Vienna Empire episode 3
Vienna Empire episode 3
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:00What happened to Austria's imperial city next?
00:00:05Find out more about the life, times and language of Vienna
00:00:11by heading to bbc.co.uk forward slash vienna
00:00:18and follow the links to The Open University.
00:00:30MUSIC
00:00:46This balcony.
00:00:54After centuries of Habsburg absolutism,
00:00:57seven years of Hitler's dictatorship,
00:01:00ten years of Allied rule,
00:01:02Austria became an independent democratic republic
00:01:06and, for decades, a member of the European community.
00:01:15In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte,
00:01:19Emperor of the French, lost his empire and his throne.
00:01:24That's how Europe's most powerful men arrived in Vienna
00:01:28for the ultimate summit meeting,
00:01:31to rebuild the Europe that Napoleon had almost destroyed.
00:01:37But the Congress of Vienna wasn't all diplomacy.
00:01:41It turned into the biggest party the continent had ever seen.
00:01:47Hosted by the family that had dominated Middle Europe for centuries,
00:01:52the Habsburgs.
00:01:54Five years after Napoleon and the French had captured Vienna,
00:01:58the city was at its height.
00:02:00We follow it from apogee to decline.
00:02:05From the beauty and self-obsession of Empress Sisi
00:02:09to the suicide pact of Crown Prince Rudolf
00:02:13to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
00:02:16I'll follow the Habsburgs to the downfall of the dynasty.
00:02:22In this final chapter in the story of Vienna,
00:02:25I'll also discover how the imperial city became the capital of ideas.
00:02:32From Klimt's exploration of our sexuality
00:02:35to Freud's voyage into our minds
00:02:38to the angry young artist who hated them both,
00:02:42Vienna shaped the modern age for both good and evil.
00:02:48These are the streets warped by Hitler and Stalin,
00:02:53who 30 years later tossed Vienna between them
00:02:57in history's greatest war of annihilation.
00:03:03A city of death and tragedy that changed lives,
00:03:07among them my own family.
00:03:10Vienna became the academy of civilisation.
00:03:14But it was also the battlefield of extremes,
00:03:18of monarchy versus revolution,
00:03:21of communism versus fascism
00:03:24and of pious formality against wild decadence.
00:03:28And it all happened here, here in Vienna,
00:03:32the World City.
00:03:45MUSIC PLAYS
00:03:53Autumn 1814, France was vanquished
00:03:57and after ruling most of Europe, Napoleon was in exile,
00:04:02emperor of the tiny island of Elba.
00:04:07Now that Napoleon was defeated, all the great men of Europe
00:04:11and women, in fact, descended on Vienna.
00:04:17Emperor Francis invited them all to the ultimate summit meeting
00:04:22and wildly decadent junket
00:04:25in order to put Europe together again
00:04:28after 20 years of destructive wars
00:04:31against revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
00:04:34Francis was the host but he wasn't really in charge.
00:04:38In charge was Prince Clemence von Metnik.
00:04:43He was vain, he was boastful, he was playful,
00:04:46but he also had a clear and brilliant vision
00:04:50of how to run Austria, how to position it
00:04:53and how to rule Europe.
00:05:00This is the Austrian Chancellery
00:05:02and Prince Metnik lived and worked here and ruled Vienna from here
00:05:06in the capital of Austria for 30 years.
00:05:09His bedroom was right above us here.
00:05:14This grand meeting room was the nerve centre
00:05:17of European political activity during the Congress of Vienna.
00:05:22As Europe's self-appointed puppet master,
00:05:25Metnik would be the chief arbiter of a new continental system
00:05:30and Habsburg Vienna would be its capital.
00:05:33But as well as redesigning Europe,
00:05:35Metnik and the Emperor relaunched the very look of Vienna itself.
00:05:40I've come to see some of the richly embroidered costumes
00:05:44worn by the dignitaries at the Congress.
