CarrollBlog

Vienna is a city of plaques. All over you see them on the sides of buildings announcing Mozart lived in this one on Blutgasse (Blood Lane), or Beethoven composed the Heiligenstadt symphony here. Of course there is a large one at 19 Berggasse, the office of Sigmund Freud. Further down the fame ladder you have impressive plaques that say the film director Fritz Lang lived in a dark unprepossessing building near an equally anonymous place where Billy Wilder stayed before migrating to the US before WW2. The saddest plaque I know of is in the middle of a beautiful wine vineyard on the edge of the Vienna Woods. It is for the dramatist Ferdinand Raimund and announces he proposed to his fiancee on that very spot. Raimund committed suicide a few years later in his early forties after being bitten by what he believed was a rabid dog. Apparently the writer was more terrified of dying THAT way than by his own hand. But my favorite plaques are for people you've never heard of with names like Egon Wolfclick or Alfred Dingl who lived here too and to someone in this town, rated a permanent commemoration in stone. It's like a treasure hunt to find these announcements-- you're always looking when you're out for a walk. Now and then you spy one for the Socialist politician from the late 1800's, or the brothers who, in their time, were famous graphic artists and who lived in this building until they were both sent to Auschwitz. The wonderful American novelist Stanley Elkin said all he dreamed of as far as artistic success was concerned was to have one on the side of his suburban St. Louis house saying he lived there and the dates. Before he died a few years ago, his wife surprised him on a birthday with just such a plaque. Elkin said all kidding aside, he was surprisingly moved by it.