Dankenswert

Deserving of Thanks

Our Austrian friends have taught us in word and deed to “embrace winter.”  For instance, we’ve been instructed to have a brisk walk every day and, if at all possible, attempt to time the walk during the fleeting moments of sunshine.  According to BBC Weather, Vienna enjoyed an average of two hours of sunlight per day in November; one hour of sunlight per day is expected during December.  Suspecting that we might need encouragement or comfort to face this news, our Viennese pals advise, “the company of friends and family provide light and warmth during the winter months. “  Yesterday, Thanksgiving Day, we twice experienced this aphorism. 

The sun poked out at about 14:00, so we quickly strapped on our shoes, put on our coats and headed down Neubaugasse for the requisite brisk walk.  Around the corner is a “klein aber fein” second hand clothing shop.  Frau Lochman, the proprietor, beautifully dresses her windows, and inside she offers quality wares at very reasonable prices along with Austrian Gemütlichkeit.  Yesterday as we walked by, she bounded outside to greet us with a hearty “Good day of thanks for you!”  Frau Lochman told us she was looking out the window all afternoon hoping to see “her Americans” because when the morning news mentioned the Thanksgiving holiday she thought of us and wondered how we would celebrate.  We all stood on the sidewalk in front of Frau Lochman’s store, soaked in the sunshine, and discussed our plans.  Then we all agreed every day is a day for giving thanks.

We encountered the “light and warmth” aphorism for a second time only a few hours later.  The students at Central College’s Vienna campus invited us to share Thanksgiving dinner with them.  We’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Central’s gracious Director and this year’s lively students on a couple of occasions this fall, but nothing could have prepared us for the hospitality we experienced on Thursday evening.  From the hand-drawn invitation and handshakes when we arrived, to the last bites of pumpkin, pecan, and apple pie, we felt like honorary members of the Central College clan.  We’ve been showered with enough light and warmth to keep us toasty until spring.   

The ambrosial feast prepared by our talented hosts

Exuberant company and stimulating conversation

The delicious 13-kilo turkey gave its all

Grüß Gott Winter, Pfiat di Herbst

Hello Winter, Good-bye Autumn

The past week has grown increasingly cold, grey and blustery in Wien. We’ve scampered through all types of precipitation from downpours to snow flurries. We even experienced a couple thunder/lightening storms while it was snowing.  So, as we offer “Grüß Gott” to Winter, we also bid “Pfiat Di” to Autumn. 

The “Pfiat di” phrase (or the less oft used “Pfiat di Gott”) is frequently uttered at the closing of a conversation.  Depending on the Austrian it sounds something like “Fear-dee,” or “Fit-dee,” or a nice spitting “Pfffffffffffidi.”  Until recently we were at a loss as to the exact meaning of this farewell.  Our American friend here in Wien solved the mystery our Austrian friends could not!  “Pfiat di,” shortened from “Behüte Dich Gott,” is the good-bye cousin to “Grüß Gott.”  So, when you commence a conversation with “God’s Greeting” you conclude it with “Pfiat di” meaning, “May God look after you” or “God protect you.”    

The photos on this blog post are a fond farewell to Fall; Pfiat di Herbst!

Soaking in the Autumn sun in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Enjoying the Bratislava Castle grounds and view of the Danube.

There has been some sort of camp/castle/palace/fortress/bastion on this site since 2800 B.C. 

Location, Location, Location...

The tree outside our apartment window. The leaves remained green until the middle of October.  They then suddenly splotched with yellow, turned completely gold, and dropped within a week.

Loving the season; loving each other - in Prater Park.

Strolling along the Danube canal.

A relaxing walk in the Wiener Wald with our friends Petra and Edwin.

Even Franz Joseph I, seen here as he tends his Burg Garten, is getting saying "Pfiat di" to Autumn.

Grüß Gott Winter!  This photo was taken outside the Radiokulturhaus, where the Austrian equivalent of NPR (including all the LIVE music) is housed; hence, the giant mosaic ear.

