Vienna caught in the act

Never have I heard a person say, “God, Vienna is ugly. I hate that place”. In fact pretty much every time I mention that a majority of my family lives in the Austrian capital, strangers start to ooh and aah about how beautiful it is and how much they’d love to move there – if it wasn’t for the funny language. “And no one wears Lederhosen there, do they?” No. No, they don’t but thanks for asking.

Anyway. People’s adulation is understandable. This is, after all, the home of Johann Strauss, Sigmund Freud and Falco. The place where The Kiss was born, Schnitzel invented and the Danube painted a thousand times over. Vienna provided its nobility with elegant Lippizan stallions, and Ultravox with the lyrics to their 1981 Single of the Year, aptly called Vienna. Then there are the castles, glitzy balls, horse chestnut trees and tuxedoed waiters.

But sometimes, all these lovely things that render the capital so charming also have a tendency to make it sickeningly sweet. Occasionally, you can overdose on Vienna’s syrupy clichés. As actor and producer Heinrich Schnitzler wrote back in 1950: “Take the tune of a Strauss waltz; add further the [...] pleasant rumors you have heard concerning the proverbial charm of the Viennese; cover the whole with a thick layer of sentimentality derived from operettas and movies; pour over the concoction a generous portion of nostalgia; sprinkle it with some saccharin; and the result will be the popular notion of Vienna.”

Hush, don’t blush

Indeed, look closer at the postcard clichés and you’ll spot naughty secrets scuttling beneath the conservative landscape, revealing a different kind of urban identity. Did you know, for instance, that Prince Eugene of Savoy, who spent his summers at the stunning Belvedere Palace, was not only one of Europe’s most prominent military commanders in the 17th century, but also a flamboyant homosexual who loved dressing in women’s clothes? Or that Emperor Charles IV, father of Austrian monarch Maria Teresia and founder of the Karlskirche (Vienna’s biggest Baroque church), allegedly entertained a slightly too intimate relationship with Count Michael Johann Althan III? What if I told you that the younger brother of testerone-charged Emperor Franz Joseph carried the nickname ‘Luziwuzi’ and was once slapped across the face by an army officer for making sexual advances?

Beneath its stiffly starched collars and Swarovski-encrusted evening gowns, Vienna’s high-society has always loved scandals and favours those making them. In the early 1900s, Gustav Klimt shocked art critics when he painted a series of audaciously erotic murals for the Viennese University. “It’s porn!” they cried. “It’s the future,” he replied, turned his back on the conservative Academy of Fine Arts and formed the Vienna Secession along with 15 other artists in 1897. Their aim was to free the capital of its old-fashioned, stodgy conventions and launch it onto the international art scene. The motto above the must-visit Secession Building (which still features Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze fresco) reads: “To every age its art, to art its freedom.” Censorship evidently had no place in Klimt’s private life either, considering that he fathered 14 illegitimate children.

In naked protest of human coops

Meanwhile his protégé Egon Schiele was arrested in April 1912 for seducing a young girl below the age of consent – Valerie ‘Wally’ Neuzil was 17 when she met the 21-year old painter – and police seized over one hundred of his drawings considered to be of pornographic nature. A judge felt so offended by the sketches that he burnt one of them above a candle flame during the trial. Of course, today Schiele’s works are exhibited in one of Vienna’s finest cultural institutions, the Leopold Museum.

Two decades later, the world welcomed another controversial Austrian, self-titled “architect doctor” Friedrich Stowasser, more commonly known as Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His obsession wasn’t with women but with the respect of humans and nature. He went as far as to rip his clothes off and give two lectures in the nude to voice his protest against “having people move into their living quarters like chickens and rabbits into their coops”. Abhorring sterile, monotonous, straight-lined architecture, he built the colourful Hundertwasserhaus apartment block featuring undulating floors (“an uneven floor is a melody to the feet”), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms. He refused to take payment for the design because he had done it to “prevent something ugly from going up in its place”. Among Hundertwasser’s biggest achievements was the remodelling of traditionally hideous places such as the Spittelau Heating Plant, silos, social housing complexes, railway stations and a public toilet in Japan. Even death could not kill off the architect’s mischievous, rebellious spirit: refusing to be squeezed into a square grave in some grey cemetery, he was buried in the Garden of the Happy Dead in New Zealand, which he saw as his true spiritual home.

Must-visit... or not

In short, for every bit of tradition there’s a hybrid, for every convention a counter-culture. My father’s Vienna is not that of his daughters’. He’ll tell you that the famous Backhendl (or baked chicken) tastes best at the Heurigen auf der Als and to stay at the family-run Jäger Hotel.

My sister Barbara, on the other hand, will recommend skipping dinner and heading straight to Glaser Café near the bustling Schottentor for a few drinks before hitting the Skykitchen Club, located high above city roofs inside a former restaurant. Then check out the Platzhirsch, where you’ll find the “hottest guys and sexiest girls in town” according to my youngest sibling Anna, who also insists that you must tumble across the Heldenplatz after a big night out and marvel at all the historical buildings with one eye closed.

My own favourite secret spot is the Baumkreis am Himmel in the wine region of Grinzing on the outskirts of Vienna. Here you’ll find forty trees each carrying a hidden loudspeaker. Stand in front of any of them and the branches will begin to tell you their story.

Meanwhile, my step-mom says there’s no better (and cheaper) breakfast spot than on the top floor of furniture shop Leiner, located smack bang on the city’s top shopping mile Mariahilfer Strasse. One thing that we all agree on is that you cannot leave Vienna without checking out the refurbished Museums Quarter, or MQ for the initiated. In summer, bring a bottle of wine and sit at one of the tables placed in between the huge culture temples. During winter, there are plenty of bars to keep you from dying of frost bite. Or ignore our advice all together and find your own juicy slice of Vienna. Just don’t stop at the first cliché you see.

Address book

Glaser Café, Währinger Straße 2-4, 9th district

Heurigen auf der Als, Alszeile 34, 17th district

Hundertwasserhaus, Kegelgasse 34, 3rd district

Jäger Hotel, Hauptstraße 187, 17th district

Leiner Möbel, Mariahilferstraße 18, 7th district

Platzhirsch, Opernring 11, 1st district

Skykitchen Club, Roßauer Lände 47-49, 7th district