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

Visitors to Vienna would be lucky to have former New York Times foreign correspondent Paul Hofmann as their guide. A native revisiting the city 50 years after fleeing Hitler, he could take them on excursions and tell them things no ordinary tour guide could. Here, Hofmann retraces the trips he made with friends and describes his early love for Vienna's woods, forest villages and prewar culture. He returns to neighborhoods, homes and haunts of farmers, artists, writers and thinkers, such as Freud, Beethoven, Shubert, Kafka, Mozart and Auden; tells what buses, trams or trains they took and what walks they favored. He also details where the natives shop for wine and food, what history was made in which castles and what it was like to grow up in this forest-encircled, romantic city. His account of the sensational deaths of Prince Rudolph and Mary Vetsera in 1889 in a forest lodge is not a rehash but a vivid recapturing of the politics and society of the time. Dominating all is the enduring mystique of the Wiener Wald. This book, part evocative memoir of a bygone era, part unique guide to the present, is a good substitute for Hofmann's own companionship. (May)