love letter to vienna

by Chi

Vienna has topped the Mercer Quality of Living Survey seven years in a row. That means it’s officially one of the most livable cities in the world, taking into account factors such as the political, social and economic climates, medical care, education, infrastructure and environmental conditions. I was blessed enough to be able to spend a semester abroad there, straddling the divide between 'Western' and 'Eastern' Europe, from January to June 2016. Slowly, over the course of those six months, the majestic old city grew on me. Some nights when I close my eyes I see those imperial snow-white buildings on the back of my eyelids and I realise that, despite my exchange-student loneliness and alienation, I miss Vienna. Where some people found boredom, I found Gemütlichkeit – a sense of cosiness and leisureliness that perfectly defines the city.

Dear Vienna,

You gave me some pretty bad neck cramps during those first few weeks. I couldn’t stop craning to look at all your grand imperial buildings, and when I laid eyes upon the one that was meant to be my host university, I thought you were pulling my leg. I didn’t realise I’d be studying in a palace. I can’t get over the mix of ornateness and warmth that’s present in your Jugendstil architecture and your ubiquitous churches – some Gothic, some baroque, all of them beautiful.

Your citizens fit elegantly into this landscape like pieces in a puzzle. Vienna, I appreciate your old men in their wool vests and old-man hats and your old ladies with canes and big coats. I didn’t see a single pair of thongs for months. When I wore mine out to the supermarket one warm day, they flapped obscenely on the pavement. In a way, it made me feel more conspicuously Australian (or maybe just bogan), though I did feel like a piece of home was on my feet. People here are demure, and the animals too. Unlike in Australia, dogs accompany their humans into restaurants, cafés and banks. They even come along to work because “8 hours at home alone is way too long”, according to my Austrian friend. There is a palpable sense of serenity and contentment in the way people stroll companionably beside their pets along riverbanks and through parks.

People who prefer the chaos of Berlin (graffiti-splattered, techno-music-pumping, full of counterculture types) might be put off by you. Vienna, to me you’re calming. I love the dignified charm with which people do things and I love the way Viennese couples will get up and start waltzing or jiving to live music, which is the happy result of compulsory ballroom dancing classes in high school. You’re a city “lavish with civilities”, in the words of Leon Trotsky, who lived a life of “beautiful uselessness” in Vienna from 1907 to 1914.

Vienna, I take offence at how everything I wear is bound to absorb the stench of cigarette smoke. But Vienna, I appreciate how like a black-and-white film your coffeehouses look when people are huddled around circular tables, sipping on a Wiener Melange in between drags or hands of cards. I love the languid coffeehouse culture and the old-timey Heuriger (wine taverns). I love being surrounded by art and music, art that was considered avant garde at the turn of the century. Vienna, you taught me what Expressionist art was when you introduced me to that twisted young genius Egon Schiele, whose visceral self-portraits kept me holed up in the Leopold Museum for hours.

Vienna, I love how friendly you are to me late at night. There’s nothing more soothing than walking your clean, quiet streets after dark where the only thing I’m likely to be assaulted by is a squirrel leaping across the sidewalk, or phantom catcallers that my memory conjures up from walks past bus stops in Brisbane. Never real ones, though.

Vienna, I love it when you give me the D (Vitamin). The sunlight is like a shot to my veins sending fizzy thrills through my body. The first breath of summer draws me outside, envelopes every Austrian in a blanket of languor. People attribute the stereotypical grumpiness and pessimism of Austrians to the weather, particularly the bleakness of winter. It's true that when I arrived in March, sunny days were the exception rather than the rule. Rain in the city is this constant drizzle, neither like the sweet summer rain that we get at home nor the thundering deluge that pours down and leaves the world sparkling and renewed. No. Viennese rain greyscales everything and leaves the city soggy.

But, oh, when the sun comes out, there is a smile on everyone’s mind. It feels almost like a crime to stay indoors. We are little animals waking up again after a long hibernation, crawling out of our burrows and into the Eisdiele at Schwedenplatz (which remains closed during winter) for ice cream. We congregate along the Donaukanal on balmy summer nights, a sweating beer in hand, to watch the lights on the water, the graffiti on the belly of the footbridge and whatever broadcasted football game is playing behind the bar (Austria always loses, so the fans’ enthusiasm is instead channelled into hating Germany and supporting whatever team is playing Germany).

We freeze half to death trying to go swimming in the Dechantlacke (Dechant Lake) in early spring, because public pools aren’t open until May. It’s full of half melted ice that the sun hasn’t yet penetrated. We're also surprised by a nude man rollerblading casually down the path and discover that the Dechantlacke is one of the homes of Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture). Mere weeks later, the sun’s fully come into her own and we get sunburnt doing yoga by the Danube. I feel a queer sense of joy when I look out my window one late spring day to see a blanket of vines draping the wall of the building next to my dorm – greenly, jungly. They were dead and withered when I first moved in.

To escape the confines of my shared room, I take walks around the neighbourhood and that always lifts my spirits. I’ll take my journal or history readings to a patch of grass in one of the cosy parks dotted throughout Vienna – to the quiet stateliness of the Stadtpark, with its gilded statue of Johann Strauss, or perhaps to the mind-boggling grandeur of Schloss Schönbrunn, which is fiery in autumn and absolutely beautiful in summer when the hedge mazes burst into greenery and the flowerbeds bloom. I love sitting on the hill that overlooks Schönbrunn. I could sit there for hours with a bottle of wine and be rewarded with the setting of the sun over the spread of the city at nine, ten pm.

Vienna, from the mouth of an Australian, I bloody love ya. But don’t take it personally because I think I would have loved any place that took me in, a clueless little exchange student who’s never known complete independence in her whole life, and spat me out much the same but different somehow. Vienna, you just happened to be my chosen city and you will always hold a special place in meinem Herz.

Postscripts:

Vienna is considered the epicentre of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe*. It benefited enormously from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, becoming the gateway to ‘Eastern’ European countries that have historic ties to the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

For an interesting portrait of Habsburg-era Vienna on the eve of World War I, check out Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederic Morton – a social history that lavishly narrates the lives of characters such as Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, Freud, Jung, Tito and members of the Viennese court.

For way more magical pictures of Vienna than mine, stalk @natalie_wien on Instagram. Feeding my nostalgia one square at a time ...

* I put ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ in quotation marks because, despite being a useful geopolitical marker, there is some academic argument that the dichotomy is an artificial cultural construct that glorifies Western Europe. I love the professor who told me that, though I haven’t had time to read more about it.