Ten things to know about the Viennese: Part 2

by Kate Wiseman

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August 26, 2010

Kate Wiseman lived in Vienna for six months, working at an international NGO, learning German, and getting to know the city. This is the second part of “10 Things To Know About the Viennese, and Why You Should Visit Vienna Anyway.

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6. The Viennese are fussy.

In the most of the Western world, we have moved past formalities like using someone’s full title every time you write them an email or using formal verb forms. Not so in Vienna. You must use the formal verb conjugation and full title of anyone older or better educated than you until you are officially invited to be on a first name basis. If you are writing to an engineer, for example, you must address her as “Frau Diplom Ingenieur Wiener Schnitzel,” or Mrs. Master of Engineering Wiener Schnitzel. If you are meeting a professor, you must address him as “Herr Doktor Goulyasch Suppe,” or Mr. Doctor Goulyasch Suppe. Forget this, and all is lost.

If you are invited into someone’s home, they will expect you to take off your shoes. If this affects your showering behavior or your choice of socks, consider yourself warned. Depending on whether you are dealing with a good Austrian or a bad Austrian, you will either make your hosts extremely uncomfortable while they try to figure out how to broach the issue or you will invite the wrath of the house upon your head.

Finally, you must greet the elderly. When you see an old person coming down the street towards you and her posture says “I am ignoring you, but I know that you are there,” she is not hoping that you will return the favor and ignore her too. She is waiting for you to say is “Grüß Gott,” which literally means “May God greet you” but in this context means “Good day.” If you miss your cue, you might find out that the little old grandma in the fur coat and pumps has spent the last forty years or so practicing using her shopping bag as a weapon for aggravated assault.

If you have had a nice evening or are saying goodbye to Viennese friends, they will kiss you twice, once on both cheeks. Go to the left first. That is all I can say about that.

7. The Viennese like to smoke.

From what I’ve seen, it is more unusual for a Viennese person not to smoke than to smoke. According to the World Health Organization, that is not quite true—only 40.7% of Austrians smoke. (In the US, it’s about 20%). I have a friend who is half-Austrian and half-American, and she does not smoke. Her Austrian friends dismiss this peculiarity as representative of the American in her. The EU is pressuring the Austrians to ban smoking inside public buildings and offices, but the smokers disagree. Recently, there was a referendum in Austria about this issue and 81% of Austrians voted against the smoking ban. I don’t think that my family of five people can achieve that kind of quorum on a political issue, and we all love each other.

As it stands right now, there are special “non-smoking areas” in large restaurants, but they don’t have to be separated by even a wall from the smoking section. Workplaces can choose to allow smoking if they want, as can small restaurants, which seems to suit the Viennese just fine. As far as I can see, they just want to breathe in the deep aromas of second hand smoke in every bar and restaurant in the whole city. "Mmm, how delicious," said Reinhard. "Yes," said Hilde. "Let's just ash our cigarettes onto our food from now on. It could only improve the taste." "Quite right, Hilde. Quite right." This is the Viennese way.

Besides the obvious downsides of being constantly surrounded by smoke—respiratory disease, your coat smelling like an ash tray every time you go out, general nastiness—I think the smoking is responsible for the spitting epidemic that seems widespread. If you were walking down the street in Charlotte and someone hacked an enormous wad of spit in your pathway, you would probably get some looks, and maybe even some public censure. In Vienna? Just keep your eyes open and watch the ground. Little globules of spit are especially prevalent throughout the U-Bahn tunnels. Just add that to the list of obstacles you might encounter in your everyday life.

8. The Viennese are not fazed by nudity.

If there were a scale that measured attitudes from prude to exhibitionist, I think most Americans would be closer to prude. Setting aside the outliers that shock and titillate the American public, swear words and sex scenes are edited out of public television. Couples do not always live together before marriage. Advertisements are sexual, but not graphically so. In Vienna, on the other hand, I see nipples on a daily basis. If the word "nipples" offends you, imagine how I feel as I try to read the newspaper on the U-Bahn in the morning. Every single day, there is a naked woman on page three, except for the occasional half-naked man, who I assume is put there in a nod towards gender-equality. For a while, there were posters for an art exhibition called “Phalli” that featured three men with their goods on display. I was confronted by the ads every morning on my way to work. I was especially amazed when the Secession Exhibition Hall for Contemporary Art, a key architectural highlight of Vienna and the home of Klimt’s “Beethoven’s Frieze,” hosted a swinger’s club as a temporary installation in several rooms leading up to the Frieze. No one protested this, and when I read about this in the newspaper, the article was accompanied by graphic photographs of people using the equipment with each other. In the morning newspaper! The horrors!

