By 1914 Jews made up about 5% of Cisleithania’s population. Their enormous palaces adorned the Ringstrasse, the city’s most elegant boulevard. Fortunes made in the fast-industrialising empire, many by Jewish and assimilated Jewish families such as the Wittgensteins and Ephrussi, changed the urban landscape. By 1910 Vienna had a population of 2m, the sixth-biggest city in the world. In the second half of the 19th century Franz Joseph’s subjects poured into the city: Italians, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenians, Moravians, Germans and, especially, Czechs. In deference to its multinational character, this half was not called Austria but was often referred to as Cisleithania, named after a tributary of the Danube. After 1867 the empire was divided into two: a Magyar-dominated Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multilingual other half, ruled from Vienna. Vienna was the heart of an Austro-Hungarian empire of about 53m people that stretched from Innsbruck in the west almost as far as the Black Sea in the east. What distinguished pre-1914 Vienna from most other European capitals, and what gave the Viennese school its particular intellectual tang, was that it was an imperial city rather than a national capital. Vienna was thus the cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism: the currents that have shaped much of Western thought and politics since Vienna itself started to implode in 1916 until the present day. Hitler arrived in Vienna from the Austrian provinces in 1908 and developed his theories of race and power there. But the Viennese rebellion was more intense, and more wide-ranging. This ferment was part of a generational revolution that swept Europe at the end of the 19th century, from Berlin to London. Those Viennese who escaped Nazism went on to sustain the West during the cold war, and to restore the traditions of empiricism and liberal democracy. But the ideas and art brought forth during the fecund period of Viennese history from the late 1880s to the 1920s endured-from Loos’s modernist architecture to Gustav Klimt’s symbolist canvasses, from Schoenberg’s atonal music and Mahler’s Sturm und Drang to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Imperial Viennese society could not survive. The emperor Franz Joseph is said to have kept the curtains drawn so he would not have to look at the new world across the square. But the building embodied such a different aesthetic, such a contrary world view, that some wondered whether a society that produced such opposites in quick succession could survive. This outcrop of modernism, designed by Adolf Loos, was completed in 1911, less than 20 years after the dome-topped palace entrance it faces. In one corner, the monumental, neo-baroque entrance to the Hofburg palace, seat of the Habsburgs in the other, the Looshaus, all straight lines and smooth façades, one of the first buildings in the international style. ACROSS the cobbles of Vienna’s Michaelerplatz the world of empires, waltzes and mutton-chop whiskers glowers at the modern age of psychoanalysis, atonal music and clean shaves.
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