Our first Austrian snow flakes - seen in the wee small hours of the morning during a smashing dinner party.  Skadi (the goddess of winter) was certain our camera didn't slip out of our hands as we were leaning out the fourth-story window to snap a photo.

Wieder Absichten

Repurposing

The repurposing of buildings and other structures in Austria, Europe—anywhere on the planet really—is always intriguing, and to our way of thinking, a sound idea to save history, the environment, and the soul of a place. In Lincoln as in Vienna, it is fairly commonplace to see a train station transformed into a restaurant, a factory remodeled for apartments or office space, a barn rebuilt to shelter people instead of cattle.
We fully expected to see Austrian banks, hotels, private or government offices, apartments housed in what used to be palaces, and we’ve not been disappointed. But we’ve seen re-purposing in Austria that we’ve not yet before observed.


In Leoben, for instance, the convent dating from the 1500s on the river Mur, was re-purposed in about 1900 to be a prison (insert the joke of your choice here). Last year, preserving as much of the original structure as possible, the once-convent-prison was painstakingly repurposed again into a gorgeous shopping mall – with a food court and everything! (The Styrian prisoners have been relocated to the hills.)


Here in Vienna, the imperial stables were repurposed a decade ago. The 15-acre Hapsburg horse hotel is now the Museum’s Quartier ( http://www.mqw.at/fset_en.htmlone). Housing museums, cafes, dance clubs, libraries, and gift shops, it is one of the ten largest cultural complexes in the world. The stable smell is gone, but all the lovely arches, staircases, viewing stands, and equestrian-themed embellishments on every doorway remain.
But what about repurposing something even larger than 15-acres? Let’s say you had 4 brick cylinders, each 300 feet tall and 200 across, which were originally built in 1896 to hold coal gas (dry-distilled from coal) before it was distributed to Vienna’s gas network. What would you do with them when you no longer needed to store coal gas? How about connecting them with sky bridges and creating a city within a city? The “Gasomter” project was completed in 2001 and now holds apartments, banks, stores, a 3,000-seat music hall, restaurants, movie theatres, historical archives, student dorms, offices (http://www.wiener-gasometer.at/en/). Brilliant, eh?

Please read the next blog entry for the most sobering repurposing of all.

Flaktürme

Flak Towers

Flak towers are enormous, concrete, aboveground anti-aircraft structures erected by the Lufwaffe during WWII. For more information see these websites: http://www.ww2sites.com/index.php?action=jump&page=atwien, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_Tower, http://www.thirdreichruins.com/vienna.htm,http://www.tourmycountry.com/austria/flak-towers-vienna.htm

Always built in pairs, 18 towers were erected between 1940 and 1944 (six in Berlin; four in Hamburg; six in Vienna). They vary in size, ranging from 129-187 feel high and up to 141 feet in diameter; the reinforced concrete walls are eight feet thick; they vary in shape – square, rectangular, or round. Each tower took only six months to build. In addition to the weapons and spotlights mounted on the top of the towers, the interiors served as hospital wards and air-raid shelters for tens of thousands of people (we were told up to 30 thousand people sought protection in the largest tower in Wien).
The six flak towers in Vienna, built between the winter of 1942 and the autumn of 1944, were the last of the 18 to be constructed. Unlike the towers in Berlin and Hamburg which were all or mostly demolished during or after the war, all six Vienna towers still stand. This is due, in part, to their sturdier design (no windows, only one door, stairs only on the inside – not on the outside).
None of the guidebooks we’ve perused contain the “the flaktürme tour;” still, we find them fascinating, so, thanks to the guidance of friends and the internet, we sought them out. Two towers are actually very near our apartment; two stand in the oldest park in Vienna; and the final two are in a small neighborhood park. Although only two of the six towers have actually been “repurposed,” the Viennese with whom we’ve spoken (people of all ages, cultures, and political views) discuss the towers’ noble purpose – giant reminders of the horror of war.

