With European sovereignty under attack from Donald Trump and his national security plunderers, er, advisors—will Denmark eventually capitulate to the orange monster’s protection racket threat to take over Greenland? It is still refreshing to note that there are at least oases of the old continent’s Social Democracy which stand against the ever more powerful encroachment of American neo-liberal domination. One of those oases is Vienna, where the hard-fought gains of the Socialist movement of the 1920s still endure.
Vienna, long the most, but now for the first time in decades voted the second most, livable city on the planet, behind Zurich, still boasts a gleaming public transportation system with trams, buses and subways crisscrossing every block, with escalators in those metros increasing ease of travel for the elderly and disabled, and with police presence at a minimum. This is in contrast, for example, to ever more liberalizing Paris with its more run-down transportation system, either lack of or out-of-service escalators, all marked by the piercing, constant sounds of police sirens at all hours disrupting pedestrian and traffic flow. The latter being the sign of that most prescient mark of a neo-liberal regime, income disparity, as the gendarmes are more and more required to police the discontent of a recalcitrant working- and underclass.
Vienna’s diversity and changing makeup are apparent in its food. The inner Stadt, the central city, inside the ring, remains a conservative marker of Hapsburg order—though there is a neo-liberalizing presence here where what was once a glorious Turkish restaurant in Schwedenplatz is now a “gourmet” American-style restaurant called “Hapsburger.” Just outside the ring, though, in an area comparable to Paris’ 11th arrondissement, there is a great deal of culinary experimentation with the nearly mile-long open-air mall Mariahilfer Strasse suddenly transforming at its end farthest from the ring into a series of all kinds of Asian restaurants and an Asian grocery. This is the area nearest the Westbahnhof, part of the international rail system that brings visitors and immigrants to the city.
That end of Mariahilfer Strasse also boasts one of the city’s best Greek restaurants, Mythos, its succulent cheeses and newly added vegetarian menu proving why in a recent TimeOut survey Greek food surpassed Italian as the world’s highest rated. The other end of the trail also houses Türkis, with a branch also near the Stephansdom cathedral in the city center. The Türkis menu includes braised lamb and chicken and an abundance of mixed dishes in its salad platter.
Food in Vienna, consisting of all kinds of seeded-brown breads and vegetarian spreads, is healthier than Paris’ white-flour baguettes and croissants. The inner city, of course, is the café capital of the world. There is nothing like the Old World elegance, and out-of-this world pastry and coffees, of the Grand Cafes, foremost among them being Café Central, where Trotsky is said to have planned the Russian Revolution, and Café Mozart, not only the traditional meeting ground of the city’s musicians, partly because of its location just a few steps from the Staatsoper, one of the world’s finest opera houses, but also home to Freud’s writing and psychoanalysis circle. Paris, in contrast, is constantly in the process of losing its cafés and bistros, now declared a national monument, to specialty coffee shops which have become not places of exchange but work centers and tourist locales with the décor designed to better accommodate selfies.
The far-right may be poised to now take over the government but Vienna still remains a cosmopolitan oasis. Austria as a whole is rejecting the drive toward war with Russia that fuels the continent’s elites as more and more money is diverted away from aiding their own working classes and funneled into the war machine, all the while fueling ultra-nationalist ressentiment, as immigrants, not the oligarchs, are blamed for Europe’s problems. Austria, meanwhile, clings stubbornly to its neutrality, a position handed down to it from the last Cold War to this one.
Part of what makes the city so “livable,” of course, is its museums, theaters, concert halls and cinema retrospectives. This past holiday season there was and continues to be much to choose from. There is always a blockbuster show at the Kunsthistorische or Art History Museum, and this year’s features Rembrandt, which opened with a meticulous miniature of an Amsterdam street scene, followed by a tableau of John the Baptist preaching and the stunning longing and yearning of a woman in bed awaiting her lover, tabbed as Sarah expecting Tobias. The exhibition also featured a contemporary Hoogstraten who spent time in Vienna. The pairing was somewhat unfortunate though enlightening. Hoogstraten’s trompe l’oeil deceptions were pitted against or compared to Rembrandt’s, in whose rendering a young girl extends her hands over the picture frame to create the “trick” of depth extending out of the frame. But Rembrandt’s luscious concentration on the orange folds of the girl’s dress and the look of mixed amazement and consternation on her face far exceeds Hoogstraten’s what seems like cheap effect at 3-D imitation without the master’s humanity. The exhibition, by the way, then leads into the museum’s Bruegel collection with, among others, its stupefying Fight Between Carnival and Lent, a compendium of peasant enthusiasm and excess for the former and forced piety for the latter.
Another blockbuster was at the lesser known Kunstforum, site of a former Austrian bank, which housed an exhibition on “Gauguin Unexpected.” The unexpected elements, besides a recounting of Breton peasant life, were the artist’s reliefs and sculptures as well as paintings of Tahitian life. Gauguin’s encounter was very mixed, since he impregnated, then left two underage girls, but also published Le Sourire (The Smile, the title meant sarcastically), his anti-colonial broadside containing his own writings and etchings highlighting the brutality of the French administration in both Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.
The city’s second most prestigious museum, The Albertina, is given over to Chagall, with his wondrous pictorial account of his early life in the Jewish peasant village of Vitebsk. Chagall was initially a featured artist after the Russian Revolution, but his peasant magical realism ran afoul of the extremely didactic abstract Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, and he left the country—a pity, because had he stayed and been incorporated into the dialogue, his innate feel for the peasantry but in a modernist, cubist sense, would have been a bridge between the revolutionary Russian avant-garde and the pedestrian socialist realism that was to follow. In the basement of the Albertina is a collection of the New York artist Robert Longo, whose black and white hyper-realist murals painted from journalistic photos resound across the decades, be they cops beating demonstrators or, most strikingly, a series of paintings from Freud’s house in Vienna as he was fleeing the Nazis in 1938, including an eerie one with a swastika plastered across the entrance of his building on 19 Berggasse.
