[This is one of a series on
Cities at a moment of apogee in their histories]
The image of Belle Époque Vienna is usually a positive one,
the Imperial pomp, the impressive buildings, the vibrant intellectual life, the
fashionable bourgeoisie, the lively dancing and the pervading music. Vienna in
the immediate pre-Great War years had all of this but there was a flip side of
poverty and discontent in a city of 2m souls which a surprising number of
distinguished inhabitants professed not to like. The city was an uneasy
compound of anachronism
and modernity and was to be the tinder-box to the greatest cataclysm ever to
strike Europe.
 |
| Mayor Lueger presides over a ball at the Rathaus (City hall) in 1904 |
 |
| The Burgtheater (Court Theatre) on the Ringstrasse, Vienna |
The Viennese took their recreations happily. They whooped
about at the Prater pleasure gardens, ate delicious cakes at Demels and at the
Sacher Hotel and patronised the boulevard cafés. The cafés were meeting places
– Griensteidl became the rendezvous for Young Vienna, the intellectual group
including dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, novelist Stefan Schweig and architect
Adolf Loos, protagonist of Art Nouveau. The Café Central was patronised by
austere Sigmund Freud but a real regular was a certain Mr Lev Bronstein, who
edited an obscure Russian newspaper called Pravda.
A senior Austrian politician, on being told of the danger of Russian
revolution, joked dismissively “We had better keep an eye on our Mr
Bronstein!”, better known to history as arch-agitator Leon Trotsky.
The music of 3 generations of Strausses still captivated
popular taste but by 1914 the atonal and dodecaphonic technique of Arnold
Schonberg led the avant-garde with his followers Anton Webern and Alben Berg.
The people sang:
Wien, Wien, nur Sie
allein
Sollst stets die Stadt
meiner Träume sein!
(Vienna, Vienna, you will always be the city of my dreams!)
The Vienna Secessionists, led by Gustav Klimt, was the
dominant painting school, while a whole class of rich connoisseurs attended
exhibitions, collected art and porcelain and appreciated the short literary
essays (“feuilletons”), favoured medium of the intelligentsia. At his famous
consulting rooms at Berggasse 19 Wien IX, Sigmund Freud was inventing the new
science of psychoanalysis, selecting his patients among a rum group of neurotic
Jewish ladies and writing about the libido, the interpretation of dreams and
the concept of the unconscious. He formed a group of disciples, including Carl
Jung and Alfred Adler with American members too, but Jung and Adler split off
on their own quite quickly. The final intellectual strength came from
philosophy where Ludwig Wittgenstein was the acknowledged genius, studied under
Bertrand Russell in Cambridge in 1912, inherited a fortune in 1913, becoming
the second richest man in Vienna, much of which he soon gave away. His later Tractatus astonished colleagues and
defined the entire subject.
Vienna was famously cosmopolitan and many of the leaders of
the arts and professions were of Jewish origin.
 |
| Sigmund Freud |
 |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein |
The Jews were envied for their success and riches, though
there were plenty poverty-stricken refugee Jews from Galicia. The Rothschilds
and the Ephrussis maintained palatial establishments in central Vienna and
lavish houses in the country. The Empire and its bureaucracy was generally
supportive and Franz Joseph tried to block the appointment of Carl Lueger as
Mayor of Vienna. Lueger did good work beautifying the city and modernising the
water supply and drainage but he was a virulent anti-Semite, dying in 1910. His
oratory inflamed the Viennese working class and one of those most impressed was
Adolf Hitler, a native of Linz, who lived in the city, latterly in a
doss-house, from 1905 to 1913. He then sought his fortune in Germany, bringing
his poisonous Viennese opinions with him.
The insurrectionary underbelly of Vienna was not confined to
Trotsky and Hitler: Stalin (under the pseudonym Koba) visited an unimpressed
Trotsky from Cracow in 1913 while another brief resident until conscripted in
1914 was Josip Broz (otherwise Tito) later dictator of Yugoslavia.
Despite all these tensions and difficulties, there were few
clouds in the sky in summer 1914. The Emperor departed for a holiday in lovely
Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut. His nephew and heir Franz Ferdinand was due to
visit Bosnia, annexed in 1908. Relations between the two were uneasy. Both were
arch-conservative, but FF planned to streamline the Empire by clipping the
wings of the erratic Magyars and advocated peaceful diplomacy in the Balkans.
The Emperor had disapproved of FF’s marriage to the aristocratic Sophie, who
was not of royal blood as custom required. The marriage was a morganatic one
(any children could not succeed to royal positions) – FF felt insulted.
As the world came to know, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his
wife were assassinated on 28 June in Sarajevo by a terrorist called Gavrilo
Princip, working for the Serb gang The Black Hand
.
.
The appalling news shocked Vienna. The Emperor had delegated
the handling of the crisis to his government, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and
Foreign Minister Count Leopold Berchtold. The involvement of Serbia was soon
established; a harsh ultimatum was despatched to Belgrade: the Serbs were
conciliatory. But Vienna had miscalculated. Russia mobilised to help the Serbs
prompting Germany to mobilise to support Austria-Hungary. The French, allied to
the Russians, mobilised too and Germany marched against France through Belgium.
Britain declared war on Germany as she had guaranteed the integrity of Belgium.
By early August 1914, all Europe was aflame.
The ruinous War lasted over 4 years. By November 1918, the
Habsburg Empire was no more and soon Vienna was the over-sized capital of a
relatively small European state. Her days of joy and glory were gone for ever.
SMD 06/06/16 Text Copyright © Sidney Donald
2016
No comments:
Post a Comment