This year — as, in fact, in many years — the Eisheiligen (“Ice Saints”) arrived pretty much on schedule, bringing a real drop in temperatures and, this year, some rain.. They haven’t quite left us yet so are a bit tardy in that respect, but the rain is desperately needed so I, for one, am not complaining.
Who are the Eisheiligen? This year I decided to look into the matter a little bit and turned to the German-language Wikipedia (see link below).
The first thing I noticed was that Wikipedia listed Mamertus on May 11th as the first “ice saint”. I had never heard of Mamertus, even though he was Archbishop of Vienna in the 5th century. Then I noticed that Mamertus apparently only counts in northern Germany. Bavaria and Austria consider the first “ice saint” to be Pankratius on May 12th. Here I am on familiar territory.
The other “ice saint” I always remember is the last one, die Kalte Sophie, on May 15th. From Wikipedia I learned that she was tacked on later, perhaps to accommodate the fact that Bavaria and Austria usually get the weather from northern Germany a day later. This explains why “our” ice saints start a day later and end a day later.
Anyway here they are with their dates: Mamertus (May 11), Pankratius (May 12), Servatius (May 13), Bonifatius (May 14), and, as stated above, Sophia (May 15).
Why are these saints special? It’s complicated, partly because the dates that have been handed down come from the Julian calendar and don’t align with the Gregorian calendar. In any case, it’s a little bit like the weather forecasts in the Farmers’ Almanac in the USA — there to help farmers plan their planting times but predicted on the basis of recognizable patterns far before any forecast can hope to be accurate. And, yet, the forecasts are right quite a bit of the time.
This one in Tokyo (the World Championships). Julia Mayer, who was the first Austrian woman to cross the finish line in the Vienna City Marathon in 2023 and 2024, came in 33rd. Might not sound like much to a Kenyan or Ethiopian, but Mayer said afterwards that she was absolutely satisfied and could not have done any better. It sounds like quite a dramatic race for her on a hot and muggy day. At the 20-kilometer mark, she was 46th (already better than her results in the World Championships in Budapest two years ago) and worked her way up slot by slot.
I’ll be very curious how she does in the VCM 2026, if she runs it.
I just heard from a colleague who is currently in Vienna with a group of U.S. American students that two of his group were walking around yesterday and ended up chatting with the Austrian president, Alexander van der Bellen. They even got a selfie with him! (With or without his shelter dog I don’t know. )
So, 2014 must have been the last time I watched the Eurovision song contest. I remember Conchita’s win and how fascinating it was. And now Tom Neuwirth is being written up in the NYT.
Below is a link to a very interesting (and rather worrying) ORF article about the word “normal”. Recently, the governor of Lower Austria, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, used the phrase “people who think normally” (“normal denkende Menschen”) repeatedly in an interview in the newspaper the “Standard”. She is a member of the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) and, the ORF tells us, was only following the party line, which has also been embraced, as you might expect, by the right-wing, nationalistic Freedom Party (FPÖ).
The Vice-Chancellor, Werner Kogler, of the Green Party (“die Grünen”), as might be expected, sharply criticized that use of the word and called the “normal” rhetoric “prefascist” (“präfaschistoid”) in an interview in the news magazine “Profil”.
In my opinion, Kogler has some justification for doing so. The problem is, of course, who gets to decide what “normal” is — and then what happens to those who are considered “not normal”. In a country that has a not-so-distant history of labeling anyone who criticized the government “asocial” (“asozial”) and sending them, often, to concentration camps sometimes to be murdered, it does feel as if we are on a slippery slope. (link to recent ORF article on this below)
I accept that there is bound to be (always has been?) backlash and that as diversity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives make headway (I’m not so sure “equity” plays a big role in the discussion in Austria at the moment) there will be pushback against people who want inclusive language (one of Mickl-Leitner’s hobby horses) or reject schnitzel or cars as central to their lives (Chancellor Nehammer’s [ÖVP] examples). I also think we need to tread very carefully and always remember where this kind of language has led in the past and could still lead in the present and future.
I have finally gotten around to creating a blog article I have been meaning to post for over a year. It is in the form of the first, and possibly only, video I have filmed for my blog. Because of the size of the file I am putting a link here for those who wish to take a look. Warning: It is on an emotional topic.
Having already pointed this out in four different years, I didn’t want to mention again that Austria once again did extremely well at the WorldSkills championships, where young people compete in the trades. (You can imagine that young Austrians do especially well in trades related to tourism and gastronomy.)
This year, though, something really special happened: the Gold medalist in stone-cutting was Austrian — and female. The Kurier this morning had an interview with Anna Karina Feldbauer (only 21 years old) about how this came about. Like most people who excel at something, she was simple fascinated by the idea of making things — even gravestones, a large part of stonecutters’ work — out of stone.
In a time when ever more businesses are seeking the next generation of skilled craftspeople yet ever more young people are going to university so that they have access to more prestigious jobs (and not necessarily because they’re really interested in, say, business administration), it strikes me that Anna Karina Feldbauer can be a really good role model.
Today, October 26, is a holiday in Austria, commemorating the vote in Parliament that established Austria’s permanent neutrality. (My understanding is that it was the first business enacted by the Parliament after all occupying powers had left Austrian territory after the Second World War. More about the treaty here.)
It is probably no accident, then, that the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) chose today to draw attention to the special photo and image archive of the Austrian National Library. Here is a taste from the ORF site of the millions of photos stored.
The ORF article is lengthy and only in German, unfortunately. Some of the main points they make: the Imperial Collection created a foundation for the current collection (yes, there is a photo of the enigmatic Empress Elisabeth); the rise of press photography bearing contemporary witness to life vs. studio portraits; the suppression of free media and therefore, of course, photojournalism as well as the banning of Jewish photographers during the Nazi regime and the resurrection of those professions after the Second World War; the role photography played in documenting the Cold War and the images of its major players (one of the most chilling photos for me on the ORF site was of Russian soldiers goose-stepping in Moscow in 1988); and the challenges of maintaining a usable archive in the world of digital photography where photos can be snapped one a second. (In fact, the teaser for the article mentions sinking into Austria’s fattest “photo album”.)
A heads-up: The Austrian National Library is planning for 2023 a retrospective of photos by Yoichi Okamoto who was head of the United States Information Service during the Occupation in Austria and later presidential photographer for Lyndon B. Johnson.
Those who would like to see more photos, I have chosen the link to the digital archive with images of Vienna to share with you here.
ecbinvienna 