VIENNA

Traditionally the seat of the Habsburg dynasty and the capital of its central European territories, Vienna experienced both great development and relative decline in the nineteenth century. With a population in 1789 of roughly 200,000, Vienna was the third-largest city in Europe after London and Paris. It experienced, like most major cities, an extraordinary population boom in the period. By 1914 Vienna's population was over two million, but the city was now only fourth-largest in Europe, having been overtaken by Berlin. This was symbolic of the waning significance of Vienna as a political center, due to the checkered career of the Habsburg dynasty. It is indeed virtually impossible to disentangle Viennese history from Austrian history in general, and the name Vienna came to symbolize for the national communities of the Habsburg Monarchy not simply a city but rather the whole nexus of central power of the Habsburg state.

Vienna was not only a political and administrative but also a major economic and cultural center. It underwent dramatic modernization, especially after midcentury, even though the relative slowness of this development compared to Berlin's explosive growth gave rise to an image of Vienna as the conservative, even backward, other capital of central Europe. By 1900 it enjoyed a cultural reputation as a more old-fashioned, less avant-garde center than either Paris or Berlin, and it is only in retrospect that fin-de-siècle Vienna, the capital of a decadent multinational empire at the crossroads of so many of the positive and negative movements in the coming modern world, has come to be seen as a major center of innovation in its own right.

1789–1815: war and peace

In 1789 Vienna was still a walled city, surrounded on three sides by steep banks (on the fourth by a short stretch of the Danube River), beyond which the city's suburbs spread. Architecturally the city was dominated by the baroque. The enlightened absolutism of Joseph II's rule had liberalized Viennese cultural and intellectual life, and the city had

become the center of the German musical world. Combining both tendencies, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's hymn to (Masonic) reason, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) was premiered at Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden in September 1791. The outlook for enlightened reform was already darkening by 1789, however, and the consequences of the French Revolution, along with the deaths in quick succession of Joseph II and Leopold II, set Austria on a course by which Vienna, as seat of the Habsburgs, came to represent the ideological nemesis of the revolution.

Revolutionary opposition in Vienna itself was slight and was snuffed out ruthlessly, but Austria lost a series of wars to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and Vienna was occupied twice by French armies, in 1805 and 1809. On the second occasion a part of Vienna's fortifications, at the Hofburg, was razed. The cost of these lost wars had a devastating effect on Habsburg finances, leading to state bankruptcy in 1811, with long-term damage to the Austrian, and Viennese, economies.

Cultural life, however, carried on. During these bleak years Ludwig van Beethoven premiered most of his symphonies in Vienna, and the premiere of his opera Fidelio in November 1805 occurred during the French occupation, with many of the audience being French officers. Habsburg efforts after 1805 to encourage German nationalism even attracted a group of conservative German Romantic poets to the city as Germany's "capital," although the defeat of 1809 ended this project.

Count Metternich's astute diplomacy after 1809 and the defeat of the French in Russia in 1812–1813 brought about a radical reversal of Austria's, and Vienna's, fortunes by 1814. In September 1814 Vienna became the site of the congress that was to reconstruct pre-Napoleonic Europe. The Congress of Vienna was an opportunity for Austria and the Viennese to entertain the other European powers and to persuade them to see Europe Metternich's conservative way, which to a large extent they did. The congress also confirmed Vienna's reputation as a city of many amusements but not one at the vanguard of progress. The Prince de Ligne commented that: "Le congrès ne marche pas; il danse" (the congress does not walk [i.e., make progress]; it dances). The congress ended in June 1815 with a fairly durable settlement, but the comment was quite prescient about Vienna in the coming years.

1815–1848: biedermeier and vormÄrz

By the 1820s Vienna's population, including the suburbs, had risen to roughly 300,000, with surplus labor from the countryside flooding into the city's proto-industrial outskirts. Economic growth, however, lagged, and population growth was not matched by modernization of the city's infrastructure. Gas lighting was introduced in 1817 but not systematically. The Danube flooded disastrously in 1830, and the lack of an adequate water supply resulted in a cholera epidemic in 1831 and 1832. A new water supply system, built after 1835, was ineffective. A new gate was punched through the walls at the Kärntnertor, but otherwise the old city remained walled in.

