An edited version of this article appears on the blog of the Akademikerhilfe - an organisation which supports students by providing affordable and community-focused accommodation in cities across Austria and runs the accommodation I'm currently staying in.
There is a wonderful passage in the late Jan Morris’ book Europe: An Intimate Journey describing the Ringstrasse in Vienna which reads,
‘Like some megalomaniac’s dream, its buildings rise one after another preposterously into view, Gothic or Grecian or baroque, plastered in kitsch or writhing with classical allusion, here a titanic opera house, here a refulgent Attic assembly, a university more utterly academic than Heidelberg, Cambridge and Salamanca put together, museums as overwhelmingly museum as museums could possibly be, and all appearing to curve deferentially, even obsequiously, around the immense pillared and rambling sprawl of the Hofburg, the imperial palace – where for nearly seventy years Franz Josef, the last Habsburg emperor that anyone remembers, toiled at his simple desk, dressed always in his severe military uniform and addicted to boiled beef and potatoes.’
Just this one paragraph contains all the ingredients needed for a fabulous piece of travel-writing – enough adjectives to conjure up historically accurate grandeur, but not enough to feel like an audio guide in an art gallery, personal insights presumably based off afternoons whiled away in said museums, and a healthy meaty stew to finish it off. It is almost as if one is riding on the Straßenbahn 1 (or D, or 71), peering out of the tram window at the imposing facades lining the route, imagining the stories of those who lived, worked, and studied behind those doors in times gone by.
But before I lose myself in nostalgia of a year abroad which I very much intend to resume, I’d like to pull apart Morris’ sweeping claim that the Universität Wien is ‘more utterly academic’ than the mentioned triumvirate of great European universities. Writing as one who also applied to Heidelberg for Erasmus, has completed two years at the University of Cambridge, and has now made it to the end of one semester at the University of Vienna, during a pandemic, I might add, I think I’m just about qualified to shed some light on the matter. And if anyone has experience of the Universidad de Salamanca, I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. (Semesters in Austria run from October to January, and then March to June, in case any British friends are reading this feeling outraged, wondering why I'm on holiday and you're not.)
Tram 71 trundling past the Hauptgebäude (Main Building) of the University of Vienna.
From reading feedback of previous exchange students, it slowly became clear that I would be mistaken if I expected that the Universität Wien was going to be a piece of cake. There was a scribbled note on one of the feedback forms which said, ‘students applying here should be resilient and determined’ and the cryptic comment ‘one semester was enough’, which I conveniently pretended didn’t exist. I decided to sacrifice the metaphoric piece of cake for the real and delicious ones you can find just across the road at Café Landtmann, waved au revoir to the rest of my friends who hopped over La Manche to internships in Paris, and committed to the Viennese cause.
The past semester has evidently presented its fair share of challenges but has also been enormously rewarding and eye-opening. As an exchange student, I was initially apprehensive about feeling like an outsider, and while admittedly there were moments of inevitable bewilderment, they were few and far between. The few students I did get to know were friendly and welcoming, adding me to their WhatsApp chats and inviting me to join their study sessions (pre-lockdown). The concept of year-groups doesn’t really exist in the same way it does in the UK – students have great flexibility over what they study, how long they can take to graduate, and can even start in the Summer Semester – and while I still find this a little odd, I think it does give each student more responsibility for their learning and progress. And when each semester costs less than €30, and you are able to work part time, you can see why taking five years to complete a Bachelor’s degree becomes quite the norm.
As an Erasmus student I had considerable freedom in terms of courses (as long as it was more on the arts than astrophysics side), which meant that I was able to dabble in quite the range of subjects. This enabled me to encounter an interesting cross-section of the student population – several students in my German literature classes were also completing teacher training alongside their normal Bachelor’s degree (‘Deutsch auf Lehramt’), for example, and certainly exuded teacher vibes when they had to present to the class (the long skirts and cropped hair completing the look). My Politics lectures were attended by a noticeably different crowd of students, and my Dutch class was just an eclectic assortment of those who required it for Comparative Literature, those who wanted to claim 7 ECTS in one go, and those of us who just thought it might be a bit of fun.
The whole ECTS - European Credit Transfer System - business has caused me many an administrative headache, for despite being created in order to have a standardised system across Europe, they are far from standardised, and British universities chose not to adopt it (of course). While friends on exchange at other European universities appeared to rack up a surplus of 30 credits, I seem to have completed a mere 18 despite working about twice as hard as them and doing exams. A weekly hour and a half seminar which entailed preparatory reading, delivering presentations, and a final spoken exam was only worth a pitiful 3 credits. (Perhaps another reason why the median number of semesters it takes for Germanistik students to graduate is 8.6…) The Austrian grading system, numbers between 1 and 5, 1 being ‘sehr gut’, also took a while to get used to; none of this starred first or high/low 2.1 malarkey or even Tripos rankings that I’d spent two years wrapping my head around.
The Arkadenhof (arcade) surrounding the central courtyard of the main building.
I was also surprised by the level of formality at the Universität Wien, and especially because my friends at Cambridge often remarked that I was a stickler for formality, always addressing our professors using ‘Dr’ of ‘Professor’, rather than just ‘Mark’ or ‘Mary’. During one of my first classes I was attempting to email my work to the Professor, and asked the girl sitting next to me to help me navigate the confusing interface. Instead, she seemed horrified that I had gone for a ‘Liebe Prof.’ and immediately rectified it to a ‘Sehr geehrte Frau Professor’. Given that it’s quite common for Professors to sign off their emails using ‘Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr.’ before their surname, I’m not sure why I was so surprised. The formality does however extend the other way too, and I certainly enjoyed being spoken to as ‘Frau Whitehead’, even if it did make me feel like an indomitable German language teacher.
I also completed a great variety of tasks and assignments each week, which I found a pleasant change from churning out thousands of words worth of essays, as one does at Cambridge. It ranged from reading articles on Migration Policy to collaborating and presenting on literary theorists, and often felt a lot more like school, except a lot harder and in German. It’s impossible to compare levels of stress, but I did find not having a major deadline (or two) each week quite liberating. The level of online provision was also impressive; all my classes and lectures were conducted ‘live’ and you had to have your camera turned on throughout to be marked as present. One of my literature exams was deemed so important it went ahead in person, and instead of just waving me through or asking for an essay, I was interrogated over Zoom instead. Lectures were 90 minutes instead of 50, complete with animated questions to the lecturer at the end, and students regularly posted on the online forums – both of which you would definitely get weird looks for at Cambridge.
Despite the aforementioned differences, there were however some reassuring similarities; the unspoken dress-code of humanities students more or less translated across (dark turtleneck, statement jumper, big scarf), as did the fact that I still left my work to the last minute, although more likely because I was busy ‘making the most of my year abroad’ and eating strudel, rather than drowning under last week’s still uncompleted work.
I’ll end this mammoth report by returning to Morris’ claim – was my first semester at the University of Vienna ‘utterly academic’? Well, the phrase ‘academic rigour’ certainly does jump to mind, but so do the words ‘Kaffeehaus’, ‘Almdudler’ and ‘Nutella-stuffed dumpling’. I did my fair share of studying, but the knowledge that this was one semester (not 8.6) and that I always had the excuse of being a non-native speaker relieved the stress and quashed any pressure I might have felt. While it was a great shame it ended up online, I’m still glad I chose to do it all in the first place.
So glad in fact that I feel it’s time to get back to Vienna and do it all over again - zoos, museums, and non-essential shops, and an afternoon at Paris Charles de Gaulle, I’m coming for you!
Here's to hoping that I'll at least be in the same country as this beautiful building for the entirety of next semester...