Sweet and savory

Vienna, Austria We began our day back at the palace, hoping to tour a part of what used to be our favorite pastry and confectionery shop, Demel. When we first came to Vienna, their second floor was a restaurant that served fabulous wiener schnitzel, if memory serves. Flash forward to our next visit, post-Covid, to find out they had eliminated their upstairs restaurant. They did serve main dishes on the first floor, but wiener schnitzel was not among them.

The Demel museum described in our guidebook no longer exists, gone for six years they tell us. So much for our morning plan. Now the focus is purely on sweets and drinks, making Demel a very fancy café indeed. There are several stations where you can see their confections being made, and an extensive shop of the most beautifully packaged sweets. It seems to us that these items are almost three times as expensive as they were when we first visited. We escaped with some of the lower-priced items.

Our next destination was at the end of a metro line, in a fancy suburban neighborhood. We visited what is known as the Ernst Fuchs Museum, but the building’s claim to fame is that it was built by Otto Wagner over 130 years ago and has had a very dramatic life.

Wagner was the leading architect of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a founding member of the Vienna Secession creative movement, but his house was quite controversial. Its Italian Palladian style was politically unfashionable at the time it was built. But it spoke to the creative lights of the day, such as his comrades Klimt and Schiele. Wagner sold it in 1911, and built a smaller, equally elegant home next door. Later in its life, Josephine Baker and Mata Hari would visit the rich theatre family who had bought it. Then, everything changed in 1938.

The Nazis seized it and and made it an office of the Hitler Youth, with storage for belongings confiscated from other victims. Then came the Russians, then the French. This once-gorgeous home became a shoddy shell, destined to be replaced by a gas station in the oh-so-sensitive 60’s.

Then in 1972, along came Ernst Fuchs, who understood the beauty of the original. An artist himself, Fuchs was a founding member of Vienna’s Fantastic Realism movement, of which you may have never heard. I’m not sure you missed anything. However, Fuchs can be celebrated for the style and remnants of Wagner’s original work that he saved. While it mostly serves as a backdrop for his own work, the elegance of the original building shines through, with beautiful Secessionist touches.

The adjoining Fountain House has no actual fountain, but it served as Fuchs’ showroom. You may recognize touches of Barcelona’s Gaudi and Vienna’s Hundertwasser, whom we fell in love with during our last two trips. At any rate, it does look like he was tripping when he designed it.

The home that Otto Wagner built next is close by, and is a study in a very different style. It is pure late Secessionist, considered Art Nouveau in Vienna. It is a private home, but we could get close enough to admire its simplicity and geometry.

All in all, worth a small jaunt to the suburbs.

Don is off to the opera tonight, so no official dinner to report. Somehow we managed to sustain body and soul, fear not.