Tag: vienna

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Vienna: Beyond Redemption

Last Friday, the streets of Vienna were thronged with children. Children chanting. Children forsaking meat, cars, planes and even school. Children demanding action in fighting climate change. It was, in relation to population, one of the biggest turn-outs of the Fridays For Future-movement worldwide. And yet, despite the looming climate catastrophe, the children remain unheard. Is all hope is lost?

500 years ago already, the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch wondered whether humankind, immoral and sinful, was beyond redemption. Catering to the illiterate medieval society, he depicted the horrors of the punishments of the mortal sins in hitherto unmatched creativity, in horrific perversion and brutality: A toad in a nun’s habit frying the gluttonous sinners nicely chopped up in a pan. Naked sinners of lust impaled on a bare tree, one guilty of wrath getting his head blown off by a grenade fired from a bizarre engine of war.

Hell.

The Last Judgement Triptych, from which the above mentioned scenes are taken, is one of the world’s outstanding masterpieces in late medieval art and the uncontested high light of the Paintings Gallery of the Academy for Fine arts in Vienna. (Where a hundred years ago, Egon Schiele studied, to name but its most famous student.) One of Bosch’s most important oeuvres, the Last Judgment Triptychon disappeared after its creation around 1500 in the Netherlands, but re-surfaced in a Habsburg collection in the 17th century. The notoriously catholic Austrian Habsburg dynasty was one of Bosch’s major commissioners.

The Last Judgement Triptychon is currently at display at Theatermuseum Wien, as the Paintings Gallery is undergoing complete renovation until 2020

Bosch was a religious man, a devotee to the Virgin Mary deeply anchored in the catholic doctrine. He designed his paintings after the altar pieces of the catholic churches: three connected tables that could be read like a story, from left to right. The Last Judgement starts with the expulsion from Paradise on the left wing, then on the center piece, zooms in on torments of the sinners, where cyborgs, demons and other hybrid monsters have their way with the sorry souls, and ends, on the right wing, in burning hell.

Detail on the left panel: Evil looms in paradise. And it’s pretty sexy.

Among art lovers, Hieronymus Bosch is considered a masterful painter of landscapes. On the Triptychon the meadows and trees on the left panel are rendered in impeccable beauty, teeming with colorful birds. But the charming fields turn into barren land, wastelands and dumps on the center piece, and into burning fields on the right panel. The bright cerulean skies of Paradise turn black in the smoke pillars rising from hell’s fires: This is the destruction of nature, literally, by the hands of humanity. The Last Judgement Triptychon remains topical to the present day. A medieval Sunday for Future.

The Paintings Gallery invites artists to “correspond” with Bosch. Ali Banisadr, an Iranian painter living in New York, suffers from or enjoys synaesthysia. While painting, he hears internal sounds. His dynamic brushwork, which oscillates between figuration and abstract expressionism, reflect a chaotic world, an explosion reminiscent of Bosch.

However, Bosch, who sported a tonsure, defined the root of all evil not in corporate greed, but in the moral failing of the individual. Lust makes all men untrustworthy  was a popular proverb around 1500. Accordingly, it was any sex that didn’t serve the purpose of procreation that caused of human downfall. (Like a thornbush out of your ass, keep an arrow in your head, to save one in your heart, was another popular saying of time, which must have given Bosch some ideas.) But then world was more spiritual back then, and art more allegorical than it is nowadays. What seems like insane perversion in the 20th century, must have made complete sense in the 15th.

On an even sourer note Bosch didn’t stop at scapegoating beautiful women and homosexual men. Jews (wearers of the obligatory yellow badges in medieval Europe), Africans and Muslims alike were responsible for humanity’s demise. Another radical catholic point of view that sadly finds its adherents to this day: in the rising extreme right movements of the 21st century.  

Four Trees by Egon Schiele, from 1917. Like Bosch, Schiele is not known for his landscapes, even though he painted them masterly. The Four Trees, on permanent exhibition in Vienna’s Belvedere Castle, is rumored to have been coerced from a Jewish family during the Third Reich in Vienna.

But what is the morality of the Last Judgement? A novelty in his time, Bosch did not call on Jesus and Mary for redemption. Rather, he had the holy family watching passively from the center panel as the world went to shambles. Each and every one has to make an effort, the Triptychon tells us, to not stray from the right path, on the journey of life. Evil looms everywhere.

