Old Vienna

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“The old and new Vienna” around 1900 - pictorially documented by the attentive follower of the profound changes of this time, the city photographer August Stauda
Burgring , a few years after completion, 1872; Palais Epstein on the left side of the street , on the right the Äußere Burgtor

The term old Vienna stands for the romantic, transfiguring wishful thinking of a past, untouched and unadulterated city of Vienna . In terms of time, not historically true, but in the sense of nostalgia , one refers to the attitude to life in Vienna before the renewal of the cityscape in the Ringstrasse era in the middle of the 19th century or, since the end of the First World War, to the time of the Danube monarchy .

Application before 1900

"Old Vienna" exported to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

The talk of an old Vienna should conjure up an apparently intact past in the time of urbanization , when Vienna became a barely recognizable city of two million within a few decades due to rapid population growth. This past is mostly settled in the Biedermeier period (1815–1848), sometimes it goes back to the 18th century. From the 1850s onwards, urbanization took hold of Vienna more and more and the population rose, starting from around half a million, in five-year steps by 100,000 to 150,000 each, up to over two million at the beginning of the First World War in 1914.

The Viennese city walls were removed from 1858, the magnificent Ringstrasse was built and the old buildings of the former suburbs and new buildings were clad in magnificent facades of contemporary historicism . New buildings usually towered over the old structure considerably. Road straightening led to the loss of the familiar cityscape. Railroad and horse-drawn tramway lines were built and in many cases replaced the wage wagon. Gas lighting replaced earlier lighting. Around 1900 the "electric" replaced the horse-drawn tramway; electricity soon took on the pioneering role in lighting. Then the first automobiles appeared.

The Wilhelminian era and industrialization created wealth for entrepreneurs and industrialists as well as great poverty in the masses of immigrant workers. The classic handicraft received overwhelming industrial competition. Most of the immigrants came from the crown lands of the monarchy, but often not from German-speaking countries. B. as Italian dike diggers , Ziegelböhm or krowotic peddlers .

The entertainment options also changed as a mass audience had to be served. Great social and cultural upheavals were on the horizon. The more these developments progressed, the more some people got the impression that an “idyllic, untouched old Vienna” was being lost.

The term often appeared when the aim was to transfigure modern forms of entertainment and media events into the ancient and popular, as with the Wienerlied and the popular singers of the later 19th century.

A cult around the time of the Biedermeier was connected with Old Vienna , also around the middle-class, sociable music of Franz Schubert . In this context, at the end of the 19th century, in the midst of the great upheaval in urban expansion and change, events and major events took place that went back to the times of "old Vienna": for example the Vienna Schubert Exhibition in 1897 or the Vienna Music Festival. and theater exhibition in 1892 in Vienna's Prater , which was very popular. A reconstruction of the Hoher Markt from the period after 1710, called Old Vienna , was built there as an adventure world with restaurants and entertainment. Originals such as the actor Ludwig Gottsleben presented themselves on a recreated fairground stage . A seemingly naive popular time of the first commercial Viennese suburban theater was Viennese popular theater called. It served, for example, the cultural politician and theater founder Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn to exclude newer forms of private entertainment.

In the field of fine arts, painters such as Rudolf von Alt , Emil Hütter , Franz Kopallik , Richard Moser , Erwin Pendl and Franz Poledne documented the change in the cityscape in vedutas and thus largely shaped a sentimental image of Old Vienna.

Effects after 1900

The so-called Dreimäderlhaus around 1960

The old Vienna nostalgia was omnipresent after 1900 and was reflected in numerous company names, product names or music titles. Carl Michael Ziehrer wrote a waltz Alt-Wien (op. 366). In 1911 a potpourri operetta Alt-Wien to music by Josef Lanner was performed by Emil Stern in the Carltheater . One of the highlights of Old Vienna on the operetta stage was The Dreimäderlhaus after Franz Schubert by Heinrich Berté in 1916 ; an attempt to divert attention from the First World War , which oppressed people as its end was not in sight. One of the late baroque houses on the Mölker Bastei ( Schreyvogelgasse 10 ) that had been saved from demolition was named the “Dreimäderlhaus” as a result of the operetta.

Until the time after the Second World War , Old Vienna had great influence as an expression of a general conservatism. It served, for example, to distinguish it from the city of Berlin , which, as the “European Chicago ”, was at the center of the so-called Americanization debate. Old Vienna was popular as a brand name for shoes and porcelain, for example, and was intended to signal a pre-industrial production method ( manufacture ). Adoration of Old Vienna reached its last climax in the 1930s, which was reflected in names such as the Café Alt Wien , which opened in 1936 .

In the time of National Socialism , the old Vienna nostalgia again served as a distraction from the warlike present. It was also used by Austrians like Willi Forst as an unspoken contrast to Prussia - not objected to by the NSDAP regime , since Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wanted to keep the people happy in the interests of the war and the “ Viennese shame ” was well received throughout the Reich.

Over the decades, the historical period to which the term referred shifted. While "Old Vienna" in the second half of the 19th century referred to the time before the demolition of the city ​​wall , after the Second World War the term alluded more to Vienna in the late 19th century or the turn of the century, such as with the concept of the golden operetta era . Ironically, “Alt-Wien” romanticized the exact period in which the term itself was used to distinguish it from the modernization of the time.

Prominent examples of this are the Sissi films by Ernst Marischkas and similar monarchy-nostalgic films from the post-war period, which operated extremely successfully with an old Vienna cliché that no longer explicitly referred to the "village", narrow Vienna of the Biedermeier period, but (also ) to the imperial, metropolitan Vienna of the 1860s to 1890s.

From around the 1960s onwards there was increasing irony and disenchantment, for example in the cabaret by Helmut Qualtinger . The scientific disenchantment culminated in the exhibition of the Wien Museum Alt Wien - The City that Never Was from 2004/2005, in which the historical construction and ambivalences of the term were explored.

Old Vienna nostalgia, however, is still a powerful marketing idea and especially in tourism to Vienna. For guests from ultra-modern Asian metropolises, Vienna as it presents itself to them today is already a nostalgic event. In the Vienna telephone directory 2011/2012, the term Alt Wien was used to include comprehensive company names for restaurants, cast goods, a hotel, an art trade and the schnapps museum. Products and dishes such as the Alt Wiener Gold coffee blend or the Alt-Wiener soup pot also make use of the nostalgic effect of the name Alt-Wien .

At times there was - a certain irony given the age of the "clients" - a chain of kindergartens in Old Vienna , which went bankrupt in 2016.

literature

  • Wolfgang Kos , Christian Rapp (ed.): Alt-Wien. The city that never was. (Exhibition catalog of the Wien Museum). Czernin, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3707601935 .
  • Monika Sommer , Heidemarie Uhl (Ed.): Mythos Alt-Wien. Tension areas of urban identities (memory - memory - identity, 9) , Innsbruck, Vienna [u. a.]: Studien-Verlag 2009. ISBN 978-3-7065-4386-6
  • Franz Hubmann: The good old days. Photographs from Vienna. Preface by Helmut Qualtinger. Salzburg: St. Peter 1967
  • Andreas Kloner: Fire Festival and Blue Danube Waltz. A long night in old Vienna. Deutschlandradio-Feature 2012, 165 min.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Topography and urban development: graphics and painting. Wien Museum, accessed on February 22, 2020 .
  2. ^ Website of the Hotel Altwienerhof
  3. ^ Website of the Alt Wiener Schnapsmuseum
  4. https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000043563753/alt-wien-kindergaerten-verein-wird-insolvenzverfahren-einleiten