Vienna, ah what a place. It is the one city on Earth where you can find someone who thinks its the best place to live on Earth, while ignoring the fact that the city was built up to house hundreds of thousands of poor, giving them naught but a thin strip of blue sky, if any at all.
It is, literally, a concrete jungle - but prefers to describe itself as a city of gardens and parks.
It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you profess to hold, whether you are leftist or right-wing, you will ALWAYS receive the ire of its citizens if you criticise Vienna for being an inhuman, desperate city. And yet, in many ways, it really is a desperate place, full of yearning and misery. You only have to take a walk down one of the many, many gasse (roads) where only a bare ribbon of sky is exposed, and hear for yourself the lamentations of its citizens. The Viennese are not friendly, and never will be, as theirs is the culture of duplicity refined. But of course, tourists looking for Beethoven and Mozart won't notice, because Vienna is very good at distracting the visitor from its ugly core.
It is not a friendly place, either - well except maybe for a few weeks in early Spring, as things thaw out and the winters piles of dogshit melt.. I've lived here for 12 years, and type this from a villa looking out over Turkenschanzpark, which is one of the places considered so valuable to the citizens who believe it is the greenest city in the world. Its true, once you're in the park, its easy to forget the hell that surrounds it.
Of course, if I'd been born here, I wouldn't see all of this in such a dark light. But as I was born in a state where the wide open sky is not a privilege but rather a right, I find the Viennese love of their prison quaint and irregular.
Vienna has the same population density as Montreal and Toronto (~4500/km2), and somewhat lower than Denver, not exactly known for their attempts to cram the poor into tiny spaces.
Having been there only briefly, trying to fathom what I had somehow 'completely missed' given your comments ...
You visited. I have lived. It takes the changing of the seasons and the winter gloom to understand why Vienna is structurally an oppressive place. The caves people live in, the mind-numbing streets they use to get to them, the sameness of it all under a dull grey. The hacks that have made it liveable are exposed by the weather, eventually, and you will see it, the inhumanity.
Having lived all over the world which provides me with some basis of reference, I reject this characterisation of Vienna based on architectural structure.
There is absolutely nothing oppressive about the physicality of Vienna, it doesn't take more than a couple of days of being there for this to be self evident.
Now - you can say something about the culture of Vienna, that the people are this or that, fundamentally different than elsewhere, but from your very emotional and personal comments, even I would doubt that. I suggest this is an issue with the observer, not the observed.
Couldn't disagree with you more. The architecture of Vienna is designed to pack people on top of each other, giving each domicile the bare minimum air and light required. It is truly oppressive to experience, year after year. The Viennese live in caves.
Don't forget that other beautiful green space, that oasis of tranquility: Augarten!
Such orderly networks of paths, passing through tree lined groves, and occasional plots of wild growth to distract one from the careful arrangement of nature...
And, towering over everything - dominating one's vision - two monstrous flak towers („Flakturm“) constructed by the Nazis in the early 1940s. And I do mean monstrous: huge gray concrete structures that rear up into the sky.
As a good point (maybe even intentional) the article is contradictory itself, using sentences like "This" "analogy, while tempting, fails to take into account" ... and then continuing with other shallow explanations. And all this leads to the coda:
"In examining Vienna’s cultural legacy, and especially its zenith during the fin-de-siècle period, my intention is not to debunk or demythologise. Vienna’s mythos is part of its beauty. What is necessary, though, is to understand the complexity of this legacy, and that there is no satisfactory single answer to the question of the cultural vibrancy of Vienna 1900."
And like when one composes a piece of music and even when one plans to break some expectation and one has to still remain consistent to itself, the text remains true to its style of writing about the "failures" of other presentations while just repeating them. Seeing that the author both writes music and is a music critic, but that he also avoided to concentrate too much directly on Schoenberg, I can still say I've (by induction) learned something new: it motivated me to read a bit more about "Pierrot lunaire":
to discover that it got a new interpretation relatively recently:
"In March 2011, Bruce LaBruce directed a performance at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin. This interpretation of the work included gender diversity, castration scenes and dildos, as well as a female to male transgender Pierrot. LaBruce subsequently filmed this adaptation as the 2014 theatrical film Pierrot lunaire."