It was the rich, the nobility and the aristocracy, whom Bosch accuses of sanctimony, guilty of the seven mortal sins, in his paintings. Another novelty in his days: wealth and high social standing would not safe anyone from hell. And so Bosch, despite his radical pessimism, despite his fatal thinking and hopelessness, opened the doors to the new world order of the Renaissance, the age of science and enlightenment.

Fridays for Future at Heldenplatz, Vienna, in front of the Imperial Castle.

While at the general election that took place two days after the huge climate strike, the majority of Austrians still voted for right wing and neoliberal parties that favor industries over environmental protection, the Green party was pushed into parliament as the strongest Green party in the world. Not all hope is lost.

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Vienna: Scarred Faces

Vienna has many faces. One very beautiful. The city, peacefully slow yet vibrantly social-democratic, has scored the top ranking as the world’s most livable city for the past ten years (Mercer Quality of Living City Ranking). One very ugly: Stained and scarred by history: fascism, the holocaust and the loss of the city’s Jewish community.

Vienna counts almost two million faces – plus 90. Italian-German photographer Luigi Toscano has mounted 90 larger than life current portraits of holocaust survivors at Vienna’s picturesque main boulevard, the Ringstraße, an avenue that features the architectural splendor of the old city. The collection of photos, printed on water repellent, slightly transparent canvas, has toured 70 countries to commemorate the past: Lest we Forget! in times of resurgent totalitarianism, xenophobia and right wing extremism worldwide.

But it was only in Vienna that the photos – touching close-ups of aged, wrinkled faces, eyes that 80 years after the fact still reflect the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the sadness of the being orphaned and unrooted, and even the optimism and love of reconciliation – were vandalized: defaced and slashed with swastikas.

Toscano’s outdoors exhibition, free and accessible to anyone, has arrived in Vienna in the midst of a political scandal. Until last week, Austria was governed by a coalition between the neo-liberals and the right wing party . The former, whose young chairman Sebastian Kurz eerily resembles the young Emperor Franz Joseph II, husband of Sissy and erector of the Ringstrasse, mastered marketing and political staging to the perfection, hence becoming strongest force in Austria. The latter not so: A video surfaced depicting the right wing leaders drugged and in the act of instigating corruption. A week and a parliamentary motion of no-confidence later, the coalition was history. The act of vandalism, it is suspected, was an act of frustration, hate and antisemitism, which the government had encouraged.

The destruction of the portraits came as a shock to everyone. Another shameful mark in the history of Vienna. But it’s from the dark that the sun rises. Viennese spontaneously got together at Ringstraße, brought needles and threads and sewed the torn portraits back together. Vigils are held to protect the photos 24/7, flowers laid, candles lit. Vienna has learned from its history, it seems.

Who are these faces who stand the rain, the wind and the cold to keep watch? It’s the young Catholics. It’s the Boy scouts. It’s the Young Muslims, who sit feasting through their days of Ramadan and for whom the Chief Rabbi brings food each night. What love, what solidarity!

The portraits now are as scarred as the city. But what is a scar? It’s something that mends together which hate, violence, fear and terror has ripped apart. A scar is a symbol of growth. Of: love conquers everything.

Vienna has many faces. Scarred faces, beautiful faces.

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Vienna: Mother Figures

In 1908, during archeological excavations close to the sleepy village of Willendorf, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a tiny limestone figure depicting a voluptuous woman was found. The archeologists immediately recognized the value of the find, put it in a wooden box and delivered it personally at the imperial-royal Museum of Natural History in Vienna. The figurine became an archeological, historical and art sensation: the later dubbed “Venus Of Willendorf” turned out to be some incredible 29,500 years old. Hopes were high that the figurine would shed light on Stone Age and the beginning of human society. Yet, more than hundred years later the little woman remains a mystery. In her silence however she tells us more about us – and human nature.

The origins of the Venus remain unknown. The limestone she is carved out is not local, and the ochre she supposedly was painted with has long faded. She has no face, but an elaborate hairdo of seven concentric circles. She measures 11,5cm from the tip of her head to her ankles. The little woman has no feet, and never had. What she has instead is big buttocks, burly breasts, a billowing belly, and a prominent cleft between her thighs. She is without doubt a symbol of fertility. Fitting snugly in one hand, she was maybe a lucky charm, meant to be carried around.