00:05:47Dr Monika Kersel-Rundscheimer is going to tell me
00:05:50how they reveal the tawdry state of Vienna.
00:05:56One of the problems the Emperor faced
00:05:58when he decided to make the Congress in Vienna
00:06:01was that his population was completely impoverished
00:06:04so he feared that he would organise all these glamorous parties
00:06:07and his court wouldn't come because they didn't know how to dress.
00:06:11So he decided to give all his dignitaries
00:06:14and employees beautiful civil uniforms.
00:06:17So the ritz and the richness of the gold embroidery
00:06:20is always a symbol of rank and this is easily to recognise.
00:06:24This is one of the most important men in the Empire wearing this,
00:06:27like Lord Chamberlain, for instance.
00:06:30And red is a very important colour,
00:06:32so red was reserved for the nobility.
00:06:35And the children's uniform are also in red
00:06:38because this is the uniform of a page.
00:06:40The pages were of young members of the Austrian nobility
00:06:43and they made services at the Congress as well.
00:06:49These extravagant costumes really mattered in an age
00:06:53when the pomp of power was the expression of its plenitude.
00:06:58Francis and Metnik were using bling to promote the dynasty.
00:07:04Of all the VIPs who attended Europe's greatest summit,
00:07:08its biggest star was Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
00:07:12The true liberator of Europe, he and his army had fought all the way
00:07:16from Moscow to Paris to destroy Napoleon.
00:07:20Now Alexander wanted Russia, not Austria, to be the dominant power.
00:07:25And only one thing stood in their way,
00:07:28Metnik and the House of Habsburg.
00:07:40All politics, said the French Prime Minister at the Congress of Vienna,
00:07:45is women.
00:07:47And the struggle between Austria and Russia,
00:07:50Metnik versus Tsar Alexander,
00:07:53was played out not only in the corridors of power,
00:07:56but also in the bedrooms of two extraordinary aristocratic megavamps.
00:08:03And it happened that they lived at the top of the same staircase.
00:08:12In one apartment was Princess Katia Bagration,
00:08:16beautiful and promiscuous.
00:08:18She had been Metnik's mistress.
00:08:21Now she was the Tsar's.
00:08:23She was known as the naked angel for her see-through dresses.
00:08:28In another apartment was Wilhelmina Duchesse de Saigon,
00:08:32a highly intelligent and formidable semi-royal heiress.
00:08:36Metnik was passionately in love with her,
00:08:39but she took other lovers and her infidelities drove him mad.
00:08:43Each day, Tsar Alexander visited Katia,
00:08:47and Metnik visited Saigon.
00:08:50But there was a problem.
00:08:52Their apartments were on the same landing.
00:08:59One day, Tsar Alexander decided to hit Metnik where it would hurt.
00:09:04That day, instead of turning right to visit Princess Katia,
00:09:09he turned left to visit Duchess Wilhelmina.
00:09:13Police agents reported to Metnik
00:09:16that the Tsar spent many hours with the Duchess.
00:09:20Vienna was fascinated.
00:09:22Metnik was distraught and infuriated.
00:09:26He even talked of challenging the Tsar to a duel.
00:09:29Instead, he sobbed at his desk in the Chancellery.
00:09:34They could swap mistresses and carve up kingdoms,
00:09:38but in the end, they had to compromise and run Europe together.
00:09:47Nine months of political rivalry and social intrigue
00:09:51nearly wrecked the Congress,
00:09:53but finally the treaty was ready to sign.
00:09:57I'm sitting in the chair of the Chancellor of Austria,
00:10:01and this was and is his Cabinet Office.
00:10:05In June 1815, in this building,
00:10:08the Congress of Vienna Treaty was finally signed.
00:10:12The map of Europe had been redrawn.
00:10:15Legitimate power, Austrian power,
00:10:18had been restored in Germany, in the Balkans, in Italy, in Hungary.
