Went on a musicological mission today. Goal: find the sources for two newspaper articles, find the origins of a photo and then identify the people in the photo. A daunting task to say the least, we headed to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek or Austian National Library to look at microfilms of old newspapers.
The library is in the Hofburg, which is the old city palace of the Habsburg family, meaning it is incredibly large. So we ended up in the wrong portion of the palace at first, and then once locating the right portion, we bought out yearly passes to the library, since we will be back to do more research and look at old scores. After dropping off our backpacks in the Garderobe (coat check), we headed inside to attempt to find the newspaper collection.
Dr. Solvik had given us somewhat specific directions, the first of which being go left. We did and after following a few signs, ended up in the current newspaper section, which does not have newspapers from 1943. We then followed Dr. Solvik's directions more specifically.
Go Left. Open the door, it should lead to a staircase. Follow the spiral staircase downward. At the bottom, go straight down the hallway. At the end of the hallway, there is door. Knock three times and tell them you eat lunch on Thursday. Enter. Go to the desk and ask for help.
We ended up in the right place and asked for help. Only two of us are german speakers and I am the best of the bunch, so I did most of the talking, and pretty much got that we needed more information in order to get anything from them. So we headed back upstairs to the information desk, who gave us a book in order to look up all the relevant newspapers published in Vienna in 1943. Being during the middle of WWII there were not many, but the book is organized by year and includes a range of 200 years so it took us half an hour to read through every Wiener newspaper titles in the past 200 years and determine the dates they were published. We only found 3 and one we already knew. Oh well, it's all about learning the process. Oder?
We got the microfilm for the important one and were able to date and identify one of the articles. The other two are probably within the other two newspapers which are going to head back and find later. Still no signs of the photo.
At a premier of a work by Richard Strauss (right) in 1943.
After our fun there, I headed back to IES and met up with Abe in the tiny baby IES library. I have to say our the library at the Hofburg palace beats out Palais' little library any day. We decided to make a trip to the Haus des Meers with Zan, getting the German Team back together for another fun and fluent adventure.
The Haus des Meers is about a block from my house and is housed in an old builing from WWII that was designed to be a concrete safehouse in a sense, with lookouts on the top, so it is essentially a tall concrete tower with a outdoor walkway level that goes around the entire outside of the building near the top. It was converted into an aquarium after the war, and two 3 story glass greenhouse looking things were built onto part of it.
I have to say it was pretty awesome. In general I love aquariums, and this one, although small had some pretty cool stuff. Including piranas, one really cool larger tank with a giant sea turtle, and the two greenhouses which were open and had multiple floored walkways to check out the various types of wildlife living within them. Those parts had birds flying around your head, monkeys running along the railings, and bats hanging around above your head. Pretty sweet. Best part is: I got a yearly pass, so now I can go whenever I want to!
Zan left early for class and Abe and I walked around on the lookout level and saw gorgeous views of the city at night. We attempted to identify the buildings but weren't always successful. We petted some koi and then went back to one of the open areas and sat around for a bit, before heading to Pablo's Zuhause for pizza and lasagna.
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