Then and Now

Once again, our wanderlust has taken us across the Atlantic, or the pond as I like to call it. For Dan and me, this was our ninth trip abroad together. This time we went to a city I had visited in 2008, Vienna, Austria. Dan had never been to Vienna before, although during his months of planning our visit, his fingers traveled Vienna’s streets so often on Google maps, he knew his way around the Ringstrasse soon after we arrived.

When I visited in the summer of 2008, I was with my husband John, who died in 2015. Back then, I really liked Vienna, but we stayed only 4 days before hopping a train to Bratislava. This time with Dan we concentrated on Vienna for more than two weeks. Our days here were filled with sightseeing, the Parliament, the Belvedere Palace, and the stunning Leopold Museum that houses many Klimt paintings.

Vienna is also known for its design, so a fun place to visit was the Mak Museum, where we saw their latest inventions, such as a washing machine made to last 100 years. Will clean clothes ever go out of style? Doubt it. In addition to their modern household designs, we saw furnishings from the Secessionist era, stunning art deco pieces for the home, even the fashions of various 20^th century eras. All of these said to me: life is art to the Austrians. Why can’t a beer opener be as beautiful as a piece of sculpture?

This visit to Vienna was so different than my first time. Of course, my relationship with Dan is lightyears easier than mine with my husband of 37 years, John. Ours was a difficult marriage. I was not easy to live with (hey, I’m still a pill) and John, a contrarian, was seldom pleased or happy, yet possessed a brilliant mind and deep appreciation for art. He was an economist, a synonym for very cheap, or so I joked. Yet in Vienna, he sprung for tickets to the world-famous art museum the Kunsthistorisches. Dan and I went there as well, but Dan took it a step further and got window seat reservations at their café, which is like sitting inside an art deco masterpiece while sipping a latte.

Dan seeks places that take him back in time, and beautiful architecture is his passion. I knew he would be wowed by Vienna and he was. We visited its oldest church, St. Rupert’s founded in 740 AD.  More importantly, we visited architect Otto Wagner’s Steinhof church called the first modern church in Europe. It is also known as the art deco church with its clean simple shapes and geometric forms of flowers, angels’ faces, and woodland creatures in stained glass and ironworks.

Otto Wagner left stunning architecture all over Vienna. Dan and I tracked down many of his buildings, but arguably his Steinhof church high on a hill on the Vienna outskirts is his masterpiece. Wagner designed this church for the insane, who were committed to the asylum on the hillside below. Instead of dark candlelit side chapels or a high altar filled with images of suffering, his church is light- filled with joyful windows of brilliant stained glass in many hues of blue. Here Wagner offered the suffering souls from the asylum the God of light and tender mercy.

The first time I visited, John and I climbed the steep hill passing all the ugly beige asylum buildings to the church, but we could not go inside because the church was locked. I admired the church’s exterior, but never experienced the miracle of its interior. With Dan, I did. He found out the few hours weekly the church is open to the public and bought tickets. When we went inside, a peace washed over me, one I seldom experience. Beside me, I sensed Dan feeling it, too.