I was born in Vienna, I grew up in Vienna, I went to school in Vienna, I graduated in Vienna, I studied in Vienna, I started my career in Vienna, I did theatre for the first time in Vienna, I did film for the first time in Vienna. There are also a few other Viennese details... But how much more Austrian can you get? ~Christoph WaltzIn Vienna, it's impossible to be overlooked. You can only be ignored. ~Alexander Löwen
And for us in this country to think of having, for example, adictatorship—a popular form ofgovernment in many countries to-day—would, on our part, be an act of consummate cowardice, an act of surrender, of throwing in our hands, a confession that we were unable to govern ourselves...In this country we do not want what I call the "get-rich-quick" mind. Speed and efficiency are very good things, and they are, perhaps, the idols of this generation. But they do not necessarily go together. Acceleration, as I have often said, is not a synonym for civilisation. It is quite true the State coach of this country may be going through heavy ground, the wheels may be creaking; but are you quite sure that the wheels of the State coach are not creaking to-day inMoscow, inBerlin, in Vienna? Are you quite certain that they are not creaking even in theUnited States of America?
Stanley Baldwin, Broadcast fromLondon (6 March 1934); published inThis Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 21.
FromStettin in theBaltic toTrieste in theAdriatic, aniron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states ofCentral and Eastern Europe.Warsaw,Berlin,Prague, Vienna,Budapest,Belgrade,Bucharest andSofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call theSoviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control fromMoscow.
Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, United States
Sinews of Peace. (2009, July 29). In Wikisource, The Free Library.
The second cardinal tragedy [ofWorld War I] was the complete break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Treaties of St. Germain and Trianon. For centuries this surviving embodiment of theHoly Roman Empire had afforded a common life, with advantages intrade andsecurity, to a large number of peoples, none of whom in our own time had the strength or vitality to stand by themselves in the face of pressure from a revivifiedGermany orRussia. All these races wished to break away from the federal orimperial structure, and to encourage their desires was deemed aliberal policy. The Balkanisation ofSoutheastern Europe proceeded apace, with the consequent relative aggrandisement ofPrussia and theGerman Reich, which, though tired and war-scarred, was intact and locally overwhelming. There is not one of the peoples or provinces that constituted the Empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence has not brought thetortures whichancientpoets andtheologians had reserved for the damned. The noble capital of Vienna, the home of so much long-defendedculture andtradition, the centre of so manyroads,rivers, andrailways, was left stark and starving, like a great emporium in an impoverished district whose inhabitants have mostly departed.
I never knew the old Vienna beforethe war with itsStraussmusic, its glamour and easy charm.Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough - mmm - had themoney to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs but you know they can't stay the course like a professional. Now thecity - it's divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: theAmerican, theBritish, theRussian and theFrench. But the center of the city that's international policed by an International Patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the samelanguage. Except a sort of smattering ofGerman. Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of otherEuropean cities.Bombed about a bit.
Well, the break-up of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, the whole problem faced by this was probably one of the causes which made me shift my interest from purenatural science to political problems. It meant observing the collapse of the society and more especially, the collapse of the intellectual society of Vienna. The Vienna was, as you said and remained for a number of decades one of the greatintellectual centers of the world. Nothing could be more exciting than Vienna of the 1920s and early '30s.
Austria-Hungary was a predominantly rural society, but Vienna was toasted as one of the most cultured and cosmolitan capitals on earth, beloved ofFranz Lehar andThomas Mann.Lenin thought it a 'mighty and vivacious city.'Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' was sung there inEnglish, and in 1913 it played host to the world premiere ofBernard Shaw'sPygmalion. It is an oddity of history that in the same yearStalin,Trotsky,Tito, andHitler alike lived for some months in Vienna. The greatAmericanboxerJack Johnson was star turn of that winter's season at the Apollo Theatre. Among a host of popular cafés, theLandtmann was the favorite ofSigmund Freud. The city represented a global pinnacle of snobbery: bowing, scraping, and even hand-kissing shopkeepers flattered their middle-class customers by adding anaristocratic 'von' to their names, and addressing them as 'Your Grace.'Domestic servants were subject to almostfeudal routines: employment law entitled housemaids to only seven hours off a fortnight, every alternateSunday. Aristocratic Viennese had a New Year's custom of pouring gobbets of molten lead into buckets of icedchampagne, then trying to predict the future when they hardened.
Max Hastings,Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (2013) (p. 10)
After Germany was defeated Austria fell into theWestern camp and was assigned the status of Hitler's 'first victim'. This stroke of doubly unmerited good fortune authorized Vienna to exorcise its past. ItsNazi allegiance conveniently forgotten, the Austrian capital—a 'Western' city surrounded bySoviet'eastern' Europe—acquired a new identity as outrider and exemplar of the free world. To its former subjects now trapped inCzechoslovakia,Poland,Hungary,Romania andYugoslavia, Vienna stood for 'central Europe': an imagined community of cosmopolitan civility that Europeans had somehow mislaid in the course of the century. InCommunism's dying years the city was to become a sort of listening post of liberty, a rejuvenated site of encounters and departures for eastern Europeans escaping West and Westerners building bridges to the East. Vienna in1989 was thus a good place from which to 'think' Europe.
Tony Judt,Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), Introduction
How beautiful Vienna would be without the Viennese!
In the West,America’s leaders called the shots. Reflecting their country’s essentially Manichean view of the world—a struggle betweengood and evil—they were skeptical of any kind of negotiations with the Soviets. And the lessons drawn from Munich and Yalta suggested that parleys at the summit were particularly dangerous. In June 1961 the disastrous meeting at Vienna served to confirm that precept. The bruising encounter betweenJohn F. Kennedy andNikita Khrushchev constitutes almost a textbook lesson in how not to do summitry. And their meeting helped spark two of the most dangerous confrontations of theCold War: theCuban Missile Crisis and America’squagmire war inVietnam.
David Reynolds,Summits: Six Meetings That Changed the World (2007), p. 163
Austria had become the second German state in fact, because thereGermanculture, nowhomeless in its old home, found a new country. The more violent theopposition to German National-Socialism, the more justified became the Austrian claim to be the representatives of the now homeless German culture and of the higher values of Germanism. To all intents and purposesWeimar had been exiled from theThird Reich and had found its home in Vienna.
Kurt Schuschnigg, The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian Ex-Chancellor’s Account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, New York: NY, Atheneum (1971), p. 44
I was born in Vienna, I grew up in Vienna, I went to school in Vienna, I graduated in Vienna, I studied in Vienna, I started my career in Vienna, I did theatre for the first time in Vienna, I did film for the first time in Vienna. There are also a few other Viennese details... But how much more Austrian can you get?
Encyclopedic article onVienna on Wikipedia