If you're interested in Schoenberg, it's definitely worth checking out the other members of the second Viennese school: Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. A really good starting point would be Berg's violin concerto or (if you like opera) Wozzeck (which has themes that seem astonishingly relevant today (ptsd, difficulty for returning military in adjusting to civilian society etc). Berg's violin concerto is famous for having an amazing moment of transcendent beauty built around a reference to another great work (which I don't want to spoiler but you can search and find out about it if you want or just listen to it!).
There's this unforgettable plaque in those Vienna "kaffeehauses" I saw in the museum quarter. Something along the lines of "The 400-year old Grand Vienna Teahouse was founded on March 13th, 1938, by Hans Gruberhuber, a humble chimneysweep." Every teahouse had a plaque like this.
C'mon. It was the expulsion of Jews that ended Vienna's influence on global culture. It was their struggle that motivated new music. Listen to Schoenberg's music and hear the pain of a man facing seemingly insurmountable discrimination. He anticipated and put into sound a great deal of violence that was and continues to be fought over identity.
Sure, that's true, but only partly. Austria lost an empire at the end of WWI. I come from an area that used to be part of that empire, and until WWI, if you were talented and ambitious, you went to study in Vienna. Many of the locally recognized writers, artists etc. did. And some stayed there for their entire careers. That all ended after the war.
Vienna stopped being relevant quickly after the WWI with the end of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, years before nazis became relevant. Vienna stopped being the economical, academical and art center of the Central Europe. Later events certainly didn't help, but even before that, as the influx of money and fresh people stopped, so did the art - as that always goes hand in hand.
Stefan Zweig in his "World of Yesterday" captures the essence of your argument well. Although I think we says more that WW1 combined with the Nazi takeover later was responsible, rather than specifically the racist attacks on Jews. He has a haunting few lines where he talks about those Jews in Vienna ("they") in the days preceding the Nazi anschluss:
>They invited each other to full-dress parties (little thinking that they would soon be wearing prisoner’s clothes in a concentration camp), they were lavish customers at Christmas for their beautiful homes (little thinking that in a few months they would be confiscated and plundered). And this eternal gay unconcern of old Vienna which I had formerly so much loved and which, as a matter of fact, I am always redreaming, this gay unconcern which Vienna’s poet laureate Anzengruber once caught concisely in Es kann Dir nix g’schehn–for the first time it gave me pain.
His post-Austrian life came to quite a sad end. Both he and his wife committed suicide together, shortly after mailing his final manuscript to the publisher. This is an interesting read on what unfolded for him in Brazil:
Wow, we complain about the immediacy of Twitter and FB, yet Zweig was already feeling too plugged-in in the mid-twentieth:
"In times of catastrophe former generations could revert to isolation and remoteness; it was reserved for us to have to know and to co-sense whatever evil happened on our globe at the moment of its occurrence. No matter how far I withdrew from Europe, its fate accompanied me. Landing one night in Pernambuco, under the Southern Cross, dark-skinned people in the streets, I read on a news placard of the bombing of Barcelona and of the execution of a Spanish friend with whom, a few months before, I had spent some pleasant hours. Once in a Pullman car between Houston and another Texas city I suddenly became aware of loud, mad shouting in German: a fellow-passenger had innocently tuned the train radio to Germany’s wave length and in consequence I had to listen to one of Hitler’s inflammatory speeches while the train rolled along the Texas plains. There was no escape, not by day, not by night; always I was in a torment of anxiety about Europe and about Austria within Europe."
I would be happy if one could once again board planes without doffing shoes, but Zweig remembers even more frictionless travel:
"Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one."
"When those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should
apply for an immigration visa or a tourist visa;
a stenographer in a consulate who could cut down one’s waiting-time was more significant to one’s existence than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland."
On the passport thing, I was curious about how true it was. Turns out there has been fluctuating amounts of freedom of movement over the course of human history. Equivalents to passports have existed for a long time, so Zweigs nostalgic comments here only really generalise to a short period of European history. In fact, there are plenty of stories about the exploits of Scientific adventurers trying to get visas for international travel during the French revolution and Napoleonic wars period. English naturalist Joseph Banks was well known for his granting of passports to scientists in continental europe so they could travel through international waters and advance science.
