Vienna Ice Revue – Once Upon a Time…

… there was a dream of the „Magic of Love” “In the Country of Dreams”. A dream under the “Rainbow” with “Masquerades”, “Confetti” and “Cocktails”. These were the imaginative names of the imaginative productions of the Revue (1945/46 – 1970/71).

Why was an Ice Revue developed in Vienna? There are two explanations. A sportive and an imaginative. The sportive explanation starts with much Austrian success in figure skating before and after World War II, among others Karl Schäfer, Emmy Puzinger, Emmerich Danzer. So there was potential for founding an Austrian style „Holiday On Ice“. With the music by Robert Stolz and the style of ice operettas they made the Austrian audience happy and could distinguish themselves abroad from their competitors. “The Vienna Ice Revue was a guarantee that after the War there was an Austrian product that was both brilliant and glamorous.” [1] The imaginative explanation is that Vienna was the right place for icy seductions & innovations, colourful & sweet ice exhibits. As a “logic consequence” the Eismarillenknödel (Ice Apricot Dumplings) got invented in 1967 and earned their inventor the title Kommerzialrat.

Wilhelm Beetz – To satisfy Viennese needs

That nightmare: You need to go to the toilet urgently. Searching, running, asking – nothing helps. Nowhere a toilette. Depending on your personality the dream may continue in different fatal ways. What if a man or a women would appear, covered in a wide coat that covers a wooden bucket too. The bucket to sit on – the coat to cover you. Would you dare to end your problem for just two kreutzers?

These Buttenmänner and Buttenweiber (wooden bucket men, wooden bucket women) did exist really in Vienna at the beginning 19th century and this already meant some hygienic improvement. Because the situation in Vienna was upsetting: “heavy-weight air”, “harmful evaporations”, “like in fog”, a higher mortality rate than in Paris and London.

Bettine von Arnim – “Viennese are Viennese, and nothing else” / “Vienna smells sweet”

I made a kind choice for the headline to show the difference in a soft way. The difference between the original exchange of letters between Bettine von Arnim and Goethe and the letters in her book „Goethe’s correspondence with a child“.

On July 28th, 1810 von Arnim (1785 – 1859) writes from Vienna in her original correspondence with Goethe „three to four weeks I have been here, the theatres I saw were below any standard, miserable clothes and even

Jaromir Mundy – Rescue!?

Who is the deplorable man commemorated with a memorial at one of the places in Vienna where traffic roars most? I wondered about this quite often near the Danube channel, Urania, Stubenring on my way to the airport.

There in the triangle of Radetzkystraße 1 / Obere Weißgerberstraße 2 the architects Ferdinand Hrach and Franz Gruber built the first central station of the „Wiener Freiwilligen Rettungsgesellschaft“ (Viennese Voluntary First Aid Association)

Josef Madersperger – Sewing Machine

Do inventions make their creators happy?

Josef Madersperger a tailor from Kufstein arrives in Vienna in 1780. Here he invents the sewing machine in 1814. In 1815 he obtains an „Austrian Privilege“ for that machine. Franz II. introduced the Privilege Acts in Austria. They should protect inventions of „useful machines“. Privileges were the predecessors of patents. But protection was only the first step to commercial success as Madersperger had to see. He lacked the money to produce his machine and could not maintain the Privilege. He died impoverished in Vienna in 1850 buried at the cemetry St. Marx not far from Mozart. The Viennese tailor guild raised the cross on his grave.

Many inventors later the sewing machine made one of them happy. And besides the improved technology marketing skills were crucial for the success.