Vienna is different [antikvár]

VIENNA IS DIFFERENT Everything is different here. Nothing is what it seems, what its name would imply, what you would expect. First of all, the city of Vienna does not lie on the Danube. It lies on a river by the name of Wien which is not really a river, and actually Vienna does not lie on it either. As soon as it (the river) approaches the town in a delicate trickle it is hidden and vaulted over. Only in the last leg of its course does the Wien play the proper role of a river with a city lying on it: it surfaces and flows in full sight, pleasantly incorporated into the cityscape, towards its mouth which it reaches all too soon. It graces the Stadtpark, it separates the Ministry of War (which no longer is one) from the Wholesale Markét Hall (which is called that despite the fact that it no longer bears that name) and flows past the Main Customs Office (which is alsó called that despite the fact that it no longer bears that name), and there is its mouth already, but by no means in the Danube but in the Danube Canal on whose banks Vienna alsó lies and which is no Canal but rather an arm of the Danube. The bed of the Wien is huge, deep and broad, elaborately designed and almost completely dry. If one looks very closely - and only then - one discovers a rather ridiculous trickle down there. This river dwarf in the gigantic river bed has the effect of a baby in a great four-poster bed. One almost gets the impression that this disparity must be due to megalomania, that the great city tried to upgrade the river which shares its name. One could not be more wrong. The little Wien, outwardly harmless and innocuous, frequently used to become dangerous over night. For centuries it overflowed its banks in spring and caused great damage until the great mayor Dr. Kari Lueger insisted on its regulation. Approaching the city from the West one sees the generous construction and the little rivulet before it runs its subterranean course, harmless, idyllic and yet demonic and dangerous by nature -a symbol, a landmark, a leitmotiv. The assertation of this Viennese duality - harmless-demonic -is by no means new, but neither is it as old as one might béliévé. For a long time, for all too long a time, Vienna cherished her role as a capital of joie de vivre, of optimism and easy-going indolence, as attested among others by Goethe and Schiller ("Sunday forever, forever turning the spit on the hearth") and Grillparzer ("Enervating is thy summer breeze, thou Capua of the spirit"). Vienna did not protest against the motto "life's a dance" which was claimed for Viennese music, against dancing and dance music being understood as a self-portrayal rather than a way out, as diagnosis rather than therapy. Well into the period of operetta and the pioneer years of the sound film industry Vienna was presented as lively and jolly. Only the dual catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions with its dual special visitation of the city brought to the surface the question of whether the native dance in three-four time had not been a dance on a vulcano. Only in the decades since it arose from the ashes of the Second World War has Vienna tried to see its own image anew, discovered the demonic behind the harmless fa