Bojana Simeunovic

What is a home? A place on a map? A house wrapped in a relationship, or a role, or an identity? Not only: Home is also a sense of being present and awake to our true selves wherever we are, in every moment. 

For Georg Klaar, author of Last Waltz in Vienna, home became an abstract phenomenon, a choice to recover, since being Jewish in Vienna at the outbreak of World War II could only mean loss. My own sense of loss feels similar, at least to me: a life uprooted, and the struggle to find myself again in turmoil, surrounded by ambitious people and luminous places that feel alien and out of reach—being lost somewhere between voguish glamour and genuine self-realization. The book evoked my own hidden fears.

It all starts with the fear of darkness, and with our search for the genuine light, the kind of inner light that can only be found in a person’s soul. We sometimes lose that sense, reality slips away and all we want to do is run.But you can never run away, not really.

“I hate this Facebook!” my friend said in a private message – although of course she was writing on Facebook. “Everything is so banal; all we do is rake over what’s happened in the past month. It’s just not enough.”

“I know.”

It wasn’t exactly a sensitive answer, almost insulting, in fact. But I simply had nothing else to say. At some point you have to ask yourself whether a friendship is worth fighting for. The answer is not simple and depends on the character of your friend as well as on the relationship. In my case, the person was worth it, but the relationship was not.

Even today, 94 years after the Empire was dissolved, the monumental presence of ancien régime Austro-Hungary hangs over Heldenplatz. The square, the Hofburg palace courtyards and adjoining gardens are all public thoroughfares, in places lacking the gates and fences to lock even if they wanted to.

It was on Good Friday 2007 during a family get-together that Heinz Patzelt, Secretary General of Amnesty International Austria, was introduced to Jovan Mirilo’s case for the first time.

A clear message for the rest of Europe – ‘Not our fault!’ – continues to reverberate through the streets of Greece’s capital during the strikes and almost daily demonstrations that have continued through May and June. In Spain, the government is working toward cutting the country’s budget deficit from 11.2% of GDP in 2009 to expected 6.5% in 2011; yet the pundits emphasize the crisis Spain might face while struggling with an unemployment rate of 20%, the highest in Europe.

When Kosovo declared its independence in January 2008, Serbia and five of the 27 EU members along with some 89 other sovereign states refused to recognize it, sending the case to the International Court of Justice. Public hearings held last December in Hague are still inconclusive.

And now, the cause has been further complicated by the opposition of the Vatican.

Sometimes the inner voice of conscience can drive offenders insane. Not so, the Greeks, it seems. The country’s misrepresentation of its fiscal readiness to enter the European Monetary Union has damaged the bonds of trust among the EU member states.

The financial crisis is persistent, yet some passionate travelers seem to still put aside enough money to spend on journeys. Particularly in Austria, tourists spent more money in 2009 than 2008, equaling into 6.72% of tourists’ spending – the highest level since 1997 according to www.traveller-online.at.

“We managed to get a good market share during the crisis,” said Reinhold Mitterlehner, Austrian Minister of Business and Economics. “With this growth Austria is behind only China, Turkey and Australia – that means the fourth in the world.”