In the morning we went to a big (and very good) exhibit, sponsored by the town, on Melk and Nazism, 1938-1945. There were specific names and addresses of Jews who had lived in the town, and their experiences -- ranging from survival to death in a concentration camp. There were a lot of photos of the town in that period, including one of our hotel decorated with Nazi banners on May 1, 1938 -- the Anschluss was in March of that year. The exhibit included posters made my children in the local school with photos and text. There were pieces of bomb shrapnel on display from when the town was bombed, front pages from local newspapers, official city notices, and photographs from the concentration camp at the edge of town plus nearby Mauthausen. They did an interesting job of also showing what happened at the end of the war -- expulsion of Germans from points east such as Czechoslovakia, and the prosecutions and executions of pro-Nazi officials of the town at the end of the war.
Afterward we went to one of the great Baroque buildings of Europe, the Melk Abbey (Stift Melk). It is still a functioning Dominican, abbey, and I was really struck, particularly after the Nazi exhibit, by the element of battle present everywhere -- angels battling, the battle of good vs. evil in the world, etc. It was recently restored, and many of the exhibits (including some religious propoganda) are pretty high-tech. The restoration was paid for from the proceeds of the sale of the abbey's Gutenberg Bible to Harvard.
We then drove along the Wachau wine area toward Vienna, stopping at the Kirchenwirt Restaurant in Weissenkirchen for lunch. It was a great meal with good local wine in a very tasteful room -- which isn't always an easy thing to find in this part of the world.
Our arrival in Wien was a NIGHTMARE. It's very hard to navigate (in a car) the streets of Vienna to a hotel on a small street without really knowing the proper route in advance.
I LOVE VIENNA. It's a fabulous city, and feels much more like a real city than Munich. It also feels very un-American in a way. The people are pretty sophisticated, and make even New Yorkers look like we don't care about our weight. As a city, it's so "out of the way" in terms of its importance today, but it doesn't seem to matter at all. It's a very cosmopolitan and attractive city. We looked at restaurants on along a street near us called Baeckerstrasse, which has several interesting choices. We chose a very attractive restaurant called Neu Wien (New Vienna) that turned out to be excellent. We had a classic of Vienna -- tafelspitz (boiled beef) with a great Vienna wine called Wiener Trilogie. On the walk back to the hotel we walked by a plaque on a building near our hotel stating that Robert Schumann had lived there for a bit.
