The Legacy of Empires
25/07/08 12:19
The farthest east I’ve traveled in Europe before visiting Vienna was the Czech Republic, a country with a historic orientation to the west for the most part. That was a long time ago, however — 1996. On that same trip, I also visited Berlin, a place once isolated as an island of east-looking Germans. Even so, Berlin never felt like it was in the east. Perhaps in current language, Berlin was a kind of Forward Operating Base in the Cold War. In Bavaria, both Munich and Passau felt close to the east, but again the connection seemed pretty weak. Like Berlin, the east felt like more a threat than a source of ideas, oppportunities, or culture. Vienna is completely different. Vienna looks hard to the rising sun, facing downstream and east. I sense that it still thinks of itself as the capitol of the Balkans, though dressed in the latest fashions and carrying a world-weary sense of empire.
In fact, Vienna has been a part of several empires. I often use the image of the Roman god Janus in my talks about how to think of climate change, and I found myself thinking of the founding of Vienna as a Roman frontier city -- another kind of Forward Operating Base. I wondered about invoking Janus on his old stomping grounds. I hope he was happy I was there, invoking him as the god of climate adaptation.
Vienna is a large city with such a deep, somehow tired sense of its history. People walk slowly on the sidewalks. The stewardess on Austrian Airlines strolled down the aisles in their bright red semi-military dresses; Richard Strauss’s waltz’s played on the speakers as we boarded the plane as the passengers calmly boarded. The contrast with boarding a plane in Paris, San Francisco, or London (much less Beijing or Delhi) was enormous.
The buildings of the central core of the city expressed the powerful legacy of being the new Rome of the western Church -- the residual seat of the old Holy Roman Empire. Sidewalks were full of people who spoke slavic languages, or more exotic and eastern speech. But the sense of a lost empire was strong too: government buildings from the nineteenth century that were “too big” for the size of the nation now and housed libraries or museums, a dozen Starbucks or so, clothing that looked towards Milan or Paris, British and U.S. chains.
There were other echos too. My last night in Vienna, I was taken out by some of the local staff with many of the other visitors. We had a great time, and I was glad to socialize with my colleagues. One club in particular struck me with it’s small entrance but high, vaulted interior. Two ornate fine marble columns stood in the middle of the room. At first I thought they were Corinthian, but the leaves at the top were not acanthus but grape vines with fruit, perhaps suggesting the fertility of the Danube valley in this area. The cash register stood below one column, and the beer pulls were near the other one. I walked around the bar, curious about what this building had been. A small star of David had been carved into the front of each capital; a Torah had once stood in what had probably been a wealthy old synagogue here, at least until the Anschluss. And I thought about how Vienna had been part of other empires, looking north.
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