VIENNA, CITY OF MY DREAMS

There's one city I'd like to visit more than any other–Wein, that's Vienna to you Englishers. I have at least a dozen books about the city–picture books, histories, travel guides. I have some money put aside for a trip (but nowhere near enough) and CD's to learn conversational German, although I'm not sure that would help with the unusual dialect spoken in Austria. It's strange that it should be that city I so long to see. None of my family is from there, although most of my mother's family passed through their on their move to Hungary and my grandmother was taken there as a little girl for an operation. Maybe I have a relative or two in Vienna, but not that I know personally. I do know, however, what sparked my interest in the great Imperial and Royal capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

I was maybe 13 when my grandmother took me and my sister and my motherr and maybe my cousins to Lutz's pastry shop in Chicago. It's a wonderful old-fashioned place with a bakery in front and a café in back, like the typical Viennese Konditorei. We had some sort of pastry, I don't remember what. The thing that struck me (in addition to the wonderful pastries) was the two guys in their Lane Tech High School sweaters seated at a table near us. The had magnificent individual pots of hot chocolate that they drank as they played chess. Can you imagine anything more civilized than that? This was long before places like Starbucks made the scene. High school kids more typically hung around drugstore soda fountains (now vanished from the face of the earth) or hamburger joints (also a disappearing item.) Here were people living the life I would want. The seed was planted.

Years later I started at my first church in Miami, a rather uncivilized place in some respects, though with some fine cultural spots and elegant places to dine. In ,y early years there I still subscribed to the "Saturday Review" a wonderful magazine for literature and arts. One week they had an article of Vienna in the winter. The first full page picture was of a tray of pastries. From that moment on I decided that someday I would have to see the city myself.

Vienna is far more than eating, though the cosmopolitan make-up the city provides a wonderful mix of German, Hungarian, Slavic, and Italian elements. That still exists even though the old empire disappeared after WWI. It's a strange thing that the Austrian Empire which managed to hold together diverse nationalities spawned a racists like Hitler who did everything he could to eradicate diversity. Of course, that reflects the entire 18th and 19th centuries–a rise of nationalism that divided people against each other by ethnicity. The "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia in recent years reflects the same struggle that started WWI. Well, all that aside Vienna remains the great cosmopolitan city.

I notice that almost every street corner has some historic church, palace, building, or museum. The city center is a testimony of one the greatest examples of urban planning–the Ringstrasse. The Emperor Franz Joseph had the old walls protecting the inner city destroyed and a magnificent circle of boulevards replaced them and united the inner and outer city. Again, another irony. As the empire collapsed the capital became grander and grander. It's interesting to speculate how much of both the collapse and the grandeur were due to the Emperor himself.

One part of Vienna that intrigues me is it's musical history. Few cities could boast among their residents, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and of course the great Strauss family. Is there anything more typically Viennese that a Strauss waltz? And since then, nothing. To be sure the great musical tradition is still there in the operas an symphonies, and of course the Boys choir.

There's art, too, and great architecture. Some Gothic, more Baroque, more Biedermeier period, but what really intrigues me is the art of the Secesion, those artists including Gustav Klimt, the domestic arts of the Wiener Werkstatte, and the architecture of Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Adolf Loos. It's all modern without being ugly. One of the things that strikes me about the bare-bones American modernism incluenced by the German Bauhaus is it's stark ugliness-great glass, steel and concrete boxes. You could take a chunk of that sort of modernism and stick it anywhere. You wouldn't know if you were looking at a bank, a hospital, an apartment building or a jail. You can't tell what's the front and where the door is. Not so the Viennese architectures before WWII. While breaking with tradition, it still has order and beauty and form.

Maybe I would be disappointed if I actually saw Vienna. Maybe the new glass boxes have chocked out much of old Vienna. Maybe MacDonald's has supplanted the coffee houses. Maybe people just laugh at Strauss Waltzes. But then, maybe not. Which would be better, only to dream of Vienna and thus never be fulfilled and yet never disappointed or to actually see it and risk disappointment?

To help your dreams: these pictures. The Secession Building on top, and at the end St. Stephen's Church, The Emperor Franz Joseph, Café Demel and, naturally, Sacher Torte.

Where ever your dreams take you, may the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne