When you tell a German to do something, he does it. When you tell an Austrian to do something, he does it too, but then asks why. – Karl Kraus.

I visited Vienna for about a week in 2023, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Austrian Cities

• Vienna – 9/10 (2023)

Vienna has the vibes of a Civilization game in which you accumulate a ton of Culture Points and are then reduced to one very nice – possibly now my second favorite after Moscow – but irrelevant city. (Appropriate its national art gallery got The Tower of Babel painting, quite the apt metaphor). It is an incredibly aesthetic city, but walking through it, one cannot shake off the ghost of history, the idea that these streets were “meant” to constitute the central metropolis of a 60M empire or post-imperial federation in the later 20th century, as opposed to the provincial capital of a comfortable and well-off but by and large irrelevant 8M nation. The only other place where I get this feeling profoundly is Saint-Petersburg.

If I was German, committed to Germanic culture, and wanted to raise my family in the Germanic world, I would probably live in Vienna. Street crime exists, but is an order of magnitude lower than in Western Europe. Public transport is a pleasure. It is less socially authoritarian than Germany proper (see Karl Kraus for some amusing observations), and is cheaper than Switzerland, with none of its nouveau riche pretense and more in the way of genuine culture and artistry. This expresses itself in its proud stewardship of late Imperial traditions, such as the Viennese winter balls, the classical music performances in the churches, and the fin-de-siècle cafe culture.

The downsides, such as they are. Vienna’s age as an EHC magnet ended with the dissolution of its empire in 1919, as it went from a metropolis brimming with artists and geniuses to… a quiet and staid city deep in the post-Wirtschaftswunder doldrums. As in the rest of the Germanic lands, shops and many other amenities close early. Nightlife is close to non-existent. Austria has excellent skiing, but you need most of a day to get to the premier resorts – it strikes me that you should live in Salzburg or Innsbruck if you’re deep into alpine sports.