Does he use standard Hochdeutsch in the book? I would have loved to read it in the original language, but I struggle with easy reading novels targeted at teenagers in German.
Yes he does, there is basically no difference between written German in Austria and Germany, and he writes in a very modern tone.
Compared to other novels of that time period the writing is actually very clear, it's definitely well suited to (advanced) students of German. My guess is the biggest issue would be vocabulary.
" It was the expulsion of Jews ... It was their struggle that motivated new music. Listen to Schoenberg's music and hear the pain of a man facing seemingly insurmountable discrimination"
? The Jews, at least as a group, were relatively wealthy and literally owned most of the financial sector and occupied large swaths of the professional class, and had for quite some time.
50% of doctors.
82% of credit bureaus.
75% of banks.
85% of lawyers.
75% of textile.
etc. (This is list is very long) [1]
That's not to take away from the horror of the Nazis, but it's hard to fathom your causal notion otherwise.
I would go with the answers below i.e. 'End of Austria-Hungary ex-Habsbourg Empire'
I think this kind of sugarcoating is commom across Europe. Usually history is treated here like WWs were kind of an anomaly in an otherwise glorious history. We all know that this is not the case. European history is riddled with tales of genocide and oppression, mostly in the colonies sometimes within Europe. So what you see here is a data point in a general pattern.
If the "colonies" had kept their history recorded prior to being colonized it would not have been prettier than whatever was done in Europe or by Europe - the Chinese, Persians and Mongol/Turkic occupied lands that did record history from pretty early on have documented every kind of mass, group and individual atrocities imaginable take place.
Same for everything that as far as we know took place in the Americas prior to colonizaton.
Colonies did keep their histories recorded. It was systematically destroyed. Dutch in Indonesia, British in India, Europeans in America. It is very common to find mass graves in Africa even now for which there doesnt seem to be any records about how they came to be.
The lack of recorded history is more about the west-central African, Caribean and American colonies. India has a decent historic record surviving today and it shows the usual story of class-stratified kingdoms waging wars, persecuting ethno-religious outgroups etc.
Source for the systematic destruction of historic documents in India and America ?
Not an answer to your question, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2017.1... doesn’t speak about India (which I fully accept might be a counter-example), but you can add Sri Lanka/Malaysia/Malta to the list of places with untrustworthy records, and it casts suspicion on others. (the article also makes clear at least sometimes it was done with the consent of the new regime).
This talks about the records of colonial regimes which I'm sure were subject to as much redaction and suppression as possible, but I was talking about the historical records of the colonized cultures pre-colonization - do we know about any systematic attempts to destroy those ? Things like having ancient Egyptian and Babylonian relics taken to Britain and Germany don't really qualify either here because even though they were used to glorify the colonizing empires they were extensively studied and preserved.
There’s nothing particularly European about what you describe though. These types of events have occurred pretty much everywhere in the world throughout history. They aren’t European patterns. They are human ones.
Europeans are also good at feeling ashamed of it, and talking publicly about it, and shaming themselves about it.
Somehow the fact that the soviets and maoist killed more people each than "europeans" (this is quite the american generalisation) is forgotten, as are japanese atrocities, as are cambodian ones. Also no one seems to talk about the middle east being the centre of the world wide slave trade for a very long time, as opposed to Europeans being at fault for all of it.
It takes courage to admit one's dark history. And kudos to Europe for that. Secondly, why the shaming ? Historical facts should be stated as it is and people living in the present shouldnt be shamed for it. That feels wrong. But one cant adjust admit to some glaring faults and say everything else is great. Colonial mindset is still a thing across Europe. Just look at poverty tourism in Africa. Most tourists are Europeans. Its also very much true that European tourists who go to Vietnam or India or Thailand dont go there for experiencing their culture but to feel better about how life is better in Europe as most would very much tell you in private conversations. There is also the mindset of grateful immigrants rampant across Europe. Like somehow if someone makes it here they should sing the praises of their country because it is clearly a one-sided deal.