But then again, if she was of a nomadic tribe, part of a group of hunters and gatherers, why was she obese, her arms thin and unfit to pick berries or dig for roots, and no feet to run from or after big animals? And if she was a token of procreation, why was she an older woman, instead of a young one at the pinnacle of fertility?

The terror birds roamed Earth in the Stone Age. This one roams the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, now residence of the Venus of Willendorf.

The Venus of Willendorf most likely was no lucky charm, but a totem of womanhood, the epitome of femininity, the antithetical man. Some researchers suspect the figure to be the self portrait of a female artist – her exaggerated proportions the foreshortening effect of self-inspection, her facelessness the result of the lack of mirrors. Others argue that the figurine does not depict a human woman at all, but a deity, a kind of Mother Earth. The Venus is maybe another proof that early societies were in fact matriarchies.

Whatever the truth behind the little figurine, the Willendorf woman was not the only, nor the oldest figurine found in the region in the 20th century. But she was and still is the most prominent. Something about her seems to resonate with (not only) Austrian culture. She is among the most popular archeological objects in the world – and definitely the prime attraction of the Museum Of National History in Vienna.

Museum of Natural History as seen from the twin Museum, the Museum of Art History. Both Museums were built in the style of Viennese Historism.

The Natural History Museum in Vienna dates back to 1750, when emperor Franz Stephan purchased the then largest collection of natural history objects from Chevalier de Baillou in Florence. This collection, assembled by noblemen and royals, comprised 30,000 fossils, snails, mussels, minerals and precious stones and made its way from Italy over the Alps by means of a mule caravan. The emperor was quite taken with his purchase. He visited the collection every day and furthermore financed expeditions around the world to ship home even more rare specimen of live animals, plants and stones.

Emperor Franz Stephan had enough time to indulge in his passion. It was up to his wife, Maria Theresia of Austria, to run the empire – and the family. The couple had sixteen children. Yet, it was exactly her being a supermom that turned her into a successful leader and business women. Despite her being a strict, authoritarian leader inspired by catholic fundamentalism, to the people of the empire she appeared gentle and big-hearted. Despite never having been crowned emporess, that’s what the people called her. Emporess Maria Theresia. She was their mother, a mother to nine nations. A mother of 50 million.

Another Mother Figure: Maria Theresa was mother to 16 and the rest of the monarchy.

Maria Theresia herself had no interest in natural history, but she recognized the importance of her husband’s collection when it came to mineralogy and the importance it possibly held for mining and exploiting raw materials from the soil. When Franz Stephan died, she donated the collection to the public. She hired a curator to create a museum (open by individual admission only, mind you) at her Imperial palace.

In the following 100 years, the collection kept growing and finally, under her great-great-grandson Emperor Franz Josef I, a new building had to be erected. The new Museum of Natural History, opened in 1889, is situated at Vienna’s pompous Ringstraße, facing its almost identical twin, the Museum of Fine Arts. In between the two imposing buildings, Maria Theresa sits enthroned as a bronze statue. A mere twenty years after the opening of the two museums, by 1918, the monarchy was history itself, but the two museums and Maria Theresia are still standing tall. As is the Venus of Willendorf.

Sunset in Vienna. Maria Theresia and a general in bronze, the museum of natural history in the background

After 29,500 years hidden in the soil, the Venus of Willendorf was condemned to her little wood box until 1989, when she was finally presented to the public. She now resides in her own little chamber on the second floor of the Museum, from where, through the windows, the visitor also has a good view of Maria Theresia, Emporess.

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Vienna: No One Writes To The Emperor

 

“I am madly in love with you, virtuously or diabolically, I love you and I will love you to the grave,” his wife, Isabella of Parma, wrote. Unfortunately not to him, Emperor Joseph II, but to his sister, Marie Christine.

Joseph had married Isabella when they were both 18. His mother, Queen Maria Theresia of Austria, had set up the marriage to fortify the bonds between the Austrians and the Bourbons of France. That was how Maria Theresia did business. She used her children – of which she had sixteen – as merchandise.

The royal wedding was a flamboyant spectacle, the last baroque festivity of its kind, designed to impress the people with both empires’ unlimited wealth and military strength. Joseph was smitten with his bride, Isabella with her new sister-in-law.

