Jubal in Vienna: Learnings And Suchlike

[Jubal]

Winter has come to Vienna - perhaps in many different ways.

Firstly and most obviously, it's snowy! The weather has been rather glum-looking for weeks and the snow is a welcome break. It's been sunny today as well - yesterday was much more snowy, but it was also pelting it down much of the day.

Living in the Viennese winter is an interesting and new experience. I've been having terrible problems with dry eyes and muscle twitches, which I now suspect may be a result of the air being far too dry for me to function properly - I'm working out how to humidify the flat (which is equipped with a dehumidifier, but this apparently does not work in reverse. My poor rosemary plant is looking really very sickly indeed, I'm wondering if it's unhappy with the lack of light coming into my flat, or it may have caught some kind of disease.

The turn to winter has coincided with a sisterly visit, which is nice. Yesterday (Nov 30) we went to Schonbrunn, the Versailles-equivalent palace of the Habsburgs. Given the inclement weather we opted to avoid the Tiergarten (Zoo) and park, though we did walk up the hill to the Gloriette, a small building (with a cafe nowadays) placed where the palace was originally meant to be on a somewhat landscaped hilltop; these plans were apparently abandoned when it was realised that the hill was not structurally stable enough, at which point the palace was built at its present location. The inside is worth a visit, though the decoration is rather wearing in places - I think I still have white and gold seared onto the back of my eyeballs. It's very much a museum to the later Habsburgs, focussing largely on two generations - that of Maria Theresa when the palace was built, and that of Franz Josef and Sisi, the last long-standing inhabitants. Sisi (formally, the empress Elisabeth) is something of a legendary figure of whom much is made, for her role as the quintessential poetic, independent-minded, long-haired beauty - amid and very much part of, it has to be said, a rather dysfunctional Imperial family. Schonbrunn is rather expensive to look round, especially if one wants to go around the Tiergarten as well, but the gardens are free and I very much hope to return in better weather.

Today, the main attraction was Vienna's Christmas markets, a major institution here. We mostly dotted around the town centre ones - Rathausplatz, Maria-Theresien-Platz, Stephansplatz, and Mariahilfstrasse - which unfortunately all turned out to be largely copies of one another. I suspect one needs to get further out of the tourist-trap region to get a much wider diversity of Christmas market fare, and hopefully we might manage that tomorrow. I did buy some things for myself - a tape measure and a wooden spoon - but most stalls were selling fairly endless Christmas decorations and sugary items of various sorts that didn't wholly appeal. The Christmas market fare is probably the main part of the experience, gluhwein in particular, and the many wurst-type items that could be found. We dropped into the Schmetterlinghaus, which if rather low on butterflies compared to my other visits still had some few of them flying around and being rather delightful - tea in the neighbouring Palmenhaus cafe followed and was rather nice. In the evening we went to the Spittelberg, a small area of smaller, older streets near the Volkstheater (and mostly comprising nowadays of rather pricey inns and art shops), and took a look at the Christmas Market there. This one at least was rather different (something of note for future reference), and had a fair number of unusual and interesting craft and pottery type stalls. I was very tempted by a horn (of the playing variety), but managed to resist mostly because I didn't have enough cash on me. Deciding that the local eateries were a bit costly looking and that sitting down might be nice, we wandered back up Lerchenfeldgasse and past my flat, passing by various restaurants, and eventually settling on the Cafe Hummel, a cafe/restaurant just north of my flat. This turned out to be an excellent choice and I'd definitely go there again. The food was in pretty significant quantities, and was actually pretty cheap considering: three people with main courses and drinks came in at under fifty euros, which given it was very good indeed is not bad for restaurant pricing anywhere, let alone Vienna which is hardly the cheapest place to eat. All in all, a nice discovery!

I do worry a bit that winter is coming to Vienna in less pleasant ways, however. Coalition negotiations continue between the OVP, the traditional right-wing party in Austria, and the FPO, the far-right party who've managed to gain a lot of votes on an anti-establishment, anti-immigration and anti-Islam platform in recent years. Unlike the fractious SPO (social democrat) and OVP coalition that ruled before the election, the two right-wing parties seem to be managing a close relationship. I honestly fear the FPO in a way that I don't most other hard-right parties in Europe; for one thing, they're further right in their natural leanings. Their European Parliament allies are the French National Front and other parties with explicitly fascist links, and almost every senior figure in the party has some history of support for fascism. Tighter migration restrictions and significantly greater restrictions on gaining citizenship certainly seem to be on the cards, something pretty directly concerning for an immigrant like myself, and something that I feel will in all likelihood make integration for migrants harder (after all, why spend the time to root oneself in a country if it's going to be a decade before you can get any legal rights there and you may well get deported or move beforehand?) FPO plans for much easier referendum-trigger powers seem to be going ahead, too, which is a little concerning, especially as the FPO are pushing for very low thresholds both for calling and turnout in binding referendums, which if the OVP/FPO alliance isn't suiting them could be used to wreak extraparliamentary havoc by a smart FPO. The new chancellor, the OVP's Kurz, is just 31; wunderkind of the Austrian political scene he may be, but I worry that he's overestimated his ability to deal with Strache, the FPO's politically savvy leader. The Red-Green Viennese government is already at loggerheads with the as yet incomplete coalition and is already publicly seeking ways to circumvent social security cuts: the Austrian constitution makes it very hard for states to effectively stand their ground against a determined Federal government, however.

I'm tired and unnerved by the political aspect of the Viennese winter; my helplessness in the face of it frustrates me, and it's definitely playing on my mind. But perhaps that is a matter for the spring. The cold's setting in outside, and the winter is beautiful... and for now that is enough. We will see what lies beneath the winter, come the thaw.



@Koob: yes, I'm a PhD student in Digital Humanities I'm not sure I'm doing enough work on all that, but hopefully I'm learning more than I think...