I have grown up in so many cities that I find it difficult to distinguish between homesickness and wanderlust. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that my first entry in a series of travel-writing posts concerns the one city that I love, but to which I attach none of the nostalgia of childhood - the Roman Forum, for me, was a playground before it became a ruin, New York's Metropolitan Museum was the site of an annual children's Christmas party, and the Parisian Invalides was near the outdoor market from which we bought our Sunday morning bread. All these cities will I treat in due time, with perhaps undue familiarity towards them - but it is easier to begin with writing about Vienna, which was never anything but a city.
The summer before my freshman year of college, I did a mad thing and moved to Vienna for a month, living in a rented room off Nestroyplatz, on the memory of two surreal days there the year before. I sought in Vienna a particular brand of conservatism - the sort that belonged to Metternich rather than McCain - a hushed antechamber for dead Habsburgs. And in some sense Vienna is, far more than any other city, a playground for such anachronistic aristocracy; its subtlety welcomes fantasy.
For all Vienna is hushed; all Vienna is ritual. It is a city of old men - of sweeping palaces and lamp-lit boulevards that even in the height of tourism are never quite crowded enough. The buildings - whether the creamy excesses of the eighteenth century in the Innere Stadt or the floridly dark art nouveau houses along the Linke Weinzeille, overlooking the Naschmarkt - overshadow the city and its inhabitants like no other city I know. In New York, the people stare down their skyscrapers. In Rome, inhabitants laugh and smoke and drink scattered around ancient monuments with an apparent obliviousness that comes only from such subtle surety in these household gods. But in Vienna, these ghostly remnants still reign over the city long after the death of kings. The Viennese themselves - walking eyes downcast, participating in courtly formalities, wishing "Gruss Gott" upon visitors in shops and restaurants- are still the subjects of a vanished empire. The attendees of the Staatsoper - from student standing tickets to the private boxes - dress in black tie. Indeed, I once witnessed a sale of drugs in the infamously sleazy Karlsplatz metro station between two dreadlocked goths, in which the two participants bowed to each other upon completion of the transaction.
All this does indeed lead to melancholy. The Innere Stadt, the imperial and cultural heart of the city, is bounded by the Ringstrasse - a graceful nineteenth-century tree-lined boulevard that swoops past the Staatsoper, palaces, and grand hotels; this may well be the most salient metaphor for a city strangled by memory. So much beauty of the city comes from this very sadness, from the memory of something lovely and and ghostly and half-forgotten - a promise that can be consummated only by the unreachable reversal of time.
It is taxing to stay too long in the city. The silence of a morning cafe melange at Cafe Sperl, on Gumpendorferstrasse, the unencumbered echoes of horseshoes from the carriages that circle the gothically haphazard St. Stephen's Cathedral, the lingering scent of fading September flowers filling empty gardens at Belvedere Castle and Schonbrunn, all these things become overripe, stifle the soul in self-indulgence. Perhaps this is to be expected from a city balancing its post-war regret alongside the recipe for Sachertorte. Vienna's suicide rate is one of the highest in Europe; this is a city governed by the supremacy of the dead.
Such post-mortem imperialism is not uncontested, particularly by the young - twenty-somethings unconscious of either war except in history, seeking to reclaim the city for the living. Far out by Erdberg, dreadlocked punks smoke drugs in the company of shaggy stray dogs in the converted warehouse of the Arena, a decrepit rock venue. Swarms of pan-European youth descend on the Donauinsel for the annual music festival there. There is a willful, angry defiance about this scene - rage against a city whose rulership, nevertheless, will remain in the hands of the dead. In the better-heeled, trendier areas of Mariahilf and Neubau, in newly popular Asian fusion restaurants and cafes like the retro bookshop-cum-record-store-cum-cocktail-bar "Phil," on Gumpendorferstrasse, the hipsters - and this writer - spend long hours on shiny macbooks. So did I spend Viennese days.
But after Phil closed, the walk home led me across the Innere Stadt: through deserted streets, beneath deserted buildings. The palaces and moon alike appeared stark and white against the canvas of the sky, as if their shapes had been sliced from the heavens.
And nightly in that oppressive emptiness, I succumbed to the tyranny of Vienna's ghosts. They had preserved the city for their own.
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