Travel soultions: Vienna

Time Out takes a 36-hour waltz around the Austrian capital – and finds barely enough time to soak up the coffee and lavish helpings of culture

 

Art nouveau splendour beside the Naschmarkt

Around the relaxed ’50s-style interior of Vienna’s Café Prückel, one of the city’s most-loved coffee houses, sit elderly ladies in pearls and loden jackets, students from the neighbouring art school, aloof intellectuals, chain-smoking sirens, and appreciative tourists, all attended to by the sorts of waiters who take their profession very seriously indeed. As it’s my first visit to the Austrian capital, I might as well immerse myself in all the clichés, so a juicy wienerschnitzel, with mildly tangy cabbage accompaniment, is on its way. Behind glass are all the Viennese hits: Sachertorte (the chocolate sponge filled with apricot jam made famous by Vienna’s Sacher Hotel), Esterházy (layers of sponge and cream);

Linzertorte (nutty sponge filled with strawberry jam), and a spicy apfelstrudel. It’s clear why this city is synonymous with café culture.

The sightseeing starts just outside the city centre in the Landstrasse district with a pilgrimage to the Wittgenstein house (now the Bulgarian Embassy). Every detail of the building, down to the door handles, was designed by the philosopher Ludwig for his sister Gretl using unorthodox proportions that make everything unsettlingly tall and thin. It’s not officially open to the public except when staging exhibitions, so instead I spend a while enjoying its austere façade.

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Nearby is the madcap 1980s housing designed by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. It’s a riot of colour, mosaics and sloping floors and I can’t believe I once thought it was cool – now it just looks tacky. Opposite, full of tourists, is his themed shopping village. No wonder more cultured Viennese despise him.

Mosaics at the Secession building

Making my way via the leafy Donaukanal (a channel fed from the Danube) I head back to the Innere Stadt, the compact historic centre of Vienna designated a UNESCO world heritage site. I quickly notch up gothic cathedral Stephansdom; Otto Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank (Postsparkasse); Mozart’s old house; the State Opera House; a sign for the Spanish Riding School; an antiquarian book fair; and a sweet little shop selling dirndl dresses.

After some time wandering the narrow streets and alleys of the medieval Jewish quarter I find Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in tiny Judenplatz. A solemn concrete tomb imprinted with the pages of books, this inside-out library weighs heavy with the unwritten histories of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who died in the shoah. Around it groups of place names read like poetry: Lodz, Lublin, Majdanek; Maly Trostinec, Mauthausen, Minsk.