Wonder Years Never Cease...

Vienna is full of American ex-pats, and they all seem to love it here. The city has been a melting pot for generations, and there is more diversity in this city than any other central European capital, I'd wager - even Berlin. This is good and bad.

There are several wonderful influences from the eastern European cultures and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Palatschinken is one - despite its name, the dish is vegetarian friendly (they're basically pancakes. The name is derived from Latin): 

Palatschinken

Other culinary delicacies, not unique to the Wiener Küche, have come to symbolize Austria - grace à empirical conquest (Schnitzel, for example, has Venetian origins) - and for those who insist all things Austrian are indeed Austrian, I suggest taking a look at contemporary Austria's charming yet less well-to-do neighbors. They most certainly would have a different story to tell.

Herein lies the problem: though Austria has been a melting pot since Habsburg times, it seems that, after a generation or two, no Serbian or Slovakian wishes to remember they had ever been anything other than Austrian. This reinforces the unfortunate aspects of of a closed society that still permeate the Austrian mentality: Austrian, good; Other, bad. This is oversimplification for effect, but I don't seen anything wrong with that.

The coolest thing about Austria is not its culture, which is not all that unique when considering the German-speaking world as a whole, but its topography and climate: the Alps. It's a well-known criticism that mountain people are a little kooky, with the reputation of being hicks, but, still, lovable - how else can you explain my 15-year-old students' love for John Denver? (Outside of Vienna, what part of Austria isn't  "Country Roads"?)

This brings me to an Austro-American comparison: we North Americans, too, have a melting pot - many would say the USA is the original melting pot...I don't know about that. (May I, for instance, bring up Ancient Rome?) We, too, seem to promote integration or segregation  - or did, up until the 1960s and the Civil Rights movements. 

In many ways, the United States lives in a fantasy world of past glories and triumphs, i.e. the end of World War II, the 1950s, when we helped Europe rebuild, we gained the reputation of being the world's policemen, and America was - in one way or another - the greatest country on Earth. Despite blatant evidence to the contrary, I'm afraid plenty of Americans still feel this way.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like it's a lot of hype over nothing to remember the glory days of yore. I would rather live in the present. What's past is past, and now more than ever, the world is changing at a fantastically rapid pace, practically from day to day. For the sake of each nation's collective psychic well-being, I hope my host country and home country both come to their senses, and stop playing the "Remember When?" game, like a couple of nursing home dandies.