Vienna, City of Paradox
aeon.co
aeon.co
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.
Learn them by foot, and words alone.
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.
Hell is in the park too.
Having been there only briefly, trying to fathom what I had somehow 'completely missed' given your comments ...
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.
"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":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)
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.
Many people around the world had the will, but the Europeans also had the means.
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.
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.
But weren't most of the Soviets Europeans?
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.
And of course about each other. It's plural place after all, one of the many things that appears to be lost amongst anglosaxons.
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.)
Do you have any sources for your assertions?
Source for the systematic destruction of historic documents in India and America ?
>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.
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/death-in-exile-e...
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.
I'm reading the book with Duden open in my browser.
"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."
r/Askhistorians is a great place to look for more information. Here is a pretty good threat related to the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dq9940/why_d...
? 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'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Vienna
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.
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.
But this is largely no more.
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.
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.
Both places are still going strong too.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_adulthood_i...