Dear travelers,

As the a new year has just begun, I wish you a wonderful new 2018 full of health, friendship, curiosity, insight and travellust.

If one of your trips will take you to Vienna, I will be happy to welcome you here. Be it, to take you on a a tour or arrange a special travel program  for you.

My New Year’s image for 2018 are some of the demounted laurel leaves from the iconic cuppola of Viennese Secessionist Building. The leaves like the building will be restored in the coming months. They will be back again in May 2018 in full glow.
The Viennese Secessionist movement was an art movement founded in 1897 by a bunch of artists around Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann. They aimed to promote modern art and design in Vienna, at a time when the city’s mainstream was a very conservative one. In the few following years Vienna will not only grow to a metropolis, being back then the fifth biggest city in the world, but also to an important center for modernity.
People like Otto Wagner and his school in architecture, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in painting, Josef Hoffmann and Kolo Moser in design, Gustav Mahler and later Arnold Schönberg in music, Arthur Schnitzler und Hugo von Hoffmansthal in literature, paved the way for a style which influenced all of our contemporary culture.

Vienna in 2018 will celebrate the anniversary of 1918, the year when many of the above mentioned artists died and with them a whole cultural epoch came to its end. It is the year of the proclamation of the first democratic republic of Austria, at the end of World War One. The vast Austro-Hungarian Empire turned then into the small state that Austria is still today.
2018 is also 70 years after the “Anschluss” into the “German Nazi Reich”, the beginning of the darkest period in Austria’a history. Nationalistic feelings, anti-semitism, anti-intellectualism, anti -liberalism, already nurtured in Vienna around 1900, came to its horrid manifestation in the following years.

Let us hope for a year in peace and togetherness, the possibility to enjoy life to its fullest but also to always remember the things we must never forget.

All my best for 2018!

Yours, Katharina