Just a Tourist
In this post I review Vienna as a tourist, and then delve into Vienna’s history.
I traveled to Vienna as a tourist with little prior knowledge of Austria, its history or its culture. I met my son in Vienna as he was completing a multi- month tour of Eastern Europe. We stayed in a modest AirBnB apartment 2 km from the city centre (Innere Stadt).
Google and the Internet provided the maps, guides, and translations we required to plan and organize our excursions. We used the public transportation network of subways, trams, and buses for our travels. It was efficient, low cost and easy to use. We walked extensively throughout the city
We ate street food and fancier meals at iconic Viennese restaurants. We indulged in the art, music and museum scene as discussed in the previous post.
Personal Encounters
I have only praise for Vienna and its citizens. Our main interactions with the Viennese were with our AirBnB host, the numerous waiters, shopkeepers and tour guides. They were all helpful and respectful. We mingled with regular citizens of various ethnicities while shopping in markets, sitting on trams or relaxing in parks. We enjoyed the musicians and dancers.
The city felt efficient, clean, safe and welcoming. I would highly recommend a visit to this beautiful city.
Vienna Beyond Tourism
Of course Vienna is far more than a beautiful tourist attraction. A city as old as Vienna contains innumerable layers of politics, history and culture. Vienna experienced centuries of immigration, conquest, assimilation, expansion, exploitation, victories and defeats, creating the city that exists today. While I am an avid reader of European history, I don’t know enough to offer a meaningful perspective on Vienna’s history. A moral and ethical assessment depends on who evaluates the outcomes.
Anschluss
A period of history often lost to the tourist is the role that Austria played prior to World War II.
On March 11–13, 1938, Nazi Germany annexed the neighboring country of Austria (Österreich). This event is known as the Anschluss. “Anschluss” is a German word that means “connection” or “joining.”
Google
City Hall and the Hofburg Palace
A visitor to … the curved colonnaded Neue Burg wing of Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Palace, can walk right up to doors that lead to one of the most infamous balconies in Austrian history: the site of Adolf Hitler’s speech on March 15, 1938, in which he announced to cheering Austrians that his birth country had been incorporated into the Third Reich, an event known as the Anschluss. Yet the doors stay closed, making it impossible for a visitor to step out onto what is sometimes called the “Hitler balcony.”
Google dw.com
Was Austria complicit in sustaining the atrocities of Nazi Germany? Should Vienna be condemned for its role? While I unequivocally condemn Nazism and Fascism, my judgment of Vienna is less clear.
I cannot condemn Vienna for its darker history, unless I am willing to offer a similar judgment on my own behaviour. I have certainly ignored or harmed others (perhaps inadvertently) in the pursuit of my own goals. Some victories have meant defeat for my rivals. I have applauded leaders who supported my beliefs, and I have formed alliances that I have later regretted. I have turned a blind eye to suffering, and I have ignored pleas for aid. I have avoided conflict where righteous action was needed. Is a city history any different my personal history?
Indeed the reasons I love Vienna and reasons I dislike Vienna are the very values that I love and hate about myself.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,”
Bible. John 8:7.
Accepting Responsibility
The opinions of today’s Viennese citizens are far more legitimate than mine. It is important that Vienna’s role in the Anschluss is being acknowledged and not denied. Vienna has built the Monument Against War and Fascism on Albertinaplatz, behind Vienna’s Opera House to acknowledge victims of war and violence, and the 65000 Viennese Jews who died in concentration camps.
Conquest and Exploitation
Vienna played a key role in many world-changing events. The whole history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire must hold some dark chapters. Consider the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and colonization. Do the Vienna museums and galleries display the spoils of war and political conquest?
A partial answer was provided in a notice at the entrance to the Welt Museum (World Ethnographic Museum)
“Most of the world’s population was dominated by foreign powers in the years between 1500 and 1920. This foreign rule was defined by conflicts and exploitation. Against this backdrop, ethnographic museums flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries and shaped stereotypical beliefs of lost or colonised cultures. As our Museum was one of those benefitting from Europe’s colonial expansion, the stories behind many objects and how they were acquired deal with appropriation and colonial violence.
Although the colonies gradually fought for and were granted their independence after World War Il, it was as if time stood still in ethnographic museums. The cherished and seemingly timeless conceptions of “us” and “them” were only hesitantly challenged as late as in the 1980s.
Today we face our colonial past not only to raise awareness but also to learn from it. After all, how we deal with our collections and the people related to them in the present will shape the image of ethnographic collections in the future.”
Vienna Welt Museum
Notorious Artist
In his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described how, in his youth, he wanted to become a professional artist, but his dreams were ruined because he failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Hitler was rejected twice by the institute, once in 1907 and again in 1908.
A tour guide told us that Adolf Hitler hated Vienna after he was rejected by the art academy. The guide suggested World War II may have been drastically different had Hitler been accepted into art school and became an artist.
Should we blame Vienna for Hitler’s conversion to politics? Should we applaud Vienna for maintaining high artistic standards? Here is a painting by Adolf Hitler. Judge for yourself.
Nobody is Perfect
Each of us is a mixture of good qualities,
and some not so good qualities.
In considering our fellow man we should remember his good qualities, and realize
his faults only prove that he is, after all a human being.
We should refrain from making harsh judgment of a person just because he happens to be
A Dirty Rotten
No Good
Son of a Bitch!
(Anonymous)
and a ruthless, evil, mass murderer and war criminal
Thank you for writing such an extensive commentary on this aspect of European History. I am interested in this area too.
I have also been watching with interest how some countries have had the honesty, ( the guts) to step up and acknowledge their past.