Vienna: A Tale Of Two Cities

Fatima Bhutto journeys through the Austrian capital and finds it bound by history, yet remarkably forward-looking.

- Fatima Bhutto

East of the Danube River, Vienna was once the gem of the Habsburg empire. It is a UNESCO heritage city—even its legendary café culture was awarded UNESCO status—that has been home to stars like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sigmund Freud and Gustave Klimt. It was here that Adolf Hitler was rejected—twice—by the Vienna Academy for Fine Arts (he was also the only person to ever use the balcony of the Hofburg Palace, where he announced the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into a Nazi Germany), here that the Glock pistol was invented, that part of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was filmed and that Arnold Schwarzenegger fed into a strong, muscular young man.

The magazine Monocle named Vienna the world’s best city in terms of quality of life, and the Mercer Quality of Living Survey has placed it at the top of its list of places to live for nearly a decade running. But you wouldn’t necessarily feel any of this as a tourist, when your presence seems a nuisance to the locals who don’t hesitate to tell you off for any number of reasons. On the near-empty Museumsquartier metro, a young man, who looked utterly exhausted and broken, was sleeping with his feet propped up on an empty seat. Sure enough, a woman strode across the carriage in order to wake him up and scold him. Speak too loudly in the Belvedere gardens? Shut up, someone will offer. Ask a stranger for directions? I don’t know, the stranger will huff, waving you away.