The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile

Rating:
Summary: Scraping a brilliant surface for the dark underbelly
Review: When in Vienna, I visit the military museum where, encased in glass, is the blood stained uniform of Franz Ferdinand; nearby is the bullet ridden car in which he and his wife were shot. I visit crypts, study the strange configurations of the pestilence monument, and listen to the strains of Mozart arias.

Vienna: coffee houses, Gemutlichkeit, heuriger wine, women of infinite grace and charm, handsome men, newspapers, politics, classical music, waltzes and elegance. What is beneath that merry exterior? Death, morbid, obsessive preoccupations, neurosis, decay and corruption. This city both embraced and killed Mozart, Kaiserin Elisabeth (and drove her son to murder-suicide), and welcomed the Anschluss (notwithstanding a prominent Jewish population). Very strange, even macabre. Just look at the paintings and drawings of Egon Schiele.

Mr. Hofmann answers the questions native born Viennese dislike asking: as Arnold Schoenberg stated, once in exile, "Our beloved and hated Vienna". Vienna is arguably one of the loveliest cities in the world, much like Paris, but there is no sense of 'joie de vivre', but rather, a pervasive sense of transience. That all beauty is ephemeral. A tragic, living memento mori. Suicide is rampant here; Freud pioneered psychoanalysis here; the city is an uneasy mix of nervous ethnicities. Mr. Hofmann, in this social and historical study, examines the extreme contradictions of this society, and how it produced, nutured and destroyed many of the greatest artists and thinkers in world history.

Perhaps the reason why Vienna has produced genius is because of this dichotomy: the sensitive sense and respond to the push-pull undercurrent by either attempting to analyze it or reflecting it in their output.

But even after reading this fine book I do not understand why. Perhaps Vienna must remain mysterious, a decaying skull behind the alluring, sensual mask. I adore this city -- simply because of its nature.