Fear and Loathing in Vienna

Returning to the "City of My Dreams" two years after the pandemic's end.

Wien, Wien, nur du allein , Sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein!

Vienna, Vienna, just you alone, May you always be the city of my dreams.

—Popular folk song

The composer Gustav Mahler is reputed to have remarked, “If the world comes to an end, I will move to Vienna, because everything happens fifty years later there.” He was referring to the way the city clings to revered traditions and resists newfangled developments. For many who have called Vienna their home, therein lies much of its charm. After living in the city off and on for a total of fifteen years, I returned to the United States at the end of 2018 and didn’t return to visit my innumerable old friends until now.

During the pandemic I was appalled by the news of the city’s brutal lockdowns and insane testing requirements. The very notion of having to present a paper displaying a negative test result in order to enter a coffee house struck me a repugnant. In 2021, the only way to obtain freedom from almost daily testing requirement was to get a new, hastily developed COVID-19 vaccine.

The vaccinated were free to move around and free from ostracism, while the unvaccinated were second-class citizens, regarded with fear and loathing, and subjected to constant testing.

For all of 2021, this was an absolute bonanza for anyone in the country who was in business of selling PCR or antigen tests. With the Austrian state—i.e., taxpayers—picking up the tab, there was a massive, perverse incentive to continue this gravy train for as long as possible.

As the beloved Advent season of 2021 approached, public health authorities began to amplify their dark rhetoric for all those unclean, obstinate, stupid, and unsocial people who were still holding out against the experimental gene therapy shots. It made no difference that, by then, it was clear the shots did NOT prevent infection and transmission. No matter. As then Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said in November 2021, “Winter and Christmas will be unpleasant [ungemütlich] for the unvaccinated.” Many perceived a sinister quality in his laconic phrasing. With pressure mounting, many relented and got the infernal shots.

As I heard reports of this totalitarian madness visiting the city, it reminded me of the dark autumn of 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. During my early years in Vienna, I got to be friends with an old cabaret musician named Gerhard Bronner, who’d been obliged to flee Austria in 1938 because of his Jewish ancestry. I remembered him telling me of the terrible distress he’d felt upon watching the beloved, delightful city of his youth descend into madness.

The madness of 2020-2021 culminated on January 20, 2022, when the Austrian Parliament passed a vaccine mandate for the entire country. For everyone who’d held out through the “unpleasant” Christmas season, the writing was on the wall—very soon you will be legally required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine or you will (apparently) remain under house arrest.

At this point, something surprising happened. A public demonstration was announced on the Vienna Ringstrasse—the grand boulevard that encircles the old city center. The Austrian state and its dutiful lackeys in the media reported that only around ten to thirty thousand people were expected to participate—that is, only a tiny minority of esoteric weirdos.

Instead, approximately 500,000 people showed up for the march. Extrapolating from this number, it was estimated that around 2 million Austrians (of a total population of 9 million) were vehemently against the mandate.

BRAVO!: Demonstration (on Ringstrasse in front of Opera) against vaccine mandate.

For me, watching events from across the Atlantic, reports of the Ringstrasse demonstration were profoundly satisfying and redemptive. The demonstrators consisted of the sensible, liberal-minded, and thoughtful Austrians I’d come to know and love during my happy years of living in the country. Their demonstration proved to be successful. Shortly thereafter, Parliament postponed imposing the mandate, and then dropped it altogether later that spring.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon and evening catching up with an old friend who is a professor of organic chemistry. For hours we sat in his garden in the suburb of Nussdorf, reviewing the pandemic and the Austrian pandemic response. For me the key takeaways were the following:

• In an atmosphere of fear and propaganda, the majority of people instantly become astonishingly unquestioning and compliant.

• Most of the Austrian academic medical establishment revealed itself to have zero courage or critical thinking ability.

• An outstanding exception was Professor Andreas Sönnichsen, who was head of internal and family medicine at the University of Vienna medical school until he was fired in March 2022. Like Drs. Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Harvey Risch, and George Fareed in the United States, Professor Sönnichsen remained an intelligent and principled dissident and was severely punished for it.

• All of the official pandemic measures were ineffectual at best. Most of them were downright fraudulent.

Over the course of our five-hour conversation, my old friend told me many remarkable things about the pandemic response—some fascinating, some horrifying, and some absurdly funny. Perhaps the most profound remarks he made were the following:

• “It is precisely during a time of grave crisis that our constitutional protections count the most. It’s when we are most frightened that we are called upon to stick with our constitution, and NOT yield to emergency measures passed by flawed politicians and public health bureaucrats.”

• “Thank God this new generation of mRNA vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses. If they DID work, we would experience a new respiratory virus coming out of a lab somewhere in the world every year or so, because the money—paid by the state—is just too good for the vaccine cartel to pass up.”