00:10:24More than that, from now on,
00:10:27Metnik and his so-called Concert of Great Powers,
00:10:31a sort of early version of the UN Security Council,
00:10:35decided everything in Europe.
00:10:38Nicknamed the Coachman of Europe,
00:10:41Metnik manipulated the continent through a series of mini-Congresses,
00:10:46crushing revolution wherever it reared its head.
00:10:51At home, he presided over a dreary stability
00:10:54enforced by his secret police.
00:10:57Shunning coffeehouse politics, the Viennese turned inwards
00:11:01and retreated into the dark, gloomy,
00:11:05The Viennese drank, ate and danced away the Metnik years.
00:11:11The calm stability and mildly repressive conservatism
00:11:16of Prince Metnik's rule,
00:11:18characterised by the regular and reassuring waltzes
00:11:23of Johann Strauss and his family of composers,
00:11:27were the most popular in Europe.
00:11:30These waltzes of Johann Strauss and his family of composers
00:11:35couldn't contain the forces of the age,
00:11:39nationalism and liberalism,
00:11:42and soon it was clear that they were seething dangerously
00:11:46just beneath the surface.
00:11:51In 1835, Emperor Francis died
00:11:54and he was succeeded by his elder son, Ferdinand,
00:11:58who unfortunately suffered from a speech impediment,
00:12:01epilepsy and water on the brain.
00:12:05Metnik remained in charge, but now the sovereign was ailing,
00:12:10the minister was geriatric, the regime was sclerotic.
00:12:14It was all ripe for revolution.
00:12:24Across Europe, students and radicals
00:12:27engaged with exciting liberal ideas
00:12:30to destroy Metnik's absolutist regime.
00:12:33In Vienna, while the old danced, the young dreamed and plotted.
00:12:41In February 1848, revolutions broke out in Italy,
00:12:46then in Paris, and then they spread to Vienna.
00:12:50The Habsburgs panicked.
00:12:52They needed a scapegoat and they blamed Prince Metnik.
00:12:58After almost 40 years in power,
00:13:01Metnik was forced to resign and fled Vienna.
00:13:10In October, events took a violent turn.
00:13:13After the shooting of some demonstrators,
00:13:15the revolutionaries demanded revenge.
00:13:18The minister of war was lynched.
00:13:21The mob strung him up from a lamppost.
00:13:28The following dawn, a fleet of imperial black carriages emerged
00:13:33from the Habsburgs' main residence, the Hofburg Palace.
00:13:37The mob let them pass.
00:13:39They fled the capital.
00:13:43As soon as the Habsburgs were away from revolution-stricken Vienna,
00:13:47they got their courage back and they planned their revenge.
00:13:51They ordered their army to take Vienna back.
00:13:56On 28th October, a huge Habsburg army,
00:14:00fortified by Croatian and Montenegrins from the Balkans,
00:14:04attacked the city.
00:14:06First, they bombarded it for several hours,
00:14:09and then, street by street, barricade by barricade,
00:14:12they fought their way in.
00:14:14The Croatians and Montenegrins burst into people's houses,
00:14:17murdering and torturing and plundering.
00:14:20By the end of the day,
00:14:22Vienna was back in the fief of the Habsburgs.
00:14:26The revolution was over.
00:14:33But it had shaken the dynasty to its core,
00:14:36and if it was to have a future, young blood was required.
00:14:42That future was the Emperor Ferdinand's nephew, Franz Joseph.
00:14:49His mother, the Archduchess Sophie,
00:14:52described as the only man in the House of Habsburg,
00:14:55had dedicated her life to preparing young Franz for power.
00:15:00Now she schemed to replace Emperor Ferdinand with her son.
00:15:08In December, at a hastily arranged abdication ceremony,
00:15:12Ferdinand did go,
00:15:14and one day stepped for handsome 18-year-old Franz Joseph.
00:15:22From the moment of his accession,
00:15:24Franz Joseph always appeared in uniform.