Statue of Jospeh II at the Imperial Castle Vienna

Joseph II was Maria Theresia’s third child but first son and therefore the desperately awaited successor to the crown. The queen herself had inherited the title from her father for the sole reason that there were no male successors in sight. Now her first son filled her with pride and joy – the promise that the empire would soon have a male leader. She famously presented the new-born to the kings of Hungary, who in sympathy for the young mother, immediately took to arms and defeated the Prussians, Maria Theresia’s archenemy.

Joseph II opened the imperial parks to the publics, as well as the theatres, abolished censorhip and liberated the arts.

Other than that, Queen Maria Theresia spoiled and pampered her first son. He grew into an arrogant young man, who not only Isabella did not find charming. The people of the empire were not taken with him either. They despised his taciturn intellect, his fascination with the Enlightenment and rationality and preferred his mother, who despite being a conservative, catholic fundamentalist, appeared like their loving mother-figure.

After her husband’s death, Maria Theresa wore black for the remainder of her life.

At 24, after his father’s death, Joseph II was crowned co-regent of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He immersed himself in state business. “A monarch must be the first servant of his people,” he said. He traveled, studied ways of improving the monarchy, socially, economically and militarily. Yet, his ideas of reforming and modernizing the state were stalled by his mother, who after her beloved husband’s death remained frozen in the past, clad in black eternally.

Young Isabella, intelligent and educated, did not enjoy her role as baby machine. She was said to be plagued with melancholy and depression, and despite her love affair with Marie Christine, she was pregnant five times. Three pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. One girl survived only to die from small pocks at seven years old, and one girl’s birth was so complicated, she took Isabella with her to the grave. Joseph was heart-broken. He never recuperated from the loss.

Joseph II had a General hospital built in Vienna and the world’s first asylum for the mentally insane.

After his own mother’s, Queen Maria Theresia’s, death Joseph as a regent could finally realize his reformatory ideas: He installed the freedom of religion and limited the hitherto unlimited rights of the Catholic Church. He abolished serfdom and equalized the tax system. He abolished censorship and liberated the arts – Vienna turned into a heaven for musicians and Mozart and Beethoven settled in the city. He opened the universities to all religions, not only the Catholics, and the imperial theaters and parks to the public. He had general hospitals built and the world’s first asylum for the insane. And the people – still hated him. To the extent, that after his premature death at 49, most of his reforms were revoked. Not the serfdom, though, which could not be re-established.

While the nobles hated him, among farmers Joseph II was always popular. Even before his death. They just couldn’t deal with his progessive ideas regarding the Catholic church, whose rights he severly cut..

His eulogy left no doubt:

“Der Bauern Gott, der Bürger Not, des Adels Spott liegt auf den Tod”
“On his deathbed lies the peasants’ God, the affliction of the burghers and the scorn of the nobility”

a popular satirical verse went.

Joseph II had been ahead of his time. A few decades later, he was indeed venerated and a multitude of monuments were erected in his memory. But there was more writing in his honor.

After Isabella’s death, and another unhappy and unconsumed marriage  following mother’s wish, the widower Joseph remained single for the rest of his life, but frequented the whore houses of Vienna on a regular basis. One day in the year 1778, a prostitute refused herself to him and after some quarrel, the emperor Joseph II of Austria and Hungary was thrown out of a bordel in Spittelberggasse in the then suburbs of Vienna. Now, there was someone who wrote to the Emporer!

He came flying through this door

Joseph II, Emperor

 

Durch dieses Tor im Bogen kam Kaiser Joseph II. geflogen– 1778

Witwe Bolte, now an upscale restaurant, was once a brothel in Vienna’s redlight district. While the place underwent renovation, the 18th century inscription was left untouched.

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Vienna: Salt and Pepper

The Saliera, the only work of art undoubtedly attributed to the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini

In 1544, the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini sculptured an intricate little salt table, saliera in Italian, which, for different reasons, went on to become one of Vienna’s most famous works of art. The Saliera is insured for the breathtaking sum of 60 million Euros. And good that it is…

Created for Charles I of France, the Saliera is a virtuoso piece in the then fashionable style of Mannerism. While in Renaissance art natural beauty, symmetry and balance were enhanced, Mannerism exaggerated these qualities to an extent that artworks appeared asymmetric, artificial. Mannerism addressed intellect rather than emotion – complex and sophisticated, with style and technique outweighing beauty and – meaning. A characteristic that some might find quite suitable to Viennese etiquette and manners…

The peppery Earth

Made of ivory, gold and enamel, the Saliera depicts a man and a woman: an allegory to the Sea and the Earth. A small vessel next to the man holds salt, a temple-shaped box next to the female figure pepper. On its base it even has a set of roles, for convenience at dinner parties and banquets – or for pure appreciation.

