Welcome to the walk-in-vienna blog. This is already the second post. Boy, how time flies! Did you know that this is exactly what the church clock at Vienna's central cemetery tells us. Literally. Where other clocks have numbers that one has letters that spell out: "T-e-m-p-u-s F-u-g-i-t" - Time flies. So it is official. In latin.
Last week we went way back to prehistoric times to understand the ultimate causes why Vienna always ranks No.1 for the most liveable city. Heaps of time flew by since then. Many generations of happy Viennese enjoying their No.1 living conditions. Last time I mentioned the stone-age people from the linear pottery culture. Would you have known that stone-age people made pottery. One would assume that stone-age people used, well, stones. One has to. I did. But truth be told, I didn't think too much about that before last week. Probably it is because they were Neo-Lithic stone age people. Don't worry I leave the pin from last week in all the pottery.
But did you know that we have lots of other neo-styles here in Vienna? Especially on Ringstrasse. That's called historicism and it was totally en-vogue in the 19th century. We have Neo-Baroque, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Romanesque and all mixtures of these. Vienna is full of that because much of old Vienna was destroyed to make way for this hipper styles in the 19th century. Like the old city fortification which stood where now Ringstrasse is - the "Boulevard of Historicism".
However, despite all those neo-styles they didn't build in Neo-Lithic at the time. A shame. Think about it. How cool and avantgarde would that be! A Palais on Ringstrasse looking like a giant cave. Or like a lime-stone cliff with cave entrances. Like Wardsia in Georgia. I think it would be great. There is a fair chance that I am the only one who would find that great, I guess. But I also like the Hundertwasserhaus. Many people don't, actually. How can you not like a house abounding with fun colors and shapes and ornament and built-in trees! Built in trees! I wouldn't mind a whole boulevard of Hundertwasser houses. Some of which maybe even in the neolithic style. Why not? In that sense I am a rather atypical representative of the indiginous population. The Viennese are notoriously hard to please with new buildings. About every building on Ringstrasse was heavily criticised. In the Parliament one couldn't see anything, in the City Hall one couldn't hear anything and in the Imperial Theatre one couldn't hear or see anything. Or so it was said, naggingly. And the opera was the "Königgrätz of architecture". A bit much, considering that Königgrätz was the decisive defeat of the Austrians by the Prussians with almost 10000 dead. But some of all that criticism surely was justified because the Imperial theatre was completely overhauled only ten years after it was built. Needless to say that the actors dreaded the new building. Besides a general healthy suspiciousness of everything new, they especially disliked it because it was so huge compared to the old cozy stage that was directly attached to the Imperial Palace. Maybe therefore they developed the "Burgtheater-Deutsch" which had two features: loud and clear! Boy it's great that nowadays the actors have these small microphones! I seriously doubt though that these are "Wolter-proof". The famous diva Charlotte Wolter had a cry so bloodcurdling that people flocked to the theatre just to hear that! They even made a phonograph recording of her cry around the time when also Franz-Josef was recorded for the first time. That's how important she was. She was not the emperors girlfriend though. That was a different actress and a topic worthy of an own blog-post, so let's put a pin in it.
Back to the "lithic" aspect of Ringstrasse, the stones.
Some of them are natural stones, lime stone mostly, grown in the sea I was mentioning last time. Most of them were bricks, also made from millions of years worth of sedimentation. It was only a matter of time until someone got the idea to mold all that sediments into something new that we now call Ringstrasse. The Lord Of The Bricks was Baron Drasche. He must have woken up everyday with a smile on his lips and a song in his heart. Imagine what glorious times that were if you happened to be in the brick business back then. For 50+ years Vienna was a huge construction site. Golden Times! However, if you were not on the owning and commissioning but on the actual building end of all that glory, things looked a bit less glorious. As worker you probably didn't have so much song in your heart than dust in your lung. And a good chance of tuberculosis, which was even called the "Viennese disease". It was rampant. Around 1900 20-25% of all deaths were due to this disease. In the blue-collar districts the numbers were even higher. "Nasty, brutish and short" (©Thomas Hobbes) comes to mind when thinking of the life of the working class in these times. Baron Drasche even installed the "truck system" in which workers were not paid in real money but in "company money". Merle Travis described that in his song "16 tons" - you owed your soul to the company store - which was more expensive and had worse quality than normal stores. That's how it was done back then. A doctor learned of these conditions, investigated, wrote essays, tried to help and eventually became the head of the Social Democratic Party, who did a lot after WW1 to better the conditions for the workers. The doctor was Victor Adler and he was the landlord of another Doctor who lived in Berggasse 19. The address sounds familiar? Yes that other Doctor was Sigmund Freud. Everything connects to everything else in Vienna. And now it becomes clear why Dr. Freud had to discover the unconscious in Vienna. It's all about sedimentation!
Tempus fugit - time to wrap it up for this week. But let me mention just one other thing, because it is so intriguing, and infectious diseases and how they shape the world is such a hot topic these days. Did you know that tuberculosis and syphilis, in a sense, were proximate causes for WW1? But, no, that takes us too far this time. Let's put a pin in it.
Thanks for stopping by and see you next week!
Cheers, Max
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