This is the best attempt I can make to extract these messages from another thread. On this forum you can only spilt a topic into two pieces, can't pick out individual messages to make another topic.
So,
harmonyharmony wrote:
I hated Vienna when I visited it. Most of it smells of horse wee, it's too big and imposing, and there are just too many multi-national shops.
richard barret: wrote:
Really? I'm rather fond of it myself. Compared to most European capitals it's quite small - and they all have the same shops anyway. There are several very good concert halls, as you'd expect, museums (especially the wonderful Sezession), a festival of contemporary music that puts most others to shame, several good friends of mine (not much of an attraction to you, of course), some of my favourite eating establishments, and more dead composers than you can shake a stick at.
Ian Pace wrote:
Those are rather the sorts of things one notices as a brief visitor to the place. From the impression I've got (including what I know from friends who live there, including Austrians) it is small but also a provincially-minded city, in which an old moneyed elite continues to have power over most fields of life, in which in the higher echelons of society anti-semitism is still rife (acceptable in a way that it would never be in Germany); there is a deep and aggressive distrust of foreigners in much of Viennese society, something that can be felt from just walking into an average cafe, and which is adorned with the rather kitschy products of a culture industry writ large (in which 'Mozart-themed' or 'Schubert-themed' paraphenalia are everywhere). As well as being a massively patriarchal society (it's not for nothing that this is the only present-day place where a phenomenon like the Vienna Philharmonic could still exist in its current form). Many of the least admirable elements of an old feudal Europe join forces with a remorseless commercialism. And, outside of the new music festivals and a few other places, musical life is extremely conservative, utterly dominated by star performers and run-of-the-mill programming of the classics.
Its history (like that of many European cities) is not too great either......
tonybob wrote
wow - you picked up a lot from a brief visit - what i picked up from my all too brief visit, was, yes, a town where mozart's balls are king, but some of the friendliest, most patient people in the world; they'd have to be, putting up with my Michel Thomas deutsch.
Not to mention the Haus der Musik, Hundertwasser Haus,Musikverein, the Staatsoper etc etc, history everywhere you look (the graveyard is spectacular!)
I would go again and again given the chance, and i think your analysis rather over critical.
Ian Pace wrote:
I've been there quite a few times, but I'm basing my opinion equally on what I hear from people there and what I've read about the place. So as to try and get away from a tourist view of the place (I would hardly categorise London in terms of the equivalent things in that city to those you and Richard mostly list about Vienna).
richard barrett wrote:
Naschmarkt is a long thin "market square", and Kettenbrückengasse is a small street that goes off it to the left (next to the U-Bahn station named after it) if you're walking away from the centre.
Ian, I've spent quite a bit of time there over the years, actually, and I would say I know my way around it reasonably well. I don't have any evidence which would tell me whether antisemitism is more prevalent there than elsewhere in central Europe (certainly not among the Viennese people I know) and I have never experienced this "deep and aggressive distrust of foreigners in much of Viennese society, something that can be felt from just walking into an average cafe". The official culture is indeed quite conservative on the whole (apart from the Wien Modern festival and various things that take place under the auspices of "Kunstradio" at the ORF), but one doesn't really need to take much notice of that in view of the fact that there's so much else going on outside it. Which just goes to show how different impressions of the same place can be.
Ian Pace wrote:
Well, there are only 8000 Jewish people in the whole of Austria, most of them in Vienna, but I remember reading some articles saying how shockingly prevalent and shameless anti-semitic sentiments were in the higher echelons of Viennese society. And there have been various studies on xenophobia in Austria, prevalent in Vienna as well as the rest of the country (Haider's support was not just in the rural areas). Also, average wage-differences between men and women have hardly shifted in 20 years, in distinction to the rest of Western Europe.
opilec wrote:
I'd echo Richard's views. Maybe I'm just lucky with the cafés I go in, but I've never felt the "deep and aggressive distrust of foreigners" that Ian refers to. As a bit of a scruff, I usually gravitate towards Café Hawelka, which (when it's not stupidly busy) is a great place to relax in, and I've never felt out of place. That there's anti-Semitism around I don't doubt, but more than in some places in East Germany, for instance? Of course, the polite veneer and conservative pretensions can sometimes be obvious, but there are plenty of other things to occupy oneself with instead. I stopped worrying about not being as "well-dressed" as the Viennese years ago. And, of course, it's perfectly possible to love and hate a place at the same time: reading between the lines, that seems to have been Klemperer's view, and he kept going back!
Concerning Haider, the biggest demonstrations against him and his party were, I believe, in ... Vienna.
Ian Pace wrote:
Café Hawelka, as the café where where, amongst others, the fanatically anti-Austrian Thomas Bernhard used to hang out, may be rather atypical to say the least. The more routine cafes, people there tell me, are very closed places where foreigners are frequently not welcome. East Germany, or for that matter much of Eastern Europe, where there is much less of a tradition of multi-culturalism and non-white immigration, is a different matter. The demonstrations in Vienna against Haider were significant, but 20% of the Viennese voted for him in 1999, which went down only to 15% in 2001.
