Vienna

So we finally got over COVID, and after being cooped up in our apartment, we were eager to get out and see the glorious city of Vienna!

Which I knew nothing about. We had now entered a part of Europe where I truly had almost no idea what to expect. Whereas the national identities of most European countries such as Britain, France, Spain & Italy are pretty straightforward and familiar to us Americans, what could I say I knew about the Austrians? Images from The Sound of Music, snow-capped mountains and lush alpine meadows, yodeling, sausages and cheese, and Arnold Schwarzenegger came to mind, but that was about it. Who are the Austrians and what is their history? What language did they even speak? German, apparently—I had to look it up on the flight there. But despite the name, it’s as much their language as it is Germany’s. (Regardless, it’s nothing like any other language I’ve studied, and I struggled to learn even a few basic phrases!)

Turns out that my crude ignorance of Austria cannot be chalked up solely to lack of attention in high school history class. Because things in this part of Europe have been, well, rather complicated for at least the last couple of millennia, including the 20th century. While we toured Viennese palaces during the day, I spent my mornings huddled over Wikipedia trying to understand who it was that ruled in these palaces, what exactly they ruled over, and the long and twisting road that Austria has taken to where it is now—a tiny, proud, affluent, land-locked country in central Europe that punches above its weight.

Vienna (Wien in German, pronounced with a “v”) immediately felt very comfortable and familiar to us, just as Paris feels comfortable to Americans—and Tokyo does not. The Viennese are very much westerners, with language, culture, religion, and values that strongly correlate to the European influences and colonists that helped shape the U.S. No wonder then that Vienna has been called the easternmost Western capital in Europe. I quickly learned that our word “Austria” is actually a poor adaption of the actual name of the country in German, Österreich, which means eastern kingdom or realm, a name in use for over 1,000 years. Vienna has also been called a head without a body, because this sprawling, spectacular, treasure trove of a city seems out of place in such a tiny, unassuming, and largely pastoral country. And that’s because it is. Vienna was the capital of huge central European empires for centuries, and it’s only in the past 100 years, when the modern state of Austria finally distilled, that this Rome of the east found itself marooned in a tiny island of a country.

Everything in Vienna seems to revolve around the dynasty of the Habsburgs, otherwise known as the House of Austria. Rudolph of Habsburg was elected King of the Romans in 1273, and thereafter, his family ruled central Europe almost continuously as kings and emperors until 1918. (The house also strategically intermarried with various other European royal families and spawned kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, and Portugal, and even one emperor of Mexico.) First there was the Holy Roman Empire, which was from 800 AD to its dissolution in 1806 one of the largest and most powerful kingdoms in Europe, at its greatest extent stretching from modern-day Germany to Italy and from eastern France to western Poland. The Habsburgs ruled this Catholic empire almost continuously from 1440 until its demise. From this came the Empire of Austria, and then in 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was the second largest country in Europe after Russia. Throughout these evolutions, the Habsburgs ruled over an incredibly diverse group of peoples, with different religions, customs and cultures—the Austro-Hungarian Empire had three official languages and a dozen others that were widely spoken. But this diversity was also unstable, and in 1914 this came to a head in the Balkans when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria over the question of Bosnian independence, kicking off WWI.

Out of that war, Austria emerged as a tiny independent state, a fragment of what it had been (about the size of South Carolina), and Vienna ceased to be the center of much of anything. It must have been quite a blow to their pride, and their economy was in shambles too. So it’s perhaps understandable that over the next two decades, many of the German-speaking Austrians wished to align their interests with their powerful German neighbors. In 1938, this finally happened when Hitler, who was Austrian by birth, annexed the country into Germany (called the Anschluss—think of it like Brexit in reverse) with popular support in Austria. His stated goal was to unite all German-speaking peoples into a single “Greater Germany”, but his ulterior motive was to expand his territory and use Austria’s resources for the war machine he was building. But not all Austrians were in favor of this; The Sound of Music tells the real-life story of how the very Austrian Von Trapp family had to escape through the mountains into Switzerland on the eve of the Anschluss. Tens of thousands of Jews in Vienna had to flee as well. Austrians played a significant role in the Nazi war effort throughout WWII, though resistance groups remained throughout the war, and Austria sustained heavy bombing by the Allies. After the Third Reich was defeated, Austria was divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones  much like Germany, until it once again became an independent state in 1955 and declared its permanent neutrality.

I like this summary of the historical relationship between Austrians & Germans:

Austria used to be the core power of the German states. [T]he modern country of Germany has only existed since 1871. The word itself is not meant to refer to that country, because it is much older than that, and was meant to simply refer to all German speaking people. They lived in tens and sometimes hundred of separate states, largely independent of one another, which made it necessary to have a single word for the whole pile of them. For half a millennium, Austria was the largest and most powerful of these German states, and ruled over most of the rest through the Hapsburg Emperors. They were pushed out of that role by Napoleon, who destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, and were replaced one lifetime later when Prussia succeeded in forcing other German states into its political orbit. Austria was left on the outside, too strong to be dominated like the others, and therefore strong enough to detach itself. Austria really began to separate from its German identity in a significant way after WW2.

Another significant difference is that the Austrians remain largely Catholic, while Germany was the birthplace of Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

But enough about its political history. This is of course also the city of music, home to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Johann Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and more. Appropriately, the city center (where all bus and tram lines start) is the opulent opera house, which is the size of a small cathedral. Griffin and I learned about this musical legacy at the Haus der Musik, Vienna’s interactive sound & music museum, where we also discovered how sound and the human ear work, and composed some musical pieces of our own. (We could have also attended one of the many performances at the city opera for children, but decided to skip.)

Vienna is also famously the home of Sigmund Freud, and we visited the apartments where he lived and worked for over 50 years.

