Important changes are evident in Vienna these days. When I was there in March, for the first time in my memory, there was a real sense of political turmoil, occasioned by the recent entry into Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s government of the right-wing Freedom Party, and its putative leader, Mr. Jörg Haider. For the past fifty years, the government, with its chancellors changing every few years, has been made up of an ongoing cozy coalition between the two major parties dominant in the postwar period—the Social Democratic Party (spoe, known colloquially as “the Reds,”) and the AUSTRIA PEOPLE’S PARTY (OEVP, “the Blacks”). Haider and his party have put an end to all that. People are uneasy.
On the surface, things did not seem to have changed in any drastic fashion. The city itself, which counts on its easygoing ways and ample dispensing of gemütlichkeit for tourists, does seem to be surreptitiously taking on something of the aluminum-and-glass air of a German city, accompanied by a pretense to efficiency decidedly un-Austrian. Some of the cafés have turned into automobile showrooms or computer salons. The cafés that remain do still contribute to the atmospheric attraction much touted by the ministry of tourism in its brochures. Indeed, the admirable and most definitely unspoken rule of letting all customers remain at their respective tables for as long as they like is still inviolate.
I visited two remarkable museums. The “Collection of Ancient Musical Instruments” in the Hofburg
