The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Austria:
Vienna
Vienna (Wien) is considered by its oh-so-fashionable residents to be der Nabel der Welt (literally, the belly button of the world). Outside the Nabel, however, Vienna is often written off as a living, breathing fossil, a wedding-cake city that once shared the spotlight with London, Paris, and Rome but has since slipped into peaceful obscurity. This longtime center of the Hapsburg Empire and the pet project of the medieval Babenberg dynasty does boast some magnificent baroque and Gothic architecture, yet the city is anything but a static collection of monuments. Even during Vienna's most stagnant days under Emperor Franz Joseph I, Viennese writers like Arthur Schnitzler were feeding voraciously on the city's corpse, producing works of death and decline using Vienna as their setting and metaphor.
Today, alongside imperial palaces and 12th-century cathedrals, you'll find Art Nouveau by Otto Wagner, controversial artistic interpretations by Hans Hollein, and crazy, environmentally conscious designs by Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The Vienna Opera House still plays to packed audiences, but the song could just as easily be an old blues tune performed by Natalie Cole as a Puccini aria. And in cafés where the likes of Trotsky, Loos, and Lenin once debated art and revolution, new generations discuss European fashion and CD-ROM drives. Vienna has always been the site of contradictions and change: The religious reformations of Empress Maria Theresa, Freud's liberalism and rationalism, the anti-traditional Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) movement, and the summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev all took place here.
As Eastern Europe becomes hipper, and travel there easier, Vienna finds itself in the familiar position of a gateway city--a role it hasn't played since the Allies left Austria in East/West limbo after World War II. Visitors and young explorers passing through on the way to Budapest and Prague will find a Vienna in transition; a city still relying on its truly impressive past, and at the same time staking out space as a modern European supercity.
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