WJU and Vienna's History: Part Three

The third in our series was penned by Erinn Garrison, class of 2013:

In Vienna, the history that is presented to tourists focuses on the more positive aspects of Viennese history while the city tries to avoid the negatives. The most prominent example of this is the emphasis on Empress Elizabeth, the other royals that inhabited Vienna, and art. The royals’ extraordinary lives and art seem to be the prominent images that the city wants displayed because almost everywhere we visited was dedicated to the royals or displayed artifacts and art important to Vienna. We could pick up a mug, a t-shirt, a poster that either had a royal on it or a famous piece of artwork that was located in Vienna, but there was very little that had anything to do with the World Wars expect at the military museum. It was very rare to see anything connected to World War I or World War II; even at the Wien museum there was only a brief exhibits about those times in history. If we hadn't gone to the military museum we wouldn't have known anything about Vienna during these wars. It seemed almost that the city wanted to forgot or erase the negative parts of its past and focus only on the good, or at least less controversial, parts of its history.