The Spell of the Vienna Woods: Inspiration and Influence from Beethoven to Kafka

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Paul Hofmann, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, offers a fine meditation on the Vienna Woods, a tract of gladed forest five times bigger than the combined boroughs of New York, geographically the last gasp of the Alps before Austria opens onto the great central European plain. In those forests, Hofmann tells us, lie the origins of many great works of the imagination: the later symphonies of Beethoven, several Schubert sonatas, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and, most famously, Richard Strauss's 1868 opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, which instilled in the Viennese a sense that the woods had to be protected from the growing city on their fringe. Thanks to the play of art and memory, the woods thrive today; as Hofmann remarks, "No other major European capital can boast such a large and safe recreational area."

From Library Journal
As a child growing up near Vienna, the author, a travel writer, delighted in exploring the woods. Since then, Hofmann has revisited the area independently and with friends. His purpose in this narrative is to acquaint the reader with the woods by blending personal anecdotes, history, tourist information, and enlightening facts-for example, the catalog of personalities over the centuries such as Johann Strauss, W.H. Auden, and Crown Prince Rudolph who have enjoyed the area as a source of recreation and refuge. Hofmann's absorbing details and descriptions allow the reader to explore vicariously the diverse topography, villages, and vineyards of this 540-square-mile area. At times reading like a novel, at other times like a collection of short stories, this work is a pleasant introduction to the environs of Vienna. Recommended for public libraries.Jo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, OntarioCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The Vienna Woods cover the farthest eastern extension of the Alps, surrounding the city on three sides and providing it its park and playground for centuries. Great composers and writers have found inspiration there, and Hofmann captures some of their enchantment here. He grew up in Vienna and fled the Nazis as a young man. Fifty years later, his delightful book transforms his characteristically Austrian nostalgia for the terrain of his childhood into an informal history of Austrian society and culture. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of Austrian life as found in the woods (e.g., the drinking of Heuriger, the local new wine celebrated in folk song) or on the lore of the woods, such as the famous 1888 suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph at Mayerling. Treating more literary lore, Hofmann affords a consideration of Kafka's love affair with Milena Polak that is particularly poignant. More prosaically, he also tells us what to see and do, where to go for good drink and food, and how to get around the woods via Viennese public transit. An exemplary work beautifully written. John Shreffler

From Kirkus Reviews
``A culture is not better than its woods,'' Auden once said. And since the British poet spent his last days in the Wienerwald, the partially landscaped woodlands of Vienna that are the subject of this book, Hofmann begins with these words. This is really a memoir, since travel writer Hofmann is returning to the sylvan sites of his own Viennese youth--woodlands steeped in cultural history, a place of intimate and sometimes secretive pleasure as well as scandal. Beethoven had a fondness for these woods, as did Freud and Mahler. In fact, they were a favorite haunt of practically every major figure in Viennese history. Emperor Franz Josef tried to lure back his wayward and wandering wife, Elizabeth, with a magnificent hunting lodge there. At Mayerling, a Wienerwald village, the Crown Prince Rudolph apparently committed suicide with Baroness Marie Vetsera in 1889. Hofmann takes us on a series of walks, or tours, through the woods' different areas. The historical material that pops up as we follow the author is perhaps more interesting than the sometimes lame observations of meals, comments, encounters. The accounts of Kafka's four happy days with Milena here (perhaps the only happy days of his life spent with a woman), of the development of the Biedermeier era's romanticism, and of the Strauss waltz closely associated with the countryside are charmingly informative and relaxed. Particularly curious is the telling of Egon Schiele's brief imprisonment in the prison of Neulengbach (he had an unfortunate proclivity for painting undressed and underaged girls). The book also has the virtue of being a de facto hands-on guide to walking in the Wienerwald, but one that will be primarily read as an anecdotal view of a largely vanished culture. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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The Vienna Woods cover the farthest eastern extension of the Alps, surrounding the city on three sides and providing it its park and playground for centuries. Great composers and writers have found inspiration there, and Hofmann captures some of their enchantment here. He grew up in Vienna and fled the Nazis as a young man. Fifty years later, his delightful book transforms his characteristically Austrian nostalgia for the terrain of his childhood into an informal history of Austrian society and culture. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of Austrian life as found in the woods (e.g., the drinking of Heuriger, the local new wine celebrated in folk song) or on the lore of the woods, such as the famous 1888 suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph at Mayerling. Treating more literary lore, Hofmann affords a consideration of Kafka's love affair with Milena Polak that is particularly poignant. More prosaically, he also tells us what to see and do, where to go for good drink and food, and how to get around the woods via Viennese public transit. An exemplary work beautifully written.


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