CONCRETE DREAMS
Cities, by offering seemingly endless
options, have become for many both the
starting point and the end station to
reach the nirvana of an eternal good life.
The streets may not literally be “paved
with gold,” and the slums not so peaceful
or hygienic as the countryside, but cities
offer the greater opportunities and
stimulus of open-mindedness, techno-
logical innovation, global cultures, and
tolerance. An essential element is choice,
and there is certainly plenty to choose
from in Vienna, including the choice to
be conventional, which the city also
magically manages to protect.
“Lifers” in New York City or London
are surprised that a smaller, more provin-
cial city like Vienna repeatedly ranks at
the top of international surveys on living
standards. Vienna has an undeniable
global importance, with its many NGOs,
and regular hosting of internationally
critical nuclear containment talks, but it
also lives on to this day in the shadow of
its grand empire lost, of the days long
gone when it ruled vast swathes of
Europe, made and broke popes, and
provoked world wars. The city is neutral
now, rather like a spectator asked to occa-
sionally referee a boxing match between
two insane uncles – which is actually a
good thing for anyone valuing a life that is
easier, if not necessarily good.
The answer to what makes Vienna so
especially good at being neutral lies in part
in the words of the Austrian novelist and
Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek: “The
smaller a group, the easier it is for more
people to argue and enter into discussions.
The U.S. is vast. It’s too large. The intellec-
tuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or
universities, like a bunch of chickens
hiding from the fox.”
Vienna’s smaller size and less polarized
social structures (there are more political
options here than simply red or blue) work
together to provide a balance, an alterna-
tive to chasing an impossible dream of life
as an endless good time at the expense of
others. The annual May Day Communist
Party Picnic, with Latin American barbe-
cues, amusement park rides, and Kurdish
revolutionary musicians, celebrates the
city’s deeply rooted postwar socialist
roots. Things are more group oriented
here, it is about much more than naked
individualism.THE PERFECT RECIPE
Winston Churchill understood this: “We
make a living by what we get,” he said.
“We make a life by what we give.” At
Atelier 10 in the 10th district, a group of
free art studios in a repurposed factory
space, the German director Florian
Reese gives socially and phisically
disadvantaged artists a chance to develop
artistic autonomy and present their work
to gallerists and collectors. Magdas Hotel,
a cool boutique space in the 2nd, employs
refugees. These places provide a sense of
The Good Life to all three stakeholders in
the social contract: Those offering help to
others, those benefiting from it, and those
of us lucky enough to enjoy these spaces.
It’s not selfish to enjoy giving. It’s a neces-
sary soul warming reward that lasts a lot
longer than a new shirt.
In Vienna, it’s okay to live modestly
while pursuing a deeper path toward a
good life – something ideal for the finan-
cially unstable life of an artist. You can
pass an open-air cinema by the Turkish
market in Yppenplatz, or dancers
practicing the tango on the polished
stone floor behind the National Library,
and join in for free, as casually as drop-
ping in at a local café. As the electronic
composer and DJ Peter Kruder put it,
waving his hand like a fish swimming up-
stream, “In those larger cities you are
always chasing the next big thing. Here
in Vienna, you can go inside yourself to
see what is really there.”
Vienna’s polyglot, multicultural and
diverse social classes, drawn to this post-
Iron Curtain border town by successivewaves of migration from the east and
west, offer each other the keys for
making life good. Kruder’s compositions
are spiced with the Turkish music from
taxis passing his 16th district window.
Romanian students stay to work for
Austrian startups. Streets artists from all
over the world collaborate on murals. A
Spanish man legally partners with a
Viennese barman. A new world develops,
which offers the next generation even
more models for a good life than before.
The ghosts of the past are ever present
too – Sigmund and Anna Freud, Bertha
von Suttner, Gustav Klimt and Emilie
Flöge, Bruno Kreisky, Gustav Mahler,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Adolf and
Claire Beck Loos, Bertha Pappenheim,
Karl Popper, Max Reinhardt, Egon
Schiele, Max Steiner, Arthur Schnitzler,
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Billy
Wilder, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Trude
Fleischmann, Stefan Zweig. They shape
the quick of the present, provoking us,
through the art hanging on the walls of the
Leopold Museum, or the plays on the
stage of the Burgtheater, to color our
actions with wisdom and compassion. We
best appreciate life knowing how lucky we
are to live in such uninteresting times.
There are no natural disasters in Vienna,
but there have been man-made ones, such
as the one that struck violinist Viktor
Robitsek and many of his colleagues, fired
from the Vienna Philharmonic in 1938.
The Nazi storm whipped away the rights
of thousands of Jewish or Roma Viennese.
Very few of them ever saw Vienna again.
For the renowned gypsy musician
Harri Stojka, The Good Life doesn’t
require words. His lightning fingers send
a message of love and thoughts of a
tolerant future drift from his guitar
through his kitchen window. For fans of
the equally quick-fingered electronic
keyboardist Dorian Concept, to simply
survive life’s crazy rollercoaster, some-
times it’s necessary to be deliriously lost
in a trippy ambient musical haze.“The U.S. is vast. It’s too large. The intellectuals
hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities,
like a bunch of chickens hiding from the fox.”
Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian playwright, novelist and Nobel laureate 2004COVER STORY