Max Steiner. Billy Wilder. Gustav Mahler. What do these people have in common besides being still reasonably well-known? I wouldn't have known myself before I went to Vienna, but there I learned, while just walking around, not only about these overachievers' early whereabouts, but that their whereabouts were here in Vienna.

I will give the city high marks for courage, in that Vienna actually chased a few of these people, by both act and inference, out. If I'm not mistaken, Steiner was a Jew. Vienna was a rather warm place for a Jew after Hitler's Anchluss, whose implacable anti-Semitism would deport, and eventually kill off, sixty thousand of them. A drop in the bucket, considering the astronomical death-toll of the war itself. But those sixty thousand lost were enough to significantly drain the city of its intellectual autonomy. It was Jews like Freud around whom the intellectual life of the city revolved, and which raised its international reputation during the pre-WWII area to heights it will likely never achieve again.

At any rate, a city that could do such a thing to its intelligentsia has cohones for acknowledging its not-so-very-favorite sons. I came across Steiner's name in the Prater, while in the company of my dear friend Linda Tabor, a Richmond expatriate who is fond of saying that it took her forty years to come back to Vienna. What she says also happens to be true; she'd been married here in the Sixties and had fallen in love with the place - which is not a hard thing to do.

Steiner had apparently come of age in the neighborhood
- a fact the city fathers wished to acknowledge some years ago in the form of a handsome little gewgaw with his name and some significant career milestones on it.
He became a very successful Hollywood composer, working on such films as Gone With the Wind, accentuating its majestic sweep with a score that might be seen today as somewhat over the top. But who hasn't been stirred by its great melodic heart, culminating in everybody's favorite moment in the film, when The Great Kiss happens?

Steiner was a somewhat traditional composer and kept whatever avant-garde tendencies he may have had to himself. Like most refugees from Europe, he settled into the American zeitgeist without any apparent adjustment woes. As did Billy Wilder, whose "funny"
accent gives one pause because his films are so quintessentially American. He said to Jack Lemmon that they couldn't go wrong if they could make films about the rich screwing.

Perhaps the old, and war-extinguished, Viennese irreverance was resurrected by him via American movies. It is a pleasant thought.

Vienna is a city of plaques and reverences to a often glorious, but also creepily blood-stained, past. I think that's why much of its art and literature is seen as so mordibly self-flagellating. Something called "Actionism" flourished here back in the Eighties, I think - and has obvious scions, if art galleries are any indication of the city's darker creative impulses. Actionism was an attempt to reduce
art to a gross and earthy - not to mention degrading
- substance: shit, for one. In the States, such playacting might be regarded as infantile (which
doesn't mean it can't be successful. Remember "Piss
Christ"?) In Vienna, the precis of Actionism might be seen as an spasm of revulsion against its past, a rejection of all order and standards, a grim salute to the chaos and cruelty that underlies all human interaction on this earth.

Could be. I don't, however, think anybody could argue with the need for atonement. Nor should one demur at its many possible manifestations, from plaque-posting to art forms in which feces and not, say, cadmium yellow, provide the material strength.

There are other plaques around the city as well: these state in no uncertain terms the toll taken by Allied bombings. Most occurred later in the war, but the plaques lump them all into the 1939-1945 years - the entire extent of WWII. I like that as well. It seems to acknowledge that Vienna was in the thick of things (which it was) from the git-go, when Hitler rallied two hundred thousand strong and got a very, very clear signal. Of course, Vienna was Hitler's adopted city and who in his right mind wouldn't want to welcome a conquering hero who might someday deport him if he didn't?

