Review of Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
Most of the great thinkers of the former Austro-Hungarian empire were Jewish, though. The Holocaust thoroughly devastated the Central European intellectual circles and turned a previously important region of the world into a somewhat mediocre place. Not a complete backwater, but a shadow of its former self.
If you look at the geography, if you look at the political climate, just at the fundamentals it's not clear why Vienna is a large city. There really is not a lot of reason for this city to matter today yet somehow it is a wonderful place to live in, despite all that.
The city somehow managed to find an identity on its own that somehow makes it work.
Could you elaborate on this a bit please? Vienna has culturally always been considered the front door to eastern Europe (from a central European POV).
Vienna is one of the best cities in central Europe to go for an academic degree: Renting is capped and still affordable (and wants to be kept that way btw, see the ban of AirBnB). There are almost no education fees, even non-austrians can apply for benefits from the government. With 200k students it's the largest german-speaking university city on par with Berlin[0]. The employment law is exemplary good. For me personally it isn't surprsing that almost 1/4th of whole Austria lives in Vienna.
[0]: https://www.wien.gv.at/statistik/pdf/viennainfigures-2023.pd...
Taht's not true at all. Employers can lay off workers for no reason at all at any time without paying any severance (unless you have a unio that can negotiate a better deal). Just hand them the notice and you're done.
[0]: https://www.arbeiterkammer.at/beratung/arbeitundrecht/beendi...
§ 27.
Als ein wichtiger Grund, der den Dienstgeber zur vorzeitigen Entlassung berechtigt, ist insbesondere anzusehen:
1. Wenn der Angestellte im Dienste untreu ist, sich in seiner Tätigkeit ohne Wissen oder Willen des Dienstgebers von dritten Personen unberechtigte Vorteile zuwenden läßt, insbesondere entgegen der Bestimmung des § 13 eine Provision oder eine sonstige Belohnung annimmt, oder wenn er sich einer Handlung schuldig macht, die ihn des Vertrauens des Dienstgebers unwürdig erscheinen läßt;
2. wenn der Angestellte unfähig ist, die versprochenen oder die den Umständen nach angemessenen Dienste (§ 6) zu leisten;
3. wenn einer der im § 1 bezeichneten Angestellten ohne Einwilligung des Dienstgebers ein selbständiges kaufmännisches Unternehmen betreibt oder im Geschäftszweige des Dienstgebers für eigene oder fremde Rechnung Handelsgeschäfte macht oder wenn ein Angestellter den in § 7, Absatz 4, bezeichneten Verboten zuwiderhandelt;
4. wenn der Angestellte ohne einen rechtmäßigen Hinderungsgrund während einer den Umständen nach erheblichen Zeit die Dienstleistung unterläßt oder sich beharrlich weigert, seine Dienste zu leisten oder sich den durch den Gegenstand der Dienstleistung gerechtfertigten Anordnungen des Dienstgebers zu fügen, oder wenn er andere Bedienstete zum Ungehorsam gegen den Dienstgeber zu verleiten sucht;
5. wenn der Angestellte durch eine längere Freiheitsstrafe oder durch Abwesenheit während einer den Umständen nach erheblichen Zeit, ausgenommen wegen Krankheit oder Unglücksfalls, an der Verrichtung seiner Dienste gehindert ist;
6. wenn der Angestellte sich Tätlichkeiten, Verletzungen der Sittlichkeit oder erhebliche Ehrverletzungen gegen den Dienstgeber, dessen Stellvertreter, deren Angehörige oder gegen Mitbedienstete zuschulden kommen läßt.
The proof of guilt is up to the one who fires in the end.
I know of one person who got fired unlawful, and their ex-employer is now EUR 80k+ poorer.
[0]: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes...
You don't need a reason to terminate an employment contract with a notice period, correct, but that doesn't mean it wasn't socially discriminating in origin - that depends on the social situation (eg. older employees can sue for discrimination on age) and the Arbeiterkammer will fight for it.
I'd rather suggest to go to the Arbeits- und Sozialgericht[0] and listen to some real cases, they are public anyway.
[0]: https://www.justiz.gv.at/asg-wien/arbeits-und-sozialgericht-...
Just because cases don't go through the court system, doesn't mean employer abuse doesn't happen.
What I once saw when I went to the Arbeits- und Sozialgericht was a man, in the beginning of his 40s, suing for unlawful termination of his employment contract, after notice period and 7 months of employment. He sued with the help of the Arbeiterkammer. The judge asked the employer for their reasons, and tried to figure out if the termination has been made through thoughtful reasoning and after consideration of any other options. It is the responsibility of the employer too(!), and frankly in their best interest, to bring their employees up to speed and make them succeed in their work.
