VIENNA IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The first Soviet officer to enter Vienna poses in front of his tank: an American Sherman.

Map of Vienna at the 1920s

The trajectory of Viennese history over the course of the twentieth century follows a downward arc: in the first two decades of the century the city was a dominant political and cultural hub in Europe. Thereafter it declined in significance as a European capital. The cultural developments of Vienna's imperial era, which ended in 1918, substantially defined the city's identity and have overshadowed cultural developments of the subsequent twentieth century. As a result, post- Habsburg Vienna is sometimes described as a nostalgic museum city that showcases its own grand past. While Vienna remained the capital of Austria through the twentieth century, the political and geographic contours of the Austrian state fluctuated greatly. Vienna went from being the capital city of the Habsburg Monarchy with fifty-two million inhabitants to being the capital of the small First Republic with just six million people. From 1934 to 1938 it was the capital of an authoritarian Catholic corporate state (Ständestaat).

The city was incorporated into the Third Reich between 1938 and 1945. In 1939 Greater Vienna (Gross-Wien) became one of the seven provinces of the Ostmark, the Nazi designation for Austria. The territory of Greater Vienna was expanded threefold as surrounding small towns and Lower Austrian countryside were incorporated into the city. Vienna emerged once again as the capital of the Second Austrian Republic after 1945. When, in 1955, the Allied occupation forces left Austria, now officially neutral in the Cold War, Vienna's status as a neutral metropolis proved attractive for a number of international organizations. The city became home or host to several United Nations offices (International Atomic Energy Agency in 1956, International Development Organization in 1967) and to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1965. In 1961 the city played host to a superpower summit between John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) and Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) and in the 1970s to Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) talks. Vienna's twentieth-century transformation from hothouse of cultural innovation to staid diplomatic hub inspired a public relations initiative by mayor Michael Häupl's (b. 1949) office in the 1990s; ads promoting Weltstadt Wien attempted to reclaim Vienna's status as ''world city.''

DEMOGRAPHICS AND STRUCTURES OF GOVERNMENT

The city has seen a slight decline in population over the past one hundred years. The 1910 census recorded 2,031,498 residents. In 1951 the city had a population of 1,616,125, and by 2001 the population had dipped to 1,550,123. The national and religious makeup of the population has shifted markedly as Austria's borders and state structure have changed. In 1910 Vienna was a microcosm of the diverse Habsburg Monarchy. While a majority of the residents were German-speaking, at least 100,000 residents spoke Czech as a first language. Eighty-seven percent of Viennese were Roman Catholic and nearly 9 percent of the population was Jewish. Hungarians, Poles, and Italians added to Vienna's reputation as a Central European melting pot. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) famously commented on Vienna's prewar diversity, writing in Mein Kampf (1925) that a gradual ''Slavicization'' threatened the German character of the city. He recorded hearing a ''babble of different tongues'' and traced the roots of his own anti-Semitism to the streets of prewar Vienna. Hitler noted that ''the visual instruction of the Viennese streets had performed inestimable services.'' Districts home to Orthodox Jews in traditional dress ''swarmed with a people that no longer even superficially possessed any likeness to Germans'' (pp. 192-193, 198-199).

After 1918 Vienna's population became more homogenous as non-German-speaking residents relocated to the successor nation-states that were founded on former Habsburg territory. Despite the anti-Semitism of the city's ruling Christian Social Party, German-speaking Jews had played important roles in the politics and culture of Vienna's fin-desiècle period. During the First Republic, the city's heterogeneous Jewish community was divided along liberal, Jewish nationalist, Socialist, and Orthodox lines, and developed various strategies for coping with increasingly overt anti-Semitism in the interwar years. In 1934 most Austrian Jews (93 percent) lived in Vienna; the vast majority of these either emigrated or were deported in the 1930s and early 1940s. Today Jews make up a fraction of the Viennese population. The opening of a permanent Jewish history museum (1996) and a Holocaust memorial at the Judenplatz (2000) have facilitated discussion about the historical experiences of Viennese Jews and the history of anti-Semitism in the city. Post-1945 immigrants to the city have included Turks and citizens from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, 49 percent of the population was Roman Catholic, nearly 8 percent was Muslim, and 25 percent was recorded as ''confessionless.''

ADMINISTRATIVE AND POLITICAL STRUCTURES

In the first two decades of the century Vienna was administratively part of the province (Land) of Lower Austria. In 1922 it became its own province and incorporated new districts on the opposite side of the Danube River. The city government is led by a mayor and a municipal council, and the municipal administration is made up of departments (Magistratsabteilungen). From 1897 to 1918 the clerically oriented Christian Social Party controlled the city government. The influential Karl Lueger (1844- 1910) served as mayor until his death in 1910, and his party retained power until the end of World War I. Between 1918 and 1934, the period known as ''Red Vienna,'' the city government was in the hands of socialists. When the Socialist Party was banned in 1934, the municipal government was taken over by the corporate Fatherland Front and later by the National Socialist Party. Since 1945 all seven of Vienna's mayors have come from the Socialist Party.

SPATIAL DIVISIONS ON SOCIAL AND OCCUPATIONAL GROUNDS

Today Vienna is made up of twenty-three districts (Bezirke). The First District sits in the center of the city and is surrounded by the Ringstrasse, a grand boulevard built on the site of the old city wall, which was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the Ringstrasse sit many government buildings and cultural landmarks, including the parliament, the state opera, the Hofburg (a former Habsburg palace, now the site of museums and the Austrian National Library), the city hall (Rathaus), the University of Vienna, the Burgtheater, and the police headquarters. The remaining districts are arranged in a roughly circular pattern around the city center, with transportation arteries leading out as spokes. The Danube River flows southeast through the city. Traditionally, the first district housed aristocracy and the seat of government, the inner districts housed the bourgeois classes, and the outer districts were home to the growing immigrant and working classes.

WORLD WAR I

During World War I the civilian population suffered shortages of most essential goods. As agricultural lands in the Austrian east (Galicia) were destroyed by fighting and imports from neighboring Hungary declined, food supplies in Vienna grew scarce. Food rationing was introduced in the fall of 1914, and by 1916 hunger and malnutrition affected large segments of the population. The city was a central hub for Habsburg military transports and many schools and other municipal buildings were converted into hospitals for wounded troops. In January 1918 labor and hunger strikes in Vienna and other Austrian cities brought the home front into near-mutiny. The Spanish influenza epidemic killed more than 3,000 residents in fall 1918. Poorer Viennese continued to rely on external food aid (primarily from the International Red Cross and Society of Friends) into 1919 and 1920. Some former imperial buildings were converted by the new socialist municipal government into children's and veterans' homes.

ARTS AND SCIENCES

Around 1900 Viennese artists, scientists, architects, composers, writers, and philosophers were leaders of European cultural innovation. In his classic work Fin de Sie`cle Vienna: Politics and Culture, the historian Carl Schorske investigated the political and cultural climate that produced the likes of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Zionist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), and the writers of Young Vienna ( Jung-Wien), Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Across artistic and scientific disciplines Schorske saw a common thread: Viennese intellectuals were reacting to the perceived end of the rational, liberal culture of the nineteenth century. In its place came the post-liberal, irrational ''psychological man'' of the twentieth century. While Schorske's work, published in 1980, is the starting point for study of the fin-de-siècle period, scholars have since questioned both his characterization of Austrian liberalism and his analysis of the relation between politics and culture.

In 1897 Klimt and a handful of art students formed the Vienna Secession, a group that sought to create a ''new art'' in reaction to the more conservative establishment of Vienna's art academy. They adopted the motto ''To the age its art, to the art its freedom.'' Shortly thereafter, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and Koloman Moser (1868-1918) founded the Vienna Workshop (Wiener Werkstätte), an arts-and-crafts association that produced household objects similar those of the art nouveau or Jugendstil style elsewhere in Europe. Influential architects of the period were Otto Wagner (1841-1918), who designed a number of Vienna's train and transit stations in the art nouveau style, and Adolph Loos (1870-1933), who eschewed ornamentation in favor of spare, functional designs. In his newspaper Die Fackel, the Viennese journalist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) wrote biting satire about the contradictions, absurdities and hypocrisy of Viennese and Austrian society in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the decade following World War I Vienna was a center for European philosophical and scientific exploration. The Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis), organized by the philosopher Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), developed logical positivism and theorized on the language of science, the relations among scientific disciplines, and the unity of all scientific endeavor.

RED VIENNA, 1920s

The 1920s, known as the era of Red Vienna, saw massive expansion of social services and municipal housing. Implementing new real-estate taxes and rent-control laws, the socialist government of Vienna embarked on an ambitious building plan and added approximately 65,000 new housing units. Many of the housing developments, which cultivated both new privacy for the working classes (through private kitchens and living rooms) and also increased communal domesticity (shared play areas, libraries, and laundry facilities), were to become models for urban planners in other European cities. After 1947 the socialist municipal government resumed the public housing support for which it had become internationally known in the interwar period. Between 1951 and 1970 an additional 96,000 housing units were built.

