Author: Tianle Zhang

Lena is a friend of mine who happens to be German, and was a student at Humboldt Universität in Berlin. However, national boundaries have never really been an issue for her: alongside traveling all across Europe, she’s also had extended stays in South Korea and the United States. I figured she’d be an ideal candidate for a conversation about the cultural stereotypes surrounding American students.

The main thing that stood out to her was school spirit. When she thought of American college kids, they were always wearing university-branded merchandise, attending pep rallies or football games, and going to a ton of extracurricular activities. I suppose this is understandable, given all the movies taking place on college campuses; Lena cited Legally Blonde (2001) and House Bunny (2008) as her main inspirations. I can’t say that I’m familiar with either movie, so I can only hope that they’re faithful ambassadors of American culture.

Lena thought that American school spirit had both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it seemed to be a great way to bond with others, given the preexisting community which greets you when you set foot on the quad. On the other hand, she worried about the kind of peer pressure and conformity that would come from such a powerful campus culture. Indeed, the extent of the relationship between European students and their universities is their commute to campus and then their time in the classroom. For them, the university is primarily an institution dedicated to learning, and only secondly a cultural hub. I think that this would lend European uni students a higher sense of independence, as they are able to more freely choose the activities and friends they want to engage with.

This paints a fairly accurate picture of Notre Dame. I always thought of ND as a very traditional college , with a very strong sense of school spirit. Most of my peers certainly embody this stereotype, and I’ve personally seen both the advantages and disadvantages of school spirit play out in my four years here. However, it was certainly interesting hearing this same perspective from across the Atlantic.

I was hungry last Monday. Sadly, if you had looked in my backpack, on the table, or in the fridge of my AirBnB, you wouldn’t have been able to find anything to remedy this situation. It wasn’t as if Vienna had run out of food, or I had run out of euros. No, it was Pfingstmontag, that is, Pentecost, celebrated fifty days after the Resurrection, when the Holy Ghost had descended upon the gathered Apostles. An unfortunate two thousand year chain of events followed, culminating in me starving in my lofted bed.

The problem was that all the grocery stores were closed. Further compounding this was the fact that Pfingstmontag naturally takes place after a Sunday, where most European stores are also closed, meaning two consecutive days without access to groceries. To add insult to injury, Pfingstmontag was a feast day. Of course, most Austrians had planned around this problem, and had wisely purchased their food before the public holiday, but me being the clueless American that I was (am?) had not done so, resulting in my unchecked hunger. At the time I was outraged, and sulked to myself along the following lines: “Don’t Austrians know that people need to eat? You know in America, everything’s twenty-four seven, right? Why is everyone so lazy here?”

I talked to Josef, my German tutor, about this. He said (in German) that Austria has so many public holidays—Pfingstmontag is just one among many, you can check the national calendar online—was mainly because of the strength of labor unions here. Sure, Pentecost is a religious event, and Catholicism is still fairly practiced in Austria, but the reason Europe has so many holidays and the U.S. so little isn’t really thanks to the laity. Still less is this difference because of some quirk in the calendar.

Rather, the unions here had fought for these holidays as a time of rest, a carefully drawn boundary where people can relax apart from the stresses involved in busily accumulating capital for others. I started noticing this difference in other parts of life, too: businesses close much earlier in the day here. The Viennese have more time for themselves, perhaps to spend time in cafes, to read, to talk, to smoke. Indeed, the legacy of “Red Vienna”—when the city was governed for years by the Social Democrats, who constructed affordable housing blocks and initiated welfare programs—continues to this day, even leading to the New York Times to dub the city a “renter’s utopia.” Given how my American perspective has trained me to treat the dominance of finance over the public good with a kind of inevitability, my experience of Vienna has shown me the possibility of a radically different, and dare I say better, relationship between labor and capital. Even if this experience had to began with an empty stomach.

Though I’d never admit it, suffering as I am from a touch of the cynicism of its male lead, one of my favorite movies is Before Sunrise (1995). Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy are firing on all cylinders, and Linklater’s ability to capture something essential about the rhythm of romantic conversations—especially the delicate entwinement of sincerity and subterfuge taking place during any first date—and the costars’ onscreen chemistry combine to create something deeply true. Céline reflects on this truth towards the end of the film:

“I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.”

It’s the little spaces that are sacralized by one’s attempts to truly know another. Yet if this is the case, these spaces must be just as important to the attempt of interpersonal understanding as the presence of the other person. Over the course of the film, as Céline and Jesse each negotiate their own cultural differences, this space becomes the city of Vienna; far from being a static setting, the city personifies itself in a million different little ways, from the record store where Jesse steals a furtive glance at Céline, who feigns a look away before returning the glance, only for him to look away in turn; or the winding cobblestone streets guiding their effortless conversations; or the people: the poet, the palm reader, the bartender, each an unwitting ambassador of Austrian culture for these two lovers.

In Vienna, I’ll be learning German for six weeks at the Internationales Kulturinstitut, so I think that before long I’ll also be able to engage in the conversations which were so integral to Before Sunrise. I hope to find the spaces that once briefly struck Céline as divine.