"We don't need to state any reason" won't fly in front of the judge in Austria, as the judge wants to make an informed decision.
The issue is being able to let go of workers for no reason, not the notice period itself, which BTW, every EU country has, Austria is nothing special here, quite the opposite. Do you feel this imbalance of power that you can be let go at any time for any reason is a fair to the workers in a so called socialist country?
Wouldn't be such a big issue if unemployment wouldn't be a pitiful 60% of your salary for ~3 months (yes it can be longer but you're then at the mercy of the system handler if they agree with the job search you're doing, otherwise they can also cut you off if you don't want to take hard jobs like warehouse work) .
>you can still sue immediately through the Arbeiterkammer
AK will only help you sue only in case of unfair dismissal which rarely happens because employers don't need to provide a reason for terminating you as long as they give you the 6-week-3-month notice. So long hours, burnout and hire-and-fire mentality is rampant among Austrian companies, but rarely talked about because it contradicts the "most livable country" narrative paid for by Austria to the Economist who runs that yearly campaign-ad.
I don't think of Austria as a socialist country and I think it's fair to be able to let people go without reason, but with a notice period (and unemployment benefits and social healthcare).
In practice, it won't be much different than with the requirement of a reason anyway: If you'll want to fight it, then you'll need to go through legal ways and contest the employers decision anyway. In Austria there's a 2-week time limit to bring in a lawsuit on unlawful termination of an employment contract if you still want to work there.
Where are the benefits for Austrian workers for this lack of protection against firing versus countries that have protections?
And where is this HN simping for ruthless capitalist that lay you off you the moment you get sick coming from? What am I not seeing here?
Sounds like you made some experiences with the wrong people.
The process is faster than in other european countries, true, but we're still far away from a short process... unemployment benefits, social healthcare, sick leave, holidays etc. A shorter process can open up good opportunities, but demands some security to enjoy the risks. I think we're mostly balancing this act and it's a good thing when it makes Austria more attractive to employers. Competition against Germany, Belgium, Sweden, or the Netherlands is in my own interest.
Especially in the case of software engineering it can be beneficial to join unstable employments and be ready to change frequently. I'm mostly seeing it as grateful (depending on market), as you can only see so many system designs fail in your lifetime. :D
This might shock you, but lot of Austrian employers behave like this: Hire and fire. Got sick? So long. This shouldn't be acceptable in an EU country. AK is also useless here because the laws are toothless.
>unemployment benefits, social healthcare, sick leave, holidays etc
Those exist in every other EU company where you can't lay off people just because you don't like their face anymore.
>Competition against Germany, Belgium, Sweden, or the Netherlands is in my own interest.
Yet those countries score better at innovation, entrepreneurship while having better worker rights and higher wages. How do you explain that? I'm not sure working yourself to death in a race to the bottom on lowering workers rights is a good strategy.
And if it's easy for me to hire... then it's easier for the next entrepreneur to hire... paradoxically driving wages up and forcing businesses to keep hiring high so as to keep their competitive edge.
The only people suffering under such a system are freeloaders - who get hired and then proceed to lean on labour laws to stick around for a long time after their welcome has worn out.
Austria has no sea access, no navy, few natural resources. Vienna is strategically not in a particularly amazing position compared to most other cities around. It's not clear to me what the fundamental reasons are why Vienna should be a large city other than that it historically was one, declined a bit and somehow regrew.
I think it's great here, but I also cannot really understand why.
Austria used to have all of those things. Vienna itself is not particularly different from any other imperial capital in terms of its location.
There was also a fairly strong Polish school of maths and formal logic, but it can only be called Austrian with some stretching of the word; while Galicia was part of the empire, it was about as far (ethnically, culturally and physically) from Vienna as possible.
While Vienna is located at the crossroads between the planes and the Alps along the Danube making it modestly fortifiable from previous Ottoman incursions in 1529 and essential hub for quarterly markets. As the easternmost capital not to fall to the Ottomans, merchants that went to the Viennese markets would have valuable first arbitrage opportunities on eastern spices, textiles, medicines, gems, and ceramics coming from the east (the taxes on which solidified the Hapsburg position). However, it wasn’t until the siege of 1683 [1] that resulted in the Ottomans crushing defeat and withdrawal much like a port city by a sea only to see the sea recede.