Extraordinary claims require better evidence than private communication. People travelling to the other side of the world to feel better about their home country? I am pretty sure you overestimate the lengths that people will go to for a little smugness.
What do you mean, it is "true"? It's a thing that exists, sure. But not all tourism to poor countries is sensibly defined as poverty tourism (otherwise the category is worthless). Maybe you can dig up some actual numbers.
I'm sure many people visit e.g. Vietnam because it's a convenient way to see a tropical rainforest, or experience the prototypical white sand beach. You might think less of them because they don't care about the culture -- and I think it's a callous waste of resources -- but it's not poverty tourism.
Furthermore, I'd naturally assume a large fraction of all long distance travellers to be Europeans, regardless of the motivation. Simply because Europeans make up a large fraction of the world population who can actually afford to do it.
>Somehow the fact that the soviets and maoist killed more people each than "europeans" (this is quite the american generalisation) is forgotten, as are japanese atrocities, as are cambodian ones. Also no one seems to talk about the middle east being the centre of the world wide slave trade for a very long time, as opposed to Europeans being at fault for all of it.
Until quite recently it was accepted belief in Europe that people from (approximately) east of the Oder and/or south of Constantinople were inferior. "Savages behaving like savages" was generally not paid much attention to (the exceptions being mostly when building a narrative to support conquest and/or religious conversion) by historians and writers because it was written off as them not knowing better. Smart, proper Europeans who should know better killing each other? Well that just can't stand. Even today you still see a lot of this in how events in "less civilized" parts of the world are discussed in the first world.
It'll take a couple of centuries for all the spoken and unspoken prejudices of the people who recorded events and studied history in centuries past to filter out.
You are confusing Europeans with Brits here I believe. And while you'll need to speak other languages to capture most of it, us mainlanders have our opinions of them as well.
And of course about each other. It's plural place after all, one of the many things that appears to be lost amongst anglosaxons.
> Until quite recently it was accepted belief in Europe that people from (approximately) east of the Oder [...]
The Oder wasn't a border until fairly recently. For quite a while, it was just Germany on both sides, without too many distinctions. (Of course, if you go even further back, things get more complicated.)
Eh, I lived in Europe, never got that feeling of the things you described. Sins of fathers are nigh but forgotten / justified (sometimes with whataboutism).
In their time, yes. But in more recent times "Europeans realized that they had become too good at their favorite activity, killing each other, so they decided to put an end to it". (paraphrased from Chomsky)
I mean, I fully trust Chomsky to find a way in which trying to end over two millennia of hostility and subjugation is somehow used to discredit the West but...
I actually see it as a kind of ambivalent compliment, even if it wasn't meant that way. You don't want to mess with people who are very good at killing you if they have to. Having an effective army isn't easy at all.
While wandering around Vienna a few years ago looking at all the buildings from the height of the empire and realising that it's quite a liveable city, for some reason it made me think about San Francisco. If the tech industry disappeared from the city tomorrow, what would be left in 100 years to show that it was there? It doesn't seem like there have been any meaningful improvements made to the actual city or its infrastructure. Just go on BART and listen to the 1970s robot voice announcements that could easily be done much better by an iPhone and Siri now. Certainly it's easier for tech companies to build parallel private transport networks than it is to invest in better public transportation for everyone.
It doesn't feel like SF has been able to capture any of the wealth being generated in a way that other cities like Vienna have, and now even when it's a century past its peak, people there still benefit. Certainly the homeless in SF don't seem to benefit even now, but maybe there are so many because SF truly is the best place to be homeless.
The reason why Vienna is so liveable is because it's the heartland of the Social Democrats. They governed the city from 1919-1934 and ever since 1945. As much as I don't like the current Social Democratic Party, their predecessors transformed Vienna into what it is today. A good place to live for everyone.
In fact at it's imperial height, Vienna had a higher population than today(2.1M then 1.9M now), living in significantly less space. The living conditions of the poorer part of the city were pretty grim. This is what got the Social Democrats to gain power in the first place.
This history also means there's a lot of pre-1914 city per capita today. The urban planning of that era has tended to result in more liveable neighborhoods today, compared to districts & cities built from scratch more recently.
