ABSTRACT
The popular image of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of its twin capitals of Vienna and Budapest was one of gaiety: of Viennese waltzes, operetta and cream cakes. It was summarised in the familiar Austrian comment that ‘the situation is critical but not serious’. That image persists and is valid on its own terms, but it concealed the Empire’s darker side – its grimly repressive prisons such as the Špilberk in Brno, the grinding poverty of many of its workers whichmade Vienna ‘Red Vienna’ at an early date and its anti-Semitism. It also did Vienna a grave disservice by distracting attention from the reality that it was one of the most creative cities of the early twentieth century. Indeed, it can be plausibly argued that, as home to Freud, Adler and Jung, Schoenberg, von Webern and Berg, Musil, Kokoschka and Wittgenstein, it was a more vibrant centre than London, Paris or Berlin. Moreover, Freud largely created the science of psychology, just as Schoenberg created the ‘modern’ music which continues to inspire some of music’s most original minds. Although Musil is less well known, his work is compared with that of the great French literary innovator, Marcel Proust. This powerful artistic and scientific tradition not only survived the First World War, but peaked in the new Austrian republic established in 1919. Indeed, some of its greatest achievements immediately preceded the republic’s very darkest years. It was a tradition which was cosmopolitan in its outlook but German-speaking and to no small degree Jewish. It was suspect on all counts. It was out of step with a Europe organised on the nationality principle, with an Austria rendered ‘German’ by the loss of its Imperial territories and with a public opinion which was minded to see Austria’s future as lying in union with Germany. It was a tradition which was faltering throughout the 1930s, and which died in 1938 when the victorious Nazis, Austrian and German alike, suppressed ‘degenerate’ art and science and persecuted and ultimately eliminated that part of the Jewish populationwhich had not alreadyfled. Itwas a traditionwhichwas not to be reborn in 1945, because too many of its supports had been destroyed. Cosmopolitanism in central and eastern Europe was no more, and more fundamentally, the wealth which had flowed into Vienna from the far corners of the Empire and sustained its administrative, merchant and military classes was no more. Defeat in 1918 had
renderedAustria marginal andVienna provincial, and the cultural and intellectual Indian Summer of the following 20 years had masked, but could not alter, that underlying reality.
