Vienna II

Counter terrorism cutlery at Gatwick

A fab birthday treat – a weekend in Vienna :)

This time (last visit was July) I had the brilliant company of my husband (WWI, second hand books, Freud).  I doubt I’d have visited the Museum of Military History if he hadn’t suggested it.  The WWII rooms are harrowing.

On Saturday morning, the Kunsthistorisches Museum café produced a sausage and grated horseradish breakfast which sustained us through most of the day (was absorbed by Breugel’s Babel having seen David Mach’s Babel Towers at the Royal Academy this summer).

Service sheet for St Ruprecht - loads of music for everyone

Later I called in to St Ruprecht, a beautiful little church tucked away in its own courtyard in the old town, and heard singing – they were having a run-through before the Saturday evening service.  So I stayed.  I thought I’d been given the wrong service sheet because there was so much music printed on it – but no.

In an odd way, it was very inclusive – I have about four words of German, but I could join in most of the service this way, singing along with everyone else.  Lay women took as prominent a part as the lay men and (little) children carried candles up to the altar at the offertory – there was a bowl of sand for them.  Communion was shared with everyone gathered around the plain stone altar and the bread was substantial, unleavened, chewy stuff.  It was a heavenly combination of my old parish church, St John’s Clapham (which was so brilliant at involving everyone) and an Iona Community service – at the Abbey or anywhere else.  I felt wholly restored.

The Anglican/Episcopal Church has a branch in Vienna and I joined them on Sunday morning.  Their magazine, Crossways, had a piece on Jewish-Christian activities.  The congregation is involved in a Vienna city initiative to encourage people of different religious traditions living in each district to get to know each other – just ordinary people, not theologians or religious leaders.  One member of the congregation most involved in this told me one of the best ideas I’ve heard of yet – add a short sentence to each church’s, mosque’s, temple’s, synagogue’s noticeboard saying that everyone of whatever faith or none is welcome to come inside and meet the people there.  If we were popping in and out of each other’s places of worship and atheist/humanist association’s premises we would soon get to know each other.  The last event for this district was a visit to the local mosque and the next is tomorrow evening, when they’ll be visiting the local Polish Church.

I met my husband for a dreamy slice of über-light cheesecake at the Jewish Museum.  There’s an good exhibition on at the moment Turks in Vienna which traces the history and geography of the Sephardim from 1492 onwards.

It’s pretty much a potted history of Europe over that period – the jigsaw of empires and alliances, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and a salutary lesson in who provided refuge, who did not and how overlapping allegiances enabled the Viennese Jews to act as go-betweens across the different cultures – East and West, Orient and Occident, Asia and Europe.

Sculpture by Hrdlicka at Albertinaplatz

The second time I passed the Hrdlicka sculptures at Albertinplatz I noticed a fresh rose had been placed on the strong, sad depiction of a Jewish man scrubbing the streets.  Nearby there is a monument with a declaration carved into it from 1945 which includes “the freedom of all religious traditions”.  The place still seems a bit of a walk-through rather than a destination.  I found a young Hungarian graphic artist there.  He produces some great cartoons - Amy Winemouse, the Zion King – and it was a pleasure to meet him.

Just like Sarajevo - Turkish coffee at the Jewish Museum, Vienna

I found out too late that there was a Klezmer Festival on – I love it.  The Austrian Folk Song Society has heaps of information – it used to collect folk music from all around the empire, but now collects from within Austria itself, including its minority cultures.

It’s an odd mix, Vienna.  Plenty of intercultural initiatives and good people involved – but the FPO (Freedom Party of Austria) polled 27% at the local elections in October.

The English Defence League were busy yesterday in Preston and Nuneaton and it’s hard to see anything as crude as this building momentum in the UK – but it’s as well to make sure it doesn’t.  Hats off to Hope Not Hate and other campaigners.

Vienna

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt (detail)

I spent three weeks in Vienna as a teenager in the 70s and loved it: Klimt, the Ringstrasse, Blumen stalls, Cat Stevens tapes and being puzzled that almost everyone wore brown or beige.  The buildings still hadn’t been completely repaired from war damage.  Anything and anyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain – and Vienna was pretty close – seemed very remote and quite foreign, something which I now realise had quite a marked effect on my education.  I still feel estranged from the history, languages and culture of central and eastern Europe.

Quite a few of the Klimt paintings on display then have now gone (I saw one in Manhattan not long ago) – rightly returned to their Jewish owners (or descendants) and sold on.  It didn’t cross my mind to check where these wonderful works of art had come from.  Even now, as the Jewish Chronicle reports, Holocaust restitution claims can progress slowly.

"During July 2010, people in Vienna will be working in the name of hope, progress, education and tolerance. Thank you for being part of it."

I shared the sumptuous sleeper from Zurich to Vienna with two women cyclists from the US and a Swiss woman (originally from Miami) who commutes weekly between Switzerland where she works, and Vienna where her boyfriend lives.  Her boyfriend is called Georg (“Gay-org”) and when I heard his name I was immediately back in von Trapp/Christopher Plummer land.

Vienna is a mix of formal and friendly – people are well-dressed but happy to chat.  The city centre is clean, tidy and oozes prosperity.  Continental cities tend to house their poorer residents on the outskirts.  ‘Banlieues’ seemed (at the Caux event) to be shorthand for ‘inner city’, whereas the outskirts or suburbs of London tend to be middle class and comfortably off.  My guest house had a poster (right) up in the breakfast room which looked hopeful.

