Peace-Yard

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As Germanophiles know, the German language often builds words by mushing together several small words into one big long word. Students of German are frequently advised to tackle intimidatingly long German words by looking for smaller pieces that might themselves be words the student can recognize. For this reason, I found it very curious that the German word for cemetery is "Friedhof", because I am all-too-well acquainted with a Bahnhof, which means train station, and all its many variations (Hauptbahnhof, U-Bahnhof, Busbahnhof, Flughafenbahnhof, and so on). I couldn't figure out what a cemetery would have in common with a train station to make them both "-hof", so I looked it up. It turns out Hof means "yard" or "court", so a train station is a "rail-yard", and hey, we have those in English too. And Greg pointed out that "Friede" means "peace", so a cemetery in German is literally a "peace-yard"!

The Wiener Zentralfriedhof (Vienna Central Cemetery) is a very busy, yet rather peaceful peace-yard. It is close to the center of Vienna city, easy to access, quite pretty to look at, and thanks to a number of strategic re-interments over the years, now contains the graves of a substantial number of Vienna's historically significant persons. For this reason, it's often a destination for tourists, and indeed made it high on our list of sights to see: Salieri, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, the Strausses, Czerny, Gluck, and Schönberg are all buried there, and, pragmatically, a memorial to Mozart also stands in the "Great Composers" section alongside them (Mozart himself was buried in an anonymous mass grave in the Friedhof St. Marx, nearby, and his exact resting place is therefore not precisely known; otherwise I suspect he'd've been uprooted and moved here by now). Of interest to myself, as well, is the Slightly Less Great Viennese Composer and 1980s pop star Falco, who is buried here (in a Slightly Less Great section).

As usual for me, I did an intensive amount of planning and preparing for our trip to the Zentralfriedhof, and as is also usual for me, the preparing wasn't quite enough and wasn't quite right, so our visit was in some ways fatiguing and frustrating, mostly avoidably.

Getting to the Zentralfriedhof was easy. We traveled to the district of Simmering by U-Bahn (subway), then took the Straßenbahn (tram) from the Simmeringer Bahnhof (train station) down the Simmeringer Hauptstraße (literally, Main Street). The Zentralfriedhof is unbelievably huge, and the Hauptstraße runs along one long border, with Tor (gate) 1, 2 and 3 so far apart from each other that they have their own separate tram stops.

From the Friedhofspläne (cemetery maps) on the official Zentralfriedhof website, I knew that the cemetery was laid out geometrically around a cross- or flower-shaped center, and that Tor 2 was the main entrance leading directly to this center area. But I didn't print the Friedhofspläne, just tried to remember them, which caused two big problems: one, the geometric pattern doesn't align to the compass points at all, so it is "crooked" relative to all of our regular street maps (the maps only show the outline of the cemetery, not its internal pathways) and "upside down" relative to north, which I tried but failed to resolve in my head; and two, I totally misjudged the scale of the place.

It bears repeating: the Zentralfriedhof is unbelievably huge. I started to feel disoriented when we arrived at Tor 2 and I could see a huge church on the cemetery grounds. I had not noticed any church on the Friedhofspläne! At first I thought perhaps the church sat in the middle of the cross-/flower-shaped formation I remembered from the map, but as we got closer, it seemed much too large and much too far away to fit and I assumed the flower-shaped bit must lie between the main entrance and the church. But we couldn't find it. Looking at the Friedhofspläne now I can see that the church is in the center of the flower, which means the flower is at least 4-5 times larger than I thought it was, and that explains a lot as far as the hiking we did and lostness we felt.

A third problem we had, which was not my fault, was that although sections in the Friedhof are numbered and signed, we couldn't figure out any pattern to the numbering scheme; it seemed to confuse us both more than it helped us navigate.

Anyway, we managed first (after an initial wrong turn inside the main gate) to locate Salieri, who is buried along the outer wall of the Friedhof and nowhere near the Great Composers section; we were feeling particularly sympathetic to Herr Salieri having just re-watched Amadeus (hint: he didn't do any of that bad stuff), so we made a special effort to find him and pay our respects.

From Salieri's grave, we walked through a Russian section where all the graves were marked in Cyrillic and arranged around a cute onion-domed Orthodox chapel, toward the main event: Section 32C, the Great Composers section. No, I wasn't making that up, there really is one. I thought we got lost on the way, but I think now that we did take the most direct route and it was just a lot farther than I expected.

Section 32C is very lovely and unusually spacious, with mature trees shading the memorials and graves. It's more like a small park than a cemetery. The "big three" composers, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert (though curiously not Brahms) are thoughtfully arranged next to each other, with a green lawn in front where tourists queue up to take turns getting their postcard-perfect photograph. Winding our way through the rest of 32C, we could spot Particularly Great Composers at a distance by looking for little colorful plantings of pansies at their burial plots. We found Schönberg's must-see super-modernistic grave a few sections away.

