108 HUNGARIAN REVIEW | May 2014 A s an evocation of the tense and tender twilight years of the Habsburg monarchy, Versinkende Sonne, Egon Schiele’s 1913 painting of the setting sun near Trieste is hard to beat. Schiele’s friend and art critic Arthur Roessler remarked on it that “in front of the sun it is already dark and cold, every leaf on the branch is stiff and numb from the cold. A deeply melancholic sky makes me ask whether this same sun will ever return”. Did it predict as well the sun setting on Stephan Zweig’s “World of Yesterday”, an “ordered world with definite classes and calm transitions”? In the same year as Schiele’s painting, the Adria Ausstellung exhibition allowed Vienna’s population to visit the Adriatic to reflect on the waves of the monarchy without leaving the city. Sailing off the crepuscular cliffs of the world of yesterday, the exhibition recreated in the Habsburg capital the Austrian Riviera, showing visitors how the Danube monarchy had evolved into the Adriatic monarchy. Now, during the last winter before the 100th anniversary of the summer of Sarajevo shots, a Vienna museum basks in the reflective glow of its former canal to the Mediterranean. The current temporary exhibition at the Vienna Museum “Wien endeckt das Meer” navigates nostalgically along the Adriatic, resurrecting with a certain ambivalence an era that sunk in 1918, washing ashore picturesque paintings, colourful posters and other madeleines of the Österreichische Riviera. A century ago, Vienna was still waltzing whimsically between the belle époque and “the age of extremes”. Stalin, Tito and Hitler trod the same baroque streets after MUSEUMS AND MALARIA ON THE EASTERN ADRIATIC RIVIERA Vicko Marelić “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht? Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin möcht’ ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn.” Goethe, Mignon