Märchenstadt Wien
A few weeks before the beginning of Herbstferien, I was discussing my travel plans with one of the
teachers at my school and, with classic German bluntness, he had no qualms
about letting me know that he disapproved of my choice of cities. Amsterdam he
accepted in the end, on the basis of my Americanness, and the understanding
that the moral permissiveness of Amsterdam exerts a force that Americans are
powerless to resist. Budapest he had never seen himself, so I suppose he felt
ill-qualified to comment. So the
brunt of his criticism fell upon Vienna, Austria. “There are so many wonderful German cities to go to,” he lectured me.
“Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Munich—why not visit one of them, if you want to go somewhere where they speak German?”
“But there’s something fairy-tale
like about Vienna,” I responded, “etwas
märchenhaftes.” The gentleman didn’t seem overly impressed by this, but I
was not to be swayed. Over the
years, especially since junior year in college, when I spent an entire semester
studying Vienna at the turn of the century, I’d developed a romanticized,
idealized fantasy about the city of Klimt and Wagner and Schnitzler and Freud
and Schiele and Schönberg and Weber and Strauss. I knew that, if I spent a year
in Europe and never made it to Vienna, I would never forgive myself, and so
rather than leave it for winter or spring, when who knows what circumstances
(or lack of funds) might pop up, I was determined that, come hell or high
water, I would see Vienna in October.
Once I got there, of course—because this is the real world
and this is the way the real world works— there were aspects of the city that
lived up to the image I had constructed in my head, like atmospheric coffee
houses, fantastically gorgeous architecture, art and music everywhere; and then
there were aspects that didn’t, such as incessant construction noise, exhibits
and parts of exhibits closed for restoration, missing Ubahn connections by a
handful of seconds, getting cat-called on the street. Since I’d already gone
through this process with Frankfurt and Germany as a whole—the process of
realizing, okay, this is actually a real place where real people live and do real life things—you’d
think I’d be prepared for this, but there were still some moments of cognitive
dissonance during my five days in Vienna, of thinking No, it can’t be like this, this is VIENNA, it has to be beautiful and elegant and fascinating ALL THE TIME.
Not helping matters was the fact that, by the time I got to Vienna, I’d been traveling alone
for ten days already: I was tired, I was incredibly
lonely, I had blisters on my feet the likes of which they hadn’t seen since
I hung up my pointe shoes, and my brain felt literally incapable of processing
any more visual information. Of course, when I first began planning my
travels—which cities to visit and in what order—I anticipated a certain amount
of fatigue by the end, which is why I
decided to save Vienna for last: I figured that a little travel-weariness would
be no match for my enthusiasm for the city. And while it’s a shame that I
couldn’t give Vienna the best of me, I stand by my decision: if I’d gone to
Vienna and then Budapest, for
example, I highly doubt I would have made it out of my hostel by the end.
But Vienna is Vienna,
I had a list about a mile long of buildings and artworks to see, coffee houses
to visit, and various other sundry Viennese experiences to have. There was no
way I was going to let a couple of blisters and some self-pity stand in my way.
The Monumentality of
Monuments
In his book Amsterdam:
A Brief Life of the City (I know, you thought we were in Vienna, but relax,
I have a point) Geert Mak writes of the Dutch city that it is decidedly
“unmonumental,” almost an anti-monument, that the construction of monuments
goes against something in the city’s temperament.
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| Favorite monument encounter: someone must have thought Goethe (who is NOT Austrian, by the way) was looking a bit chilly. Either that, or it's a cape: Super Goethe! |
FIt’s fitting, in a way, that I saw both Amsterdam and Vienna
in the same two-week span; on a spectrum of “monumentality,” the two cities
would be on opposite ends. There is absolutely nothing anti-monumental about
Vienna. Every corner you turn, especially in the Innenstadt, you’re confronted with some statue or sculpture or Denkmal. It seems like every other
building bears a plaque proclaiming which important architect designed it, or
which Emperor commissioned it, or else informing you that the building was
destroyed during WWII and subsequently rebuilt. Each of the cities I visited, including Amsterdam, felt in their way,
like giant, living museums, but in neither Amsterdam nor Budapest did the
documentation feel as deliberate, or as determined, as in Vienna. Mak further
writes about “monumentality” that monuments “are the foremost carriers of a
city’s mythology, or, more precisely, of the mythology a city wishes for
itself.” Wandering the streets of Vienna, you can’t help but wonder just what
mythology the city wishes to convey.
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| Pestsäule on Graben. Because nothing says "In Commemoration of the Plague" like a little gold leaf. |
In short, Vienna strikes me as a city trying to live in
several different centuries at once. To be honest, I think that’s what appeals
to me the most about it, seeing as how I spend large amounts of my time doing
the exact same thing.
Schönbrunn and Shiny
Things
Because my list of must-sees was so long, and the amount of
time at my disposal— a measly five days—so short, I spent a lot of time in
Vienna evaluating my plans in my head, almost involuntarily. At one point
during the five days, this phrase popped unbidden into my head: too many shiny things.
In my defense, there just are a lot of shiny things in Vienna: gold details not only on
churches, but on other buildings as well; the shiny silver tea trays on which
any coffee house worthy of the name serves its tasty caffeinated treats; of
course, the gold details in the most famous works of Gustav Klimt. You can’t
really get away from shiny things in Vienna. Still, the large part of me that
wants to experience the cities I visit in as un-touristy a way as possible couldn’t
help but feel guilty for all the time I was spending in Vienna gawking at all
the imperial splendor. Between the summer palace, Schloß Schönbrunn and the
mind-blowingly massive Hofburg Palace complex in the city center, complete with
Schatzkammer (treasure chamber) and
the Imperial silver collection, I couldn’t help but feel I was hitting all the
tourist destinations, the ones that had absolutely nothing to do with real life
in Vienna—whether in the here and now, or
in the then and there.
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| View of Schloß Schönbrunn from the front. |
At the same time, though, there are few sights in Vienna
more in harmony with the fairy-tale image than opulently decorated Imperial
residences, and the long history of the various imperial families is full of
enough drama, intrigue, romance and tragedy to satisfy even my voracious
appetite for them.
Something else about my visits to Schönbrunn et al.: As I
wandered around the extensive Schönbrunn gardens, I was by an unexpected wave
of homesickness, which at first I couldn’t account for at all. But then it
occurred to me that this, what I was
doing right then—touring the palace, visiting the zoo (yes, I went to the zoo.
It’s the oldest zoo in the world)—was
exactly the kind of thing my family
and I would have done when I was a kid if, in some alternate universe, we had
gone to Vienna for summer vacation. Because my parents—teachers, both of
them—were determined that every summer vacation should be educational, my
family was constantly traipsing through the homes of the late and great:
Jefferson’s Monticello, Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jackson’s Hermitage. Schloß
Schönbrunn in particular would have been right up our alley. My sister would
have been all over the grandeur and the sumptuous décor—we would have teased
her about decorating her house in a similar style when she married her “rich
husband.” My musically-minded father would have been fired up about seeing the
room in which four-year-old Wolfi Mozart played his first piano recital for
Empress Maria Theresa, following which he promptly climbed in to her lap and
kissed her on the cheek. And I, anywhere between the ages of about six and
fourteen, would have gone through a massive
“Sissi” phase.
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| This is where Empress Elisabeth would sit for three hours every day while her ankle length hair was being done. "Sissi" was apparently obsessed with her beauty and fitness regimes, and forbade any photographs to be taken of her once she passed the age of thirty-five. |
But for a city that is unusual and a little disturbing
itself, there may actually be none better.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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| Creepy nighttime trees in front of the Vienna Casino. |
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