After that, it was time to set out to find Falco in Section 40, which took a long time and a lot of walking in circles and several stops to rest and regroup. One unexpected find was a large section of WWII Soviet military graves, tucked just behind the church. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near Section 40. We finally found a signpost with arrows to a long list of numbered sections... but not 40... until, having walked into the middle of the road to examine the signpost up-close, I spotted a thoughtful citizen's hand-painted addition to the sign: "Gr. 40, Falco", with an arrow pointing the way!

We trudged on to Section 40 and I was not disappointed. Falco's grave is a cultural commentary in itself. On the one hand, he is shoehorned in a rather ordinary cemetery section, where graves look like graves, shade trees are few, and nearby fields of dead, brown grass stretch away in the distance waiting for future occupants (the Wiener Zentralfriedhof is by no means full). On the other hand, where Great Composers were identifiable by their officially-maintained modest plantings of pansies and not much else, Falco's grave was overflowing with tokens from his fans: fresh flowers, so many candles that a little shelter had been built to keep their flames covered, handpainted rocks, and printed and handwritten notes. And the grave itself has not just a headstone, but a 2m (6') piece of glass with a life-size silkscreened image of Falco! (I had hoped this would be even more giant and more visible from farther away to help us find it, but the transparent glass with the black-and-white screened image blends in reasonably well with its surroundings, which is probably appreciated by its neighbors.) All this for a pop star who died 10 years ago and hadn't had a hit for 10 years before that? Even I was surprised, considering the number of tourists who come to visit the Great Composers, to see Falco getting so much more attention than they. Greg, unconcerned, said, "oh, sure, but give him 300 years and see how he does then".

By this time, we were more-or-less closer to Tor 3 and hiked there to catch the Straßenbahn back to the city. The sun was out! It was warm and gorgeous! We were sunburned! But, we'd been schlepping our heavy jackets and were exhausted from being lost and frustrated and tired in the Friedhof for hours. We made our way to the Karlsplatz, then down the street to the Wieden-Bräu, a brewery/pub Greg had researched ahead of time, serving traditional Viennese cuisine and tasty Bier (just guess that one)! It was nice to relax and refuel, and we were fortunate to stumble in during happy hour so our Biere were half-price.

After lunch, we visited the Karlskirche, a beautiful church which charges admission to its nave. With some sort of restoration project going on, much of the interior is covered by scaffolding, and, bizarrely, a scaffolded elevator sits right in the middle of the pews to carry admission-paying visitors up to the dome. We skipped that. The rest of the church was underwhelming, but it appears to be an excellent destination for free (I think) musical concerts in the evenings. The best part of our visit was that I happened to pick up a delightful little propaganda pamphlet about Charles I, a.k.a. Blessed Charles, the last Emperor of Austria and last King of Hungary, the last of the ruling Habsburg monarchs, who was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004. The pamphlet describes Charles I, whom we had never heard of and who is not memorialized anywhere else in his capital city of Vienna, in glowing terms as a devout, wise and dedicated monarch. Methinks the church doth protest too much, Greg and I both agreed!

Rick Steves describes Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1916 as a "dinosaur", but, as I learned later, Charles I seemed to take clinging to the past to a new level. He was determined to preserve his reign, refusing to abdicate even after the breakup and establishment of democratic governments in newly-independent Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in 1918 following WWI rendered him irrelevant. In 1919, he was exiled from Austria for refusing to renounce his claims to the throne; Hungary took similar steps in 1921. Even his remains are exiled, on the Portuguese island of Madeira where he died in 1922. There's no indication that he was a bad ruler; he just didn't understand that his Empire's time was up.

But at the Karlskirche, the church that shares Charles I's name, he is remembered fondly and venerated, and the pamphlet ends (kind of like a Chick tract) by suggesting language the reader might use to pray to Blessed Charles for intercession (it's a Catholic thing). What a find! I would never have known about Charles I and would not have bothered to look up all the history I just typed had it not been for this passionate little pamphlet.

We hiked through a traffic jam and a flotilla of tour buses to get a glimpse of the Art Nouveau-style Secession Building near the Karlsplatz, but were too tired to go inside. We wrapped up the day by confirming our guidebook's EuroTravelTipp: the Karlsplatz U-Bahn station is rather sketchy, and its public toilets even more so (clean enough, but filled with colorful people engaged in interesting activities), and thus it is best used by tourists for a hasty train transfer and not much else.

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Photos

Greg and Salieri
Poor Salieri took a beating in Amadeus, and he doesn't even get to share F. Murray Abraham's Oscar.

Great Composers
Thoughtfully arranged for your tourist-photo-taking convenience.

Greg and Schönberg
Even in death, Schönberg is more modern than you.

Soviet WWII section
I think both the Soviets and the western Allies like to make very certain central Europe remembers their sacrifices.

This way to Falco!
Someone else understands which graves are REALLY important to visit.

Falco!
The star behind "Rock Me Amadeus" is well-loved 20+ years later.

Fiaker goulasch
I am not sure how horse-carriage drivers came up with this, but it was tasty.

Karlskirche
My postcard shot.

Karlskirche scaffolding
Most of the interior views were like this.

Secession Stau
A jam of tour buses blocks the Secession Building, which, yes, has a (temporary) mustache for some reason.