Literary Vienna

My sister turned 18 this year and I really struggled to think of a present I could get her to mark the occasion. Something told me that an inflatable spiderman or a Harry Potter mask wouldn't quite spell 'special day'... She had been going on, though, about how she wanted to travel and so the obvious thing was to take her away somewhere. Having just finished Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, I thought Vienna sounded quite interesting, so booked 4 days away for the 2 of us, staying at the Hotel Rathauspark.

Vienna is, first and foremost, a beautiful city filled with history, art, music and a hell of a lot of delicious cake... Being a book blog, though, I'm naturally going to focus on the literary side of things. Vienna has been at the centre of its fair share of books, most recently William Boyd's latest novel, Waiting for Sunrise - another one for the reading list...

There's so much to see in Vienna - you can barely stroll five minutes without running into a beautiful church topped with now-turquoise roofs and gleaming white walls, a flowering garden, a towering monument or a bursting fountain. Vienna is very proud of its composers, as you would imagine with the likes of Mozart and Strauss to its name, but writers have their place too. Goethe and Schiller, for example, both have very impressive statues on the city's famous Ringstraße. So impressive that my sister really couldn't resist imitating the former... Excuse the blurred photo, must be the snorting laughter...

Sigmund Freud may not be known for his weighty novels, but he is arguably Vienna's most famous writer in modern history and so it's no surprise that one of the city's many parks is named after him.

Palais Ephrussi

Not far away from Sigmund Freud Park, on Universitätsring, I spotted the Palais Ephrussi, one of the central locations in The Hare With Amber Eyes. Having read the book, the stunning building reminded me of the terrifying presence of Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Vienna in the lead up and during the Second World War. Of course Vienna was at the centre of World War One as well, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand's assassination triggered the start of the war.

Hof-Bibliothek

The Hofburg Palace, once home to many emperors including the Habsburgs, now houses the city's Imperial Library (Hof-Bibliothek) - the largest in Austria, housing almost seven and a half million items.

Anyway, I thought that instead of filling this post to bursting point I would do a few different posts staggered throughout the next week.

See my review of The Hare with Amber Eyes here