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NOT FAR FROM VIENNA - MINERVA PRESS - London - 1995, ISBN 1 85863 679 5 The uiversity building on the Vienna Ring is disappointing. From the outside it promises (when one looks at the architectur) dignity, reflection, depth, and universal research. On the inside the impression given is something altogether different. The walls are dirty, the floors are run down, the lacquer on the doors is peeling off from endless use over time. The stairway is circular; it gives no support, it can offer no support because the wood out of which it is fashioned needs to be given care and here in the middle of the Alma Mater Rudolfina, nothing is given care. It can not be given care because care would cost money, sometimes even a lot of money, and money is not available here. It does not help if the high any the mighty, after much reflection of course, suggest any improvements and intervene. The ministry has no money and basta! It doesn't matter if the platform of the university's Great Hall, the precious platform of the Vienna Ring painted by Gustav Klimt himself, will fall down. It does not matter bacause, why worry about Klimt's frescoes if there is no money at hand for their care, and when not even the longest and most well-phrased appeals would help? The student's Hall on this timelessly famous Ringstrasse ist something which anyone who now approaches the entrance slowly is affected by and finds that he succumbs to, with its decadent aura wherein "Gaudeamus" has been played countless times - "the bestowal of a doctor's title must be sealed and accompanied". In Vienna there is, thank heavens, no dearth of doctor's degrees and titles - so in this Hall there also is no dearth of "Gaudeamus" and "vita nostra brevies est, brevi finietur". The assembled body of brother students in this interior adjusts to this Great Hall in an artful, or rather, artless way - the hands in the pockets of the obligatory unwashed jeans (Levis, of course!), a perspiration soaked tee-shirt often sporting amusing slogans such as "Make Love Not War" or "Do it with me" or "I like it - do you?"; it remains a deep secret why these epoch-making slogans absolutely must be formulated in, and only in, English. Perhaps it is the expression of an openness to the world? Perhaps? One must not overlook a very important addition to the university uniform of this youth, "the hope of Austria". Namely, the tennis shoe, which, in God's name, must never be washed and which look their best if they have been scuffed according to the principal "the older, the more independent" or "one can be free, right?" |