The city's political life was similarly stifled. Metternich and his master, Francis I, reacting to the upheavals of the French Revolution, were determined to stop all political change, and the public sense of relief after the revolutionary crisis soon turned to a sense of stagnation. Under Metternich's "system," Austria and Vienna became watchwords throughout Europe for oppression, and although this reputation was exaggerated, the secret police and censorship system was quite well developed. Viennese intellectual life suffered as a result, and even Austria's greatest writer of the era, Franz Grillparzer, a loyal bureaucrat, was seriously affected by the censor's interventions.

Yet musical life continued to flourish. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was first performed in Vienna in 1824, and Franz Schubert produced all of his great work in the period, dying in 1828. The waltz, developed by Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder, first became part of Viennese life. In drama, Vienna's Burgtheater under Joseph Schreyvogel became the premier German stage. Given the political and intellectual climate, the dominant style of the period was one of domestic, private, inward-looking simplicity, which came to be known as Biedermeier.

The revolutions in western Europe in 1830 and the death of Francis I in 1835 ushered in a new era of frustration with the "system" and a shift toward optimism about the possibilities of progress that came to be known in retrospect as Vormärz (Before March 1848). In popular theater the change could be seen in the succession from the fantasy plays of Ferdinand Raimund to the ribald satire of Johann Nestroy. The most obvious expression of the new approach was Eduard Bauernfeld's play Grossjährig (Of age), performed, remarkably, at the Burgtheater in 1847. This cultural shift paralleled and reflected economic and technological change in the city. In 1838 the Nordbahn, Austria's first steam railway, financed by the Rothschilds, reached Vienna, and by the 1840s Vienna was linked up to the Continental rail system; in the 1840s a proper gas distribution system was being installed. In 1847 the Austrian Academy of Sciences was founded. Vienna was, haphazardly, becoming a modern city.

1848–1861: revolution, reaction, reform?

With the population of Vienna approaching 400,000 by 1848, such incoherent improvements were not keeping pace with the basic needs of the populace. The harvest failures of 1846 and 1847 led to economic depression and near-starvation in Vienna's ever-growing lower classes. Meanwhile the Habsburg machinery of government had effectively ground to a halt and was pressed on all sides, especially in Hungary, by calls for greater autonomy and freedoms. News of revolution in France in late February 1848 led to a demonstration in Vienna on 13 March. This turned to revolt when troops fired on the crowd and to revolution when a panicked Habsburg family sacked Metternich, acceding in the days following to many of the demands of the "revolutionaries."

The revolution of 13 March 1848 marked the high point of Vienna's involvement in Austrian politics in the nineteenth century. Over the next months Vienna remained at the center of the revolution in the Austrian Empire. An elected constituent assembly, the Reichstag, met there in July. However, national divisions in the monarchy and social and ideological divisions within Vienna severely compromised the revolution. Most decisive was the failure of the revolutionaries to wrest

control of the military from the Habsburgs. After another radical revolt in Vienna in October, a Habsburg army under Prince Alfred Windischgrätz bombarded and then conquered the city. Several revolutionary leaders were executed, and the city was put under martial law until 1853.

The revolution had a detrimental effect on the city's economy, but culturally and intellectually it produced a huge outpouring of pent-up creativity, reflected in the flood of publications in the period. It is telling, however, that one of the most memorable plays of the period was Nestroy's Freiheit in Krähwinkel (Freedom in Krähwinkel), a positive but skeptical account of the revolution's dynamics, and that the most famous musical piece was Johann Strauss the Elder's Radetzkymarsch, a loyalist celebration of Habsburg victory against the Italians (and the revolution).

Under the "decreed constitution" (1849–1852), Vienna was given a Provisional Communal Ordinance on 6 March 1850. This integrated the suburbs fully into the city administration, creating a nine-district municipality that lasted until 1890. It allowed for an elected 120-man council (on a very narrow, tax-based, tri-curial franchise), which in turn elected a mayor. Theoretically, the law gave Vienna considerable autonomy, but the imposition of (neo-)absolutism in 1852 ended this. The centralist neoabsolutist regime wanted, however, to develop Vienna as a suitable capital for a modern absolutist Habsburg state. Hence it initiated in 1857 one of the most beneficial changes in Vienna's modern history: the demolition of the city walls and their replacement by a broad boulevard, the Ringstrasse (Ring Street). The collapse of the neoabsolutist regime in 1859 and 1860 led to the restitution of the 1850 ordinance in 1860, and the March 1861 municipal elections created a large liberal majority that set about modernizing Vienna in earnest.

