What in the Welt
The Welt Museum and Preparing to Leave
This morning, I finally got to go to Cafe Central. I met with my parents at Central at 8 am which was...very early, especially after my late last night. However, it was worth it for the chance to go to Vienna's most famous and historic cafe. Opened in 1867, Cafe Central was a regular haunt of many historical figures from Adolf Loos and Sigmund Freud to Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Talk about a nightmare blunt rotation.
For such a famous (and expensive) place, I honestly expected better. The cakes were delicious but the eggs seemed a little bit dry and the melange was on the lower end of ones I've had in Vienna, especially when compared to Cafe Museum or the Kunsthistorisches Cafe.
Overall, I'm very glad I got to go and have this experience but it was not something I'm going to rave about forever. Also, someone in this program mentioned close to the beginning that the inside of Cafe Central looked like a Cheesecake Factory and, despite having never actually been to a Cheesecake Factory, I can't really unsee it.
After breakfast, I wandered around the Kunsthistorisches for a little while and saw some of my favorite things there for the last time. It was a little sad to be leaving behind what has become my favorite museum in Vienna but I loved getting the opportunity to walk around it one more time before I left.
From there I headed to the Hofburg Palace to visit the Welt Museum with my friend McKenna. The Welt Museum is a very, very strange museum to walk through. On the surface, it's cool to see art from so many different places and have so much representation of Latin American, Polynesian, and African Art somewhere outside of those places. However, the way these exhibits were structured constantly reminded me of why it's weird that this stuff is in Vienna rather than with the people to whom it actually belongs.
In his seminal work, Orientalism, literary critic and historian Edward Said examined the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures as they were impacted by colonialism and the false perception of the East as "uncivilized." Said defined Orientalism as the perception of Western superiority and distorted depictions of the differences between the East and the West. He also elaborated on the usage of the scientific method and other analytical systems to study the East as a means of gaining information for Western powers. Orientalism as a process turns the East into an "exotic" caricature and its people into myths to be deciphered rather than humans with cultures that just happen to differ from the West.
The Welt Museum continues this long tradition of exoticising the East from a Western perspective and it creates an uncomfortable feeling when walking through the museum. While one of the (clearly more recent) rooms was dedicated to explaining colonialism and the benefits of repatriation, the rest of the museum seemed to go entirely against that. Each room had a smattering of poorly arranged and barely explained art from different cultures that seemed there for visitors to ogle at rather than try to gain understanding from.
The crown jewel of the Welt Museum is Moctezuma's Headdress, an Aztec artifact that absolutely should not be here.
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Tradition holds that this exquisite quetzal and feather piece belonged to Moctezuma II, the Aztec Emperor at the time of Spanish conquest which means it rightfully belongs to the people of Mexico and was stolen from them by colonizers. After a negotiation between Austria and Mexico, the headdress was deemed too fragile to travel and Austria was allowed to keep it. In 2020, the Mexican government put in another formal request to restore the headdress to its rightful owners which is still being negotiated. As a concession, Mexican citizens are allowed to enter the Welt Museum for free to see the headdress whenever they wish as long as when they wish is on a Saturday between 10 and 6.
Just like the British Museum uses its free entry to justify its continued holding of the Elgin Marbles and Benin Bronzes (some of which are in the Welt Museum by the way), the Welt Museum tries to offer one day a week free entry to Mexicans rather than give them back what is rightfully theirs, forcing people to make the long journey from Mexico to Vienna to see something that should be far more accessible to them.
After the Welt Museum, McKenna and I went to the Imperial Armory at the Hofburg Palace which contained hundreds of suits of armor as well as allowing us to see more of the inside of the palace.
Walking around the curve of the Hofburg Palace was very cool but also a little eerie knowing what else happened in this building. Still, it was nice to get to see armor from so many different eras of Austrian history and to walk through such a beautiful building I have spent so much time looking at from the outside.
After doing some work in the evening, a few of my friends and I went to Sixta for our final Austrian schnitzel. While this was my last schnitzel, it's also possibly the best one I've had. I would be sure to add this restaurant to any recommendation list for Vienna that I compiled for someone visiting. The breading was so light and crispy and the veal was perfectly cooked and so tender that it melted in my mouth like butter. Even the potato salad was good! This was a perfect way to bid farewell to schnitzel.