The funny thing is that with all this nudity on display, it seems to have lost its sexual element for the Viennese. They are mostly amused at my shock and a little disbelieving when I try to explain to them how strange it seems to have a picture of a naked woman in my newspaper. It seems like they have more of a scientific interest in what they see in front of them, and because of that, there is no shame in it. These displays of nudity, sex, and sexuality are not even limited to humans. The pandas in the zoo had a baby recently, which I know because there was a picture of a cute little panda baby together with graphic photos of the two parent pandas having graphic panda sex however long ago the little guy was conceived. And that also made me uncomfortable.

9. The Viennese have astounding facial hair.

Part One: Facial hair, male.

Never before in all my days and all my internet searches have I seen so many radical mustachios in one place. We're talking twisted, waxed, curled, braided—you name it, they've got it. To make it even better, the mustache epidemic seems to be developing hand-in-hand with some sort of Gandalf revival movement. Long, full, white beards that converge in a small, less thick point. And giant walking sticks. And capes. And magic. And little hobos, I mean hobbits, running around their ankles. Ok, maybe not the hobbits, but at the very least, full beards abound in Wien.

Part Two: Facial hair, female.

What is there, a special Austrian refugee visa for former freak show artists? There are so many really, really bearded women here! And they always freak me out. I turn a corner, and there's this little old lady, oh my goodness she has a beard and she's hobbling along...

10. The Viennese do not jaywalk.

There is a giant swath of Europe starting from just north of Italy and extending through Scandinavia in which the people do not jaywalk. “Why not?” I ask. “Warum??” It is so fast and easy.

I thought at first that this reluctance to jaywalk was just timidity, but no—it is actually socially unacceptable because you are setting a bad example for the children. Which is why I jaywalk as often as possible. If I am going to pigheadedly cling to one American trait obnoxious to the people around me, it is going to be jaywalking. First of all, I have to cross a total of four streets twice a day between home and work. Do you think I have time to wait for the light to change at all four streets? Absolutely not. Second of all, it just feels good to jaywalk. I will never out-drink, out-smoke, or out-naked an Austrian, but I can be too cool to wait for the light.

I had a moment of crowning jaywalking glory in Vienna. An entire group of early adolescents was out by themselves and totally giddy with their freedom as they waited patiently to cross a deserted street. I saw them as I approached, all alone, and I knew just what I would do—I blew through the pedestrian’s red light and showed those kids a little something about life on the wild side. They were shocked and drew back as I marched straight through their midst, voices hushed by the ferocity of the unknown jaywalker. I walked a little further before turning back. Sure enough, half the group was in the process of crossing against the light while the other half wavered uncertainly at the corner. Mission accomplished. Who says you can’t leave your mark on a city in only four months?

So now that you know all this, why should you visit Vienna anyway?

Vienna can take some getting used to, but—and this is a big but—the Viennese are so interesting. The whole of European history can be found within Vienna’s inner city, from Scandinavian marauders commemorated at Schwedenplatz to territorial conflicts with Italy at Südtirolplatz to the unsteady dividing line between East and West in the local food (goulash, käsekrainer, and apfelstrudel) to the influence of medieval plagues, the Catholic Church, and World War II (not necessarily in that order). Vienna’s vaunted fin-de-siècle culture also drew in large part from its Jewish culture, which is still there, but hidden. If you tour the Hapsburg imperial apartments, you will see cultural relics that represent the artistic, literary, and political history of all of Europe, and you will see how intricately the entire continent was at one time connected through blood, marriage, and brinksmanship.

Throughout the city, the streets are calm and the buildings are stately. The U-Bahn stations bring all the Viennese together, from the most elegant old women to homeless men with wine boxes. Everywhere you go, there are signs for new museum exhibitions, art gallery openings, dance and theater performances, and film screenings. As you walk along, you hear every language being spoken while pastries beckon from behind shop windows. You get the feeling that this is a city where things are happening and people are doing important things, but the parks and the open air keep people from becoming frenetic.

The Viennese are complicated; there is no denying that. But I think that their complications reflect many of the qualities that make the city so unique—its geographic location at the nexus of Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western Europe, its rich artistic history, its political peculiarities (or hypocrisies, as some would say) in the twentieth century, and its particular cultural blend of being internationally-minded but nationalist at the same time. It is not always easy to get to know the Viennese: many are undeniably stand-offish and prickly towards foreigners. But those you do meet—and if you stay long enough, you will—are interesting, complex people who do not take much for granted. In visiting Vienna and getting to know the Viennese, you begin to see how the strains of local and international histories have meshed in this particular city, and you understand more about what shaped the continent than ever before. Even as the Viennese amaze and amuse, it is impossible to visit Vienna and avoid learning more about the Western tradition and the forces that shaped our own cultural grounds.

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Originally published October 10, 2010