Vienna, city of my dreams

It was here that Hitler announced Austria's annexation to the German Reich. But it was also here at Heldenplatz that the castle music once marched past to the edification of the Viennese. The former, however, has been more clearly etched in literature: The lyricist Ernst Jandl and, of course, Thomas Bernhard made reference to it: on November 4, 1988, from the premiere of the play "Heldenplatz" at the Burgtheater, a scandal was inevitable. Today it is virtually a standard work.

Admittedly, the style and the 900 pages of the paperback edition may make reading Heimito von Doderer's much-cited oeuvre a little difficult for some, but the recurring location where the protagonists of this social novel meet is legendary in Vienna: the Strudlhofstiege staircase in the 9th district has existed like this since 1910. With its ramps and fountains, is worth seeing even without reading the book.

Even though Sirk’s leather store no longer exists, we still know where the street corner of the same name was in Vienna and still is in many people's minds: at the corner of Kärnter Straße and Kärntner Ring. Karl Kraus memorialized this place in his drama "The Last Days of Mankind" - each new act of the work begins there.

The author of "The Emperor’s Thomb", Joseph Roth, was a convinced monarchist until his death in exile in France. And his novel "The Emperor’s Thomb" (the capuchin crypt) is also about the time between the fall of the monarchy and the Anschluss in 1938. Anyone who visits the burial place of the Habsburgs today with a guided tour will learn many an unpleasant fact about the crowned heads. By the way, there is also a virtual experience!

In 1995 Josef Haslinger's partly very disturbing novel "Opera Ball" was published: during an attack on the world-famous ball there is a catastrophe with thousands of deaths. More pleasant are the memories of a time when one still cultivated one's amours in the imperial and royal Court Opera, played with a fan and secretly left the box in the dark to have a rendezvous. Read more about this in Arthur Schnitzler's book.