Charles son, Charles II, gave the Saliera to the Habsburgers as a present to Ferdinand II of Tyrol, when the former married Elisabeth of Austria. The Habsburg emporers and archdukes were avid collectors of exotic and uncommon materials, like precious stones, ostrich eggs, shark teeth and their likes – many of which were believed to hold magic powers – and were turned into works of art by chosen artists.

The Vanitas Group – An Allegory of Transcience is another famous oeuvre at display at the Kunstkammer. Sculptured in Medival Ages by (most likely) Michel Erhart, it contrasts the chaste beauty of Youth with the frivolity of age. The world was in the tight grip of catholic chastity back then…

The Kunstkammern – arts and natural wonders rooms – were collections that attempted to represent the erudition of their time. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna was completed in the 19th century, the Saliera was transferred to Vienna, and has been at public display, well protected, since the Museum was opened in 1891. The Kunstkammer at KHM, Vienna, is still considered the most important of its kind in the world.

The Saliera sat idly among other spectacular, delicate or bizarre statuettes, clocks or automatons – until 15th years ago, on May 11th 2003, when during a renovation the museum covered by a scaffolding, the salt dish was stolen. No alarms went off, the Saliera was simply gone.

The KHM – Kunsthistorisches Musem – Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna – after renovation and without scaffolding.

The museum offered a reward of one million Euros for its recovery. Without success. It was in January 2006 only that the Saliera was discovered, buried in a forest 90km North of Vienna. The thief – one by occasion rather than training – had turned himself in. He had been caught by surveillance cameras and recognized by his friends.

Ever since then, the Saliera is the most popular piece of art in Vienna.

The Saliera advertised on Banners in Vienna.

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Vienna: Remembering The Lost

On January 27th, Vienna commemorates the Holocaust Memorial Day. 72 years ago, on January 27 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest Nazi concentration camp.

More than six million Jews were killed in the holocaust, plus an estimated number of 200,000 Roma and Sinti, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men. To never forget the tragedy, the United Nations declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

80 years ago, in 1938, Austria was annexed to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler famously welcomed by the masses in the streets of Vienna. In the following seven years, more than 65,000 Austrian Jews lost their lives and the Jewish community was extinguished.

Judenplatz, the Jewish Square, in the center of Vienna, is now a sleepy, little square. Once it was the center of the Jewish community, Instead of a synagogue, a holocaust memorial stands on Judenplatz today, to remind the passers-by of the Jewish lives that vanished in the third Reich. The concrete cube, designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, resembles a library, but the books are turned inside out. They are inaccessible, unreadable, a symbol of the many biographies, the untold, unheard stories, that were irreversibly lost in the holocaust.

The statue of Ephraim Lessing stands opposite the holocaust memorial at Judenplatz. Lessing wrote the novel “Nathan, The Wise”, a plea for religious tolerance, in 1779.

It was WWII that ended the abhorrent Third Reich, a war that came at a high toll for the city of Vienna and its inhabitants. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the cruel fights over the city. It was also the Red Army that liberated Vienna from the Nazis.

Today, Vienna is again capital city of the Austrian Republic, but still high bunkers are scattered all over Vienna. These towers, unique to the cities Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, and equipped with canons to fight hostile bomber planes, were built by the Nazis in a last and futile attempt to withstand the allied bombardments.

As the sun sets, Joggers pass by a high bunker from WWII in Vienna’s Augarten.

This year however, the commemoration day is over shadowed by the recent inauguration of Austria’s new government, a right-wing neo-liberal coalition, which – following an international trend – fails to distance itself from fascist thinking. Are the tragic events of 20th century already forgotten in Austria?

This high-bunker was turned into a Zoo and Museum. There are no canons on its rood any more. “Smashed to pieces in the Still of the Night” it reads instead – a reminder of dark times in the Third Reich.