In that withdrawal the Ottomans left behind enough coffee in their abandoned provisions that the Viennese were able to open Europe’s first coffee house and cement Vienna as Europes premier nexus for academia :-)
austria had sea access right up to WW1. and vienna only started to decline after that. vienna is also on the danube, a river that is connected to the main and rhine and allows ships to travel all the way from the north sea to the black sea. that makes it better positioned than paris, berlin or munich in this aspect. although i doubt that the river had much to do with its regrowth in the last few decades. it is more likely that its closeness to eastern europe made it an attractive destination once the eastern bloc fell apart, which was just before the time vienna started growing again.
That's exactly why. Some wonderfully peculiar people were born from that gene pool. But that's history. They don't build em like that anymore.
Many cities historically grew around ports due to the labor intensity of break-bulk shipping and the difficulty and expense of overland goods transport but modern container ports require relatively few employees and can easily move freight intermodally. The old piers in London and Hamburg and New York and San Francisco and their adjacent factories have all been redeveloped, and the working container ports have all relocated away from the city center to places where rail & highway access is easier, to places like Newark, Oakland, and Felixstowe.
Huh? I was there this summer with my daughter and there were plenty of Airbnbs. They were dramatically more affordable (especially given my need for two separate rooms).
I get the AirBnB hate from local renters, but as a frequent traveler, hotels suck so bad that they deserve disruption.
That said, especially for visiting a city, I'll pretty much go with traditional hotels, often chains, for the predictability. I've very rarely had a truly bad experience and it's usually been something like a badly situated luck-of-the-draw room and even that isn't usually a big deal in a city where I'm not spending a lot of time in a room.
I can reliably checkin whenever, there's staff on-call, I don't usually care if I have a kitchen other than a small fridge (which many hotels have these days), and so forth. I've stayed in many B&Bs--some of which are also listed these days on AirBnB. Most have been good, some less so. Usually less of a good option in urban centers.
Competition is good and empowering people to make money off their assets (just like Uber) even better. Regulate it and hotels to protect consumers but don't pretend Airbnb's are the cause for housing being unaffordable to rent or buy. Specially not when you're taxing renters like mad and offering little in return.
It's always funny reading takes in HN about places where you have first hand knowledge of, whether it be a geographic location or a company.
There also isn't a ban on Airbnb. As someone else already commented, you can still stay at Airbnbs in Vienna. You cannot rent out apartments in social housing as Airbnbs anymore and there are areas in the city where you would have to get a special permit and other inhabitants of the building would have to agree.
1. make an unlimited contract
2. sue when you'll leave anyway
That's a good one :-D
> The statute of limitations is 30 years.
It's actually 10 years. I thought it was less...
> 2. sue when you'll leave anyway
So that's actually a good strategy! Just note that there are certain deadlines, see https://wien.arbeiterkammer.at/beratung/Wohnen/altbaumietenc....
[0]: https://wien.arbeiterkammer.at/beratung/Wohnen/miete/Anwendu...
It's not only buildings built before 1953/1945 though, social housings (Wohnungen in gefördert errichteten Mietwohnungshäusern mit mehr als 2 Mietgegenständen) are capped as well.
It's not "somehow" by magic. The explanation is that as a neutral country between NATO and the former Iron Curtain, it was a middle-man for business, politics and trade between the two blocks in the cold war era, profiting from both parties without having to pay obligations to any of them. Basically it won the geopolitical lottery, similar to a Switzerland Light. Today with the Iron Curtain gone and the EU-Schengen borders extended east beyond Austria, it's a lot less relevant than it used to be and therefore a lot less profitable.
which metrics are you using for this assertion?
Why it grew back from being small due to WW2 up to the 90s is, my educated guess, the geography combined with the standard of living. Right up against the poorer east and rich west. Easy for young people to move from the poorer neighbours, for a short while or even stay. Abundant labour and low corruption [ignoring political ;)] then trades easily with its richer western neighbours.
Started as a Roman settlement, Vindobona, it has been strategically important for a very long time.
Paris without the Seine would equally be irrelevant. London too.
Sits on the Danube and was the capital of the Austrian Empire, so very important all throughout the 1800s. I'd say strategically located in Central Europe.
Then in the second half of the 20th C it was the gateway to the "East Bloc", the place where east meets west in terms of diplomacy, economic and cultural exchange, and of course espionage.
It has played a neutral role similar to Switzerland, which is why OPEC is headquartered there. It's also one of the UN's four major sites worldwide (along with NY, Geneva, Nairobi).
I spent a couple of years there; nice place to live; would happily return.
Many of the famous cafes in Vienna itself, which show up in almost every writing about the city, were stolen from expelled Jews
Though Hitler, Stalin, Trotzki and Tito did have something in common: they all visited the same coffee house, Cafe Central.
Which is still open today, unchanged, now more famous for its delicious cakes and long lines of tourists though.