I overheard businessmen at a café talking about the Europe-wide debate on Islamic headgear for women.  “Tyrolean grandmas have been wearing headscarves for centuries”, one of them said.  Islam has been recognised by the state since 1912, so there is no question of banning scarves or veils in Austria.

An Austrian Muslim family was visiting Stephansdom, the C14th cathedral, while I was there.

Stephansdom is the main cathedral and the historic centre of the city.  All the street numbers start there and fan outwards, so the central place of Christianity (mostly Roman Catholicism) in Austrian history is evident.  I met an Austrian Muslim family there who spoke English and who seemed quite at home.  I tried to remember if I’d seen many conservatively-dressed Muslim families wandering around St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey.  I’ve often talked to London Muslims who haven’t visited our historic cathedrals.  The Austrian family said relations were good between Christians and Muslims.

Swimming in the Danube

Next stop, a huge mosque on the other side of the Danube. On the way, I walked along the riverside and was amazed at how many people were swimming and lazing about in the hot sun.  Wild swimming obviously not a problem here.  I met a swimmer from Afghanistan who has been resident for a while.  He’s happy to be an Austrian citizen and goes – infrequently – to a different mosque to the one I’m heading for.

Islamic Centre at Neue Donau

The Islamic Centre at Neue Donau was built with Saudi money in the late 1970s.  I asked/gestured as to whether I could go inside (it wasn’t prayer time, so only a handful of worshippers) and was shown in.  There is a women’s gallery so I stayed there for a while in the silence.

Shakespeare & Co, Vienna (no particular relation to the Paris one)

By chance I came across Shakespeare & Co, an English language bookshop which declares, “we search and strive for intercultural understanding “.  I was in heaven.  It not only had far too many enticing books, but lots of leaflets and information on women’s groups and current affairs – perfect for a passing visitor like me.  As well as finding out about Women Without Borders, I picked up a booklet which took me through the old Jewish part of town, so I spent the rest of the day in Leopoldstadt.

The Vienna Synagogue - the only synagogue to survive WWII. I saw armed police posted at each end of the street on Friday evening as worshippers gathered.

The bookshop was in the oldest part of town, where the Vienna Synagogue is – the only synagogue to survive WWII.  I called in and later talked to one of the rabbis there.  There seems to be quite a lot of bi-lateral and tri-lateral (Abrahamic) interreligious discussion – mainly theological – taking place amongst leaders, but I didn’t hear about anything that involved lay people, or the general public, in getting to know one another and enjoying each other’s company.

The historical trail in Leopoldstadt took me past a lot of buildings that just aren’t there any more.  There were brass memorial plates sunk into the pavement which seemed a bit odd – plaques are usually on the walls.  I was told that to put anything on the walls, it would be necessary to get the permission of everyone living in the new building – and that was highly unlikely, even now.

So I walked around, trying to spot the brass in the concrete and trying to imagine the Turkish Temple (a glorious Middle Eastern style synagogue – the Sephardic Jews had Ottoman citizenship and they celebrated the birthday of the Sultan and the Austrian Emperor on the same day each year) where a bland block of flats now stands.

Massive pillars showing the size of the facade of the destroyed Leopoldstadt Temple - there were nearly 50 synagogues in Vienna before WWII and only one survived

The sheer numbers, the viciousness of the attacks (both the organised and the “wild”) and the destruction of an ordered and sophisticated way of life still deadens the senses when you imagine what it must have been like – both for the Jews and for their persecutors.

Plaque (the only one I found that wasn't on the ground) showing where the huge Leopoldstadt Temple was

It certainly peps up a determination to be on the look-out for early signs of anything similar happening today.  Having only recently visited Pakistan and heard about the violence towards religious minorities there, it gave me an extra nudge towards positive action.

Vienna, with all its music, art, philosophy – it seems impossible and no wonder nobody foresaw what was about to happen.  Even now, Vienna’s tourist board website doesn’t mention what happened to the Turkish Temple in its press release on an upcoming exhibition.  There’s a strange emptiness surrounding the whole subject.

I finished the day in a tiny kosher restaurant, Milk & Honey, with a plate of delicious fresh fish and fine company.  An American mother seemed to be encouraging her two sons (in their 20s?) to swap Facebook details with the waitress.  My children wouldn’t have put up with that, but there was a light-hearted and warm atmosphere and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re on messaging terms by now.

The next day I was lucky to meet up with Elaine from Women Without Borders – but more of that later.

Menus and history

Veal seems to be a regular on the menus here.  I”ve been trying to get the simplest possible Bosnian or Balkan time-line together which goes something like Illyrian and other tribes, Greeks, Romans (especially on west side), Byzantium and then the split of the Roman Empire which meant the west of this area looked to Rome and the east to Constantinople.  Then Slavs from the northeast (which eventually formed two groups, Croats and Serbs), Ottomans from the south, and much later the Austro-Hungarians from the north.  Then WWI (not unrelated), then WWII, then Tito, then the war and then the Dayton agreement. I”m still not sure how the Russians come into the picture – someone please put me right.  There are no samovars on street corners as there are in Iran.  But I wonder whether veal came south with the Austro-Hungarians?