The Danube city that was the seat of the Habsburg dynasty and the gate at which Europe twice turned back the Ottomans — and that, across two centuries, became one of the supreme capitals of Western music and, in its dazzling final glow around 1900, produced modern thought and modern art, even as it bred the antisemitism that would help consume it in the Nazi annexation of 1938 and the Holocaust.
More than any other city, Vienna taught the world to listen. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, the waltzing Strauss, and Schoenberg all lived or worked here, so that 'Viennese' became a byword for music itself. This was the seat of the Habsburg emperors, the gate where Europe twice turned back the Ottoman armies, and around 1900 the place where Freud developed psychoanalysis and Klimt remade painting. Yet the same brilliant city seethed with antisemitism: its popular mayor Karl Lueger built a career on it, and a young Adolf Hitler, living in pre-war Vienna, later claimed he formed his worldview there — a self-account historians treat with caution. In 1938 huge crowds in Vienna greeted the Nazi annexation with notorious enthusiasm, and the great Jewish community that had helped make its culture was driven out and murdered. The city of music was also a city where the century's worst hatred grew popular and respectable. Both are true, and Vienna lives today as a beautiful, haunted museum of a vanished Europe.