Despite its heritage, Vienna is also a very modern city, both diverse and well-mannered. Our first AirBnB was on the north side of town, in a slightly more affluent neighborhood associated with some of the great composers just mentioned. On our first day there, just before COVID got us, we explored a huge, lush park nearby (Türkenschanzpark), where we immediately got the impression that Austrians love being outdoors, love to relax, and know how to make the most of their city’s resources. The park was packed with folks luxuriating in the sunshine, having picnics, eating ice cream, and playing ping pong on the built-in tables, while children filled the many playgrounds. Of course, I’m sure everybody everywhere is just happy to be back out socializing again after the pandemic, but we got a distinct feeling that Vienna is always like this—especially on Sundays, when pretty much all businesses and stores and even many restaurants close for a day of rest. We were told that more than 50% of the city is greenspace and that one of the city’s mottos is a park for everyone. We saw this for ourselves as we visited countless other parks over the next week, all as well-used and well-loved as that first one.

And since there are no Austrian beaches, the Viennese improvise by using the Danube as their seaside. When the temperature hit the 80s in our final days there, we found scads of scantily-clad sunseekers playing on “Copa Beach”, where food stands and beach chairs are well used and plenty of folks swam or paddled in the wide river. The Danube is the longest river in Europe (if you don’t count the Volga in Russia), originating in the Black Forest of Germany, winding 1,770 miles through ten countries in central Europe, before finally dumping into the Black Sea in Ukraine. (We traced its route in Google Earth.) Here in Vienna, it has long been an unpredictable waterway, often flooding the city and regularly changing course. The city finally reined it in by forcing it into four channels: the Medieval one that meanders through the old town; an old loop on the east side that has been turned into a lake for boating and swimming; and in between, two wide, dead-straight canals, one for the plentiful boat traffic that plies the river and a second for flood control, with a narrow island in between that is used like a park.

But besides relaxing, the Viennese also know how to have fun. The Prater is the world’s second oldest amusement park, with dozens of classic and modern rides and a huge Ferris wheel that opened in 1897. We loved seeing the city from its bright red carriages, which comfortably hold a dozen or more people, and were surprised to discover that you could reserve one for you and your friends for high tea!

On the more cultured side, the city is chock-full of museums. While we recuperated from COVID, my mom took Griffin to the city’s natural history museum, one of the grandest in the world. Griffin was most impressed by the Venus of Willendorf, a tiny, voluptuous limestone figurine estimated to be 25,000-30,000 years old, making it one of the world’s oldest art pieces.

And of course there are the palaces: The Hofburg, known as the winter palace, anchors the center of the city and has been the seat of Austrian power for centuries. Built in the 13th century and expanded many times since, it’s now one of the largest palaces in the world, with 2,600 rooms. Of particular note is the Spanish Riding School, where rare white Lipizzaner horses have been trained in classical dressage for over 450 years. (Griffin learned about how these horses escaped the Nazis by watching the 1963 Disney film Miracle of the White Stallions.)

Even more popular is the sprawling Schönbrunn Palace, or summer palace, where we wandered the vast gardens for a couple hours and took Griffin to the Schönbrunn Zoo, supposedly the world’s oldest.

Amy and Allison also loved Belvedere Palace, which now houses an extensive museum with the world’s largest collection of works by Gustav Klimt, including The Kiss.

But one of our favorite activities was simply wandering the busting pedestrian streets of the old city center, with its high-end boutiques, restaurants, and chocolate, gelato and pastry shops, all clustered around the grand old cathedral of St. Stephen’s. It was in this district that I left Griffin, Amy and my mom to enjoy a Disneyland-eque “ride” through Vienna’s history, complete with 3D goggles, while I wandered out to the grounds of the Hofburg Palace. I soon heard a thumping bassline, which I followed to a park next to the palace, in front of the natural history museum, where a DJ was spinning to a small crowd while a booth sold beer & wine. Surprisingly, this seemed like a completely commonplace thing in the center of this very proper and cultured city. The scene felt strangely familiar, like the dance stage at Santa Barbara’s Solstice party in the park, but transported to much grander digs. I sat in the grass and enjoyed a beer, suddenly missing all my friends at home and the Lucidity festival that had happened just after we left in March. 😥

We also enjoyed cruising the city on the extensive tram network. While not as old and cute like Lisbon’s, Vienna’s sleek, modern trams link almost every part of the city…and just seem so much cooler than buses or the metro (which Vienna has too).

One of our final stops was a trip to the top of the Danube Tower, the tallest structure in Austria, which afforded spectacular views over the city and east to Slovakia.

Because of COVID, we ended up spending much longer in Vienna than we had planned, a full 9 days, but enjoyed every minute of it, even in quarantine. (We had to switch AirBnBs midway through, and since I was likely still contagious, I opted to walk from one to the other, 5 miles across the city, rather than take a taxi or public transit. But I actually really enjoyed the walk.) Vienna is just such an easy city to be in, a place you can easily relax but never be bored. Austrians may not be the most gregarious folks, but nobody seemed rude, unhappy, or unsatisfied. And why should they be? The consulting firm Mercer has ranked Vienna as the most livable city in the world every year since 2009, and it also ranks in the top 10 on many other similar lists. I loved all the sidewalk cafes and vegan food (a nice alternative to the meat-heavy Austrian diet). My mom loved the tree-lined streets and stately homes. Amy loved the endless array of museums and many fresh fruit stands, where we got some of the best strawberries ever. And Griffin loved the trams and gelato. 😄

One thing’s for sure: I’ll be back (said in my best Schwarzenegger voice).

But for now, we were off to our next stop: Graz, Austria, the country’s second largest city and an undiscovered gem.