A new year begins, and how best to start off the new year than with a “what will happen in 2012” article! Below you will find Cafe Babel’s predictions for 2012, from politics, to fashion to, errm politics again! Enjoy.

Join us on our first annual retreat on 23.10.2011 where we will go on a nice hiking tour in the Viennese vineyards, which will offer a wonderful sight on the Austrian capital. We will meet at 11 am at the tram station at Schottentor where our socializing will start. We will have time to get to know each other better as we take the public transport to the start of our hiking tour, facing the challenge of the steep Viennese hills, going beyond our physical capacities and finally satisfying our thirst for adventure. At the end of our tour, we intend to relax and refresh ourselves in a Heurigen (around 2 pm) where the well deserved Sturm and Apfelstrudl will wait for us and where we will be able to discover our underestimated and hidden culinary aptitudes on an open-ended basis. We can’t wait to see you! Please don’t forget to bring your sneakers, a huge portion of creativeness and fresh ideas, a big appetite for Austrian food as well as the necessary intercultural curiosity and openness to enrich our discussions!

by John Hodgshon

Cold

Vienna beer festival.

Does Austria really need another beer festival? Aren’t there enough events involving Lederhosen, Dirndl and drinking ridiculous amounts of beer in Austria and Bavaria anyway? I mean, if I want to drink overpriced beer, get drunk, have a fight and be sick, then I’ll just go back home to England. Oh wait sorry, I’m forgetting, because you’re doing it whilst wearing traditional dress and listening to Austrian folk music (shudder), its acceptable. I’ll bear that in mind next time I’m drunk and disorderly on the street and take an ‘emergency lederhosen’ kit with me. If the police stop me I’ll just quickly whip it out, put it on and et voila! Everything’s ok, because its traditional.

By John Hodgshon

Hot- Corruption or, as its called in Austria- the ‘cosy Mafia’.

By John Hodgshon.

The purpose of the Orient Express debate, held in the House of the European Union on the 26th of May, was to debate the question “Do the Balkans begin in Vienna.” The answer was an emphatic yes, but encompassed questions relating to the relationship between Vienna and the Balkan countries, the history of this relationship and its effect on the people of this region

29.6.2011, 18:00-20:00 Hub Vienna, Lindengasse 56, Top18-19, 1070 Vienna

Environmental issues form a key part of the Danube strategy, linking water management, transport, energy, tourism and innovation policies. Will an increased emphasis on the environment result in a more prosperous and stable Danube region? This is the question we want to explore in our event.

17:30 Registration

18:00 Welcome and Introduction Cafe Babel and the Hub Vienna ‐ Introduction from the Hub – Matthias Reisinger ‐Cafe Babel informational video

18:15 Introduction to topic The Danube Strategy: How can environmental management support innovation, entrepreneurship and development in the whole Danube Region?

Moderator: Dipl.Pol. Ralf Nordbeck, InFER (Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy) at the BOKU

Speaker 1: Dr. Werner Kvarda, University Professor, Institut für Bodenforschung, BOKU

Speaker 2: Prof. Dr. Edita Stojic‐Karanovic President of the International Scientific Forum “Danube – River of Cooperation” in Belgrade, Serbia.

Speaker 3: Susanne Brandstetter, Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management (Lebensministerium) / Section VII: Water Speaker presentations and guided discussion

The form will be a guided discussion format led by the Moderator. Each speaker will have approximately 5‐10 minutes to discuss their area of expertise, organization and current projects or research focus relating to the topic.

19:15 Moderated discussion Questions and audience interaction

20:00 Wrap‐up and closure

Refreshments served'

This project has been made possible by the support of the European Commission

join the Cafe Babel Orient Express debate on May 24 18:30 - 20:30 at the Haus der EU (Wipplingerstrasse 35).

for more information:

• take a look at the programme on the German section of the blog

and read our articles:

"The Balkan: does it start in Vienna?"