Two weeks ago, on January 13, the streets filled again. Despite the bitter cold winter weather, an estimated number of 70,000 people, peacefully demonstrated the Austrian new government’s program of economic aggravation and xenophobia, reminding many of the bitter days of the Third Reich. But instead of bombs, it rained hearts. For a day, Vienna was filled with love – and hope that history will not repeat itself.

 

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Vienna: The Caged Birds Fly

 

Opened in 1752, the zoo of Vienna is the oldest in the world. Mary Theresa of Austria had the zoo installed into the baroque gardens of her imperial summer residence of Schönbrunn, back then still in the outskirts of Vienna. Until 1778 only members of the royal family could wander among the cages to marvel at the elephants, giraffes, camels, bears, wolfs and exotic birds.

Today one of Vienna’s major tourist attractions, Schönbrunn with its zoological, botanical and baroque gardens as well as a lavishly decorated golden interior, was styled after Versaille in Paris. Mary Theresa sought the alliance of the Bourbon Empire to fortify her empire against her archfiend Frederick II of Prussia. On her court, French was spoken. To eternally strengthen the relationship between Austria and France, she further sent her youngest daughter, Maria Antonia, to marry the future king Louis XVI – against the teenager’s wish. However, the French empire did not last as long as the Austro Hungarian monarchy. As Queen Marie Antoinette, Maria Antonia was beheaded during the French Revolution of 1791.

At Schönbrunn castle, six year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for Mary Theresa. Little Mozart did not have to go to school as other children his age had to: As citizen of the independent state of Salzburg and therefore no Austrian, obligatory schooling did not apply to him.

Mary Theresa, despite her well-groomed image as the warm-hearted mother to the peoples of her multinational empire, was an absolute and strict ruler, and it was only her successor, her son Joseph II, who talked her into a slightly more liberal thinking and therefore reforms, such as opening the zoo to the public. In fact, the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy might have seen life in catholic, narrow-minded Austria comparable to living in the cages of the zoo. Definitely her own children did.

An ardent catholic – the Roman Catholic Church is still state church in Austria – she believed her power to be god given. Mary Theresa controlled her own children the way she controlled her subjects: with an iron fist. She introduced compulsory schooling for all children between six and twelve. Other faiths than the Roman Catholic were not tolerated in her empire: Jews as well as Christians of protestant faith were dispelled from the country – as long as they did not weigh in when it came to financing her wars against Frederick II. Wars she kept loosing.

Today, 300 years after Mary Theresa, the Zoo attracts two million visitors per year. In its more than 250 years of existence, it has gone a long way from its first exhibitions in baroque cages and adorned follies. Waldrapps, or hermit ibis, a central European bird species that went extinct in the 18th century, was bred anew at Schönbrunn Zoo. A complex re-introduction program which involved glider planes taught the birds, born in captivity, to fly long distance and find their migratory routs to Tuscanny, Italy, where their free ancestors spent their winters. The population of these striking birds is still small – they are among the rarest birds worldwide. Yet they are alive and free again – ironically thanks to Mary Theresa’s Zoo.

Every body is beautiful. A Waldrapp at the zoo, soon to be released.

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Vienna: Tu Felix Austria, Nube

When her husband died, Mary Theresa had her bedroom wallpapered in grey silk. She had her jewelry given to her court ladies, dressed in black and wore a black veil for the rest of her life. Often she was found sitting at her late husband’s sarcophagus in Vienna’s capuchin crypt. After her own death, sixteen years later, a piece of paper was found in her prayer book, on which she had noted the duration of her marriage:

29 years, 6 months, 6 days, equals years 29, months 335, weeks 1540, days 10,781, hours 258,744.

Mary Theresa, sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma had been lucky to marry the man she loved.

To her father, Emperor Charles VI, she had been a disappointment. He had wished for a son, a heir to the throne. And while he had her raised to become a lady of the court – Mary Theresa was excluded from education and contemporary erudition, but trained in painting, dancing and the French language, he still did everything to ensure she and the husband he would chose for her would follow on his throne. He chose Francis Stephen of Lorraine, by pure coincidence the man Therese loved.

At the age of 23, after her father’s sudden death from poisoned mushrooms in 1780, Mary Theresa stepped up, literally.

Detail of the Vienna Burgtheater, the most important german speaking theater. It was built under Mary Theresa.

