Swifties in Vienna Cry, Commiserate and Try to Shake It Off


Just as she was boarding her flight at Boston Logan International Airport headed for a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Mary DePetris excitedly checked the online fan group, Swiftie Nation.

Austrian authorities had discovered a terrorist plot targeting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the city, she read. On Wednesday, just before takeoff, organizers canceled all three shows. Ms. DePetris, 47, stepped onto the plane and broke the news to some of her fellow passengers.

“Half the plane was crying,” Ms. DePetris said. “It’s not just about the shows, it’s the community coming together and feeling safe at her concerts, and Swifties letting their guard down. And this just shifted all of that,” she said. “How can we do that now that we feel we are targeted?”

As the estimated 200,000 people who had been expected to worship at Ms. Swift’s proscenium in Vienna grappled with crushing disappointment, wasted money and a measure of fear at narrowly avoiding danger, a sea of fans flooded the baroque city looking for ways to shake it off.

They traded Eras merchandise in the shadow of the vacant stadium, or dissolved into tears when they caught the strains of Ms. Swift’s stanzas drifting from the doorways of sympathetic gift shops or churches. Some hung handmade friendship bracelets — a treasured Swiftie talisman inspired by a song lyric — on a tree on Corneliusgasse, a central Vienna thoroughfare whose name echoes the title of Ms. Swift’s song “Cornelia Street.” There, hundreds hugged, cried and commiserated in the middle of the road.

Tempering the dejection for many was a feeling that a missed concert was far from the worst outcome possible. On Thursday, Austrian authorities released information on the two teenagers they say planned to attack, outlining a picture of a terrorist assault designed to kill as many people as possible with machetes and explosives, plotted by the pair who had become radicalized by Islamic extremism on the internet.

One had recently started a job for a events service provider that was working at the Ernst Happel Stadium, where Ms. Swift was scheduled to play, according to Franz Ruf, a senior Austrian security official. The suspect, who the authorities did not name but said was 17 years old, was arrested there on Wednesday.

“I feel grateful to be alive,” said Charlotte Keller, 34, a human resources manager from Rome outside the stadium on Thursday.

Ewald Tatar, a manager at Barracuda Music, which organized the Austrian leg of the Eras Tour, said in a news conference that the decision to cancel the concerts was made together with Ms. Swift’s management, based on the information received from authorities.

“Although it was not an everyday decision, it was definitely the right one,” Mr. Tatar said, citing the fact that one of the suspects was an arena employee as a deciding factor. According to Barracuda’s website, all tickets would be automatically refunded within the next two weeks.

In an essay for Elle magazine from 2019, Ms. Swift said her “biggest fear” was the potential for an attack on one of her concerts. “After the Manchester Arena bombing and the Vegas concert shooting, I was completely terrified to go on tour,” she wrote, referring to terrorist attacks at concerts in those cities in 2017 that killed a total of 82 people and wounded hundreds of others.

Ms. Swift wrote at the time that she worried about keeping “3 million fans safe over seven months,” during her Reputation Tour. Her Eras tour will be three times as long, with more than 150 shows over two years that one company estimated could generate $4.6 billion in North America alone.

Ms. Swift has not yet commented publicly on the situation.

Inside the 16th-century Lutheran City Church in Vienna on Thursday, a group of teenagers from the Czech Republic sat in a pew, inconsolable. A sign outside said, “Dear Swifties, we sympathize,” and Ms. Swift’s song “August” blasted through the sanctuary: “I can see us lost in the memory,” she sang. “August slipped away into a moment in time …”

The girls sang, too. And they sobbed.

“We came here carefree,” said one, Katherine Penkavova, 18. “And now we face danger,” she added. The girls leaned their heads down on the back of the pew. “At least we can sing our feelings here,” Ms. Penkavova said.

The city tried its best to dry the floods of tears.

Listings of palliative events popped up almost immediately. Vienna’s Albertina museum and municipal pools offered Swifties free entry, while Austria’s national railway offered refunds on unused train tickets. A dance party called “Shake It Off” invited fans to come dressed in their sparkly concert best. A restaurant offered free flutes of pink sparkling wine for every crushed concertgoer.

For some the concerts had meant more than a silly, good time, including Eliya Briand, 22, and her sister Naomi, 24, who arrived in Vienna on Thursday from Netanya, just north of Tel Aviv, seeking a reprieve from Israel’s war in Gaza. Now thousands of miles from home, the sisters felt they were facing the same fear.

“It has been a really, really difficult year, and this concert was sort of an escape from the reality at home,” Eliya said.

Her sister Naomi said they had come “from war, from terror — and now we meet it again.” She added, “For this concert to be canceled because of that specific reason, it hurts a lot more.”

Some, like Teng Yilin, 22, were making the most of the situation — while blinking back the occasional tear. Ms. Yilin flew in for a single day from Shanghai to live her dream of seeing Ms. Swift live. She arrived before dawn on Thursday and was scheduled to leave around midnight. She got the news about the cancellation on the plane, but didn’t believe it until she saw people crying when she landed.

Wandering Vienna lost in grief before dawn, Ms. Yilin and her boyfriend were taken in by a group of Swifties, some of whom had come from as far away as South Africa. They bought her beers, she said, and the bar owner played Taylor Swift songs.

“At the beginning, it was sad, but after a few hours we were laughing,” Ms. Yilin said. “I’m heartbroken,” she added. “But I think it was still a good night.”

It was still too early to assess the economic fallout from the canceled concerts. The Austrian Hotel Association offered its members legal guidelines to manage an expected influx of cancellations, but Oliver Schenk, a spokesman for the organization, said that he had received conflicting reports.

“It is not yet possible to say how high the financial loss is for the companies,” he said.

Outside the stadium on Thursday, there was no coveted Eras merchandise for sale. Vendors began to pack up tubs of uneaten wurst and untapped kegs of Austrian lager.

Stefan Schneider, 48, the owner of Arena Cocktail Catering, said he had spent 10,000 euros, about $11,000, on hotel rooms for 60 staff members he brought in from Germany for the three-day event, plus another 10,000 euros in cocktail ingredients. The event would have accounted for 30 percent of his yearly income, if all had gone well, he said. He added that he had no insurance.

“It’s a disaster,” Mr. Schneider said, but looming larger than that was his fear that other concerts could be under threat. “It’s a problem. You have thoughts, what about the next event? What about disaster after disaster?”

Next week, the singer’s global tour is scheduled to begin a run of five sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a 90,000-seat arena in London. A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that there was “nothing to indicate that the matters being investigated by the Austrian authorities will have an impact on upcoming events here in London.”

With all the tickets for the London gigs snapped up and further tour dates fixed through December, it was unlikely that the disappointed Swifties in Vienna would get to see the singer soon.

And without a concert to prep for, they flooded the city.

The Spanish Riding School tours appeared sold out on Thursday, and braceleted people queued for tickets to Schönbrunn Palace. Mozart and Taylor Swift songs competed for earspace across its winding streets. Alex Januschke, a waiter at Cafe Tirolerhof, said he had spent the afternoon managing tables of disconsolate fans.

“My advice?” he said. “See the city!”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin, Christopher F. Schuetze from Leipzig, Germany, and Alex Marshall from London.





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