00:15:27He saw himself as the supreme warlord,
00:15:30an autocrat presiding with military might
00:15:33over a polyglot empire.
00:15:36But the empire had almost been torn apart by revolution.
00:15:40It had to be reconquered province by province.
00:15:46This is the Radetzky March that became the anthem
00:15:49of the reconquest of the Habsburg Empire,
00:15:52named after field marshal Radetzky, who retook Italy.
00:15:56But things weren't going well in Hungary.
00:15:59There, the revolutionaries had defeated the Habsburg Empire.
00:16:03In desperation, the young Emperor Franz Joseph had to travel to Russia,
00:16:08where he had to kneel in front of Tsar Nicholas I,
00:16:12the arrogant Russian emperor who, more than anyone else,
00:16:15resembles our own President Putin of today.
00:16:18He begged him for help,
00:16:20and the Tsar sent 200,000 men to retake Hungary.
00:16:25Franz Joseph never got over the humiliation.
00:16:28He never forgave the Romanov who'd saved him.
00:16:34But he got his revenge.
00:16:36In 1843, Britain and France launched the Crimean War against Russia.
00:16:41Franz Joseph betrayed Nicholas and backed Britain and France,
00:16:45though he managed to keep out of the war.
00:16:48Facing defeat, Nicholas died, cursing Franz Joseph for his ingratitude.
00:16:54All the while, Franz Joseph's hold on his unruly empire was weakening.
00:16:59To the west, the Italians loathed their Habsburg masters,
00:17:03and in 1859, they rose again.
00:17:07The Italians had a big backer, France,
00:17:11now ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the great emperor.
00:17:16When Franz Joseph was provoked into declaring war,
00:17:20he found himself facing a modern French army,
00:17:24commanded by Napoleon III himself.
00:17:27Fancying himself the military autocrat,
00:17:30Franz Joseph insisted on taking command himself.
00:17:33It was a disaster.
00:17:35The Austrians were defeated, Italy was lost,
00:17:38and Franz Joseph never took command again.
00:17:45Defeat destroyed Franz Joseph's dream of being a military autocrat.
00:17:50Austria was now exposed, especially in Germany.
00:17:56For centuries, the Habsburgs had dominated Germany,
00:17:59with the help of many small kingdoms and principalities.
00:18:03But now he faced a rising power there, Prussia,
00:18:07and the new Prussian prime minister saw an opportunity.
00:18:13This is Franz Joseph's office at the Hofburg,
00:18:16and it was from here that he was unfortunate enough
00:18:19to face the supreme politician of his age,
00:18:23Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia,
00:18:27who was determined to unify Germany under his own king.
00:18:32In 1866, he provoked Franz Joseph into war,
00:18:38and the Austrians were soundly defeated at the Battle of Königgratz.
00:18:43Within four years, Bismarck had got his way.
00:18:47The king of Prussia became the emperor of a new power, Germany.
00:18:52But Bismarck was too clever to destroy Austria.
00:18:56Instead, he made Franz Joseph into his ally.
00:19:00But from now on, the Habsburgs were very much the junior partner.
00:19:09Franz Joseph had been defeated in Italy and in Germany,
00:19:13and now the Hungarians were threatening revolt again.
00:19:18The emperor's family proved as difficult to rule as his empire.
00:19:22The problems went back to his marriage in 1854,
00:19:25which started like a fairy tale.
00:19:29Franz Joseph was the most eligible bachelor in Europe,
00:19:32and his domineering mother, Archduchess Sophie,
00:19:35decided he had to marry and soon.
00:19:38She herself was a Bavarian princess,
00:19:41and so now she introduced him to two sisters
00:19:45from her own Bavarian royal family.
00:19:48He was meant to like the older sister,
00:19:51but he fell immediately in love with the younger one.
00:19:54She was 15, her name was Elizabeth,
00:19:57but everyone called her Sisi.
00:20:02Within two days of meeting, they were engaged.
00:20:07The following year, in 1854, they were married.
00:20:10The whole of Europe was captivated.
00:20:22This is the marital bedchamber of Franz Joseph and Empress Sisi,
00:20:28and this is where he brought her in 1854.
00:20:31It's just been redecorated to be exactly as it was then,
00:20:35and one can feel the stuffiness and the formality
00:20:39that she found so difficult to bear.
00:20:42These two portraits tell you pretty much all you need to know
00:20:46about them at this stage.
00:20:48Franz Joseph is dutiful, plodding, dull,
00:20:52and lives for duty, Catholicism and the monarchy.
00:20:57She's wild, beautiful, fascinating and self-obsessed.
00:21:02She grows her hair all the way down to her waist
00:21:05and pleases only herself.
00:21:07But she did have to deal with her mother-in-law,
00:21:11the domineering and ever-interfering Archduchess Sophie,
00:21:15who really was the royal mother-in-law from Imperial Habsburg Hell.
00:21:23Sisi gave birth to a daughter, Gisela,
00:21:26and then a son, the heir, Crown Prince Rudolf,
00:21:30seen here sitting on her lap.
00:21:34Sisi's mother-in-law Sophie, on the right,
00:21:37forbade Sisi from raising her children.
00:21:40She said she was too immature.
00:21:42Sophie took charge instead.
00:21:45Feeling her life was no longer her own,
00:21:47Sisi then turned to the one thing she could control, her body.
00:21:53Olivia Licksheidel has researched Sisi's life
00:21:57and I'm meeting her in Sisi's dressing room at the Hofburg Palace,
00:22:01which, unusually for the time, was also her gym.
00:22:06So we are here in her dressing and gymnastic room
00:22:10and she made exercises here to stay slim
00:22:13because she was famous for her figure.
00:22:15She was very tall, very slim.
00:22:17Around her waist she had 51 centimetres.
00:22:2051 centimetres, that's amazing.
00:22:22It's really extreme, but Sisi was extreme in everything.
00:22:25So what kind of exercises did she do on this machine?
00:22:28You must imagine that Sisi was completely dressed
00:22:31and finished with the hairstyle, with everything,
00:22:34and then she was hanging here and doing some exercises,
00:22:37taking her legs in front of her, moving them to the left, to the right,
00:22:42to make an exercise for her muscles for the abdomen.
00:22:46So what did the courtiers think when they came in here
00:22:48and found their empress hanging upside down
00:22:50with her dress on and her hair hanging down?
00:22:52They were shocked. They were really shocked.
00:22:54And you find lots of sentences in some diaries or something
00:22:59where people said, oh, my God, I didn't know how to behave
00:23:03when I came in and she was doing exercises.
00:23:06Do you think she had physical love affairs
00:23:08during her marriage to Franz Joseph?
00:23:10I think not. I think she never had a love affair.
00:23:13I think that she was not interested, really, in sex,
00:23:16but only in her beauty.
00:23:18I would compare her to women who go to the gym every day
00:23:22and want to be looked at but not to be touched.
00:23:28Sisi didn't just change her own shape,
00:23:30she also changed the shape of the state itself.
00:23:34She became a great champion of the Hungarians,
00:23:37especially through her close friendship
00:23:40with a dashing former revolutionary named Count Andrássy.
00:23:44He argued that the Hungarians must become equal partners
00:23:49with the Austrians in the empire.
00:23:52And only she could have persuaded Franz Joseph.
00:23:56In 1867, he created the new dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
00:24:03This new state was to be called the K. und K.,
00:24:08the Kaiserlich und Königlich, the imperial and royal monarchy.
00:24:14The Viennese called it by another name, the Empire Under Notice.
00:24:19And the emperor was under notice too.
00:24:22Two decades after the 1848 revolution,
00:24:25he finally caved in to demands for a constitution,
00:24:29and this, a new parliament.
00:24:32In a startling declaration of innovation and confidence in the future,
00:24:37Franz Joseph then tore down the old city walls,
00:24:41which enclosed the inner city,
00:24:43and ordered the construction of a magnificent new boulevard,
00:24:48the Ringstrasse.
00:24:54Sit on tram number one or two
00:24:56and you can see the dazzling grand new buildings
00:24:59that were built along the Ringstrasse at almost breakneck speed.
00:25:03The Rathaus, Vienna's new town hall.
00:25:07The Opera House, the home of the world's greatest music
00:25:11played by the world's greatest orchestras.
00:25:14And the Burgtheater,
00:25:16where the emperor was often seen alone in the imperial box.
00:25:20Although it turned out he had his reasons.
00:25:23By now, Sisi had abandoned Franz Joseph.
00:25:27Earlier, she had intervened to rescue Crown Prince Rudolf
00:25:31from a cruel tutor.
00:25:33But she then concentrated on herself,
00:25:36leaving the sensitive boy to his own devices.
00:25:41She indulged in endless romantic travels.
00:25:45But on her occasional visits home,
00:25:47Sisi did try to help her husband find love.
00:25:50The emperor had had mistresses for decades,
00:25:53but he craved companionship.
00:25:55It was at the Burgtheater that Sisi noticed its young star,
00:25:59the beautiful but unhappily married Katharina Schratt.
00:26:03Katharina's biggest fan was the emperor himself, Franz Joseph,
00:26:08who attended every performance.
00:26:10He was lonely, and his wife, the Empress Sisi,
00:26:14now took pity on the poor emperor,
00:26:17and tried to provide him with some companionship.
00:26:20She went to the theatre, she befriended Katharina,
00:26:23she invited her to the Hofburg, and she set up the couple.
00:26:27The affair started and lasted for almost 20 years.
00:26:34But you couldn't imagine more dysfunctional parents
00:26:37than the imperial couple.
00:26:39The glacially detached Franz Joseph
00:26:42and the narcissistic, absentee,
00:26:44Empress.
00:26:46No wonder their relationship with their son,
00:26:49Crown Prince Rudolf, became so troubled.
00:26:54I've come to Meiling, just outside Vienna,
00:26:58the fateful destination for this tormented yet talented young man.
00:27:05As he grew up, he became an avowed liberal,
00:27:08and he wrote articles for Jewish-owned newspapers.
00:27:12His father was appalled by these liberal views,
00:27:16and by his private life.
00:27:18He'd married a Belgian princess and had a daughter,
00:27:21but the love of his life was a beautiful courtesan,
00:27:25and then he embarked on a wildly pre-epic series of sexual escapades,
00:27:31in which, finally, he contracted syphilis, which was then fatal.
00:27:36As he approached his 30th birthday,
00:27:39he began to feel that both himself and the Empire were doomed.
00:27:50Then, in the autumn of 1888,
00:27:53Rudolf was introduced to the 17-year-old Baroness Marie Vechera.
00:27:59She became infatuated with him.
00:28:03For months, Rudolf had been asking his many, many wives
00:28:08and asking his many mistresses
00:28:10if they would die with him in a suicide pact.
00:28:14All had said thanks, but no thanks.
00:28:18Until Marie.
00:28:20She agreed.
00:28:28On 27th January 1889,
00:28:31Crown Prince Rudolf saw his father, the Emperor, for the last time.
00:28:35He was very agitated.
00:28:37The next day, a courtier collected the teenage girl,
00:28:40Baroness Marie Vechera, from her mother's house
00:28:44and brought her to Rudolf,
00:28:46and the two secretly travelled out to Meiling,
00:28:50Rudolf's hunting lodge outside Vienna.
00:28:53On the night of 29th, they talked in serious tones all night.
00:29:03At six in the morning, Rudolf shot Marie
00:29:06and laid her out on the bed.
00:29:08He then turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head,
00:29:12blowing off the side of his face.
00:29:20This altar stands on the site of the bedroom at the hunting lodge,
00:29:25built in memory of the lovers' deaths.
00:29:30Around noon on that bleak January day,
00:29:34the Emperor and Empress were told the tragic news.
00:29:38The ruthless Habsburg instinct to survive
00:29:41quickly overcame their grief.
00:29:45The real victim of Meiling was Marie.
00:29:48The fact that the Crown Prince had seduced and murdered
00:29:52a 17-year-old girl was literally unspeakable.
00:29:56Franz Joseph ordered her to be expunged from the record.
00:30:01In the dead of night, Marie's body was taken by coach down this road,
00:30:07fully dressed and held upright between her two uncles.
00:30:12Just a few miles from Meiling,
00:30:14she was buried in a cheap wooden coffin in the corner of this cemetery.
00:30:19The official version of Rudolf's death made no mention of Marie.
00:30:23Instead, the post-mortem stated that his death was not suicide,
00:30:27but the result of morbid nervous exhaustion.
00:30:30In spring 1889, Marie was discreetly re-buried
00:30:34in this grave by her grieving family.
00:30:37And then the whole incident was never mentioned again.
00:30:45Franz Joseph soldiered on like the military man he was,
00:30:50driven by duty.
00:30:52For once, Cece rose to the occasion
00:30:55and sustained Franz Joseph in his grief.
00:30:58In a little side chapel at Meiling can be found a statue of the Madonna
00:31:03donated by the Empress, her heart pierced by a dagger of anguish.
00:31:09This statue was to prove strangely prophetic.
00:31:14On 10th September 1898,
00:31:17Empress Cece was walking beside Lake Geneva
00:31:20when she was stabbed in the chest by an anarchist.
00:31:24With a sharpened file.
00:31:26So sharp was it that she didn't realise she'd been stabbed at all
00:31:30and walked on before she collapsed and died.
00:31:34Poor Franz Joseph had lost his son and now his wife.
00:31:46By 1900, Franz Joseph was 70 years old.
00:31:50To some, he was a beacon of continuity.
00:31:53To others, the relic of an obsolescent past.
00:32:01But while the Empress stood still, Vienna moved on.
00:32:05The influx of immigrants from around the Empire,
00:32:08especially Czechs and Jews,
00:32:10combined to create a febrile, if doom-laden, explosion of creativity.
00:32:18Its crowning achievement was the art and architecture
00:32:22of the so-called secession movement.
00:32:25The secessionists rejected Vienna's dull, conservative past
00:32:30and proclaimed their mission with this motto.
00:32:34For every age, it's art.
00:32:37To every art, it's freedom.
00:32:39And it certainly was free.
00:32:41Gustav Klimt's The Kiss is an uninhibited celebration of eroticism.
00:32:48Egon Schiller's The Embrace shocked stuffy Viennese.
00:32:55To some, like Franz Joseph and his courtiers,
00:32:59this seemed like pornography.
00:33:01But to us, this is an exciting celebration,
00:33:05the beginning of the new modern era.
00:33:09The beginning of the new modern age.
00:33:16No-one so personified the creativity, the freedom, the permissiveness
00:33:21of early 1900s Vienna than the amorous life of the woman
00:33:25celebrated in this song by Tom Lehrer, Alma Schindler.
00:33:29The loveliest girl in Vienna
00:33:32Was Alma the smartest as well
00:33:35Once you picked her up on your antenna
00:33:38You'd never be free of her spell
00:33:41She was herself a talented artist and composer and musician.
00:33:46But she was also the wife, the mistress, the femme fatale,
00:33:50the temptress and the muse of five of the geniuses of this time.
00:33:57Her first kiss was with the artist Gustav Klimt.
00:34:01She then married the composer Gustav Mahler
00:34:04and on his death, she married Walter Gropius,
00:34:07founder of the Bauhaus movement.
00:34:10And then, lastly, came Oskar Kokoschka,
00:34:13the artist who often put her in his paintings,
00:34:16and Franz Werfel, the novelist and author of the Song of Bernadette.
