A stroll in the cemetery

IMG_5941, originally uploaded by bratislavadavis.

17-08-07

I bid farewell to Prague, a small, but delightful city. I saw a lot and was happy with my first trip to Prague. Some places I would like to see next time include the Franz Kafka museum, the dancing building by Frank Gehry, and the theater where there are cute puppet shows that perform operas and plays. I would also like to explore the Jewish Quarter again as I didn’t feel I learned as much as I should have thanks to the tour guide not being up to par. Finally, I wonder if there is any museum devoted to Czech cinema, as the filmmakers of the Czech New Wave were some of the finest and important in European film led by Milos Forman.

The bus ride was unremarkable other than the bus driver tailgating behind some cars. He got flipped off on one occasion.

A short tram ride from my apartment in Simmering is the Zentralfriedhof Cemetery where over 3 million are interred making it the largest in Europe. I started with a stroll to the Jewish section of the cemetery where many of the graves had been toppled as result of Nazi vandalism during Kristallnacht in 1938. There was one section consisting of tombstones piled on top of each other while many of them were simply scattered in fractured pieces. Among the famous Jews that are buried here, include some of the famed Rothschilds.

The feature landmark in Zentralfriedhof is Dr. Karl Lueger-Gedächtniskirche- a magnificent Art Nouveau church where the former mayor is buried in the crypt chapel. Lueger was a skillful conservative politician who is revered in Vienna for his love and devotion to the city as well as improving the quality of civilian life. But he was a notorious anti-Semite. Schorske states Lueger's infamous phrase, "Wer Jude ist bestimme ich" (Who is a Jew is something I determine) allowed Lueger to push anti-Semitic legislation. Lueger, for example, promoted a bill confining the immigration of Russian and Romanian Jews to Austria in 1887. Many scholars argue that Lueger cynically ran on an anti-Semitic platform to win voters, which may be the case, but even when he was in office, he was pushing an anti Jewish agenda. Carl Schorske summed up Lueger by writing, "He succeeded better in producing an alliance of aristocrats and democrats, artisans, and ecclesiastics, by confining the uses of racist poison to attacking the liberal foe."

On the way to the composer's section of the cemetery, there is a cubic tombstone where Arnold Schönberg is interred- an interesting block of granite. Schönberg had to flee Vienna due to the threat of the Nazis during the war and taught first at USC for two years and then, upon receiving a full professorship, at UCLA for eight years before retiring. The music school at UCLA is named after Schönberg. After a bitter fight with USC administrators, Schönberg's family pulled all of the composer's memorabilia, previously displayed on the USC campus, and sent them to the new Schönberg Museum in Vienna.

The composers sector has a statue of Mozart, although he was not buried there but rather at St. Marx. Interred here are Johann Strauss, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

Although I didn't see her grave, one of the most intriguing figures is Geli Raubal- the half-niece and alleged lover of Hitler. She died mysteriously in 1931 at the age of 23 in Hitler's apartment in Munich