Wien ist anders.” This was the bold proclamation at the center of a recent advertising campaign to promote tourism in the city of Vienna. The motto appeared on posters and brochures juxtaposed with the familiar images of the city marketed to tourists: the golden Johann Strauss statue, the Lippizaner horses, the Hofburg, St. Stephen's Cathedral. The effect of the images is to transport the viewer back to the days of Habsburg rule, to conjure up the image of the city that is most familiar — Vienna at the turn of the last century. Clearly the slogan is at odds with the images, invoking the question: if Vienna has changed so little, from what, exactly, is it different? The very same images also accompany a second, more successful ad campaign by the city, anchored by the motto: “Wien bleibt Wien.” Wien ist anders — Wien bleibt Wien. It seems that the tourist office wishes to have it both ways, portraying Vienna at once as a dynamic, cosmopolitan, modern city while also promising to deliver to the tourist the Vienna of a hundred years ago. In complicated ways, both slogans ring true, and as we will argue in this essay, this apparent contradiction at the heart of the city's self-understanding is indicative of the complexity that underlies Vienna as a cultural space.

It should not be surprising that Viennese cultural identity is marked by contradictions. Austrian national identity is still an unstable enterprise, its reconstruction after the world wars undermined by the substitution of powerful cultural myths for a thorough process of self-examination and evaluation.