1861–1890: ringstrasse liberalism

By 1859 Vienna had a population of over 500,000; in 1869 it reached 607,000; in 1890, 828,000. This population increase reflected Vienna's growth as an economic center, but as a political center Vienna declined in importance. The catastrophic defeat by Prussia in 1866 meant that Austria, and hence Vienna, was shut out of Germany. The Ausgleich (compromise) with Hungary in the same year also greatly reduced the range of Vienna's administrative rule, which now only extended over Cisleithania, the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary. Vienna enjoyed a much larger degree of municipal autonomy after the Reichsgemeindegesetz (Imperial Communal Law) of 1862. From 1861 it hosted the new representative assembly, the Reichsrat; after 1867, however, this was only for Cisleithania. Vienna did remain the seat of the "common" ministries (foreign, defense, and financial) of Dualist Austria-Hungary and the main residence of the emperor and court.

In the economic sphere Vienna developed spectacularly in the early liberal era of 1860 to 1873. Known as the Gründerjahre (founders' years), this period saw massive gains for Austrian entrepreneurs (hence the name), who invested much of their profits in the imperial center, especially in the new developments around the Ringstrasse. Of particular note were the many "palaces" built by Jewish financiers such as Gustav Epstein and Friedrich Schey, who, with their families, became an important part of Vienna's "second society" (the "first" being the court and high nobility).

The new liberal administration modernized major parts of Vienna's infrastructure: new banks were built for the Danube (1862–1875), a new aqueduct providing water from the Alps was finished in 1873, a large number of schools and hospitals were built, and the Central Cemetery was opened in 1874. The Ringstrasse became the site for major civic and imperial—and heavily representational—buildings, among them the twin Natural and Art History Museums, the university, the new Burgtheater; the Greek classical parliament, and the Belgian-Gothic Rathaus (city hall) among them. By the 1880s Vienna had been transformed into an exemplary modern nineteenth-century capital.

Yet by then, the German liberal hegemony in Austria no longer existed. The economic boom came to a halt in the crash of 1873, brought on by a wave of speculation surrounding Vienna's hosting of the International Exhibition that year combined with another cholera outbreak. The Liberals lost their majority in the Reichsrat in 1879 to the conservative and federalist "Iron Ring." Vienna remained a bastion of liberalism, but only because of its restrictive franchise. The emergence in the 1880s of anti-Semitic German nationalism in student and middle-class circles and the anti-Semitic Christian Social movement in the lower middle classes, together with the reconstitution of the Social Democrats in 1888 at nearby Hainburg, signaled by 1890 the approaching end of the liberal era in Viennese politics.

Culturally and intellectually this period is usually seen as relatively barren as Vienna became, in Hermann Broch's phrase, a "value vacuum." The 1860s had seen the emergence of Viennese operetta, inspired by Jacques Offenbach's works. Johann Strauss the Younger's Die Fledermaus was first performed in 1874. (His "Blue Danube" waltz appeared in 1867.) Vienna also became the home of Johannes Brahms in 1878 and remained a major center of the German musical world. In art the period was dominated by the sensual historicism of Hans Makart, whose orchestration of the Ringstrasse parade celebrating the Silver Wedding of Francis Joseph and Elisabeth in 1879 is seen by many as the epitome of the parvenu kitsch of the Ringstrasse style. At the same time, the university prospered, especially its renowned medical school, and a sophisticated press, most notably the Neue Freie Presse (founded 1864), developed to serve the emergent, sizable educated class. The results were soon evident.

