Austrian Capital Preserves Imperial Ambience

By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: January 26, 2010 (Issue # 1542)

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times A sphinx in the Belvedere Gardens which surround two 18th-century palaces in Vienna. The palaces now house art museums.

It’s midnight at the Vienna Airport Hotel. A group of wet, disheveled and strange-looking people, one with his head covered with a towel, walking through the lobby looks a little out of place in the quiet setting. But when several tired Russian business journalists try to head to their rooms, they are stopped by a short but muscular man with a mustache.

“Don’t move! Stay where you are!” the man hisses, while starting to assume what appears to be a martial arts combat stance, but after the mysterious group disappears down a corridor, he follows them briskly. It takes a while to dawn on one of the shocked journalists that the men were in fact Metallica, whose bodyguard had unwisely mistaken the reporters for fans seeking autographs.

“Metallica Performed a Black Mass in Vienna,” read the headline in Osterreich (“Austria,”) the free daily local newspaper picked up the next morning, preceding a review of the previous night’s stadium concert where the metal band had played to thousands of Austrian fans — an effort that might have affected its personnel’s thought processes.

Osterreich is the rival to Heute (“Today;”) both papers are widely available all over the city, including on the Vienna Metro (U-Bahn,) where they are frequently left behind.

The metro, which has 76 stations, was officially opened in 1898, electrified in 1925 and has been modernized since 1976. A single-journey ticket for the metro or any other public transport costs 1.70 euros, or two euros if bought onboard the bus or tram.

The Vienna Metro has proven popular with suicides, although a scientific report claimed that the introduction of media guidelines regarding the reporting of suicides in 1987 led to a 75 percent decrease in the rate of subway suicides.

However, residents of Vienna say they do still happen, and that a metro announcement that a train has been delayed for technical reasons is generally interpreted as news of another despondent person choosing to end his or her life.

The metro is just one part of Vienna’s well-developed public transport network. Almost any destination in the city can by reached by metro, as well as by bus, train or tram. Vienna’s public transport company, Wiener Linien, operates five underground lines, 31 tram routes and 80 bus routes.

While the St. Petersburg authorities are gradually scaling back the city’s tram lines, claiming that trams hinder car traffic, a tram ride is a pleasant and convenient means of transport in Vienna and it does not seem like the city will ever reject it. Visitors can take the yellow Vienna Ring-Tram around the most beautiful parts of the city. A round trip takes 24 minutes and cost six euros (four euros for children.)

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times The St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the city center dominates the city’s skyline.

The trams run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7 p.m. in the summertime.) During tours, passengers are provided with information about the city’s sights via LCD screens and headphones. Seven languages, including English and Russian, are available.

The Vienna tram museum has 100 original vehicles on show, including a horse-drawn trolley dating from 1868 and a steam tram set from about 1885. Like the tram itself, its St. Petersburg counterpart, the Museum of Electric Transport of Vasilyevsky Ostrov is endangered due to plans to hand over its premises to a new hotel and other commercial buildings.

Vienna is similar to St. Petersburg in many ways, though there has been a greater effort to preserve historic buildings there than in the Russia’s northern capital in recent years, says one Russian resident who moved to Vienna from St. Petersburg.

The Austrian capital, whose historic center, with its architectural ensembles including Baroque castles and gardens, as well as the late-19th-century Ringstrasse lined with grand buildings, monuments and parks, is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, has also raised objections regarding its cultural heritage.

Last year, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee asked the Austrian authorities to halt the construction of the 100-meter-tall building of the Vienna Central Train Station project. Although the planned height had been reduced to 88 meters early last year, the committee warned that it would protrude above the trees on one side of the Belvedere Palace Park and urged the authorities to conduct a comprehensive visual impact assessment of the entire project.

Just 56 kilometers away from Bratislava in the former Czechoslovakia, Vienna was the West’s reluctant frontier, facing the Iron Curtain directly. During the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, Austrian politicians avoided irritating the Kremlin, as the Soviets accumulated a tank force on the border, and Soviet aircraft violated Austrian air space.

Today, Vienna International Airport (Flughafen Wien) is the point that connects western and eastern Europe. With a network of 48 destinations in eastern Europe, Vienna ranks ahead of the significantly larger Frankfurt Airport, making it a viable international hub for travel to the region.