Vienna - The Balkan connection

• sign up to the debatte via the facebook page

Although you won’t hear many born and bred Viennese say it out loud, but Vienna without the Balkans would be like…. well an English city without Saturday night violence and chip shops. Vienna’s Balkan connection goes back to the days when it was the capital of the Habsburg empire, and it is this connection that makes a Vienna a little different from the rest of Austria.

It is important to remember that, from roughly the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna as the capital of the multi-ethnic Hapsburg empire, an empire which (according to its fortunes) once stretched as far as Lvov in the west, to Bosnia in the south. Because Vienna was the capital of this vast region, it was peopled by people from many different ethnic groups, who came there as workers, as part of the administration and, most importantly, as part of the Habsburg army.

Anybody who wants to form a picture of the Empire, particularly in its last years, can do worse than read Joseph Roth’s books, particularly ‘The Radetzysky March’ and ‘Weights and measures’, both of which paint an interesting picture of life in the monarchy and particularly in the army. Although the empire considered itself to be ‘all inclusive’ regarding ethnic groups (there was even a special Bosnian-Muslim infantry unit, with its own imam), the German speakers where always at the top of the pile, and tended to look down on Slavic groups as backward. One interesting explanation put forward for the failure of the imperial army was that all soldiers were given a vocabulary of 200 German words to communicate with, which greatly hindered communication between officers (invariably German-Austrians) and the lower ranks (usually from other ethnic groups). This lack of communication made the army extremely inefficient and, fatally, unable to carry out complex manoeuvres. This disdaining attitude can still be seen and heard in Vienna, where many Austrians feel superior to their Balkan neighbours, tend to speak to them in ‘baby-German’ (you go, you see, you do) and classify everything east and south of Vienna as ‘in the south’, a phrase which seems to carry a whiff of backwardness and a lack of sophistication.

Also of interest is Ivo Andric’s ‘The Bridge over the Drina’, which describes life ina small Bosnian town, and in particular the upheavals that the arrival of the Austrian army brought with it. The book provides an interesting view of the Austrians as the ‘in-comers’ who occupy Bosnia-Hercegovina and take over the administration of the small town (Visegrad) on the Drina river. The Austrian army bring various innovations with them, such as a railway, house numbering and a banking system, but they also increase tensions between the resident Serbs and Bosniaks, who suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of an international conflict. The novel can be read as a critique of the way in which the Habsburg empire rode roughshod over ethnic sensibilities by bringing innovations and changes without interesting itself for the local conditions.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Roth’s books describe how the Empire’s lack of borders allowed people to move around freely within its borders, increasing their ability to do business. A look in the Vienna telephone book confirms that many of them settled down in Vienna and the surrounding area, as evidenced by the sheer number of names ending with -ic,- its and -ich. Although many people whose grand and great parents settled in Vienna now consider themselves to be Austrian, their presence still adds to Vienna’s ‘Balkan identity’, with many traditional Viennese recipes coming from the Balkans (Cevapcici anyone?) and also many Viennese dialects words have Slavic roots. The character of Vienna is definitely different from other cities and, in a way which is somewhat hard to define, more ‘Balkan’ than other cities. It’s the way in which you’re are almost guaranteed to hear someone speaking BCS (Bosnian-Croat-Serbian) on the streets, or the fact that certain parts of Vienna, particularly those in the 16th district, are known as ‘little Croatia’.

In the end, Vienna without a Balkan connection wouldn’t really be Vienna, and, even if there are some tensions, in the end, the Balkan presence sets Vienna apart from other Austrian and German cities and makes the phrase ‘Vienna is different’ true.

By Sheena Keller

For four weeks each year, in the hot summer months of July and August, Vienna comes alive as the center of the contemporary dance world while the city hosts the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. What began in 1984 as a project between cultural manager Karl Regensburger and choreographer Ismael Ivo has now grown into Europe’s largest contemporary dance festival.