The wealthy class of the past had spend some of the wealth to be remembered via public works or patronage of art.
Through their vanity or just a goodwill they wanted to be remembered for something.
This doesn't seems to be a rule, but an exception.
All of the social contracts of old societies were broken old time ago. Helping poor is either PR stunt or dirty work of middle class. Or a ploy to extract more wealth (lookup disaster capitalism).
Globalization decoupled the 'haves' from the place they are living. They can uproot and travel away to another community. Be it SF or next SF.
This was much harder in the past. Business and family ties would make it harder to just move to Spain.
That tied the 'haves' to 'have-nots' in a way. So the 'haves' might be incentivized to make the place a better for everyone - this would be that saying that the philantrophism
is just selfish behavior as you make your own environment a better place, only through indirect means.
That's a great point. In the past maybe people wanted to improve the city because that's where they lived, and saw themselves living. There was a comment on HN years ago that I still remember where they compared working in the Bay Area to working in the mines - when people would come over to the New World for a few years to make their fortune, and then go home rich. If you view yourself as a temporary resident, then you're probably not that interested in becoming part of the community and improving the place where you live. Why would you if you're going to take your FAANG money and move to cabin in the woods in a few years?
> move to cabin in the woods
Or gated community, completely isolated from real world.
I wouldn't be surprised if this would start happening next decade or so, were large chunks of land will be used as pseudo autonomous zones where rich wall themselves off.
Your comment stirred an "ancient history of the future" type feeling for me. If the BART recordings could already be 50 years old (I doubt they are, but let's go with that for a minute), imagine that there's some speech recognition library being installed in some present day infrastructure project. Now imagine that module could sit unchanged, perhaps occasionally refurbished by historical technology preservation societies for hundreds of years until future generations look back on it like we might look back on city fortifications, aqueducts, cast iron bridges or Austrian Empire architecture.
That may be true but at least to me it was more obvious in Vienna because it's someplace that was clearly once a lot more important than it is now. Cities like London or Paris are still growing and changing. In Vienna I had the sense that this was someplace that was once the centre of an empire, and whose heyday has clearly passed (for now, who knows?) but has still retained a lot of what made it such a great city during the time period described in the article.
Athens Georgia or Muscle Shoals Alabama for music.
The amount of insane bands through those include REM, B52's, of Montreal among others for Georgia.
Muscle Shoals had such bands record in North Alabama as The Staple Sisters, The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, The Band... honestly the list there is far too long.
To add to the parodoxes, meanwhile around the same time also in Vienna:
> On 21 December 1907, [Adolf Hitler's] mother died of breast cancer at the age of 47, when he himself was 18. In 1909 Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live a bohemian life in homeless shelters and a men's dormitory.[43][44] He earned money as a casual labourer and by painting and selling watercolours of Vienna's sights.[40] During his time in Vienna, he pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten performances of Lohengrin, his favourite Wagner opera.
It is, literally, a concrete jungle - but prefers to describe itself as a city of gardens and parks.
It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you profess to hold, whether you are leftist or right-wing, you will ALWAYS receive the ire of its citizens if you criticise Vienna for being an inhuman, desperate city. And yet, in many ways, it really is a desperate place, full of yearning and misery. You only have to take a walk down one of the many, many gasse (roads) where only a bare ribbon of sky is exposed, and hear for yourself the lamentations of its citizens. The Viennese are not friendly, and never will be, as theirs is the culture of duplicity refined. But of course, tourists looking for Beethoven and Mozart won't notice, because Vienna is very good at distracting the visitor from its ugly core.
It is not a friendly place, either - well except maybe for a few weeks in early Spring, as things thaw out and the winters piles of dogshit melt.. I've lived here for 12 years, and type this from a villa looking out over Turkenschanzpark, which is one of the places considered so valuable to the citizens who believe it is the greenest city in the world. Its true, once you're in the park, its easy to forget the hell that surrounds it.
Of course, if I'd been born here, I wouldn't see all of this in such a dark light. But as I was born in a state where the wide open sky is not a privilege but rather a right, I find the Viennese love of their prison quaint and irregular.