Vienna International Airport increased its range of eastern European destinations in 2008 to include Nizhny Novogorod and Sochi in Russia, although Kaliningrad was dropped from the flight schedule. From St. Petersburg and back, this journalist traveled on a small Austrian Arrows Fokker twin-engine jet, made in the Netherlands and not produced since Fokker went bankrupt in 1996.

Operated by Tyrolean Airways, an airline based in Innsbruck, Austria, flights take around two hours and 40 minutes, and include drinks and refreshment.

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times The famed Vienna Opera House was severely damaged in bombing during World War II.

Just across the street from the airport building, the NH Vienna Airport Hotel is likely to be convenient for visitors traveling to Vienna on business — like Metallica.

Both the airport and hotel offer plenty of space for meetings and conferences, including an eavesdropping-proof presidential conference room. The state-of-the-art City Airport Train (CAT) reaches the city in just 16 minutes and costs six euros. Cheaper buses are also available.

Despite its relatively high suicide rate, Vienna is one of the world’s most attractive cities in which to live — placed sixth in the world, according to a survey provided by Vienna Tourist Board.

Number one worldwide in quality of living (followed by Zurich and Geneva,) according to Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey (April 2009), Vienna mainly attracts middle-aged, educated and well-off visitors, the average being a 41-year-old with a monthly income of around 3,000 euros. The average visitor spends around 286 euros a day during his or her stay.

The Austrian capital is also ranked sixth worldwide in personal safety (behind Luxembourg, Bern, Geneva, Helsinki and Zurich,) according to Mercer’s 2008 Personal Safety Ranking, and the second cleanest city in Europe (after Riga in Latvia, surprising as it may be), according to IBAL (Irish Business Against Litter, 2007.)

During World War II, Vienna officially became part of “Greater” Germany after the 1938 Anschluss, when Austria was annexed to the German Third Reich by the Nazi regime. The city survived the Allied air force bombings and the Vienna Offensive, which was launched by the Soviet Third Ukrainian Front in order to capture the city and lasted for 10 days in April 1945.

The “Battle for Vienna” that left 17,000 Soviet soldiers dead was commemorated by the giant Red Army Monument (Heldendenkmal der Roten Armee), built by the Soviet army using the labor of POWs and locals on Schwarzenbergplatz in 1945. The memorial includes a triumphal arch and is dominated by the figure of a soldier with a Shpagin submachine gun on his chest. The soldier wears a golden helmet and holds a Soviet flag and a golden Soviet coat of arms.

In May 2007, at the height of the anti-Estonian campaign in Russia that followed Tallinn’s move of the Bronze Soldier monument from the city center to a military cemetery, Vienna was visited by Russia’s then-president Vladimir Putin, who explicitly thanked Austria for keeping the monument in place after the Soviet army went home in 1955.

However, the totalitarian-looking monument, on which is engraved the text of Stalin’s declaration congratulating the troops that took the city, has been seen as controversial in the decades that followed its erection. The offensive names it was given by local residents include “Looter’s Memorial” and “Memorial to the Unknown Rapist.”

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times Modern architecture is also a feature of the landscape in Vienna.

Post-war Vienna, which was then occupied and divided into five zones — four governed by one of each of the victorious Allies plus a jointly-administered international zone — was the location for the filming of “The Third Man,” the classic 1949 British film noir directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard.

Based on Graham Greene’s novella, the film is considered to give a highly accurate representation of Vienna during that period and could be used as a guide around Vienna.

Unsurprisingly, it is now the subject of a tour in which tourists are led around the places where shooting took place.

The film’s climax is a shootout in the city’s sewers, and a tour of the sewers is also available as part of the cult of “The Third Man,” starting from the star-shaped manhole cover on Karlsplatz/Esperantopark. There is also a Third Man Museum (Pressgasse 26), while the film itself can be watched at Burg Kino (Opernring 19).

Many historic buildings were destroyed during WWII, but extensive restoration work was conducted after the war, and the city has succeeded in preserving its character.

In the early 20th century, Vienna was home to all kinds of politicians, some of whom were rather ominous — a fact epitomized in an etching that surfaced last year and went to auction. Taken in Vienna in 1909, it allegedly shows the then-artist and future German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler playing chess with the then-political exile and future Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin. Many doubts have been expressed about whether it was really Lenin in the image, however.

Leon Trotsky spent seven years in the city from 1907 to 1914 hiding from the tsar and publishing Pravda (“Truth,”) the banned communist newspaper that was smuggled into Russia and whose name, to Trotsky’s dismay, was stolen by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1912.

