to stop their pet project: rebuilding Vienna into the greatest Gothic city in the world.

The Museum Quarter was built where the Hapsburg rulers of the Austria-Hungarian Empire had their imperial stables. Here, one can hop from one museum to the next. Whether its architecture, the visual arts, dance or theater, the Quarter holds it all — including an abundance of cafes and restaurants. One evening, in fact, I headed out from my suite in Aldstat to Halle Café-Restaurant, and sampled a favorite imperial dish, Tafelspitz, a stewed beef and root vegetables dish and the alleged favorite meal of Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph — not my favorite meal, however.

From the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, just outside the Museum Quarter, I took in a panoramic view of stately government buildings and palaces — one being the palace of Holfburg, building that had enthralled Hitler. These were the buildings that Churchill wanted to bomb because he knew Hitler was so fond of them.

With so much history surrounding me, I imagined the eerie echoes of thousands of cheering Viennese who, on March 14, 1938, greeted the madman as he made his triumphal entry into the city. Hitler stood in Heldenplatz, Heroes Square, an area surrounded by various wings of the Hofburg. I stood in the same spot and felt an eerie chill go up my spine.

In Vienna, eye contact with strangers is easy because people are friendly, and a majority of them speak English, even the few who happen to be homeless. One day, while making my way to the Museum of Fine Arts, I was approached by a long haired vagabond (he was not selling art postcards, however) who announced that he needed money for food. In broken English he told me that he had just been released from prison. I admired his honesty, took two steps back and extended a handful of Austrian coins. But he scowled at them contemptuously, demanded two Euros and called me stupid.

The Austrian way, however, is one of friendliness. I would discover this a couple days later when I rented a car and attempted to drive into the Wachau wine country for the second league of my journey. Driving out of Vienna can be a nightmare for anxiety-prone drivers, as all the highway exits are labeled in small letters and numbers.

I was due to take a small boat trip down the Danube, but I never made it because I got lost in the mountains. Driving through the rolling hills and mountains, it began to rain, sleet and snow. Austrians drive very fast because the speed limit is between 80 and 90, so most people were passing me except for the big trucks that would move up silently behind me and flash their lights.

One truck, straight out of Steven Spielberg’s movie Duel, came up behind me and bumped my bumper. I knew then that I had to get off the road and ask for directions.

I pulled into a small restaurant supply house and café, the only buildings I’d seen for miles, knocked on the door, explained my situation — a lost journalist — and was invited inside for coffee and beer. I sat with these nice people until I was redirected out of the mountains.

Before my flight home, I took a side trip with another tour guide into Hungary where we spotted an abandoned Communist station house where 30 years before guards with guns took aim at Hungarians escaping into freedom. My guide said that the Communists in Hungary were much nicer than the ones in East Germany, who’d shoot first and ask questions later.

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