One place that isn't so well marked, but carefully acknowledged, is the - by Vienna standards - vast unused expanse of still-undeveloped real estate in Southeast Vienna, bordered by Aspangasse, in the Renwegg District. I walked there a number of times looking for some obvious and perhaps heart-wrenching sign that so many human lives were essentially lost there. But the railroad tracks were gone, and only a few functional-looking buildings were there to suggest that the area had had any purpose at all. Along Aspangasse were a number of picturesque buildings I, an architecture enthusaist, couldn't quite orient to the place itself. They had a sort of neutral charm, suggesting not horrific loss but historic continuity.
In such places people carried on their lives as their fellow citizens were being shunted off into cattle cars and taken away. I had a vision of a nice old lady sweeping the sidewalk, as many nice old ladies do here. Vienna must be one of the cleanest large cities on earth.

Much of Vienna appears to have been shelled and rebuilt. But this street had at least its share of the very old things for which people come to Vienna.
They were the kinds of very old things that had attracted Hitler, a very spotty painter of the conventionally picturesque, during his 8-year sojourn to the city. It is perhaps a cliche to notice the mundane, life-goes-on quality that surrounds hallowed sites, particular if these hallowed sites have not yet been officially hallowed. But there was nothing else around except a U-Bahn stop. Kids had sprayed a little graffiti there, but for the most part the place was eerily and resoundingly empty. I saw a provisional mockup for an one-site monument to the place somewhere. It's minimal, in the tradition of the Vietnam Memorial here in DC, but it seems less eloquent of unspeakable tragedy than the place itself.
Perhaps that's why nothing has been done with it. It just sits here, year after year, so that people might, each in their turn, reflect on it or forget about it completely.

The war museum isn't far away. I didn't make time to see it. Perhaps next visit.

People bitterly complain at how Mozart - who has his share of plaques and monuments - was treated here.
Actually, he was more his own worse enemy and simply overspent his money. His income was excellent. He just enjoyed giving a lot of it away. Not so Beethoven, who's probably responsible for more plaques and mini-shrines than any other notable person in all of Vienna. Seems he moved around a lot. Had to.
Debt collectors have good legs.

I think Mahler was one of the few people who actually left because he wanted to. Apparently he got sick of the political infighting and petty bickering of his colleagues at the Opera and moved to the States, where was received kindly and treated well. He died, a free man, at fifty.

What does all this mean?

It seems that anyplace that has a past can either acknowledge it gracefully or hide strategically from it. Richmond, Virginia, where I lived for some years, struggles not very manfully with its past because it hasn't entirely acknowledged it. There are plaques, but they mostly celebrate old victories and/or romantic exploits. The slave trade has its tour and its most wretched citizens, both past and present, have been given lip service. There is even a sort of backlash among black people that is as openly racist (against whites) as white racism ever was. But Richmond can't deal with that either because there are just things people don't talk about.

So Vienna's open and even self-hating acknowledgement of its own past is, by comparison, not a bad thing.
It will always have its indigenous charm. It will also be a magnet for tourists. And it will always have its secret, erotically complicated inner life.
But it has at least tried to come to terms for the sins of its fathers and I think that's a very good thing. I don't care much for Actionism and feel its practitioners have, as it were, thrown the baby out with the bathwater in identifying realism, for example, with the Nazis. Academic realism was indeed a propoganda tool, but the artists who celebrated Aryan trimphalism were docile creatures who merely wanted to work. The avant-garde, or "degenerate"
artists caught a great deal of flak for it and had no life to speak of once they decided to go with the "the other side." Most people anywhere don't have a great deal of courage. Even the most talented among us can bet on the wrong horse and follow it much, much too far. One of those artists was the idealistic and infinitely talented Carl Moll, who saw the error of his ways to the extent that he could no longer live with them and committed suicide. He'd, however, been one of those artists who'd been interested in equality and experimentation and departed from the academy.
Then he made a very bad mistake and backed Hitler. I did not find any plaques celebrating his existence.

Well, we always pay for our loyalties in one way or another and Vienna reminds us of that very thing implicitly, fiercely, resoundingly. Even if it didn't have the sort of imperial-era charm it most indubitably does, that would justify its existence for that reason alone.

Long live you, Wien!