Probably the most stunning exhibition, in the midst of a daily declining West, was Alfred Kubin’s drawings in the Albertina Modern about his own encounter with death and dying, early in life of his mother, then of finding bodies washed up in the river near his Bohemian town, then of his first lover. Stark images abound, including those of a pregnant woman standing next to a grave, a George Grosz-like fat bourgeois with two naked women on either side of him, and, the epitome of his work, an ape, another version of misogynist power, devouring a naked woman. These etchings, many from just after the turn of the 20th century, powerfully forecast a century of war and destruction.
The most carefully constructed can’t-miss exhibition was in, of all places, the Austrian National Library, celebrating, cautiously, the 200th anniversary of the birth of the composer Anton Bruckner. Though he gained fame in Vienna, Bruckner was always a Volk or folk composer with all the advantages and problems that entails, including his later adoration by Hitler, shown standing star-struck before a bust of the composer, who was also from Bruckner’s hometown of Linz. His great—lush, Romantic—symphonies are the fourth, the seventh and the unfinished ninth. There’s a monumental recording (on YouTube) of Leonard Bernstein conducting the ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic. Bernstein is dying as he takes the podium to pay tribute to Bruckner’s last act, which he composed while he was dying. This concert also marked a further step in Bernstein’s rapproachement with the notoriously pro-fascist Philharmonic and a further step in the orchestra’s disavowal of its past.
The newly renovated City of Vienna History Museum had an exhibit of diversity in the city which was also echoed by the Belvedere’s featuring of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, whose splendiferously colorful paintings of Africans in Vienna interposed African cultures and colors in a pictorial language that recalled the city’s bygone artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, including his own version of Klimt’s The Kiss with an African couple embracing in multicolored daishikis.
The history museum’s other exhibition had the unremarkable title “Winter in Vienna” but the intriguing subtitle “The Vanishing of a Season.” Indeed, as the exhibition revealed, 2023 was the warmest year in Vienna since records were kept starting in 1775, that is, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Snow has all but vanished from the Christmas scene here, and the exhibition ended with visitors voting on their favored solution to the problem of global warming. Most popular choices were “Higher taxes on flying to force people to take trains” and “Expanded public transport.”
The most fashionable English language novel on the city this season is the British Midnight in Vienna, set at the moment of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at the Munich conference. Leave it to the British upper middle class to strike a resoundingly wrong note about this encounter. While, as is recounted, the Brits were readying sandbags for what they sensed was Hitler’s imminent attack, the “danger” in the novel is from some stray Communists in Vienna already the victims of Hitler’s wrath.
As usual, the range of performing arts was extraordinary, moving from the Akademie Theater’s version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt with a female actress cast as the wily and ultimately despicable seducer of women, a casting which didn’t quite work, to the same theater’s even more experimental version of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, with a member of the audience picked to play Freud as she recounts her dream on the couch in part one, as she interacts with the psychoanalysts’ circle in part two, and as she joins the cast in a green screen projection ranging from Huns to creatures in space in part three. The Akademie is the experimental wing of perhaps the best theater in the German language, The Berg, and both productions lived up to that nomination. The Staatsoper’s Tales of Hoffman had the first and most prominent tale ending with Hoffman realizing he has been tricked into falling for a robot, which, when he pulls off her arm, he then labels “an automaton,” a stark illustration of misogynist thinking which refuses to see women for who they are, preferring the masculine delusion, rendered so poignantly in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where the detective Scottie (James Stewart) becomes incensed faced with the shattering of this delusion and the accusation of the puppet master who commanded Kim Novak’s performance: “He made you over just like I made you over.”
The Metro, a former opera house, now the city’s top repertory cinema, featured an Ernst Lubitsch festival including his 1918 Carmen, made before the director was whisked away to work for and eventually head Paramount. This version of the opera was an extravaganza with Pola Negri that was a wonder of staging with choruses of extras and a reminder that even coming out of the defeat of the first world war, the German silent cinema was Hollywood’s main, and a worthy, global challenger.
Finally one could not help being struck by the gap between the big budget spectacular Wicked, which with its overly cautious self-congratulatory hyping of its green-black witch as outsider might better have been titled Tepid or Limpid or Flaccid. The musical, in 3-D at the Haydn theater, named for its proximity to the composer’s house, in the end of part one, since there is another money-making part two coming, reverts to a Marvel superhero-style origin-story of the The Wizard of Oz, revealing how the witch acquired her costume, her broomstick and her flying monkeys even as she betrays her friend, the good (white) witch, in going it alone.
Much more to the point this holiday season and beyond was Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter extravaganza at the Houston Texans halftime show on Netflix, available on YouTube. The songs from an album, shunned by the country western establishment but later awarded the grammy for Best Country Album, featured the singer riding into the stadium on a white stallion, part Joan of Arc, part Lady Godiva, descending and launching into the Beatles’ Blackbird, reminding us of the civil rights meaning of that song, and then Beyoncé-style covering Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” in a much more pointed denunciation and kicking to the curb of her betrayer. This was all capped off with an array of Black cowboys and cowgirls as Beyonce reclaimed a Black space in country music, a genre that her research revealed had originally been initiated by Negro performers. Her bold insertion into a previously forbidden space countered the mealy-mouthed, smirkingly liberal corporate Wicked, and seeing both in Vienna illustrated how the city itself, while retaining its social democratic past, was also moving into an uncertain future but one potentially filled with promise as it sheds phony “liberalism” or corporate “equity” for more hard-won, actual, equality.
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