Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

Comments

[Ken Deifik]

I'm sure you know the German saying that the Austrians want us to think Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.

I got to visit with my mother in '75. She was born and raised there, and sent to America at 16. She showed me the concrete tool shed on the Ringstrasse where she was imprisoned overnight for the crime of sitting on a bench while Jewish. It was still there 36 years later, probably still holding tools. Her parents got her out of the country ASAP after that. They were not so lucky, themselves.