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Vienna, City of Paradox
- eru 6y agoTo 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_adulthood_in_Vienna_and_Munich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_adulthood_i...
- arethuza 6y agoHitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in Vienna in 1913: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21859771 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21859771
- an_opabinia 6y agoThere'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.
- ivanhoe 6y agoVienna 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.
- zhdc1 6y agoThis. Prague was arguably another casualty.
- thecleaner 6y agoI 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.
- malandrew 6y agoThere’s nothing particularly European about what you describe though. These types of events have occurred pretty much everywhere in the world throughout history. They aren’t European patterns. They are human ones.
- eru 6y agoThe Europeans were just particularly good at it. Much better especially at war than the rest of the world for a while. Many people around the world had the will, but the Europeans also had the means.
- zpeti 6y agoEuropeans are also good at feeling ashamed of it, and talking publicly about it, and shaming themselves about it. Somehow the fact that the soviets and maoist killed more people each than "europeans" (this is quite the american generalisation) is forgotten, as are japanese atrocities, as are cambodian ones. Also no one seems to talk about the middle east being the centre of the world wide slave trade for a very long time, as opposed to Europeans being at fault for all of it.
- acqq 6y agoAs 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": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 6y agoIf 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!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)
- mprovost 6y agoWhile 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.
- me_me_me 6y agoThe 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. But this is largely no more.
- mprovost 6y agoThat's a great point. In the past maybe people wanted to improve the city because that's where they lived, and saw themselves living. There was a comment on HN years ago that I still remember where they compared working in the Bay Area to working in the mines - when people would come over to the New World for a few years to make their fortune, and then go home rich. If you view yourself as a temporary resident, then you're probably not that interested in becoming part of the community and improving the place where you live. Why would you if you're going to take your FAANG money and move to cabin in the woods in a few years?
- PunchTornado 6y agowhat other periods and cities there have been like 1900 Vienna. I guess the 70s Palo Alto. What others?
- jmeister 6y agoParis between the wars is a classic example. See the movie “Midnight in Paris”
- cguess 6y agoAthens 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. Both places are still going strong too.
- fit2rule 6y agoVienna, 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.
- no1name 6y agoCan you name a city you are fond of? Just so that we can contrast it with Vienna.