We had our first tower sighting during our second week in Wien when standing on the elevated steps of the Hofburg. While attempting to locate our own neighborhood landmarks in the distance (we were about a mile from our apartment), we saw the soaring concrete colossus . “What is that? Where is that? Why haven’t we seen it before?” Our friend Elisabeth elucidated the tower’s original purpose and location, hidden behind the walls of a military academy (which, surprise, was once a convent). The academy is only a few blocks from our apartment—we walk down that street almost daily, but we could never see the tower. The base of the tower is only visible from one street when the military academy gates are opened. When we spoke with the guards, we asked to see tower, and they politely refused. They did, however, engage us in an interesting conversation about the towers’
history and current use. They said their particular tower contained “nothing but air.” (Other Viennese have rolled their eyes when we’ve relayed that story.) As far as we could tell, there were no signs indicating the presence of the tower inside the military academy.

Positioned on an elevated, pie-shaped piece of land which juts out into a busy street, the second tower in our neighborhood (about a 10 minute walk from the first) cannot be missed. Not only can you enter the tower, you pay 12 Euros for the privilege. Between 1965 and 2000 the “Esterhazy Park” flak tower was repurposed as an aquarium and terrarium. The “House of the Sea” (or “Haus des Meeres” - http://www.haus-des-meeres.at/index_e.html) is home to over 3,500 birds, animals, fish, and reptiles which enjoy both fresh and salt water as part of their habitat. Although we’ve not been inside (we’re waiting for a cold day), it is apparently the 14th largest tourist attraction in Vienna. On the outside of the tower one can scale two climbing walls, or sit in the lovely little park and watch happy families stream in and out. On the top of the tower you’ll read "Smashed into pieces (in the middle of the night)." Attributed to American artist Lawrence Weiner, this is an allusion to the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht) in November 1938 when Vienna's Jewish synagogues were systematically destroyed; this giant message is the only mention of the tower’s origin in the area (though inside small exhibit about the creation and use of the tower was opened in 2007). At the base of the flak tower is a former air-raid shelter that now contains the Museum of Medieval Legal History and the History of Torture. (The Jensens probably won’t be visiting that museum.)



Towers three and four, in Augarten, can be found in even closer proximity to each other. Originally used as the imperial hunting grounds and “walking woods” in the 1600s, the Augarten area was remodeled in the “French garden style” with perfectly straight symmetrical avenues of neatly pruned, very tall trees. It was opened to the public in 1775. Neither of the two flak towers in Augarten contain anything except for pigeon apartments. In the summer however, the round tower serves as a projection screen for “movies under the stars.” During our stroll around these towers, we did not see signage of any sort indicating the history or current use of the structures.

Lovely Augarten - with Flaktürme at the end of two, tree-lined paths.

Finally, towers five and six are both squeezed into the quiet little Arenberg park. The largest, fortress-shaped tower, has been used since 1995 as an archival depository for the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts). With some internet research, we disovered the tower is open on Sunday afternoons – but that is about all we could uncover. So, we journeyed to Arenberg park in hopes of poking our heads inside a flak turm. Good Lord. Did we get a surprise! Not only did we enter the tower, we also got an hour-long tour which detailed the history of the flaktürme, described the current use of that particular tower’s 42,300 square feet (storage and exhibition space), and explicated the current exhibits. Interestingly, all art pieces share a theme — home, community, living space. Reflecting on this theme inside a flaktürm gives one pause to say the least.

After the tour we were allowed to go all the way up to the top to the observation platform. The view was as breathtaking as the bitterly cold wind. We’ll certainly return in the spring to linger without getting frostbite. The long-term hope for this tower is that it will be transformed into more comfortable exhibition space, as well as commercial, music, and restaurant venues (in Austria, you always have to have a place to purchase beer and a jause (snack)). Our tour guide, the ticket attendant, and the (freight) elevator operator, all commented on the impossibility of humans surviving the arctic temperatures (inside the tower) from December through March. They admitted that even yesterday’s (November 16) temperatures were quite challenging.

(Note the thickness of the walls.)

The unusable 9-story staircase

The Flaktürme are very much like the proverbial "elephants in the room" - dominant in their physical and psychological presence despite the fact that no one seems to really talk about them unless directly asked. We're happy we've done some asking.

