Dardis McNamee is Editor in Chief of the English-language monthly, The Vienna Review. In her long career in journalism she has been a correspondent for, among others, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler in New York, and for the Wall Street Journal Europe and Die Zeit in Vienna, as well as a speechwriter to two US ambassadors to Austria.
She is a cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Music and Political Science and a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna in Contemporary History, where she is researching the influence of public relations on 20th century politics and the causes of war.
She is a former Research Professor of Media Communications at Webster University Vienna where she was awarded the 2007 Kemper Award for Excellence in Teaching for Webster Worldwide and in 2010 was granted Austrian Citizenship of Honor “for outstanding contributions to the Austrian Republic.”
With her daughter, Maggie Childs, she is the author of the 2011 Frommer’s Austria and Frommer’s Vienna and the Danube Valley. She has lived in Vienna for 16 years.
The New Year had just turned when Martin Sajdik arrived in New York City with his wife and daughter to begin his new posting as Austrian ambassador to the United Nations – surely a big change from Shanghai, where they had spent the previous four and a half years.
At work on a story the other weekend and feeling trapped inside my four walls (as well as my head), I packed up my laptop, stuffed a couple of books in my backpack and headed out for Café Sperl. Perhaps the change of locus would snap me out of my stupor. Sperl is a great place to work: It’s quiet (no canned music) and commodious, with a pleasant staff, just attentive enough without getting in the way.
In his time, many people didn’t know what to make of Gustav Klimt: To the romantics he was trapped in ornamentation, to the purists in symbols. He was called a “purveyor of perversities,” yet also “provincial”. Traditionalists dismissed him as decadent, once naturalist described him as merely “irritating”.
Sometimes the truth about national character is easier for a foreigner to see than a local. It was with this in mind that, years ago, I put some hours of careful study into a little book called the Xenophobes Guide to the Austrians, by one Louis James, part of an engaging series of revelatory tomes intended as cultural “user’s manuals” for the bewildered traveller.
Composer and cabaret singer Georg Kreisler entered my life as a dictation in a German class. It was in 1996, early in my time in Vienna, and a spirited teacher at the Volkshochschule Brigittenau decided to challenge the students in the B2 class with the irresistible verses of “Tauben vergiften im Park” (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park) – one of Kreisler’s trademark bits of black humour that made him a cabaret legend in 1950s Vienna. It was hard-going for an intermediate German class. Still, you knew people were getting it, as suppressed giggles rippled about the room.
With every day’s news, Wolfgang Radlegger was getting more and more frustrated: the Euro crisis, underfunded universities, misguided immigration policy, rampant corruption – the list of pressing issues was getting longer and longer and public decision-making ever more paralysed.
In the Kaffeehaus culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, writes essayist Clive James, the richest life of the mind took place outside the university. It was a time when education was a life-long process, broader in many ways than the university, and more fun.
Allan Janik began teaching in Vienna in a Kaffeehaus. That was in 1989, and space was in short supply. He didn’t even get a classroom, much less an office. But this suited Janik just fine. He’s a philosopher and intellectual historian, and a Kaffeehaus was where he belonged.
The little Festsaal of the Jewish Museum on the Dorotheegasse was packed to overflowing on a night in June 2007. For the 80th birthday retrospective of the charmed life of fashion designer Lucie Porges and her cartoonist husband Paul-Peter, with podium interviews, reminiscences, an exhibit and slide show selected works from their major retrospective, Style and Humor, mounted there in 2000.
The list of the summer’s upheavals was already long enough – the Oslo shootings, the England riots, the car burnings in Berlin – when Hurricane Irene roared up the U.S. East Coast and slammed into New York City. It shut down airports, train stations and the subway system and left 400,000 people without power, while causing the evacuation of some 770,000 in low-lying areas of the city and Long Island.
Vienna on a summer evening: Michelle, a Canadian scientist, and her Austrian husband Oskar were meeting some American friends on a one-night stopover of a Danube river cruise. Michelle and Oskar had arranged to meet them in the lobby of the Hilton am Stadtpark. They arrived to find their friends waiting with a sumptuous bouquet of flowers for their hostess.
“It was one of those glorious, colourful masterpieces with sunflowers, roses, and more, wrapped in a bright crepe paper ‘Manschette’ holding them together, the way they do so well in the Viennese flower shops,” she said, still glowing.
Vienna loves a beautiful corpse – eine schöne Leiche – so the saying goes, but at the funeral of Otto von Habsburg, the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary on July 16, it was difficult to tell who or what that corpse actually was.
Suleiman J. Al-Herbish surely has one of the best jobs in the world. As Director General of OFID, the OPEC Fund for International Development, he is in charge of a multi-billion dollar revolving endowment whose mission is to help countries in the neediest parts of the world.
It was a warm evening in early June as a friend and I climbed down from the bus at the top of the Kahlenberg, an ancient mountain 484 meters high, in the northeastern foothills of the Alps. Here from the broad terraces of the tourism university Modul, the entire city of Vienna lays spread out before you, and on the clearest days even parts of Lower Austria.
It was 15:40 at the Heiligenstadt Station on a Thursday afternoon in early summer. On the platform of Track 4, a scattering of well-dressed people mingled in threes and fours; one checked a watch; a cell phone rang. A young Austrian man in a well cut black suit came striding up the steps to be hailed by three others, in a hubbub of laughter, two-cheek greetings and hearty slaps on the back. Then three Japanese, two men and a woman, also in dark suits, stepped off the escalator, looking around inquiringly and consulting with each other in low tones.
On visiting Vienna from the U.S. in 2006, Turkish born psychiatrist Vamik Volkan took himself one beautiful Sunday afternoon up to the Kahlenberg, for a pleasant walk in the countryside and the view across the valley. Also out for a stroll that day, were groups of Turks, all ages, families, friends one after another, all out for the air. Curious, he stopped to ask many of them why they were there.
On reading recently of the forced resignation of NPR news chief Vivienne Schiller to appease Tea Party Republicans, I thought fondly of the brilliant social scientist Daniel Bell, who died in January at the age of 91.
Bell, you can be sure, would have done no such thing: He was a liberal, and didn’t care who knew it.That is, politically liberal. In cultural matters, he was a conservative, and in economics, a socialist – at a time when the former was considered reactionary and the latter close to treason.
“The storm that broke out in December 2010 in Hungary, it’s far from over,” Miklos Haraszti began.He was seated in a circle of some 25 people in the library of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna on Mar.
![Martin Sajdik](/sites/default/files/imagecache/small/normal__MG_3811.jpg "Amb. Martin Sajdik arrived in New York in January for his "dream job"! | Photo: Martin Fuchs")
![Australian author and critic Clive James:](/sites/default/files/imagecache/small/VR_10_11_p7_top_clive james_by Katharina Klein.jpg "Australian author and critic Clive James: "a crash course in civilization" | Illustration: Katharina Klein")
![A guardsman carrying a wreath](/sites/default/files/imagecache/small/F1000022.JPG "A guardsman carrying a wreath "Thy will be done" | Photo: Laurence Doering")
