Our walking tour consisted of the city block around Hofburg. This block is huge and the Imperial Palace makes up the majority of the grounds that “keep going and going.”[1] This block signifies the wealth and prestige of the 600 year long Habsburgs dynasty. The Hofburg was built by Franz Josef but was never finished due to the fall of the Habsburgs in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. This block even has a church, St. Augustine Church, which was built in the 14th Century. Augustinerkircher has the hearts of the Habsburgs. This is not a figure of speech; the real organs that pumped the blood through the Monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire are in fact kept in the church here inside the Herzgüftel. Almost right next door is the Spanish Riding School, evidence of the Spanish Habsburg influence in Vienna.
The Hofburg Palace is also home to the Heldenplatz which was first known to present the Habsburgs to the Vienese and second as host to Adolf Hitler. Hitler used the Imperial Palace to welcome the Viennese into Germany’s Reich upon the March 12, 1938 Anschluss.
The Hofburg block is riddled with monuments erected in order to commemorate a vast array of Vienna’s heroes. We can find the likenesses of Goethe, to Mozart to Prinz Eugene of Savoy. On one side of the block we can see the Roman ruins of Vindobona. Just down the street from the ancient walls, we can enter the 21st Century and see Vienna’s history through film at the Albertina.
Adjacent to the Albertina is a site commemorating the “victims of fascism” during t
he Zweiter Weltkrieg. One represents the apartment building that was refuge to 600 Austrians when it was hit by bomb, burying men, women and children inside the rubble forever. Next to it is a Jewish man tied to the ground with barbed wire, imagery of the concentration camps.
From foot we board a bus after a much needed lunch, since we were warring off the ‘hangries.’ We left the Innere Stadt of Vienna and circled the city and became acquainted with the outer districts. As we wound through the streets I began to find my bearings. The sun seemed to be coming up from the right direction now and I could start picturing Vienna in my mind’s eye. Our bus climbed up Bald Hill where there was a church dedicated to Vienna’s heroic Poles: Pope Jean Paul and Jan Sobiesky who saved Vienna from invading Turks during the 17th Century. From here we caught a glimpse of what Sobieski deprived the Turks of on the 15th of September 1683 in addition to what Vienna has accumulated in the next centuries.
[1] Kathy Stuart, Walking Tour, 8/3/2010
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-slm
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