Introduction: Amerika in Wien

Summary

IN THE SUMMER OF 1923, a low-level Manhattan secretary stood at the foot of the Woolworth building, looked up, and was amazed at what she saw. She had seen skyscrapers before, from the boat as she sailed into Boston Harbor, in downtown Chicago where she had worked as a cook, a maid, and a nanny, and on the streets of New York as she dragged herself from building to building in search of any clerical job that would take her. American cities, she had decided, were hopelessly ugly and utilitarian, unlike the soaring cathedral towers, ornate baroque facades, and gracious cafés of her native Vienna. But then, looking up at the colossal tower in front of her, Ann Tizia Leitich had a profound insight:

Ich (stand) vor dem Woolworth-Building in Newyork, dem höchsten Gebäude der Welt, das aber in Plänen für zwei andere Gebäude schon übertroffen ist. Zuerst verstand ich es nicht, es schien nichts als ein riesiger Turm, mit Ameisen belebt, eine Masse in die Höhe modelliert. Aber plötzlich war es wie ein Schleier, der über meinen Augen zerriß, und vor mir stand der gotische Dom des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.

[I stood in front of the Woolworth building in New York. This is the highest building in the world, though plans have already been made for two other buildings that will surpass it. I did not understand it at first, it seemed like nothing more than a giant tower crawling with ants, a clump of clay modeled up into the sky. But, suddenly, it was as if a veil had parted before my eyes, and I saw before me the gothic cathedral of the twentieth century.]

Ann Tizia Leitich (1891–1976) was not only a secretary in Manhattan, she was also the American correspondent for Vienna's most important liberal newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press). In the eloquent but restrained first-person prose style of the classic Viennese feuilleton writers, Leitich writes about her astonishment in finding “Poesie” (poetry) in a skyscraper, and art, beauty, and historical resonances in a land that has great vitality and progress but little history of its own:

Der Wolkenkratzer in seiner schlanken, unaufhaltsam und machtvoll zur Höhe strebenden Architektonik ist Poesie.