By the time of her coronation, she had been married for four years, pregnant and mother to three. The empire she inherited was run down and bankrupt, the army non-existent. On top, a female reign was considered a liability by the adversary powers. The empire was attacked right away. Yet, Mary Theresa proved herself an astute leader. She charmed other nations into supporting her.

While she negotiated successfully to have her husband crowned Holy Roman Emperor – due to her gender Mary could not be crowned Empress herself – she did not grant Francis I, as he was now called, a say in leading the Empire. On the contrary, Mary Theresa led the country as a matrone, a mother figure. Soon the country prospered under her leadership and Mary Theresa honed her image of a generous, warm mother, who loved her people as much as she loved her own off-spring. She had sixteen children. The fourth was a boy, the later Emperor Joseph II.

Bella Gerant Alii, Tu Felix Austria Nube. – Let others wage wars, thou, happy Austria, marry.

While Mary Theresa did not dispose of a powerful army, she used her 16 children to set up agreements and deals. She wedded them off all over the continent to ensure coalitions, territorial gains or military support. Her children’s feelings or love interests were of no concern to her.

Mary Theresa was an ardent catholic. She believed her power God given, and her life style reflected a puritan and strict view of the world. Yet when it came to marrying off her youngest daughter to French King Louis XVI, she even negotiated the deal with the notorious Madame Pompadour, chief mistress on the French court, of whom she did not approved. Mary Theresa believed in absolute conjugal faith. Sadly, her husband, Francis I, did not.

tourists take in the sun by Mary Therese’s statue in front of the museum of art history, where her portrait in black is at display

To the children of the Habsburg Empire Mary Theresa was as strict a mother as to her own children. She introduced compulsory education to all between six and fifteen. Her relationship to her own sons and daughters was as distant as their geographic location: Mary Christina was married to Saxony, Mary Amalia to Parma, Mary Karolina to Naples, Ferdinand Charles Anthony to Modena, Maximilian Francis became bishop of Cologne, and Maria Antonia was beheaded as Mary Antoinette in Paris in 1793. But this Mary Theresa never learned.

She had died in 1780 already, wearing her beloved husband’s housecoat.

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Vienna: Go Gay


In 2015, the city of Vienna introduced new traffic lights. On 47 inner city crossings, the common stick figure was replaced by red and green couples that came in three different versions: lesbian, gay and heterosexual. The new traffic lights applied equally to all jaywalkers, regardless of their sexual orientation: walk/don’t walk, gay or not.


Initially, the traffic light couples were installed only temporarily as a marketing gag to support the annual Life Ball, a glamorous, celebrity-studded charity event to raise funds for HIV-research and anti-AIDS campaigning. Carried by a wave of enthusiasm after the bearded drag queen “Conchita Wurst” had won the Eurovision Song Contest the previous year, the city council attempted to place Vienna on the map of gay-friendly and liberal cities.

A Conchita Wurst-look a like at Vienna’s Pride Parade

The traffic lights caused a bigger stir than expected. Covered by media around the globe, the concept and design of the so-called Ampelpärchen were even sold to other cities like Munich. A relatively modest investment of purported 63,000.- Euros generated a much larger financial revenue and, of course, a large touristic benefit.

Horse carriages are a tourist attraction in Vienna, reminiscent of the glorious days of the Austro Hungarian Empire. This carriage at the Vienne Pride Parade caters to S/M inclined tourists.

Not surprisingly, the political right demanded the traffic lights couples’ immediate removal and threatened to sue the responsible politician, the green vice-mayor, for slander of tax money and/or moral decline. The vice-mayor defended the couples: Being novelties, she argued, they would attract more attention from jay-walkers, who were then more likely to obey traffic rules.

The Ampelpärchen stayed for good. Locals are mostly approving, or indifferent by now. The Viennese, law-abiding by nature, accept traffic signals of any sexual orientation, which does not make Vienna the gayest city in the world, but definitely one the safest.

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Vienna: Cherubs

By daylight, walking through the center of Vienna feels like a journey into the glorious past of an empire: the palaces with their cheerful rococo facades, playgrounds for the little cherubs, cute little creatures, half angels, half cupids.


But wait for night fall, when the streetlights are turned off, and only the illuminated windows cast shadows on the deserted streets.

The cherubs are still playing in the dark, innocent.