Advertisement
Published: August 28th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Vienna 633
cool art exhibit inspired by the artist's own bone x-rays Tuesday, 8/26
We began the day with a class wrap-up of Mauthausen. It's a rather contentious issue even amongst my own class, so we ended up spending the entire class period discussing concentration camps and the Holocaust. We talked about the surrounding city, and the idea of what they did and didn't know during the war. My professor discussed life in a totalitarian state (like the Nazi regime) and how, historically, they are important to avoid because they're incredibly difficult to come out of. I'm supposed to discuss why and how the Holocaust happened, and who the perpetrators are. However, the answer to this question, the way I see it, is far to complicated to communicate in a travel blog. It becomes more and more evident to me that the Holocaust was a result of a multitude of economic and political factors. The reparations from WWI placed on Germany, the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler, the lack of people taking the time to question the absence of their neighbors, the need for corporations to take advantage of economical opportunities, and even the nature of humans under stress as revealed by the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments. Adolf Eichmann, in his Nuremberg
Vienna 635
enjoying my beer trial, claimed that he never killed anyone. Technically he never held the gun and pulled the trigger, but that rationale ignores his role in the upper echelons of the Nazi party. In the end, the blame goes to multiple sources. I was chatting with a classmate about genocides occurring today, and how it's not as easy to intervene as people seem to believe in hindsight. She brought up an interesting point however, saying that all the people she knows that are active in Darfur awareness are Jewish. As a Jew herself, she explained that, from a young age, Jewish children are taught to live life to the fullest in honor of their ancestors who could not. Similarly, the Jewish students active in genocide awareness today do it in honor of the victims of the Holocaust. This struck me for two reasons: the first being that I had never looked at it that way, and the second being that I had never been taught from a young age to live my life in honor of anyone before me. Most of my classmates felt they gained some perspective from the trip, and most expressed this as a new experience. My one classmate
found this odd, as it was a message she has known her whole life. I'm glad we got a chance to go back and talk about our trip, and the good discussion left me feeling like I got more out of it than I had initially thought. Once class was over, I knew I had a few mandatory things to do for the week, and wanted to see who else was heading in that direction. A classmate planned to see the Jewish Museum, the Sigmund Freud museum, and the Mozarthaus, so I tagged along with her. We grabbed lunch in the Jewish Museum's cafe, and then started our tour. The museum focused on Judaism as a religion and a community more than the Holocaust alone. I saw a large collection of various items used in services, including a dinosaur menorah. There was a huge art exhibit by Jewish artists, and a temporary display on Jewish athletic clubs. One room consisted of a center display with 21 holograms showing various aspects of the Jewish story in Vienna. I enjoyed the museum, and the holograms were a really neat way to display a history. We finished up at the museum, got on the U-bahn in the direction of the Freud museum, but stopped at a cafe for a caffeine pick-me-up. We ended up chatting over our coffee, and before we knew it we only had a half hour left for the Freud musuem before it closed. We decided to cut that out of the day, and just head to Mozarthaus. We got there to be told that the museum was closing an hour early, and we only had 40 minutes to complete an hour-long audioguide tour. A veteran at audioguides (ie. knowing that I don't always pay attention) we assured the lady that 40 minutes would be sufficient. We were only interested in seeing Mozart's Freemason stuff and the apartment he lived in. Audioguides are cool for being able to explain exhibits to you in your choice language, but they get monotonous and tend to drag on, leaving me to feel like I have a low attention span whenever I am holding one. The first floor of the museum was the actual apartment Mozart lived in during the most prosperous phase of his career. After seeing what we wanted to, we were shuffled out the door by the museum staff. We decided to then go check out a wine garden or beer garden, and realized neither of us had been to the microbrewery in town famous for its hemp beer and chili beer. We grabbed our maps and headed to the brewery. The restaurant didn't have a sampler (which is stupid) but I picked a few to try in small glasses. I had the hemp beer, which tasted quite fruity, and the chili beer, which was actually spicy enough that I was glad my glass was small. We payed up and headed home.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.134s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.079s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb