Things You Can See in Vienna

I was just in Vienna on family-related matters. But I tried to keep my eyes and ears open. Here a some fragments I collected.

Walking through the halls of the University of Vienna I noticed an English-language sign about an international conference titled something like "Exploring alternatives to warfare". Academia in the service of a Weltanschauung, if you ask me, but maybe I'm too sensitive. After all, what could be bad about averting wars?

The entire city was preparing excitedly for Life Ball 2010, an extravaganza for the benefit of AIDS research and the promotion of nice feelings. Come Saturday night part of the show was disrupted by a thunder storm (the police said they were afraid of lightning), but before the disruption the audience was introduced to some groups of children musicians brought from all over the world, to demonstrate that we're all the same and shouldn't squabble. There were girls from the Ukraine dressed as Ukrainian girls do, some South African kids with war paint as is customary in South Africa, and a few other stereotypes. The penny fell when one of the hosts identified a Sari-clad girl with "you must be from India!" Not, mind you, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka: the organizers had cleared safely away from bringing children from complicated places. It might have sullied their message.

These things aren't evil, of course - but they are silly.

When I first lived in Vienna, in 1981, I was struck by the omnipresence of Franz Josef, the Kaiser who had been dead 65 years at the time. Festooned with his outlandish sideburns, his picture was everywhere: on posters, postcards, and of course he was the driving force of the tourist shops (tourism is a very big thing in Vienna). This time it eventually occurred to me I wasn't seeing him much. I can only assume that capitalism is functioning well, and the purveyors of endless trinkets have noticed that Korean and Japanese tourists - or even American ones, for that matter- have never heard of the Kaiser and care even less. I even heard a young local tour guide spend 45 minutes talking about the Opera House; while she repeatedly mentioned the generic "emperor", the words Franz Josef never passed her lips.

Meanwhile, however, some things don't change. On the inner door of a synagogue there's a list of Does-and-Don't-Does: Don't loiter in front of the synagogue. Stay away from anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish demonstrations. If you're confronted or abused by anti-Israeli or Anti-Jewish demonstrators don't respond to them, move away as quickly as possible, and if you must, call attention to your predicament for example by screaming.

Finally, a story related to me by some friends. A business woman was on the phone with a potential supplier whom she had never met. They chatted for some 15-20 minutes, at which point my friend made a comment which indicated she might be Jewish. There was a silence on the line, then her interlocutor said : "Yes, I knew I recognized your upper-class (ober beurgerlich) Jewish High-German". The woman was convinced this was related to anti-semitism; her husband poo-poohed. Yet later in the discussion he was amazed, totally incredulous, by my assertion that American Jews can choose to be American, or Jewish, or both, or neither. "Being a Jew isn't something one can choose! If you are, it's impossible not to be, and even if you wished it the rest of society would never allow it!"

Ruminations from Warsaw

I've been traveling rather a lot to Warsaw these past two years, and have posted about my thoughts here, here, here, here and here. (In chronological order. Interesting how my attention has moved from visit to visit).

Last week I had occasion to walk around quite a bit (the best type of transportation if you can afford it), and the shape of the city finally started falling into place: I think I now am familiar with most of central Warsaw. So my ruminations this time are broader than they've been so far.

Geopolitical Airport

Budapest international airport, last night. Passengers intermingling in one corridor with five gates: Tel Aviv, Beirut, Bucharest, Damascus, and againTel Aviv.

Whoever sorts the gates doesn't read many newspapers.

Thanksgiving Travel

The weekend of Thanksgiving is famously the worst time to travel in the entire year, and today is the worst day of the weekend. Or so I've been often told: I've never tried it, myself.

Today I will. Of course, in Warsaw Budapest and Tel Aviv they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so maybe it won't be a problem, but still, I'm proud of my bravery for trying.

Anyway, may my American readers all have a fine holiday!

Obama from Warsaw

I asked a Polish colleague today what the Poles thought about the American decision to drop that missile program. It's hard to know from the American media and blogosphere, since too many of them tell it as they'd like it to be, irrespective as it may be. My interlocutor grew serious.

- The Poles are angry, and feel Putin quashed Obama.
- All of them think that way, or some? You, personally, or most people?
- Most people. And the timing of the announcement - September 17th - couldn't have been worse.

He himself actually could be expected to be more lenient in his judgment, since he's a youngish university professor who teaches technology and is well traveled. A member of the Western and forward-looking part of Polish society. To underline his statement he told me there had been a popular caricature which showed Obama proclaiming "Yes We Can". Underneath the artist added "But we probably won't".

Traveling

I'm doing a spot of globetrotting, and will be offline more than usual. Blogging may be sporadic for the next 10 days or so. But anyway, it's summer. Why read depressing politcal blogs at all?

On the Passage of Time

Frankfurt airport. Three or four elderly Israeli women and one well-dressed elderly man reached the checkpoint (I think it was the fourth so far) by electric golf-cart: a service offered by the airport for elderly passengers who might have problems walking the distances. The driver of the golf cart was a courteous young woman who seemed heartened by the fact that these particular charges spoke German; and if it was German with a not fully recognizable accent, it made no difference. They were nice old people.

At the checkpoint she unloaded them and assisted them up to the barrier, where she handed them over to the young Israeli security person; this was a dark skinned young woman with whom the elderly man briefly flirted, in a grandfatherly way. “And from where in Czechoslovakia do you come?” she asked him, referring to a country that exists still in his memory but no-where else. Behind the young woman stood a uniformed young German policeman wearing body armor and a sub-machine gun. As the elderly folks passed through he smiled at them, and gave a ghost of a salute.

Do Holocaust survivors think through all the ironies of such moments? Probably not, I expect. This won’t have been their first trip through a German airport, and the novelty will probably have worn off. They seemed mostly interested in getting through the process so as to find a seat in the lounge beyond. But the ironies are there, even if no-one dwells upon them.

Postscript: Someday Israeli air passengers won’t have to be screened through four layers of security more than anyone else. When that happens you’ll know that peace may be a reality. No speech by any politician of any nationality at any venue will do the trick, unless it manages to carry off that one. Putative peace arrangements that leave the need for those special airport precautions are perhaps better than nothing, but they won’t be peace arrangements.

Ghosts - and the World that Moved on

September 1st, 2008. The weather is beautiful here in Warsaw, probably the best we've seen in the 9 days since we arrived. It's the 69th anniversary of the German attack on Poland that began World War 2, or at least the European part of it. No sign of this on the streets of Warsaw, so far as I could see. Apparently Polish high-schoolers go to their first day of the new school year dressed in finery, or so it seemed on the tram and the main thoroughfares. I did briefly note a black-and-white film on Polish TV earlier, with a plane dropping bombs, so some people have noticed the date even if by now you have to be elderly in order to remember the original event itself.

In previous posts I've mentioned the Stalinist monstrosity that stands at the very center of Warsaw, straddling the line of the Warsaw ghetto at its south-eastern corner. Here's a picture of it, followed by some ruminations.

First, when it was built it wasn't intended to have all those glass-and-steel capitalist skyscrapers behind it. Nor was it supposed to have that red-and-white roofed structure in front of it, that contains a supermarket and dozens of small stalls that sell perfume, sports shoes and fired chicken. The parking lot in front of the supermarket also wasn't envisaged by the architect. Come to think of it, the advertisement placards hanging on the facade were not foreseen, either.

The Nazis who invaded 69 years ago today also foresaw none of this, although they were the ones who razed all the previous structures and created the large empty expanse Stalin then used. To their real credit, the Poles are busy overcoming their nightmares and are getting on with life.

If you focus on the street to the south of the monstrosity, there's also an interesting story. It's called Jerozolimskie Avenue, and you can't get any more central in Warsaw than that. But back in the 18th century it was a few miles to the south of the city. Jews had been banned from the city for about 250 years, but in the mid-1770s, just as the English colonists in Massachusetts were throwing teabags into the port of Boston, someone allowed Jews to settle in the fields to the south of town. A few years later he changed his mind and threw them out, but in the meantime their nickname for the road leading east from their settlement had stuck, and remains to this day Jerusalem Avenue.

You cannot tell the story of Poland without telling about its Jews. You can't even go to the central train station.

