A Child of the Prater

The Prater is my home. I grew up in the next-door vicinity. I must have fallen in love with the Prater even in the buggy. By that I don’t just mean the Wurstelprater, where I got the inkling, sitting in a small automotive car, that I am not the born driver. The main avenue also fascinated me. I felt more secure there than anywhere else. In fall I collected horse chestnuts with my kindergarten friends and then crafted funny figures out of them with the help of toothpicks. Years later, I learned the traffic rules at the kids’ traffic school. My parents, grandparents and I took a trip to the Prater every weekend, weather permitting. I cannot recall a single rainy day in the Prater in my youth. Perhaps, though, the sun is always shining in my memory of these times.

And one day, my grandfather and I tried to fly a kite on the Arena meadow. The kite was ailing. I ran as fast as I could to get it up in the air. My grandfather tried as well. Not a chance. The kite refused. It couldn’t be due to the wind, because all around us several kites were sailing in the air. My kite must have been an incredibly special specimen of its species! It wanted to remain with us and couldn’t be persuaded to follow its nature. My grandfather and I had lost the fight with the kite.

I have so many memories of the Prater that I feel warm all over. The Prater has shaped my character. I always wanted to get there fast. But one day my parents and I moved somewhere else. A drama for me. A few days before our move, the Imperial Bridge collapsed on August 1st, 1976. I was there midmorning the day after and couldn’t even grasp what had happened. A whole year I took the tramway from Donaustadt to kindergarten in the Leopoldstadt, accompanied by my mother, and the end of the route led over a makeshift bridge. I warbled “una paloma blanca” and dreamed of living close to the Prater again. After the last year of kindergarten, I went on to enter elementary school in Donaustadt.

I never got used to Donaustadt. Leopoldstadt remained my home because the Prater is there. And it is still my home today. Whenever I’m in the Prater, I feel a deep spiritual affinity. I am in the city within the middle of a separate world. The chestnut trees, the meadows, the Heustadl pond, the ghost train, the duck pond, the Giant Ferris Wheel, Maria Grün church. Yes, I enthuse about the main avenue and the Wurstelprater. And the Prater is so significant for many people: as children’s paradise, as natural oasis, as a place of recreation, as a historically evolved area, as running track. And I have got the feeling that I have to give something back to the Prater. I was and will be a child of the Prater. A life without the Prater is unthinkable to me.