The morning lecture involved a discussion of Klüger and our Mauthausen experiences. I mentioned my opinions in the previous post. After class we ate at the Naschmarkt, always a fun, interesting experience. Then we hit the Jewish Museum. There were a lot of works of Jewish art, religious instruments, an exhibit on an Austrian Jewish composer named Ernst Toch who fled to the United States during WWII and composed Hollywood music, and some other things. I’ve always found Jewish culture, like Jewish food, to be a bit bland. But, to each his own. I’m glad I went to the museum.
After that we went to Stephansdom to tour the crypt. They have the hearts of the Habsburgs stored there. Some of the containers, for instance the one holding the heart of Maria Theresia, began leaking and had to be patched up and put in larger containers. Most interesting, I thought, were the mass graves from Vienna’s plague epidemics. One could peer in at rooms that were, literally, full of bones. Full of real human bones. It was quite creepy. In one little outlet The bones were all nicely stacked to conserve space, with the skulls staring deadly out from a wall of joints. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed photography, so I only got one bad picture that I snapped hastily when the guide wasn’t looking. Anyway, never been that close to that many real human bones before. Piles and hills of them. Vienna plague years. We can thank them for Karlskirche, I guess.
We then went to a Billa by Stephansplatz to get snacks. It had an escalator running between floors. That is the first time I have seen an escalator in a grocery store. Or a multiple-storey grocery store, for that matter.
After food we went to Mozarthaus. We debated whether to spend €7 on what was almost certain to be a cheesy tourist experience, but finally decided that we couldn’t face our friends when we told them we’d gone to Vienna but skipped the Mozarthaus. So we shelled out the Euros and went through what was indeed a cheesy tourist experience. We did however get to stand in the very room where he composed Le Nozze di Figaro, though, so there’s that. I also once again experienced a museum where they gave me the student price even though I didn’t have my student ID, probably because I could say “ich bin Student” and my similarly-aged friends had theirs. Viennese can be nice.
After the Mozarthaus we headed to the historic Café Central, where Leon Trotsky was reputed to have played chess with Lenin on a regular basis. So one might say the U.S.S.R. was born in that very room. Also I believe Freud and several other famous personages frequented the café. It was the gathering spot of Vienna’s intellectual elite, especially around 1900, I guess. Viennese coffee houses were referred to as “the penny university” because one could go there for coffee and learn from professors and intellectuals who held conversations about science and high culture there while getting a caffeine rush. Café Central was closed, however, and all of the intellectuals moved. It was reopened in the 80s and now serves mostly tourists. However, I find Viennese coffee houses to be beneficial for learning even today because not only is the coffee freaking delicious, but they have free daily newspapers. So one can go in and order a delicious coffee and read that day’s edition of a number of German, Austrian, and even American newspapers. There are also some Italian and French papers, I think, depending on where you go. The two English-language papers that are to be found in most coffee-houses in Vienna are the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times (when you go to nytimes.com in Austria, it automatically redirects you to the IHT website and you have to click a link to get the U.S. edition), and the Financial Times. I haven’t yet tried the FT because it sounds boring and economical and conservative and probably contains a lot about stocks. I’ve found my favorite Viennese paper to be Der Standard, the leftist paper. I’m going to follow it online to try to keep up my German.
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