Correspondents' Correspondence
LAND, ALEXANDER J. MOTYL / THOMAS
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The New Vienna Vienna—A silent but thoroughgoing...
...Vienna's telephone book, for example, reveals that a very large proportion of the inhabitants have Czech, Hungarian, Polish, or Slovak surnames...
...Consider the " Wall Street Journal A/fare," which broke out in late July...
...Vienna's streets turned red with screaming headlines: "Austria Angrily Rejects Attack From USA...
...Only the Zentralfriedhof, where Harry Lime was buried twice, has stayed quite unchanged.—Alexander J. Motyl Swept Away London—Western news coverage of the war in Lebanon occasionally seems to be no less controversial than the fighting itself...
...Yet as up-to-date and international as the city is becoming, it can still manage to be remarkably provincial...
...The city's Communists would not agree...
...Not until two weeks later did Die Presse finally regain its senses...
...Refusing a Polish interpreter, they insisted on communicating with the authorities in their native tongue...
...Signs of this metamorphosis proliferate everywhere...
...But old-world Vienna and the old-world Viennese of the film are now in the process of disappearing...
...Several soul-searching conferences have already considered the issue, and now an authoritative study published here by the Institute of Jewish Affairs is fueling the debate...
...Nearly 2,000 of them arrived on the scene when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, for example...
...This cosmopolitan Vienna is booming...
...A few earlier surveys and critiques had claimed that in Lebanon, television and the print reporters displayed essentially anti-Semitic double standards...
...Or did most of them show up for the inexpensive food and drink—about 50 cents apiece for some Russian caviar, a shot of Stolichnaya vodka and a glass of Bulgarian wine...
...says a Monarchist friend...
...New Tensions Between Vienna and Washington...
...Although few self-respecting citizens admit it, the spirit is decidedly American in form and content...
...the United Nations has dumped a large and ugly new structure on the other side of the Danube...
...Mainstream youth culture, meanwhile, is definitely Yuppie...
...A short while ago the Burg-kino was showing Carol Reed's The Third Man...
...East European tourists are ubiquitous, and especially visible in Mexikoplatz, where cheap stores, political refugees and black marketeers abound...
...Communists are not the only people in Vienna who habitually look eastward...
...They were swept away by psychosis...
...Today, the central district absolutely teems with Jugendlokale, ranging from the Commune, located just opposite a Greek Catholic church, to Blinis, a trendy spot decorated with mirrors and polished wood in the certified upper First Avenue manner...
...Ein Skandal...
...There were more speeches, then the laying of a berib-boned wreath at the stony feet...
...The New Vienna Vienna—A silent but thoroughgoing revolution is transforming Austria's capital...
...Millions are mobilized as actors in a historical drama...
...In Poland," said one of the refugees, "we're afraid even to speak our language on the streets...
...The baby-boomers dress stylishly, have money and are looking for their own ways of spending it...
...Five or six years ago, Vienna had virtually no bars, clubs or restaurants catering to the young...
...This unhealthy mentality, the two social scientists add, was "not necessarily an outcome of deliberate willful acts...
...It uncovered considerable "deviation from fair reporting," including factual inaccuracies that could easily have been avoided, the exclusion from news accounts of conflicting viewpoints or necessary background material and analysis, derogatory associations or comparisons between Israel and other countries, and cartoons whose hostile tone violated normal standards of good taste...
...Until recently this wasn't at all easy...
...At one point, he quoted a low-level American official who said, "I dislike the Russians but I hate the Austrians...
...Around the corner, on Karntnerstrasse, several Poles sit at a table covered with Solidarity paraphernalia...
...In early August, a young Slovak engineering student made it in a self-built flying contraption, but three luckless Czechs were fired on and stopped at the Yugoslav frontier...
...In recent years, moreover, their inadequacies have been supplemented by a new problem: Organizations that in more prosperous days maintained permanent bureaus in important areas like the Middle East now prefer to cover overseas crises by dispatching "firemen"—special roving reporters—at short notice to handle breaking news...
...Not everyone has unreservedly accepted the current trends, of course...
...The festival's organizers don't care...
...These men and women usually know little about such assignments and have hardly any time for preparation...
...On the centrally located Graben, two Czechs, former members of Charter 77, the most prominent dissident group in their country, man a stand warning of Soviet aggression...
...Several years ago the main attraction was a cosmonaut...
...As in the past, the Jesuitenwiese overflowed with young and old workers and proletarian types...
...Goulash Communism has adherents in Budapest's sister city on the Danube...
...and German and American English no longer monopolize conversation heard on the pavements...
...The highlight in 1984 was a Cuban ensemble...
...Were they all Bolsheviks...