A few minutes walk to the north, not more than one block away from the Stalinist billboard for beer, the ghosts still reside.
On the left, a bland residential building. In the top right hand corner, a new high rise going up, with a crane above it. And wedged between them is a ghost from the past.
















Two buildings that somehow were still standing after the ghetto was destroyed, and are standing still, to this very day. Too fragile for anyone to live in, of course, so the windows are blocked. The ghosts, however, are still there, and haunt us from the dead windows and the bare brick walls.

Reminiscences from Australia - 2

Like as in Manhattan, the city fathers of Melbourne felt it important to have the library near the center of town. And indeed, the Victoria State Library was built within the central rectangle of downtown. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be given a tour by the director herself.
Unfortunately, after I left and went on to other meetings, global warming struck, and the library sunk.
Honestly. I kid you not. Look, here's another photograph, totally untampered in photoshop or anything of the kind. What you see is what you get.
(Remember, Melbourne is a port city. Sea Level. Oy).

Reminiscences from Australia - 1

As you know, I recently returned from Australia. It's a nice place, no doubt about that, but it's also rather peculiar. First, the folks really do walk around upside down, as we were told when we were wee kids. Moreover, if you notice at the bottom (top?) of the picture, you'll see that in many places they've got a roof over the sidewalk, so that whenever someone falls off the world they get caught on the awning and don't float away.

To further complicate matters, they drive on the wrong side of the street:
Even when they build escalators, they put the up side on the left, not on the right, which means you've got to keep on your toes all the time.
Finally - have I mentioned this? - They've got their seasons all wrong. Here it was, the second half of June, the sun was rising only at 6:45am and was hurriedly setting before 6pm,and it was cold out. Not snowy cold, no, but you couldn't walk around in sandals, as is the custom in June.

Daf Yomi, Melbourne

As indicated here, it was my intention to continue with Daf Yomi as if I'd never left Jerusalem, simply moving from one shul to the next. Which is more or less what happened: this past week I've been going to the Daf Yomi shiur at the Chabad Yeshiva, 6am, and just as you'd have thought, they're on the same page the folks back in Jerusalem are on. Or rather, they keep on changing it every day, but that's alright. The single most significant difference in style is that while the shiur in Jerusalem tends to be in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, the one down here is in four: Hebrew, Aramaic, English, and Yiddish.

At the end of the shiur, say, 6:40, you can choose which service you want to go to. I've been going to the "Budapest Express" minyan, so named because it was set up some decades ago by some survivors from Hungary, and they race through the service faster than I'd have believed possible. By seven they're out of there, including everything, including a section specially added by the Chabadniks.

Limmud Oz 2008

I've been up to various mischief so far down here in the antipodes. One of the things I did was to participate in Limmud Oz 2008, Melbourne. I gave four lectures there, as you can see by following that link and wandering around a bit. I initially thought I might write them, and post each of them as I gave them, but since I never write the lectures I give, it seemed rather late to start now. As a compromise, I wrote outlines, which I more or less adhered to sort of to a certain extent, at least some of the time, and I've now posted them, over here.

The four theses were:
1. Jews have the oldest living culture in the world, so they have a longer communal memory than anyone else; however, having a long memory is not the result of being so old, rather the insistence on not forgetting has enhanced the longevity.

2. The attempt to create a rich database with biographical information on as many of the murdered six million Jews as possible is an unprecedented undertaking (connected to memory, by the way), undertaken at least initially in adverse circumstances, and now slowly advancing towards completion. How, Why, What.

3. Was the creation of the State of Israel enabled by the guilty conscience of the world after the Holocaust? Answer,not at all, and actually, almost on the contrary. In 1947 the international community set up the Jews in Mandatory Palestine for a second genocide of the Jews in less than a decade. (And all of the hot air about the Palestinians paying the price for the crimes of the Europeans is hogwash).

4. Training soldiers to be moral while waging war is a daunting task, but Israel does it better than anyone else. Here's how.

Tomorrow I'm off to other arenas to do other mischief. Not certain I'll have access to cyberspace, so if you want a laugh you can spend some time here.

American Support of Israel

Here's an article about deep seated characteristics of America that explain why it's so supportive of Zionism. It's pretty obvious to me that the author, one Walter Russell Mead, is himself not so enamored of Israel; perhaps this led him to investigate what it is that makes so many Americans so supportive.

Interestingly, I found this article in a bookstore at the airport in Hong Kong. Just the kind of things you'd expect to find at an airport, huh?

Is Germany Sinking?

In Warsaw I had no particular problem connecting to the online world. No sooner had I arrived in Germany, however, a curtain of disconnectedness settled around me. Had I put my mind to it it would have been possible to find Internet cafes or other such solutions, there's no doubt about that, but the point is that my mind was elsewhere, doing the things I had come to Germany to do, and I didn't have the time or even inclination to run around looking for Wifi connections. The point of being connected is that it's easy, and you don't need to think about it.

So I lived without for a few days, and nothing serious happened to me. At the airport yesterday I picked up a newspaper to see what the world had been up to in my absence - what a quaint experience.

There may well be a deeper level to this. I travel often to Germany, and speak the natives' language so I don't look like a tourist, and it seems to me that Germany is on its way down. Not in a dramatic way, but rather in a Spenglerian way - it will take time, perhaps it's even reversible, but for the time being one of the world's powerhouses of the 2nd half of the 20th century (and the first half, too...) is slipping and sinking, losing it.

Here's a short piece I wrote after a previous trip, not long ago. If I hadn't already written it then, I could have written it this week:

The German train system is unusually easy to use. Every train station in the country prominently displays its tailored double set of schedules of arriving trains (white) and departing ones (deep yellow). These schedules not only give times of arrival and departure, but also the entire route so far or onwards, with the time of arrival at each station, the type of train, the track on which it will pass through, and other technical data that is useful to tidy minds. Once one reaches the appropriate platform one finds color-coded diagrams of all trains on that track, listed by time of departure, informing where on the platform one should stand for the first-class cars, or the on-board restaurant, or, say, car number 6 from which your visiting aunt can be expected to alight because she reserved seat number 36 a week earlier. A series of signs hanging above the platform reassure you that the charts can be trusted, since the next train is indeed whatever they said it would be. All this information is relevant 364 days a year, with some lines cut on Christmas.

The one thing the charts cannot deal with is delays. This used to be no problem since until recently you could set your watch by the trains, but alas, those days have passed. On a recent cold afternoon on platform number 5 in the Hamburg central station the tinny voice coming from the speaker above our heads told of 5 incoming trains that were all late; most of them had also been redirected to other platforms. Having lugged our baggage up to the concourse and down to platform 12, we were subjected to a different announcement, tailored to the delays of the trains that had originally been scheduled for this platform.

Harsh a thought as it may be, there is a faint whiff of Italy about the German train system these days. And it’s not only the trains that exude a hint of decline. Traveling with a Wifi-enabled laptop in the hope of being constantly in touch with the office repeatedly leads to disappointment, as this technology is far from pervasive. Otherwise intelligent people still allow themselves to bemoan the loss of jobs to automation, rather than the gain in jobs in automation – perhaps if there were more installers of Wifi routers this would be less of a thorn.

Winnie the Pooh in Warsaw

Remember how last time I was in Warsaw I poked fun at Stalin's monstrosity in the middle of town? Well, it turns out that even Stalin had his uses. As I was walking by the structure today, it suddenly started pouring. Along with some other pedestrians, I dashed into one of the colonnades at the entrance to the building, and was thus saved. Apparently it wasn't a coincidence that Stalin was referred to at the Sun of the Nations.

One side of his structure is on Swietrzyskfyty st. although it's spelled differently in the original. Lots of consonants, most of them swzr. On the corner facing Stalin's place is a 40-story glass and steel office building owned by an Austrian bank (Creditanstalt). As you walk north (I think it's north) you see various imposing structures, one of the larger and more imposing one being the Ministry of Finance. Across fro the ministry and perpendicular to it is Winnie the Pooh st. In case you don't believe me, there is a stone plaque with a picture of Winnie holding hands with Piglet.

Someone must have a sense of humor. I asked my local colleague if that had been the name of the quite central street even under the Communists, but he was too young to remember. It's been that way for quite a while, was all he'd say.