Political protest traditions are very much alive in Vienna today. During a visit last year, a right-wing rally protesting the planned extension of a mosque and a left-wing counter-rally protesting the first took place simultaneously in close proximity of one another. As a result, the Ringstrasse, a circular road surrounding the Innere Stadt (Inner City) district, was closed, which led to major traffic jams in the city center.

Unlike St. Petersburg, it did not occur to the Vienna authorities to banish the protesters to the city’s outskirts, ban the rallies altogether or send riot police to thwart them. The group of visiting Russian journalists that happened to be on a tour bus at that time spent most of the tour sitting in jams, listening to local guide Anke’s passionate tales about one of Austria’s best-loved historical characters — Princess Sissi.

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times An open-air bus offering tours for visitors through the city center.

Known properly as Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Sissi’s life was full of both melodrama and rebellion against court conventions, which made her a heroine of many films and theatrical productions. Most famously she was represented in Romy Schneider’s film trilogy “Sissi” (1955,) “Sissi – The Young Empress” (1956) and “Sissi – The Fateful Years of the Empress” (1957), with a total running time of five hours.

Sissi’s life ended tragically if spectacularly — she died after being stabbed with a triangular file by the young anarchist Luigi Lucheni in 1898. For Lucheni, the murder represented propaganda of the deed, a philosophy advocating spreading beliefs through direct action. After Lucheni’s alleged suicide in a prison cell, parts of his body were preserved for scientific purposes.

Taking a bus tour might not be the best idea in the warmer seasons; due to the abundance of trees and bushes in the city, some buildings were hidden by the leaves, and Anke would repeatedly ask the visitors to believe that the invisible architectural objects she was talking about were also beautiful.

Vienna is famous for, among many other things, its coffee culture and cafes. Of dozens of traditional cafes scattered around the center, Cafe Hawelka (Dorotheergasse 6) is highly recommended.

Opened in 1939, it has provided a refuge for generations of artists, writers and musicians. Its specialty is Buchteln — sweet dumplings made of yeast dough, filled with jam and baked in the oven.

Vienna’s most famous dessert, however, is Sachertorte, a chocolate cake invented by Franz Sacher in 1832, which can be sampled at most cafes.

The staples of Austrian food — influenced by Hungarian, Czech, Jewish, and Italian cuisines — is Wiener Schnitzel with French fries and Burenwurst and a variety of sausages, all available everywhere, from top notch restaurants to street schnitzel stands. An interesting place in which to try traditional Austrian food is Zwolf-Apostelkeller (Twelve Apostles), a restaurant that has been located in medieval cellars since 1952.

Vienna’s popular drinks include a variety of wines and shnapps. Naturally, a shnapps museum also numbers among the city’s hundreds of museums. Called Old Vienna Schnapps Museum (Wilhelmstrasse 19-21,) it is still a functioning distillery where visitors can sample drinks such as Williams Pear Brandy, Wiener Blut Liquer or Absinthe Mata Hari.

Vienna’s beer industry includes a number of microbreweries and one large brewery, Ottakringer. Founded in 1837, its most popular brand is Ottakringer Helles, a light beer with an alcohol content of 5.2 percent. According to locals, the average price for half a liter of beer on tap is three-and-a-half euros, four euros is considered “expensive,” while five euros — the price at Airport NL’s hotel bar — is seen as over the top.

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times A narrow side street in the center of Vienna.

There are however plenty of less expensive, easy-going youth-oriented pubs with rock music in Vienna such as Pappala Pub (Wahringer Gurtel Stadtbahnbogen 157.)

HOW TO GET THERE

Directs flights to Vienna from Pulkovo 2 Terminal.

WHERE TO EAT

Zwolf-Apostelkeller (Twelve Apostles), Sonnenfelsgasse 3, 1010 Vienna, Tel.: +43-1-512 67 77. Traditional Austrian food and Viennese wines. 11 a.m.-midnight. www.zwoelf-apostelkeller.at

WHERE TO STAY

NH Vienna Airport (4 stars). Einfahrtsstrasse 1- 3, A - 1300 Wien/Flughafen. Tel. +43.1.701510. www.nh-hotels.com/nh/en/hotels/austria/vienna/nh-vienna-airport.html

The St. Petersburg Times was a guest of the Vienna International Airport, www.viennaairport.com