II am writing this from the terrace of Café Korb, one of the most famous and popular cafés in Vienna. A German writer friend reliably informs me that this is where artists and literary people hang out. “You just have to look at the customers,” he says, “and then compare them to the café terrace across the street.” I crane my neck and see an elegant woman with statement earrings reading a book. Two men with gray ponytails, loose linen shirts, and bold plastic-rimmed glasses are engaged in a heated discussion. One looks like a scruffy version of Karl Lagerfeld. Nobody has a laptop. My gaze wanders towards the neighboring terrace which, according to my writer friend, is a meeting place for rich Russians. Four men in suits appear to be having a business meeting next to a heavily made-up woman who is pouting in a selfie on her phone. In Vienna, cafes are considered an extension of the living room. You can spend hours there every day with little pressure to move on. Newspapers are laid out on bamboo sticks, regulars have their own table and aside from the obvious tourist hotspots, each Kaffeehaus has its own tribe.
Almost every weekend during the summer months there is a free outdoor concert or festival.
I first visited Vienna in 1990. By a huge stroke of luck, I had been posted to nearby Budapest as a young reporter for the BBC World Service, without knowing I was about to to witness history being written. The Iron Curtain – just 50km from the Austrian border – had fallen and Budapest was seething with change and revolutionary fervor. I attended endless protests and got drunk in jazz clubs with young political activists. By comparison, Vienna seemed sad and sedate. It was full of old people and ghosts. A Habsburg Miss Havisham clinging to her tattered imperial splendor. The Jewish community, which was the artistic and intellectual heart of Vienna, had been destroyed by the Nazis and it was only in the 1980s and 1990s that Austria began to confront its past, following revelations that President Kurt Waldheim had lied about what he had done. made during the war (like many others). British artist Rachel Whiteread, who was commissioned to create a Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz at the time, told me she imagined “worms writhing under each paving stone.”
Vienna’s cafes are considered an extension of people’s living rooms
It will be another 30 years before I return to Vienna. My husband was offered an academic position in the city and asked me what I thought about returning to central Europe. I jumped at the chance. England felt lost, withdrawn and broken by Brexit. I wanted a change of scenery. In the spring of 2022, we packed up our things and left London.
Vienna has changed dramatically in the years since. It’s younger, trendier and more cosmopolitan. There are bike paths everywhere and the trams fly rainbow flags. Even the pedestrian crossings are awake: instead of the usual sign of a single man, Vienna has red and green, mixed and same-sex couples holding hands. The shopping streets have been pedestrianized and landscaped with inventive street furniture, plants, trees and drinking water fountains. This was not without controversy, but the city responded by consulting residents and business owners and in some places held a referendum. A lot of work has been done by urban planners to make Vienna a 15-minute city where most daily necessities and services are accessible within a quarter of an hour on foot from home.
Today, the Austrian capital regularly comes at the top of the The Economist the magazine’s annual list of the world’s most livable cities. The score is calculated on several factors: health care, housing, culture, environment, education, infrastructure and low crime rate. I have an annual subscription which allows me, for one euro per day, to travel anywhere in the city by tram, metro or bus. There is an incredibly progressive housing policy that dates back 100 years and is based on the concept that decent housing is a human right and should not be left to the market. Today, 60 percent of Viennese live in affordable housing. This in turn lowers rents in the private sector. Additionally, tenants benefit from a high level of protection against rent increases and evictions. Low rents mean Viennese have much more disposable income to spend in shops and cafes.
When the Habsburg Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, Vienna became a city-state within the new Republic of Austria with its own tax-collecting capacity. Red Vienna, as it is now known, has since been a social democratic bastion within a largely conservative and Catholic country (with the exception of seven years under the Nazi regime). The Social Democrats continue to win the capital because they continue to achieve the things people care about and they know how to organize a party. During the summer months, almost every weekend there is a free outdoor concert or festival. Donauinselfest, held every June on an island in the Danube, is Europe’s largest free open-air music festival, attracting 2.5 million visits over a long weekend. The island is also a popular outdoor swimming spot with city dwellers, as here they do not dump their sewage into the rivers.
Vienna is one of the cleanest cities in the world and being a garbage collector is considered a good job with decent pay and benefits. According to surveys, the most popular department in the municipality is MA 48, which deals with street cleaning, waste and recycling. The 48-ers, in their bright orange uniforms, are the heroes of Vienna’s working class. They are considered cool, like the New York firefighters or the Paris firefighters. Their marketing department runs humorous campaigns with posters featuring named garbage collectors, cartoons about dog poop, and cryptic stickers on trash cans aimed at getting people to recycle more.
Every September they have a waste festival (Mistfest) with rock bands, food stalls and a flea market. I went there out of curiosity and couldn’t believe the scale of it. This year they welcomed more than 50,000 visitors, mainly families. Parents and grandparents enjoyed hot dogs and beer while their children bounced on an inflatable garbage truck, sold their toys at booths, or examined bugs and worms under microscopes while educators explained how the composting. Meanwhile, on the main stage, people were dancing and singing to the rhythm of a rock band made up of trash pickers. I ask one of the organizers how they justify spending so much money on a free festival. “There’s no point telling people they have to recycle, you have to make things cool,” he says.
Once you leave the old medieval center of Vienna, it is striking how diverse the population becomes. Mistfest takes place in one of the outlying neighborhoods where there is a strong presence of immigrants, mainly from the Balkans. In 1995, Austria joined the EU, politically reuniting the country with its former colonies of the Habsburg Empire. Enlargement has shifted the axis of power eastward within the EU. Vienna once again finds itself at the center of Europe, a magnet for immigrants from across the continent, as it was in the 19th century. Today, almost 50 percent of the population has foreign roots, which means that the food choice is much better and the monoculture of Viennese schnitzel that I encountered in the early 90s has eroded.
There is a caveat to my rose-tinted view. Despite clean streets, good housing and excellent infrastructure, the far-right Freedom Party is on the rise again in Austria, fueled by immigration fears, the anti-vax movement and an ambivalent attitude to regarding the war in Ukraine. They won’t win in Vienna, but they could become the largest party in the Austrian parliament in next year’s general elections – which reminds me that the worms continue to writhe under the shiny cobblestones.
Journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Lang was a foreign correspondent for the BBC and the Sunday Times and presented Radio 4’s Front Row for 20 years. Now presenter of the BBC’s Round Britain Quiz, she lives between London and Vienna.