Sunday, November 4, 2012

Herstferien, Episode 3: Vienna


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.

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.

Pestsäule on Graben. Because nothing says
"In Commemoration of the Plague" like
a little gold leaf. 
Even as it proudly places its history on display, though, Vienna’s also clearly a city that wants to be relevant in the here and now. While I was there, the Viennale, a film festival showcasing new international films, was rolling into town; alongside all the art museums with their priceless historical masterpieces, there are galleries and studios showcasing contemporary artists. To top it off, the city is in the process of building a brand-spanking, state-of-the-art new Hauptbahnhof, scheduled for completion in 2015, that, according to Johann, my buddy on the staff at Wombat’s Hostel, will be all 21st century all the time, and is meant to transform Vienna into a hub of international travel. I should add, maybe, that Johann isn’t very happy about the Hauptbahnhof: he thinks the city’s officials are trying to turn it into something it’s not, that, with the opening of the Hauptbahnhof, something essential to the soul of Vienna will be lost forever.

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.
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.

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. 
“Sissi,” by the way, is Elisabeth of Bavaria, wife of Franz Joseph, the second-to-last Emperor of Austria. She’s a cult figure in Vienna, something like Austria’s answer to Anastasia or Eva Peron. She’s incredibly popular in Budapest as well, as a matter of fact: apparently she was a huge advocate for the Hungarians’ self-sufficiency and even learned to speak perfect Magyar, for which I have to give her props.  In Vienna, there’s Sisi memorabilia to be found all over the city. Her face is seemingly everywhere. There’s even a musical about her, along the lines of Evita—further evidence that it would have been love at first sight for a younger version of myself. Even at (almost) twenty-three and traveling on a budget, it took all of my strength not to buy a copy of Brigitte Hamann’s biography The Reluctant Empress, which details the complicated and unhappy life Elisabeth led. If “Sissi” is the fairy-tale princess of the fairy-tale city of Vienna, she’s an incredibly unusual and maybe even disturbing one.

But for a city that is unusual and a little disturbing itself, there may actually be none better.

TO BE CONTINUED… 
Creepy nighttime trees in front of the Vienna Casino.




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