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Published: July 13th 2015
Sunday Lunch
At the beer gardenFor several years in a row various organizations have determined that Vienna is apparently the most livable city in the world based on factors such as greenery, infrastructure, social security net, and safety. It is also a city where in surveys almost 40% of the population is either the child of an immigrant or an immigrant. In less than one day at various stops in cafes and shops we have encountered waiters and salespeople who hail variously from Montenegro, Serbia, Spain, and Poland. The reason I can report this fact is because my father has no compunction in asking people where they hail from and then, when possible, speaking to them in any combination of either German, Polish, or Spanish before going to English (and in an English whose accent is from I don't know what country - but this is an old story whenever he is around non-native English speakers and is speaking English).
My father's side of the family has an intimate connection to Vienna. His father, my grandfather, Filip (Phillip) Tauber, attended what would now be part of a division of the Global Business and Trade Department at the University of Vienna, sometime between 1916 and 1920,
A Little Night Music
At the cafe in the city park before returning to his home in Lemberg/Lwow, to study law at the Polish university there. My great grandfather, Adolph Tauber, was a grain merchant and so perhaps wanted his eldest son to be well versed in the intricacies of the international grain business. I never had a chance to speak with my grandfather about his experience in Vienna at that tumultuous time. But I asked our tour guide if she knew anything about the history of higher education in Vienna and briefly explained why I was interested. She didn't, but she asked me if I was Jewish. I said yes and she proceeded to explain that in all likelihood my grandfather lived in the second district of Vienna since that was where most of the Jews lived and where he probably would have been most comfortable. Even today it apparently is the place where any Jews who do still live in Vienna continue to reside, according to the guide.
The tour today, mostly with our group but then with an added independent excursion to the Freud family home and office at 19 Bergstrasse (now the Freud Museum) was an illuminating view of the complex ways that this city has
Gustav Klimt
Woman in Gold above my hotel bed! so powerfully shaped and influenced modernity - for better and worse and everything in the middle. How do we, living at the start of the 21st century, make sense of the amazing contributions to music, art, theater, film, science, and the the excavation of the subconscious that this city gave birth to and nurtured (much by its Jewish residents)
and also make sense of the depths of depravity and evil which it equally gave birth to and nurtured? In order to leave Vienna with his library and emigrate to London in 1938 Freud forked over the equivalent of 200,000 Euros to the Viennese government. At least he got out, dying a year later in exile.
Anthropologists possess a much more sophisticated understanding of the processes that are involved in how culture develops in any society than I ever could. But the history of this city seems to strike me as a fascinating case study, even today. Case in point: the antisemitic mayor of Vienna whom I referred to in my post about Budapest/Judapest - Karl Lueger - was the very man Hitler credited in Mein Kampf with educating him about the perfidy of then Jews. Lueger also helped put
in place the first modern infrastructure of Vienna, a city that in his time was chock full of Jews well-off and poor, merchants and bankers, writers and musicians, assimilated and traditional, immigrants and natives. Yet even all these years after we continue to confront the nefarious and diabolical consequences of Lueger's influence on world history, there is still a major thoroughfare in his name in Vienna today (see the photograph). As we passed by the Dr. Karl Lueger Platz street sign on the tour, the guide said nothing, instead pointing out on the opposite side of the street the gardens with the magnificent statue of one of Vienna's great musicians. As Virginia Woolf wrote in one of her letters (and what Freud must have written, too), what we choose not to say (or write) is sometimes more significant than what we do say.
Tomorrow we will take a day trip to nearby Bratislava, in Slovakia, just across the border. It, too, was once a major Jewish center.
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Emily Katz
non-member comment
visiting Central Europe
I'm especially enjoying reading about your travels in Central Europe, Sarah. Thad and I had much the same itinerary back in the summer of 1998, when we spent about three months traveling in Central/Eastern Europe. We dubbed our trip the "defunct Jewish cemeteries of Central Europe" tour. We did hit a lot of derelict Jewish cemeteries... let me know if you'd like any suggestions in that department. :)