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Vienna's compact historic centre is a treasure trove of secular and sacred gems, from the famous cafés and grand Habsburg palaces to the magnificent Gothic cathedral at its heart. Vienna (Wien) is a world-famous metropolis that has never quite shed its provincial image. Even when it was the administrative centre for an empire of more than 50 million subjects, Johannes Brahms remarked that he lived in Vienna because he could work well only in a village. Of its many contradictions, Vienna's ability to be profoundly conservative and extraordinarily progressive at the same time is something that stands out: you see it in the architectural mix of Baroque and Gothic with Secession,Jugendstil and now ecological postmodern; and in the attitudes of the people, scornful of innovation but demanding the most sophisticated modern infrastructure. This can be summed up in the Viennese tram, a means of transport abolished in many other cities, but here reborn in the 1990s when sleek, futuristic wagons, replacing the old models, began to carry people through the traffic jams reliably and in comfort. Conservatism and flexibility also clash in the eternal question of immigration, which causes racist moaning, even while the moaner is in search of a reliable Serb cleaning woman, or a Polish carpenter, or a Croatian construction worker. Some of these "immigrants" are temporary Gastarbeiter ("guest workers"), but many, according to an old tradition, are the parents of children who will join the Viennese melting pot. Vienna is a city where the temporary and provisional transform imperceptibly into the permanent and traditional. A Viennese, remarked one close observer, "is and remains a somewhat ungraspable character - a sketch, a draft, never a completed whole...". |
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