Vienna, Austria, August 2018 - From backwater to world city

I first came to Vienna in September 1984 as part of a conference that had started in Munich and moved on to the Austrian capital for a second set of papers.  In those Cold War days Austria was still neutral, its independence from international alliances still guaranteed by the four post-war occupying powers – the USSR, the United States, France and the United Kingdom – despite the fact that the Russians had unexpectedly pulled out of the country in 1955 and allowed it to be reunited as a single and independent state. West Germany was, of course, a crucial bastion for the ‘Free World’ against the ‘Communist East’.  To the 25 or so conference participants in Munich were added a further 15 when we got to Vienna – academics from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and so on who were not allowed by their governments to travel to West Germany but for whom Austria was an acceptable academic destination.

Vienna in 1984 was a very strange city.  Its population within the city boundaries was 1.5 millions at the time of the 1981 census, and 2 millions lived within the wider Viennese urban region.  Austria as a whole counted 7.6 million inhabitants, so over a quarter of its population lived in the capital city region.  And that 2 million total had remained static since 1951.  In the other city region of our conference – Munich – the population had more than doubled between 1951 and 1981 from 1.1 millions to 2.3 millions. One of the reasons I was invited to the conference was to translate into English a chapter written by the two organisers, comparing the two cities.

Vienna was a city cut off from its hinterland.  This had been partly so since the dismemberment of the Austro- Hungarian Empire after the First World War.  But isolation was hugely enhanced with the creation of the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in the later 1940s which meant that the eastern regions of Austria formed a bulge of 180 miles into the Iron Curtain.  Vienna lay 25 miles from the edge of Czechoslovakia and 35 miles from Hungary.  Borders were fortified and defended from the eastern side.  The only land routes into Vienna were via the rest of Austria lying well to the west of the city.

In 1984 the city seemed almost dead after dark.  One night several of us from the conference went out to a heuriger wine house in a village on the outskirts and had to get a taxi back because public transport ceased at 11. On Kärtnerstraße, in some ways the main street of the city, there was only one café open after 9.  Tourists were few in number.  Vienna was a city that had little of the animation of a capital – although its cultural symbols such as the Opera House were being kept going with major state subsidies.  The big popular music hit in Austria that summer was a song attacking Vienna and praising life in the Austrian countryside.

My next visits to Vienna were in 1992 and 1994 – the first for a conference and the second as part of a family holiday.  The city had already been transformed.  Czechoslovakians (this was before the ‘Velvet Divorce’), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and even Russians made up large numbers at the 1992 conference on mass migration in the ‘New Europe’ (as it was then being called).  The Iron Curtain had gone, to be replaced by much freer movement.  Vienna had regained its role as a capital – perhaps the capital – of Central Europe.  The official language of that 1992 conference was supposed to be English – the unifying language for this new world. But I wondered for a while whether we would actually see German supplant English as the new lingua franca: many more of our new colleagues from the former Communist world spoke German at that time than spoke English.  However, that moment passed as schools in the East took up English teaching as the first foreign language.

By 1994 Vienna was back on the tourist map of Europe.  Cafés and bars were open until late; the wide street bearing the name ‘Graben’ was lined with restaurants and tourist shops; Café Central, the premier old-style coffee-house of the city, was being frequented by tourists (although not without disapproving looks from long-standing customers). I particularly recall large groups of Italian visitors, noisily following their guides, who seemed to dominate the new arrivals.

Twenty-four years passed before my current visit to Vienna. Again this has primarily been for work – to meet a colleague to discuss a book proposal.  The population of the urban region has grown once more – to 2.6 millions – after that long period of stagnation.  This actually now amounts to 30 per cent of Austria’s population – but the old feeling that here was a head that was too big for its body has gone.  Vienna is now in some ways back at the centre of its old world – of the cities of Central and Eastern Europe only Warsaw is bigger.  But Vienna has extended its reach much more: it is now a world city (with its United Nations functions and those of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries: OPEC), and it is a world tourist destination.

I have heard languages from all parts of the globe here, and many I can’t place.  Chinese tourists seem to have become the dominant groups – often looking with interest at my colleague who, I joke, seems to be the only Chinese person travelling independently. But there are also many groups of women from the Middle East dressed in chadors or at the least with hijabs.  Café Central has a long queue of what would previously have been seen as inappropriately-dressed tourists waiting outside on a Sunday afternoon.  Kärnterstraße is thronged with people at all hours of day and night.  Much of the area inside the Ringstraße is now given over to a combination of high status retail and everyday tourism.  The museums and palaces are thronged with people, with queuing systems set up.  There seem to be many more horse-drawn vehicles (Fiaker) for sightseeing excursions than twenty years ago, and the smell of horses permeates the streets around the Hofburg.

But beyond the Ringstraße, out towards Heiligenstadt to the north, or in the Landstraße district to the south-east (except around the Hundertwasserhaus which has become a major attraction) the side streets still seem as sleepy as they did in 1984.  Ordinary Vienna is still there: it has just been overlaid with world city functions once again.

On Saturday my colleague and I took a crowded train for the hour’s journey to Bratislava – another city that has been transformed, this time into a capital city.  Like Vienna, the town centre was busy with tourists and leisure activities.  Our train crossed the Morava River, now a site for fishing but once a defended frontier with gun emplacements and barbed wire.  We returned to Vienna from a smaller Bratislava station on the southern side of the Danube – Petržalka – along a line that once constituted the border between Western and Eastern Europe and which was consequently torn up during the period of the Iron Curtain.  Neither my Chinese colleague nor I could have crossed these borders when I first came to Vienna in 1984.  She has benefited from the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping.  We have both also benefited from the end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain in Europe – and so has Vienna.