Quick, name the Wiener capital of the world! Unless you skipped the title of this piece, you should know the answer: Vienna! Wiener (pronounced “VEE-ner”) means “Viennese” or “of Vienna” in German. Thus, in Vienna, wieners abound!
There’s the Wiener Staatsoper, (the State Opera of Vienna) the Wiener Riesenrad, (the Giant Ferris Wheel of Vienna) the Wiener Sängerknaben, (the Boys Choir of Vienna) and the famous, but misunderstood, wienerschnitzel. Despite what the hot dog restaurant chain says, wienerschnitzel is not a sausage. (Frankly, I wish it were.) The real wienerschnitzel is considered the national dish of Austria. It is a breaded pork cutlet that looks suspiciously like the chicken-fried steak I can get in any roadside diner in America. But, hey, who am I to judge?
The recipe for wienerschnitzel is surprisingly simple. Take one, or more, pork cutlets. Lay them across the nearest freeway. Wait until one thousand cars and/or trucks have run over them (20-30 minutes.) Scrape the cutlets off the pavement and bread them thoroughly. Deep fry them until they cry, “Nicht schiesen!” (Don’t shoot!) and then serve them to an American tourist with side crap the locals won’t eat. Wunderbar!
Incidentally, you might just want to order the hot dog. German for “hot dog” is frankfurter.
Vienna has been the capital of Austria (the Empire and the Republic) since the early 1800’s when Napoleon was busy trying to conquer Europe. It is also the second-largest German-speaking city in the world, after Berlin. Not that cities can speak any language. They mostly just sit there, producing traffic and collecting taxes.
Sigmund Freud invented psychiatry in Vienna. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schubert, Liszt, and Haydn all created their greatest works there. Johann Strauss I and Johann Strauss II, father and son, composed some of the most famous dance music in history, in Vienna. The kid, Joe Jr. as he was known around town, was acclaimed as “The Waltz King” because he knocked out a waltz or a polka practically every day for fifty years. (He must have owned the only accordion factory in Austria.) He composed one of the most popular operettas of all time, Die Fledermaus (The Bat), and the two greatest waltzes, The Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods. Without Strauss’ music, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey might have been as memorable as Caddyshack 3.
Please note (get it?) the Wiener Strauss’ were not related to the German opera composer, Richard Strauss, who also lived and worked in Vienna about a century later. Tough to keep those musical Strauss’ straight.
Regal Vienna has always been known as a center for radical socialism. In 1913, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Tito all lived in the same neighborhood in Vienna. At night, they frequented many of the same coffeehouses after attending daytime courses at the renowned Institute of Mass Murder.
Many people are under the impression that Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Vienna. The Governator is Austrian but he was born in Thal, a tiny village on the outskirts of Graz which is 120 miles southwest of Vienna. Thal is the home of 2,600 people and a really cool parish church, St. Jacob’s. Interestingly, Arnold has appeared in almost 50 movies but he has never performed in his native language. A few film critics and many California voters claim he has never performed in English, either. Again, who am I to judge?
While we’re on the subject of movies, I should mention one of my favorite movies, The Third Man. When I was a freshman in college, I had a habit of dropping into one of the lecture halls on campus for the weekly cinema offering. One night they were showing an old black-and-white movie from 1949, The Third Man. What I saw astonished me. I had never seen light and darkness used so brilliantly. Director Carol Reed made bombed out buildings and urban sewers into places of great mystery and beauty. And a still-young Orson Welles made one of the most celebrated entrances in movie history. The film was made on location in Vienna and I was instantly smitten with the place.
Graham Greene, a guy who should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote the screenplay for The Third Man but the most famous lines of the movie were actually written by Welles himself. His character, Harry Lime, says to his naïve friend, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton):
“Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”
Vienna was settled around 500 B.C. by the Celtic people. Not a heckuva lot is known about the early Celts except they ended up running pubs in Ireland and Wales and playing basketball in Boston. Later, the Germans settled in Vienna and they have been speaking deutsche there ever since.
In 976, Leopold I established the Babenberg empire in Vienna. In 1440, the Babenbergs were evicted by the German Hapsburgs who established Vienna as a center of science, fine arts, and exceptional cuisine, if you consider a plate of Wiener Schnitzel fine dining. Vienna also became the center of European Christianity, that is, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire.
This pissed off the leading Muslims of the day, the Ottoman Turks, who made several attempts to eradicate the Christian capital. In 1529, the Ottoman armies, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, assaulted Vienna. The Ottomans failed so miserably they retreated to Istanbul for more than a century and a half. By 1683, however, those irrepressible Turks were back, and this time they meant business. They might have won, too, except they hadn’t counted on the Poles, under King John III Sobieski, reinforcing the German army in Vienna. The surprised Muslims didn’t know what hit them. So, think about that, the Polish army saved Vienna, the Germans, Christianity, and Western Civilization, and what did the Poles get in return? Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
After the Turks left, Vienna spent several centuries as the designated capital of many hyphenated empires, Austro-German, Austro-Franco, Austro-Hungary, Austro-Porosis. (Alliances and hyphenations were based mostly on who your in-laws were.) Name any geographic combination and, chances are, Vienna was the capital of it. In 1914, Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand made a diplomatic side trip to Sarajevo, Serbia, and was gunned down by a young Serbian anarchist. Immediately, the nations of Europe took sides and World War I was on! What else could you have expected when so many in-laws were involved?
After World War I, Austria was de-hyphenated into the independent Republic of Austria. That lasted about 20 years until Hitler annexed Vienna in 1939. The Nazis holed up Vienna until April, 1945, when the Allies crushed them in an 11-day offensive that left the city in ruins. The Soviets took control of Vienna but agreed to sub-divide it into zones administered by the Americans, the Brits, the French, and the Russians. Vienna almost became another Berlin but apparently Joe Stalin had a soft spot in his heart for his old neighborhood. In 1955, the Soviets finally left eastern Austria, and Vienna has been free ever since. Wunderbar!
Cool Places in Vienna
Wiener Riesenrad, the giant Ferris Wheel featured in The Third Man. It was constructed by a British team of engineers headed by Lieutenant Walter Bassett in 1897. It was damaged in the 1945 Allied assault on Vienna but it’s still working.
Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the Vienna Zoo located on the grounds of the famous Schönbrunn Palace. Founded in 1752 as the menagerie of Emperor Francis, it is the oldest zoo in the world. And it has pandas!
Belvedere, a stunning royal complex consisting of the Upper and Lower Palaces, stables, Baroque gardens, and something called the Orangerie. Jeez Louise! People actually lived in places like this?
Spanische Hofreitschule, the Spanish Riding School, featuring the Royal Lipizzan stallions. When I was a kid, my parents took me to see the Lipizzaners at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. They were the cleanest horses I have ever seen.
Stephansplatz, the central square of Vienna with St. Stephens Cathedral (where Antonio Vivaldi was memorialized in 1741) and the bizarro building, the Haas Haus. Don’t stand in one place too long because the birds tend to create their own splatz.
Wiener Staatsoper, the State Opera of Vienna. Between 50 and 60 different operas are staged here every year, 300 annual performances. Every great conductor and opera singer since 1869 performed there. The current building is a reproduction of the one the Allies bombed in 1945. Sorry about that, but the show must go on!
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