Remembering Red Vienna

In January, I was fortunate enough to visit Vienna - to my shame, this was only my first visit to a German-speaking country and city.  I spent five days walking the city - visiting the Hundertwasser apartment building and museum, taking the tram back and forth on the Ringstrasse, absorbing the decadence of Klimt and Schiele at the Belvedere.  I also went out to the Zentralfriedhof, where, on an icy afternoon, I could wander quietly among the graves of great composers - Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Gluck and a whole dynasty of Strausses - and see how Austrians remember their presidents, including Kurt Waldheim.  The massive graveyard embodies formidable historical lessons for a callow denizen of the western islands of Europe - there is a large plot and commemorative apparatus of statues, walls, and gardens for the Red Army, which liberated Vienna in 1945, and there are two large Jewish plots, one of more recent vintage, the other older, with graves going back at least to the nineteenth century.  I spent some time wandering the near-wilderness of the latter, picking my way among headstones still tilted or smashed from Nazi-era vandalism.  Walking the perimeter of this section, which contains the graves of various Rothschilds and of Arthur Schnitzler, I paused silently to look down one of the many tree-lined corridors - a deer stood looking at me, vulnerable and beautiful.

I should have been reading Musil, and learning from Carl Schorske's classic study, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, but my satchel held other books.  One can't always co-ordinate one's reading with one's location.  But in this often immaculately-preserved city, with its wonderfully efficient public transport and overwhelming imperial architectural and cultural legacy, it is hard not to be forced to think historically just as one trudges the streets.  Even as I note that Vienna was the birthplace of both Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl, and is now home to an increasingly right-leaning political culture, it's good to be reminded that the political dispensation has not always been conservative.  Here is an essay, taken from the Jacobin website but originally published in German at LuxEmburg, which shows the other side of the story: 

Remembering Red Vienna

Conor