Vienna, ah what a place. It is the one city on Earth where you can find someone who thinks its the best place to live on Earth, while ignoring the fact that the city was built up to house hundreds of thousands of poor, giving them naught but a thin strip of blue sky, if any at all.
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.
Vienna has the same population density as Montreal and Toronto (~4500/km2), and somewhat lower than Denver, not exactly known for their attempts to cram the poor into tiny spaces.
Having been there only briefly, trying to fathom what I had somehow 'completely missed' given your comments ...
Don't forget that other beautiful green space, that oasis of tranquility: Augarten!
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.
As a good point (maybe even intentional) the article is contradictory itself, using sentences like "This" "analogy, while tempting, fails to take into account" ... and then continuing with other shallow explanations. And all this leads to the coda:
"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":
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."
If you're interested in Schoenberg, it's definitely worth checking out the other members of the second Viennese school: Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. A really good starting point would be Berg's violin concerto or (if you like opera) Wozzeck (which has themes that seem astonishingly relevant today (ptsd, difficulty for returning military in adjusting to civilian society etc). Berg's violin concerto is famous for having an amazing moment of transcendent beauty built around a reference to another great work (which I don't want to spoiler but you can search and find out about it if you want or just listen to it!).
There's this unforgettable plaque in those Vienna "kaffeehauses" I saw in the museum quarter. Something along the lines of "The 400-year old Grand Vienna Teahouse was founded on March 13th, 1938, by Hans Gruberhuber, a humble chimneysweep." Every teahouse had a plaque like this.
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.
Sure, that's true, but only partly. Austria lost an empire at the end of WWI. I come from an area that used to be part of that empire, and until WWI, if you were talented and ambitious, you went to study in Vienna. Many of the locally recognized writers, artists etc. did. And some stayed there for their entire careers. That all ended after the war.
Vienna stopped being relevant quickly after the WWI with the end of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, years before nazis became relevant. Vienna stopped being the economical, academical and art center of the Central Europe. Later events certainly didn't help, but even before that, as the influx of money and fresh people stopped, so did the art - as that always goes hand in hand.
Stefan Zweig in his "World of Yesterday" captures the essence of your argument well. Although I think we says more that WW1 combined with the Nazi takeover later was responsible, rather than specifically the racist attacks on Jews. He has a haunting few lines where he talks about those Jews in Vienna ("they") in the days preceding the Nazi anschluss:
>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.
" It was the expulsion of Jews ... It was their struggle that motivated new music. Listen to Schoenberg's music and hear the pain of a man facing seemingly insurmountable discrimination"
? 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'
I think this kind of sugarcoating is commom across Europe. Usually history is treated here like WWs were kind of an anomaly in an otherwise glorious history. We all know that this is not the case. European history is riddled with tales of genocide and oppression, mostly in the colonies sometimes within Europe. So what you see here is a data point in a general pattern.
While wandering around Vienna a few years ago looking at all the buildings from the height of the empire and realising that it's quite a liveable city, for some reason it made me think about San Francisco. If the tech industry disappeared from the city tomorrow, what would be left in 100 years to show that it was there? It doesn't seem like there have been any meaningful improvements made to the actual city or its infrastructure. Just go on BART and listen to the 1970s robot voice announcements that could easily be done much better by an iPhone and Siri now. Certainly it's easier for tech companies to build parallel private transport networks than it is to invest in better public transportation for everyone.
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.
The reason why Vienna is so liveable is because it's the heartland of the Social Democrats. They governed the city from 1919-1934 and ever since 1945. As much as I don't like the current Social Democratic Party, their predecessors transformed Vienna into what it is today. A good place to live for everyone.
The wealthy class of the past had spend some of the wealth to be remembered via public works or patronage of art.
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.
Your comment stirred an "ancient history of the future" type feeling for me. If the BART recordings could already be 50 years old (I doubt they are, but let's go with that for a minute), imagine that there's some speech recognition library being installed in some present day infrastructure project. Now imagine that module could sit unchanged, perhaps occasionally refurbished by historical technology preservation societies for hundreds of years until future generations look back on it like we might look back on city fortifications, aqueducts, cast iron bridges or Austrian Empire architecture.
Athens Georgia or Muscle Shoals Alabama for music.
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.
To add to the parodoxes, meanwhile around the same time also in Vienna:
> 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.
[+] [-] fit2rule|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Having been there only briefly, trying to fathom what I had somehow 'completely missed' given your comments ...
[+] [-] fractallyte|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] no1name|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|5 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] seanhunter|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)
[+] [-] an_opabinia|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moesi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImaCake|5 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
? 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
[+] [-] thecleaner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mprovost|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OriginalNebula|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_me_me|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dougmwne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PunchTornado|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cguess|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmeister|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|5 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] arethuza|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21859771