Vienna

Gasometer
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Tuesday. After two days here in Vienna, I feel I’m just starting to understand the city well enough to begin touring it intelligently.

We had hoped this morning to try out Vienna’s remarkable CityBike system, where you can rent bikes short-term at any of about 50 stations around the city and return them to another. The first hour is free (!), and the second hour only one euro. When we started out, however, the station nearest us had only one bike available, and as the day went on it never really made sense to stop using the excellent subway and and tram system.

Wrapping up

Brahms at Central Cemetery
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We began the morning with another interesting architectural find. The Gasometer is a set of four brick gas tanks from the 1890’s that have been restored as combined living/shopping/office space. The outside detail has been retained, but each tank has been renovated inside by a different architect. The complex includes below-ground parking, a theater and shopping mall at the first and second levels, and offices and apartments above.

We continued on the tram down to the Central Cemetery, where many of Vienna’s notable citizens are buried. The book I’ve been reading the last few weeks, on Vienna in 1888-89 when Crown Prince Rudolf killed himself and his young mistress, comments on the high suicide rate in Vienna and the general Viennese fascination with death. One of my guidebooks also speaks of the city’s love of extravagant funerals and of the hundreds of thousands of people who come to visit the cemetery on All Saints’ Day. (According to my book, the Viennese say that the Central Cemetery is half as big as Zurich but twice as much fun.) Doug reminded me that Mahler is said to have played with funeral processions as a small boy the way others may play with soldiers or farm animals. I seem to remember his first composition, at the age of five, was titled “A Funeral March, with Introductory Polka.”

The Riesenrad
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Unlike Père Lachaise in Paris, the notable graves are grouped together, which makes a visit easier, but less serendipitous than it is to stumble upon Chopin or Gertrude Stein or Jim Morrison mixed in with everyone else. The cemetery is a relatively modern one, opened in 1874, so it has much more of the rural cemetery feel--like a larger Mount Auburn--than the urban congestion of Père Lachaise. That also means that Beethoven’s and Schubert’s graves are not original, which makes them oddly disappointing. It feels somehow dishonest to see the grand memorial to Schubert when he died admired only by his circle of friends. Mozart is lying somewhere in the much smaller St. Marxer Cemetery, which we only saw from the tram.

Freshly adorned grave at Central Cemetery
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After lunch, we visited the Klimts and the Schieles at the grand Belvedere Museum, and sampled the coffee and pastry at one of Vienna’s famous conditorei. I have been back on caffeine for my morning breakfast the past few weeks, but to my surprise nearly everywhere we’ve been--even here in coffee-mad Vienna--I’ve been able to get my coffee koffien frei in the afternoon or evening. A good thing, since even one cup of the breakfast coffee here in Vienna leaves me hardly able to hold still enough to put in my contact lenses afterward.

Cafe Central, one of Trotsky's regular hang-outs
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This evening we went out to the amusement park at the Prater, since I insisted on riding the famous Riesenrad, where Joseph Cotten confronts Orson Welles in The Third Man. It’s a beautiful ferris wheel, with the outer ring suspended by cables like bicycle spokes. After dark, we sat on the grass just north of the park and watched the blue lights play over the design, and I thought back to the similarly lovely design of this morning’s gas tanks, built around the same time. I’m not sure it was really a simpler time, but I felt very reassured at beginning and ending the day with such classical symmetry.

The Waltz King at Central Cemetery
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This is my last entry, as we leave tomorrow morning for Munich and then home. Thanks for reading. I’ve enjoyed trying to put my thoughts together every evening, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.