Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
members were strung up from street lanterns. The Red Army, not Austrians, would liber-
ate the capital.
CUCKOO-CLOCK STABILITY
In 1948 the British author Graham Greene flew to Vienna and roamed the bomb- damaged streets looking for in-
spiration for a film he had been commissioned to write about the occupation of post-WWII Vienna. As chance
would have it, Greene penned the script for one of Europe's finest films about the era -
The Third Man
, starring
Orson Wells as the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. At one point in Vienna's Prater, Orson Wells as Lime waxes
lyrical about how under the bloody reign of the Borgias Italy produced some of its finest art. 'In Switzerland
they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.'
Never mind that the cuckoo clock comes from Germany's Black Forest - not exactly a model of stability over
the centuries. But that's another matter.