Die Bedeutung des Heimats

The Meaning of Home

The Museum of Applied Arts exhibit in the Arenberg Park Flakturm was all about "home." Where do we live? What is in our living space? Where will we live in the future?
Since there was plenty of space for installations, we enjoyed two floors of large, thought-provoking, and sometimes interactive art.

Do we play in our homes?
We had a great time tearing, throwing, and shuffling through paper.

And where do we sit?
An "electric chair" made of legos? A chair made from a washing machine?
Or are we walking around so much that we don't have time to sit?

And what if there were no water? (the name of this installation)
What would home look like?
Each little marker gave the name of a plant, the appearance, the origin, etc.

Do we live in our cars? And if we do, will our cars get fat?
(This is a Ford, by the way.)

This is a model of our collective home--our "global village."
From harbor to city, from countryside to industrial site, from desert to meadows -
the exhibit, with many iconic landmarks from all around the world,
took up much of the entire floor.

Die Gänsl und Laterne

The Geese and the Lanterns

We were in Graz last week to meet with students, faculty and administrators from the University of Graz and the Graz University of Technology – both ISEP sister schools of Wesleyan.  Here you can view photos of us lecturing about Lincoln’s multi-cultural educational system to 200+ students - we hope the students enjoyed it as much as we did!  After our amazing day of meetings and lectures, we were lucky enough to celebrate St. Martin’s Day with our delightful new colleagues.  Never heard of St. Martin’s Day?  Neither had we.

Here is what we learned about the St. Martin legend – mostly from Austrian children, Austrian professors (our hosts in Graz), and the Internet: Martin, originally from Hungary, was a soldier. On a freezing cold night when he was making his rounds, he met a beggar clothed in rags. Other than his military cloak, Martin had nothing with him to offer, so with one stroke of his sword, he split the cloak in two and gave one half to the beggar.  This generous act not only warmed the beggar, it warmed Martin’s heart – so he left the military and devoted himself to people in need.  He did such a good job that they later made him a saint.

How do you honor such a charitable and munificent man?  Well, by walking through the dark street with a lantern, and by eating a goose, of course!  As is often the case with traditions, when outsiders ask, “Why do you do that?” many locals answer with some form of “Gosh – I don’t know . . . we just do.  Don’t you celebrate St. Martin’s Day this way?” Or “Let’s go ask my Grandma.” Or “ummmm . . . I think I learned about that in grade school—I sort of remember something about setting fire to a goose because it was cold?”  In any case, the following explanations for the lantern and goose traditions have been shared with us.    

Walking with a lantern:  Our sources explained the light in the darkness (remember, it is dark at 4 p.m. here) is a symbol of how St. Martin brought a flicker of hope to the lives of the poor through his good deeds.  Children sing the following while processing through their neighborhoods, "Up and down the streets, again the lanterns illuminate: red, yellow, green, blue, dear Martin come and look! It's Saint Martin's Day, it's nice to celebrate. We knock at your door and bring you a little light. We run along to all the doors and sing now a song especially for you!” Some have told us that, especially in smaller towns, children get cookies or fruit when they go door to door (kind of like trick or treating but without the tricks, costumes, commercialism, or artificial colors and transfats).  This evening as we were strolling through our neighborhood, we did indeed see many children with homemade lanterns, though none of them approached us for treats. (Karla was disappointed; Travis was relieved.)

Eating of the goose:  Our sources don’t agree on this one, but here are the two most popular stories we’ve heard.  First, being a modest man, Martin did not feel himself worthy of becoming a bishop, so he hid in a stable filled with geese. The squawking of the geese was so loud that the townspeople found Martin and made him bishop anyway.  Another legend says that noisy geese disturbed a prayer service Martin was leading; this annoyed him so much that the geese were later served for dinner.  (We think legend number two is more plausible – and delicious.)

Finally, just this afternoon we discovered St. Martin is the patron saint of drunkards and teetotalers.  We don’t know what to make of that.  Somehow, eating of the goose and walking with the lantern doesn’t seem odd at all.