Given the city’s twentieth-century history, it’s hardly surprising that the Viennese are as keen as anyone to continue plugging the good old days. This is a place, not unlike Berlin, which has had the misfortune of serving as a weather vane of European history. Modern anti-Semitism as a politically viable force was invented here, in front of Hitler’s very eyes, in the first decade of the century. It was the assassination of an arrogant Austrian archduke that started World War I, while the battles between Left and Right fought out in the streets of Vienna mirrored those in Berlin in the 1930s. The weekend Hitler enjoyed his greatest electoral victory in the Reichstag was the day the Austrians themselves invented Austro-fascism. In 1938, the country became the first victim of Nazi expansion, greeting the Führer with delirious enthusiasm. And after the war, for a decade, Vienna was divided, like Berlin, into French, American, British and Soviet sectors.
The visual scars from this turbulent history are few and far between – even Hitler’s sinister Flacktürme are confined to the suburbs – but the destruction of the city’s once enormous Jewish community is a wound that has proved harder to heal. Vienna’s Jewish intellectuals and capitalists were the driving force behind much of the city’s fin-de-siècle culture. Little surprise then, that the city has since struggled to live up to its glorious past achievements. After the war Vienna lost its cosmopolitan character and found itself stuck in a monocultural straightjacket. Since the end of the Cold War, however, this has begun to change, with the arrival of a second wave of immigrants from the former provinces of the old empire. Whether Vienna will learn to accept its new, multicultural identity remains to be seen.
For all its problems, Vienna is still an inspiring city to visit, with one of the world’s greatest art collections in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, world-class orchestras, and a superb architectural heritage. It’s also an eminently civilized place, clean, safe (for the most part) and peopled by a courteous population who do their best to live up to their reputation for Gemütlichkeit or 'cosiness'. And despite its ageing population, it’s also a city with a lively nightlife, of late-opening cafés and drinking holes. Even Vienna’s traditional restaurants, long famous for quantity over quality, have discovered innovative methods of cooking and presentation, and are now supplemented by a wide range of ethnic restaurants.
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