Viennese melancholy

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been to Vienna. Not even how long, and sometimes not even where exactly. Wherever I was, I wanted to understand people. But Vienna seems incomprehensible, just like the colourfulness of its inhabitants. And that is wonderful right now.

To say that lovers travel to Paris and melancholics to Vienna would be far too simplistic. Yes, Amelie is great in her Parisian café. But “Before sunrise” was also rightly set in Vienna. They do the washing in the dry cleaners. Taxi drivers are only there to drive. The suburban railway runs under the underground. Contradictions are part of everyday life in Vienna, and not just for Piefkes. The most dilapidated boas stand next door to posh hotels.

You listen to Louie Austen’s easy listening crooning with €20 cocktails, and 10 minutes later there’s bludgeoning sound in a demolished cinema pub. Old and new, past and present, in peaceful harmony.

Even the Nazis are blue instead of brown in Hitler’s homeland. No one will be angry with you if you ask: “Why?”. But please don’t get the foolish idea of receiving an answer that explains everything, no matter how wine-soaked it may be! Vienna is incomprehensible.

I don’t want to ask any more. I’m in the right place, even if I had to buy my forgotten kite harness again, 9° too cold and up to 40 knots on Lake Neusiedl were simply far too much for me to kitesurf. Some things are the way they are and nobody can explain why. This is the miracle of Vienna. A lost empire lives excellently between decadence, ruins and Art Deco. There is no reason. Simply marvellous and sometimes pathetically beautiful life.

The Gospel Dating Service plays the soundtrack at the Chelsea. I’ve often heard about the Chelsea. Still, my first visit. A big oven is stoked right in front of me in the surging crowd.

Just as everything is going well, a Viennese woman, apparently of German descent, snaps at me, asking me about the nearest electronic club so quietly to such a loud sound. I am severely irritated. In the lift queue, the Viennese are simply the nemesis. But at home, they’re as smooth and colourful as silk. Or so I thought.

I take that as inexplicable. As colourful. As what I don’t understand. Celebrate the many-goal draw between Ottakring and Tegernsee and two days of silence outside before the end of the concert – and listen to how incredibly colourful the world can be between 2,700 belt whores, hope, an open backstage door and residents living undisturbed.

I sneak up the hill to the Schlossherberge on the last tram. I am invited for a glass of wine by colourful cosmopolitans. I look down at the twinkling lights of my incomprehensible city.

On the last day, the weather adapts to Vienna’s mainstream melancholy: it rains non-stop, but I still look up to the Leopoldsberg. This was the beginning of the end of the Turks in Europe in 1683. And this is where the best panoramic swing in Vienna hangs from an ancient tree. It no longer swings empty in the wind. Some fool has cut it down. I bid farewell to comprehension.