...Among the best-known Lokale are the Trzesniew-ski Buffet and the Cafe Hawelka...
...Alternatives Leben, for example, have been markedly on the rise: The Saturday morning flea market —several blocks from the "First Vienna Gay and Lesbian House," an old building painted flaming pink—very much reminded me of New York's St...
...Perhaps paranoid intrigue does have its place here...
...Clearly, though, these people are in for along, hard slog: Next day, avisitto the same spot showed that the ribbons had been torn off and the wreath looped around the statue's neck...
...Asia begins at the Landstrasse," Prince Metternich said, metaphorically, about one of the city's thoroughfares...
...and has very substantial capital holdings acquired during the Red Army's occupation after World War II...
...A caricature in the highbrow Die Presse had a towering cowboy pointing a gun at a little Austrian who has fired a shot through the American's hat while standing on a chair next to a glass of wine...
...One of its editors described the country's reaction as "highly unnecessary," comparing it to what might be expected of Soviet bloc regimes...
...Mass was followed by the singing of the Hapsburg Hymn ("God praise, God seek out our emperor, our land"), a stirring speech by a member of the League of Austrian Monarchists, and a march, flags held high, to the imperial hero's statue in the nearby Volksgarten...
...Michael Elkins, the widely respected former resident BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, told the authors a typical story: "The fire brigade people who come smashing in whenever there's war anywhere—TV leading the pack but others as well—don't have any historical knowledge...
...The response to Kempe's article was immediate...
...So they can broadcast from Damour and in all innocence say that the place was just destroyed...
...Drawing on research conducted in many countries last year, the study is the first overall assessment of the mass media's performance in Lebanon...
...Its subway spreads steadily...
...After all, he reasoned, Kempe could not have been prodded by the State Department, which had just concluded successful negotiations with Austria over the leakage issue...
...Amazingly for a city that produced sophisticated thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Viennese could not distinguish independent journalism from public policy...
...A tiny group with no seats in the Federal Assembly, the KPO has a huge headquarters building...
...Media events rekindle old fears and old cultural stereotypes (including anti-Semitism...
...Yoel Cohen and Jacob Reuveny of Israel's Bar Ilan University, the authors of The Lebanon War and Western News Media, conclude that foreign reporters "were neither objective nor malicious...
...Cohen and Reuveny take a different tack...
...Mark's Place in the early 1970s...
...Some lament the growing loss of tradition, reject contemporary architecture, and search for new routes into the Haps-burg past...
...The famed Wiener Typroly-poly, ever gemutlich—is vanishing, replaced by a brash modern generation increasingly scornful of its elders and their values...
...technology to the East...
...Vienna's culture is dead...
...A recent poll indicates that the percentage of 18-23 year olds who prize "quiet and order" above everything else has dropped by a third since 1980...
...They think that the seeming bias results from journalism's need to transform actual (and often confusing) events into a "story," artificially dramatizing them even if they are inherently charged with high emotion: "Certain types of images are aggrandized beyond their normal size...
...Several hundred Monarch-isten, young and old, recalled the good old days last August 18, at a memorial mass for "His Majesty Kaiser Franz Joseph I" (1830-1916) in the Kapuziner Chapel...
...One highly respected political commentator actually purported to see the Pentagon's hand in the whole business...
...The head of the Left-wing Socialist youth organization termed the story a "monstrous attack on Austrian neutrality...
...They don't know that a very large part of the wreckage was caused when the Palestinians devastated Damour, although if you just use your eyes you can see trees growing out of the rubble and figure out that it wasn't blasted 20 minutes ago...
...Annually, in late summer, the party throws a two-day Volksstimme Festin, of all places, the Jesuit Meadow at the Prater Amusement Park...
...publishes a daily paper, Die Volksstimme, that no one seems to read...
...Vienna behaved toward Washington rather as Prague is sometimes accustomed to behave in regard to Vienna...
...Almost daily, the press reports attempts of individuals to cross the border into Austria from neighboring states...
...Government spokesmen expressed their hurt at the affront...
...The most sensational escape took place in mid-July, when some 120 tourists from Poland decided in Vienna not to continue their bus journey to Rome...
...Thomas Land...
...Frederick Kempe, the paper's local correspondent, published a story about Austria's less-than-satisfactory efforts to halt the transfer of sensitive U.S...
...Cafe Mozart still stands, albeit completely renovated, and so does the Giant Wheel...
...Cohen and Reuveny, as well as their sources, also note the "abysmal ignorance" prevailing among foreign correspondents based in the region...
...To everyone's surprise, they turned out to be ethnic Ukrainians living in Poland, rather than Poles...
...Many were wearing the Austrian folk dress called Trachten, favored by "Kaiser Franzl...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 17
