“The trains are so much better over there!” So goes a common refrain among American visitors who have enjoyed European train travel. While American train disrespect may be overblown, there is no doubt that many European trains offer greater comfort, views, and line availability. These trains may be excellent, and they may help to make a European trip memorable, but they are not what makes Europe unique. One can easily hop on a train in many of America’s metropolises, and can even take some cross country, so train travel cannot be considered a uniquely European delight, pleasant, undeniably scenic, and UNESCO protected as some of it may be.
If not the trains, what, then, does make Europe so different? Age.
Vienna, for example, can trace its earliest references back to 881 AD (per Wikipedia) and Bratislava, toward which I was en route on a comfortable European train when writing this piece, can trace its earliest settlements back to roughly 5,000 BC (again per trusty Wikipedia). The USA boasts evidence of premodern life, though we have scant evidence in physical form. Vienna, for example, has at least one church remaining from the 8th century. That church, Ruprechtskirche (St. Rupert’s Church), originally completed in 740, was some 900 years young when my family’s late 1600s built home in New Hampshire saw its construction completed. New England, home to America’s oldest European settlements, is known as New for a reason, and the reason is Europe, the Old World’s, history. Older buildings lining old streets, many of them stone cobbled, do not necessarily make Vienna objectively “better,” but they do mean Europe’s great cities offer experiences and culture one cannot enjoy in the new world.
How, though, does the age of the architecture and infrastructure in a city like Vienna impact its culture?
Does growing up around baroque Kirchen (churches) and walking streets meant for horse drawn carriages shape a person’s view of the world? Does Vienna's continued haunting by the specter of the Habsburgs lend to its inhabitants a natural inclination toward conservatism and historical reverence? Regardless of the extent, how could it not? Unlike, say, a reactionary Balzac in a post-Empire France, the modern Viennese are generations removed from the height of Austro-Hungarian power and even generations past the post-Anschluss and WWII humiliation brought by the National Socialist era. Comfortable now in their appreciation of Vienna and Austria’s history, and kept in form by a natural conservatism formed from centuries of Catholic rule, the Viennese hum along comfortably in a city that mixes the ancient and modern in a balanced fashion. The city’s history continues to inform its culture, no matter how much time elapses, how many tourists visit, or how many governmental changes take place.
Also helping to maintain Vienna’s culture are the shops, restaurants, and wohnhäuser (apartment buildings) that often trace their construction and operations back centuries. While the age of an iconic restaurant or beloved café can be felt upon entry, it can also often be seen thanks to plaques outside front doors and graphics on menus that read ‘Seit 1820’ or whatever year since when the location has existed. These ‘since’ signs (since is the rough translation of Seit in this case), are so common throughout Vienna that one eventually ceases noticing them while making their way about the city. These ‘seit’ indicators should not be ignored, though, no matter how frequently they present themselves as they represent more than just the year they display.
A restaurant or café founded in the seventeenth or eighteenth century maintains none of its original owners or staff or patrons, but in its very structure and sein (being) it survives as a manifestation of the aspirations of its creators and as a safeguard of the history that took place within its walls and surrounding seating area. In these structures we can see proof that generations before our existence was conjured up, people, people just like us, came together as friends, lovers, and family to bond, unwind, and enjoy life. It is in the ungraspable, non-structural aspects of these physical structures that the value of Europe’s age and the importance of protecting its history can be felt in its completeness.
Vienna’s restaurants, cafes, and churches are gateways allowing for interaction with the past and lend an ability to feel a oneness with past lives regardless of our position in the human continuum. One can visit St. Stephen’s Kirche and see the same remarkable interior, be moved by the same hymns, and pray the same prayers to the same God as millions have throughout time.
It is on these aged stages where life plays out today just as it has before and just as it will tomorrow. New actors playing the same roles will walk into these same scenes and experience the same moods and atmospheres as those who came before them. They will be the diners, the drinkers, the lovers, the loved just as men and women in the past. Things in old Vienna and throughout the Old World will be the same only in different ways. But, acting out life on these stages in existence ‘seit long ago’ is what makes the experiences special, not unoriginal.
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