Thoughts on Vienna

Epistemic status: Purely vibes based based off four days in Vienna. Almost zero research or knowledge of anything Austrian. Actual Austrians should read at their own peril.

Charn

I went to Vienna a few weeks ago.

The first thing you notice getting off the airport bus is the quiet. Well, that’s not strictly true. The bus drops you off by the central train station, which still has people around at 11pm. But not very many, and you quickly get away from them in the walk to the hostel. And once you’re half a block from the train station, there’s nothing but silent, empty streets.

This is strange. This is a dense downtown area full of six story housing blocks. There should be some sign of life somewhere. But there’s less people around than a backcountry trail. Maybe it’s the Austrian habit of graying out windows, or their frugality with lightbulbs, but there’s no sign of life from the apartments either, no lit windows or the sounds of family arguments. Just long, empty streets.

picture taken later, on the other side of the river

Vienna isn’t a dead city the way suburbs are. There’s construction going on, so clearly people are living there and planning for more. It just feels… slightly empty. The people there are old - on my first day, I don’t think I saw a single person outside the hostel without grey hair. I saw a few children around later (Austrians, like Germans, seem to do the thing where they walk kindergarteners around in groups on the street. I have no idea where the kids are going, but I like it).

I walked some more around downtown the next day. It’s quite beautiful and well planned - there’s lots of great pedestrianized streets, nice shops and general people walking around. I’d say Vienna has the beauty of Berlin with the excitement of Munich, which is a bit mean (Berlin was the least pretty of the German cities I’ve been to, and Munich is famously the boring capital of Europe, competing for the title with Vienna itself). But I mean this in the nice way too - Vienna also gets some of the nice quietness of Munich, and some of the rough practicality of Berlin is nice to have.

As we see here, there are some busy areas. As we see in the other pictures, they’re not the whole area. As we notice in them all, they’re not young, which is both depressing (old people town) and nice (old people feel comfortable going out). No idea which interpretation is true.

Eventually, I realized the correct way to think of Vienna: It’s an incarnation of Charn.

For those who don’t remember the Magician’s Nephew (or haven’t read it¹), Charn is a ruined city that Polly and Diggory come across when they’re worldhopping. It was the capital of a cruel world-spanning empire until Jadis, the last queen, used the deplorable world to put down her sister’s rebellion. This killed every living thing in the world² (except for Jadis herself, who turned herself into a statue until Diggory woke her up).

When Diggory and Polly arrive in Charn, it’s a dead empire. They can see its beauty and grandeur and be amazed, but not its life. Vienna felt like this.

Like Charn, it’s the former capital of a great empire lost in the mists of time. There are some traces of its former glory, in the history books and maybe the architecture, but it’s long enough gone that even the locals consider it a quaint historical thing rather than something to be proud of or to mourn. Nobody (except Matt Yglesias) thinks much about the Austro-Hungarian empire anymore.

But in that shadow, Vienna is… well, there. It’s not dreaming of big empires anymore. It’s not the quiet farming village where the hero grows up before leaving to see the world. It’s not the great international port, or finance hub, or even the center of spy intrigue that it was briefly in the early cold war. It’s just there, almost like the ghost of a city, with people who exist and live there day by day like ghosts who keep walking the paths they did in life³.

Also like Charn, they have chariots

I did overhear one conversation in English during my time there, when a middle-aged shopkeeper told a man on the street “Eh, we’re all immigrants here… me, I’m from Hungary”. I’m used to thinking of immigrant cities as being full of excited young people, like San Francisco or New York. It was strange to think of an immigrant city full of older people nearing retirement, running small businesses and living a quiet life.

Obligatory downtown buildings

Also, seems like every German city has to have one of these. I don’t know what they are - the official town museum? City Hall? Opera house? Some long German word with too many letters?

The home base for the Austrian version of the avengers?

Actual Recommendations

My two favourite parts of Vienna, that I’d actually recommend people visit, were more low-key than the cool walkable downtown.

Onw was this apartment block by the river. It had nice parks and a small coffee shop nearby that was my favourite place to sit down in the city. If I ever end up living in Vienna, this seems like a good place to be.

The other one was a bit of a longer trip out of the way - I decided to take the UBahn’s green line all the way out to the end (where scattered houses start replacing the apartment blocks), and then climbed up a small mountain. It was a nice walk

Metro

And just to close, I have to say something about the Vienna metro. It’s thoroughly great. It’s not one of the world’s huge transit systems (it’s about a third the size of Berlin’s, I think), and doesn’t have cool features like platform screen doors or automated trains. But it’s simple, nice, and works. It carries about as many yearly passengers as Berlin or Madrid’s systems, despite having a third as many stops and half the urban population. It doesn’t have fare gates (one of the nice things about a high trust society is that you can do that). It gut stuck for a bit once or twice when I was on it but mostly it just works, at high frequency and good coverage. It’s like a showpiece of how to do well by just doing a few basic things right (which, sadly, so many people and places fail to do, both in transit and in general). There’s probably also something to be said about how their narrow trams are functional and easy, but I don’t know if it actually helps make them managable.

Also, for some reason, the doors on some of the subway cars have handles (yes, you need to turn them to open the door). I’m not sure why.

Picture not of, but at least from, the train

1. If this is you, go read it now. There’s also a manga now.

2. Providing Lewis a great metaphor for Nuclear weapons. It doesn’t work for GoF pandemics or AI risk though. There’s probably something theologically interesting in that Lewis saw the world being destroyed by Wrath, even though the greatest sin in christianity should be Pride (which, arguably, is what drives AI and GoF research).

3. I’m fairly certain they aren’t actually ghosts and are real people with complex lives that I just didn’t notice because I don’t actually speak German. But if they were ghosts, I don’t think I’d notice the difference.