Hannah Putz on top of the Mercedes-Benz E 500 Coupé. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros
Cities might all be different but what ties them together is the debate around them: how has a city changed, what’s the art scene like, is it cool or not, where to go out, where to get the best food, the best coffee? Though one might grow tired of this sort of debate about one’s home town, it gets exciting once hitting unknown turf – so we asked photographers Hanna Putz and Katarina Šoškic to elaborate on what it’s like to live in Vienna or, in Putz’s case to come from Vienna.
“Vienna is interesting because it is boring and conservative on the one hand but has a very vivid art scene on the other hand,” explains Šoškic. “There’s a trashy mood to the city and its night life is hidden. You have to really discover people and places if you want good parties. A typical Viennese thing is to complain all the time, take things for granted and not appreciate the value of things,” she adds.
Putz was born and raised in Vienna and has returned to the city after an eight-year stint in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. “Vienna is a village but it’s the village I grew up in and so it’s a love/hate relationship that binds me to this place. Vienna and Viennese are particular – in positive and negative ways. I like that. One can go under here or stand above it,” Putz explains in Cafe Anzengruber, where she took us to experience the city’s best Wiener schnitzel, though that is a whole different debate in itself. “I’d love to be a tourist in my own city one day,” she states. What would she do? “I’d buy a city guide and would see what is written in it. I’d probably go to the traditional Spanish riding school with Lipizzan horses, visit the Hotel Sacher in the evening, sleep in a hotel and get on a Hop-On-Hop-Off bus because these are all things I’ve never done in Vienna.”
Read more about Sleek’s trip from Berlin to Vienna via Leipzig and Prague in the Winter issue of Sleek, publishing this month. Find out more information on The Search at mb! by Mercedes-Benz.