The pain of Taylor Swift fans

In today’s edition, Alex Ross tells the extraordinary story of a Holocaust survivor. But first, exclusively for newsletter readers, editor Tyler Foggatt reports from Vienna, where three shows on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour were cancelled due to a terror threat. Plus:

Tyler Foggatt
Senior Editor

Earlier this week, I traveled to Vienna, Austria, to attend one of three Taylor Swift concerts scheduled for this weekend. The city was packed with Swifties, many of whom had made epic journeys to get to Vienna, the penultimate stop on the European leg of the Eras Tour. My friend, who had flown in from Tirana, Albania, said she encountered a group of girls at the Tirana airport joyfully singing “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart.” They had come from Skopje, Macedonia (at least five hours from Tirana by bus) and were headed to Vienna to fulfill what they described as their “lifelong dream of seeing Taylor.”

On Wednesday evening, less than twenty-four hours before the first concert was due to start, I was in a beer hall near the city centre, when suddenly people started sobbing loudly, looking at their phones. All three concerts had been cancelled due to a planned terrorist attack. Austrian authorities had arrested two teenagers. ISIS Supporters of the group who had allegedly planned to “kill as many people as possible,” as one suspect reportedly put it, using chemicals, explosives, knives, and machetes. One seventeen-year-old suspect had recently been hired by an events company that provided services at the stadium where Swift was scheduled to perform. The restaurant, eerily, began playing a mournful acoustic version of “Bad Blood.”

Last year, after seeing an Eras tour show in Philadelphia, I wrote an article describing, among other things, how safe I felt at the show — a rarity at any mass gathering in the United States. Other fans, who saw the tour in places like Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Edinburgh, made similar comments online: They never once worried about a fight breaking out in the audience or going to the bathroom alone. Concerts are joyous occasions where even the security guards sing and dance. That’s what’s especially troubling about the events of the past few weeks, which include not only the foiled terrorist plot in Vienna but also a stabbing in the U.K. at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class where three young children were killed and ten others injured.

In Vienna, fans, who have been reimbursed for concert tickets but not for long trips, are experiencing two feelings at once: relief that everyone is safe, but also devastation that shows have been canceled. “We’ve been waiting a year for this,” a woman from Spain told me, wearing a denim jacket she had embroidered with the titles of Swift’s various albums. The city was a beautiful place to be stranded, she said, but “we didn’t come here to see Vienna.” She was reluctant to do much sightseeing or go anywhere where there would be big crowds.

Some Swifties have tried to make the best of a bad situation. They’ve been gathering in Corneliusgasse (the city’s version of Swift’s “Cornelia Street”) and downtown, exchanging friendship bracelets and holding their own impromptu concerts. Last night, my friend and I walked downtown, where hundreds of Swifties in the outfits they’d planned to wear to the show — gold sequin dresses, floral jumpsuits, cheerleading uniforms — were singing an a cappella version of “Shake It Off.” Two fans even got engaged, as a crowd sang “Love Story” around them. On social media, someone compared the horde of singing Swifties to the Whos in Whoville after the Grinch stole Christmas.

Editor’s Pick

“The word ‘untamable’ “It could have been made up for her,” writes Alex Ross of cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Holocaust survivor, memoirist and “unrepentant chain smoker” who once played Schumann’s “Träumerei” for Josef Mengele. Ross visits her at her London home, where she recently sat down with the son of Rudolf Höss, the head of the Auschwitz death camp, for a new documentary, in which Höss’s descendants confront her brutal legacy. “She is perhaps the most astonishing person I have ever met,” Ross notes in his feature on an artist who, throughout her remarkable life, has remained resilient, witty and kind.

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PS Artistic swimming, Synchronised swimming, formerly known as synchronised swimming, is the Olympic event to watch today, despite what its critics, notably Anthony Lane, might say about it. “There are some sports, sadly, that are doomed to remain irredeemable, where the skills required, however imposing, can have no hope of emerging from the fog of absurdity,” he wrote in 2008, from the Beijing Games. “Everyone agrees that synchronised swimming is too tempting a goal.”

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.