Around the corner there's a plaza with a statue of Copernicus, who was Polish in case you've forgotten. And further down the street, the Warsaw University. I walked around campus, and just about all the buildings had obviously recently been renovated. Only the the school of medicine still looked vaguely as it would have under the Communists - grimy, old window panes, creaky window frames, that sort of thing.

Maybe the Poles don't appreciate their doctors.

Quite a number of the buildings had life-size (i.e. very large) black and white photos of the same buildings in March 1968, when the Warsaw students were at the vanguard of the rioting students of the world. The difference, of course, between them and their fellow rioters in West Germany, France, and the USA, was that the ones here in Warsaw were facing a real enemy, the kind that put rioting students away, in unpleasant places.

The same buildings that today are spanking clean looked like you'd expect, in the photos. Grimy, derelict, grim.

The Capitals of the Empire

Until the Fall of the West (see previous post), some quick travelogue comments.

The United States being the uniquely powerful state it is, is in many ways the imperial power of our generation, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way. The traveler from afar travels from city to city and sees the different capitals of the world:

Washington DC, seat of political power. It's denizens are formally dressed, and hurry about their business exuding the power. New York, business and money capital of the world. Its denizens also are formally dressed, except for the millions that aren't, but the power they exude is jerkier, jumpier, quicker. Washington is somehow heavy, ponderous, while New York is quick, perhaps almost frenzied.

Boston, where I sit this evening, can claim to be the academic capital of the world (if not Boston, who else, pry tell?). And indeed, wandering around today I was impressed by the many bright young adults, by the many posters in the subways offering academic opportunities; by the earnest young woman standing in the crowded subway car reading The Economist.

LA, capital of entertainment, and Las Vegas, world capital of fantasy, I didn't visit this time, and won't report on.

Research is Important

On a subway this snowy morning I saw an ad advocating that parents talk to their children about the dangers of alcohol while the kids are still young enough to listen: "Research has shown that middle school children are more likely to listen to their parents than teenagers", thus spake the poster.

Aren't you glad we have fine research universities that know how to churn out such important insights into human nature? I certainly am.

Travel

I know, things have been slow here. The Israeli and American security fellows are gearing up to shut down Jerusalem over the rest of the week, on account of a visit by George W, so I've decided to leave and go elsewhere. I'll be traveling for the next 10 days or so, and will either have ample time to blog, or ample time but no access, or lots of access but no time, or no access and no time. I think that more or less covers all possibilities, no?

In the meantime, you can always read The Guardian.

Stalin Lost

This should come as no surprise, but Communism is gone from Warsaw. I just wandered through a spanking new mall, which is an exact copy of a spanking new mall in any affluent Western city, including the prices.

But memories linger. Two young American tourists in the lobby of the hotel were saying to each other that it's incredible that this is what a hotel in Warsaw looks like.

Other Hannukah Candles in Warsaw

It wasn't a joke, that quip I made last night about the Stalinistic monstrosity in downtown Warsaw.
Here's a collection of pictures of many buildings in the genre, all awful, some ghastly; in it there is at least one picture of the Warsaw one, called the Palace of Culture and Science. Orwell's Ministries of Truth, Peace and Whatever in 1984 were referring to these things, as one glance will confirm.

This afternoon I was in a car with some Polish fellows and we drove by the edifice (it's hard not to what with it's being at an intersection of various main roads). My hosts confirmed that it had been presented as "Stalin's Gift to the Polish Nation"; when I asked why somebody doesn't simply tear it down and build something else (the area is full of brand new 30-40-story buildings all built since the end of Communism), they told me that actually there are plans to somehow retool the exterior of the building, so as to make it look like something else. Perhaps.

Anyway, my hotel is sort of at the back of the thing. We drove by the front. On its steps is a large Christmas tree, which is fine, and about 30 meters in front of it is... a Hannukia, all lit up. More or less precisely where the south-eastern corner of the Warsaw Ghetto was, if you'll pardon my being morbid.

My guess is that the local Lubavitchers put it there, with the agreement of the mayor, one has to assume. How do I know there are local Lubavitchers? Because of the Hannukia, obviously.