Our final lecture. Kathy brought us up to current from World War II. We talked a great deal about post WWII Europe, especially the occupation by the Russians. Turned out the Russians were sometimes worse than the Germans. Obviously they didn’t persecute individual groups such as Jews, but they raped the women and plundered the men wherever they occupied. Many Austrians and Germans tried their best to flee to the side of the country occupied by Americans. We were much nicer, I guess. Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four quadrants, each policed by the US, UK, France, or the Soviet Union. Kathy also told us some of the stories that her mother had told her about growing up in post-WWII Berlin. Her mother and grandmother lived in the Russian quarter, which was treated just as horribly as the Soviet-occupied quarter in Vienna. Kathy’s mother narrowly escaped rape a few times. Some of the stories were scary. Some were also funny, like the time a Russian soldier came to her house leading a cow on a rope. He knocked on the door, held out the rope to Kathy’s grandmother, and said, “Vodka.” He was trying to trade the cow, which he’d probably stolen from some peasant in the countryside, for vodka. But Kathy’s grandmother had no vodka, so the Russian went away to try the next house.
After lecture my friends were going to visit the Kaisergruft, the crypt containing the sarcophagi of the imperial family. As related above (or below I guess, since the blog site does it that way), I’ve already visited the Gruft and received the tutelage of Dom Ambros, so I elected to do the Karlskirche instead.
Karlskirche, which can be translated “St. Charles’s Church,” was commissioned in 1713 after Vienna’s last plague epidemic. The name serves a dual purpose. The church is dedicated to Charles of Borromeo, one of the plague saints, in thanks for Vienna surviving the plague and to ward off more, I guess. It was commissioned by Emperor Karl VI, who probably chose Charles of Borromeo out of the many, many plague saints because they shared a name; thus the magnificent structure bears Karl VI’s name as well. It was built by the famous Austrian architects, the Fischer von Erlachs, father and son. The distinctive characteristics of the church are the two Roman columns in front, which spiraling friezes going around them and telling a story. They recall the similar columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome. After one pays one’s €4 student admission fee, you can view the magnificent church, which is very nice and baroque inside. Apparently you can get in for free during Sunday mass, but I overslept when my group was going to go and I think they decided to go elsewhere anyway. But, they’ve got a lift and elevator with which you can go to the very top of Karlkirche, up at the top of the dome, where you are very high and can view the city. Unfortunately hey have this latticed screen thing outside the windows, so it’s very difficult to get good photos. However, it was nice and I stayed up there for a good while before returning to the streets.
After Karlskirche I tried to find the statue of Kulczycki, who opened the first Viennese coffee house, “Hof zur Blauen Flasche” (House of the Blue Bottle) after the Turks invaded and left and the Viennese discovered coffee and its uses. Kathy said there’s reputed to be a statue of the man on Kolschitzkygasse. I went to this street and searched and searched but could not find the statue. After this I went to Café Landtmann, which was recommended to me by Dom Ambros. I tried a “Türkischer,” a coffee which is made with the grounds in it and not strained at all. It was interesting. I won’t order it again, but I’m glad I tried it. When you drink it you can definitely taste that it’s not all liquid, but has some grounds too. So it’s very thick, and at the bottom of the cup there is a kind of sludge of wet coffee grounds. It was served with a piece of Turkish delight.
The class went to see The Third Man, a film about post-WWII Vienna and the quadruple occupation, but I got there too late and didn’t see it. Later that night we went back to Praterdom, the huge club to which I’d been once before. My friend Richard, who for the record is the nicest, most polite person I’ve ever met, was at first not admitted by the security. We had to go rescue him. Apparently the shirt he was wearing was misinterpreted as neo-Nazi. I guess the cut of the shirt, which was a nice white polo, was associated with neo-Nazis, as well as this kind of leaf symbol that was on the breast. That was just the company logo though. In any case, Richard is definitely not a neo-Nazi. The shirt is an expensive designer item in the States. It is pure coincidence that it shared characteristics with something often worn by neo-Nazis. An interesting experience. In any case I’m glad that the Viennese don’t take kindly to neo-Nazis. In the club there was this farm-themed dance floor where we danced to “Cotton-eye Joe.” You know, “where do you come from, where do you go, where do you come from, Cotton-eye Joe?” Definitely not what you’d expect from a Viennese club!
We stayed out ‘til 2 in the morning, and the U-Bahn only runs until midnight, so we got a cab home. After much scouting around at all the taxi drivers and their prices, one guy agreed to take us home for a flat rate of €15. That was the best we’d found after 10 or so taxis, so we took him up. On the way he was playing a radio station with some American music. I had a conversation with him, in German I’m proud to say, about music in Vienna. He said all the new, popular music that they play on the radio in Vienna (and I suspect everywhere else in Europe, based on my experiences in other cities and countries) is English-language, even when the artists that sing them aren’t necessarily native English speakers. All the new artists sing in English. I guess it’s the new international language in Europe, which is why whenever a sign is in two languages in Europe, one of them is almost always English. I think the music thing is both caused by and contributes to young Europeans learning English. I think they’re mostly required to learn English in school, but I also think they want to because things like all the new hip young people music being sung in English. Lots of advertisements and things like that that I’ve seen which were directed at young people used English phrases, though. Though I will say that after Cotton-eye Joe, they played a song in German. I didn’t catch it all, but it was something about the cares of the world passing you by, I think. In any case all the Austrians in the room went NUTS when it started playing, and they all sang along and started dancing jubilantly. Whatever it was, it’s a really popular song there, and it seems to have pleased the Austrians more than the English language, mostly American songs.
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