But the 1920s were also a decade of political violence. The ''red'' city of Vienna had long been held in contempt by the clerical ''black'' forces of the Austrian provinces, represented by the conservative Christian Social Party. The historian Gerhard Botz counts 215 deaths and 640 seriously wounded from ''political violence'' in Austria between 1918 and 1933 (1983, p. 304). In 1919 and 1920 small groups of communists regularly agitated for a Soviet-style government, but they never managed to take Vienna as they had neighboring Budapest and Munich. One notorious incident of interwar street violence took place in July 1927 when members of the fascist Home Guard (Heimwehr) on trial for killing a man and child in the Burgenland town of Schattendorf were acquitted. Angry working-class demonstrators took to the streets in Vienna, the Palace of Justice was burned down, and troops fired on the crowds. Nearly one hundred demonstrators and a handful of troops were killed, and around one thousand Viennese were wounded in the ensuing violence. This crisis was part of a larger political polarization between Right and Left that marked Viennese politics in the decade after World War I. The Karl-Marx-Hof, built between 1926 and 1930, and one of the municipal government's most celebrated housing developments, was the central site of Austria's brief civil war in February 1934. More than 300 people were killed when the army and right-wing paramilitary forces battled socialists in Vienna and other Austrian cities. The socialists were defeated, the Social Democratic Party was banned, and leaders of the leftist fighters were executed. Today a plaque at the Karl-Marx-Hof commemorates this battle, placing Vienna at the center of the growing European-wide split between Right and Left in the 1930s. It reads ''On 12 February 1934 Austria's workers were the first in Europe to stand courageously against fascism. They fought for freedom, democracy and the Republic.'' Following the civil war, Austria was for four years the capital of the corporate clerical state ruled first by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892-1934), who was assassinated in Vienna, and then by Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897-1977).

THE THIRD REICH, 1938-1945

One of the moments in interwar Viennese history that would later complicate apologist claims that Austria had been the first ''victim'' of Nazi Germany's territorial expansion was the warm welcome that Adolf Hitler received on 2 April 1938 when he spoke on Vienna's Heldenplatz. Ninety-nine percent of the Viennese electorate voted ''yes'' in the 10 April plebiscite on annexation by Germany. In November 1938 Viennese synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses were attacked and burned in the events of Kristallnacht. The National Socialist Party had an extensive network of branches and cells in Vienna. At the local level 14,254 ''blocs'' administered the affairs of neighborhoods and apartment buildings. In February 1941 mass deportations of Viennese Jews to ghettos and concentration camps was begun; in total, around 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Geographically, Nazified Greater Vienna was the second largest city in the Third Reich behind Berlin. However, despite its position as a transport hub and potential ''bridge city'' for German interests in southeastern Europe, the Berlin government tried to reduce the regional influence of Vienna. It was classified as a provincial city (Provinzstadt) rather than a leadership city (Führerstadt), and Hitler vowed to break Vienna's cultural hegemony in the Alpine and Danube regions by promoting Linz as a competitor.

During World War II the food and fuel supplies to Vienna were less restricted than they had been in World War I. Although it was better provisioned, the Viennese population now faced Allied air attacks. The United States began regular bombing raids on Vienna in September 1944. A police report on the mood of the people from March 1945 described ''panicked fear of air attacks (the people's nerves are shot). Repeated bitter statements about the lack of any [air] defense'' (Widerstand und Verfolgung, vol. 3, pp. 474- 475). By war's end in April 1945, 8,769 Viennese civilians had been killed and tens of thousands left homeless in the 110 attacks that constituted the ''air terror.'' The physical infrastructure of the city (bridges, canals, housing stock) was heavily damaged during the Battle of Vienna in April 1945, when the Red Army captured the city from the retreating German Army. The territory of Lower Austria, surrounding the capital, fell into the Soviet occupation zone. The outlying territories annexed by Greater Vienna in 1938 were eventually returned to Lower Austria. The city of Vienna itself was divided into sectors run by the Soviets, Americans, British, and French. The center of the city (I. District) was under quadripartite control, and the occupation administration changed hands monthly. One legacy of the Soviet occupation of Vienna is the towering monument to Soviet liberation, unveiled in 1949, that still stands on the Schwarzenbergplatz in the city center.

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