1890–1914: vienna 1900

On 18 December 1890 the incorporation of Vienna's outlying suburbs was made law, effective January 1892. Vienna became a city of nineteen districts with a population of 1,365,000. Partly due to this expansion, the municipal elections of 1895 saw a shocking defeat for the Liberals by a Christian Social and German Nationalist coalition, whose platform was anti-Semitism. This was initially resisted by the Habsburg authorities, and the anti-Semites' leader, Karl Lueger, was only confirmed as mayor by the emperor Francis Joseph after much delay, in 1897. From that point on, however, the Christian Socials were able to manipulate the franchise to ensure their complete hegemony over Viennese politics. Lueger's rule was in

practice much more moderate than his rhetoric suggested, and his municipalization of the city's utilities and expansion of amenities are seen by most as contributing to a golden era in Vienna's history. Nevertheless, his anti-Semitism, though seen as opportunistic, had practical effects on city policies and cast a pall over life for Vienna's Jews, as well as encouraging the prejudices of those who were not mere opportunists, such as Adolf Hitler.

Vienna was around 1900 the central stage for Cisleithanian mass politics. From 1890 there was an annual mass march by the Social Democrats on 1 May along the Ring; in 1897 and 1898 the Badeni affair, which touched on German-Czechrelations, led to clashes in parliament and the streets; and from 1905 to 1907 there were mass demonstrations in favor of universal suffrage (passed in 1907). The national divisions of the last years of the monarchy tended, however, to see parliament stagnate and power pass from Vienna to the provincial, national centers.

Yet this was also the period in which the cultural and educational investments of previous generations came to fruition in a series of great cultural and intellectual achievements, known collectively as fin-de-siècle Vienna or "Vienna 1900." These included Freud's development of psychoanalysis; the art of Gustav Klimt and the Secession as well as of the Austrian expressionists, including Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka; the music of Gustav Mahler and the young Arnold Schoenberg; the beginnings of the philosophical Vienna Circle; Austromarxism; and major contributions in such fields as physics, physiology, economics, medicine, law, and sociology. Vienna had a flourishing literary world that comprised far more than mere "coffee-house wits" and included major writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Karl Kraus. It also developed a thriving popular mass culture, especially in operetta.

Part of this was to be expected in a city that by 1910 had a population of more than 2,031,000 and had continued to expand as the major educational and economic hub of the Dual Monarchy. In retrospect, however, the achievement of Vienna 1900, especially its very early insights into the modern world's problems, requires explanation. Some see this as a result of the alienation of liberals from power and the retreat of the next generation into the refuge of art; others have, more narrowly perhaps, pointed to the very large presence, even predominance, of Jews as creators and supporters of this culture.

Jews were not the largest minority group in Vienna: estimates put those of Czech origin as about a quarter of Vienna's quite polyglot populace before 1914, whereas Jews were by then under 10 percent of the whole. Yet the Jews were the group that became the designated "outsiders"; they also were the group that invested by far the most proportionally in secondary and higher education. This, combined with their position within Vienna's social and economic structures (heavily overrepresented in commerce and the liberal professions), as well as the alienation caused by the success of political anti-Semitism in the city, helps account for the remarkable Jewish presence in the circles of the modern culture that has made Vienna 1900 so famous. In this view, it is precisely because Jews were threatened by the developments in late Habsburg Vienna that they recognized the problems with modernity and progress that only appeared later to others and so were forced to come up with solutions that anticipated later developments elsewhere.

See alsoAustria-Hungary; Cities and Towns.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. 2 vols. Translated by Sophie Wilkins. New York, 1995. Translated from Der Mann ohn Eigenschaften, edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 vols. Reinbek, Germany, 1978.

Schnitzler, Arthur. The Road to the Open. Translated by Horace Samuel, with a foreword by William M. Johnston. Evanston, Ill., 1991. Translated from Der Weg ins Freie. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1961.

Secondary Sources

Barea, Ilsa. Vienna. New York, 1966.

Beller, Steven. Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.

Beller, Steven, ed. Rethinking Vienna 1900. New York and Oxford, U.K., 2001.

Boyer, John W. Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna. Chicago, 1981.

——. Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna. Chicago, 1995.

Broch, Hermann. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time. Translated by Michael P. Steinberg. Chicago, 1984.

Csendes, Peter. Geschichte Wiens. Vienna, 1990.

Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein's Vienna. Chicago, 1996.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. London, 1980.

Spiel, Hilde. Vienna's Golden Autumn, 1866–1938. New York, 1987.

Steven Beller