00:34:22What a roster of geniuses.
00:34:24She was truly the queen, the muse of an entire age
00:34:29and, of course, of Vienna.
00:34:31Please envy the swans who get Gustav and Walter
00:34:35You never did falter with Gustav and Walter and Franz
00:34:49Gustav, Walter and Franz and many others
00:34:52helped give birth to the modernist movement.
00:34:55Their work was not only a rejection of the past
00:34:58but a quest to explore the unconscious
00:35:00and to reveal the primal and sexual drives
00:35:03that another immigrant to Vienna was writing about at the time,
00:35:07Sigmund Freud.
00:35:10Freud was from a Jewish family.
00:35:12He married, he had children and he moved here in 1891.
00:35:16After qualifying as a doctor, he started to treat men and women
00:35:21who were suffering from the anxiety in those days known as hysteria.
00:35:26After that, he started to create a new way of looking at the human mind.
00:35:33He called it psychoanalysis.
00:35:41This is Dr Freud's waiting room.
00:35:43When patients went into the consulting room,
00:35:46they lay on a couch and he sat, chain-smoking cigars and let them talk.
00:35:52For Freud, all human behaviour was partly founded on the subconscious,
00:35:58that reservoir of hidden instincts and memories,
00:36:03and the drive towards sexuality and death.
00:36:08These ideas would change the world
00:36:11and our very understanding of ourselves.
00:36:17Freud's genius was quintessentially Viennese.
00:36:21He was inspired by its obsession with sex and death and art
00:36:27and its combination of the stilted formality
00:36:31of the Habsburg monarchy and court,
00:36:34his own background of Jewish angst
00:36:37and its unique atmosphere of unbridled sexual libertinism.
00:36:42Vienna created Freud and his patients.
00:36:48Freud, in some ways, typified the hundreds of thousands of immigrants
00:36:52who arrived in Vienna in the late 19th century.
00:36:55But as well as transforming the city,
00:36:57this bubbling cauldron of ethnicities also brought trouble.
00:37:03The backlash against immigrants is personified by one man,
00:37:09Karl Luger, who was mayor of Vienna for 13 years, from 1897 to 1910.
00:37:17Luger created not only modern ultra-German nationalism
00:37:22but also modern anti-Semitism with all its vicious tropes.
00:37:26He blamed the Jews for all the evils of modernity, science,
00:37:31liberalism, decadent art, capitalism itself,
00:37:37and all of these things, he said,
00:37:40tainted the purity of the German nation.
00:37:47Franz Joseph didn't like this rabble-rousing,
00:37:50but naturally he did nothing about it.
00:37:52And for the Jews of Vienna,
00:37:54many began to feel that they could never be safe in Europe.
00:38:00Luger unleashed some of the most evil forces
00:38:04and shamed the 20th century.
00:38:07And that dark influence reached a younger generation,
00:38:11and among them was a young Austrian painter of postcards,
00:38:16then living in Vienna, who was inspired by Luger.
00:38:21His name was Adolf Hitler.
00:38:35In 1908, the 19-year-old Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna
00:38:40to pursue his dream of becoming a raffish art student in the city of art.
00:38:48At first, he loved Vienna.
00:38:50He walked along the Ringstrasse
00:38:52and painted its grand buildings like the Opera House,
00:38:55where he loved to listen not only to the Germanic Wagner
00:38:59but also the Jewish Mahler.
00:39:03But above all, he admired the German nationalism
00:39:06and the strident anti-Semitism of the mayor, Karl Luger,
00:39:10and he disdained the weak, obsolescent figure of the Emperor,
00:39:15whom he saw daily riding through the city in his carriage.
00:39:20He loathed his cosmopolitan and shambolic Habsburg Empire.
00:39:25Now, he was rejected, first by the artist's school
00:39:29and then by the architect's school.
00:39:31He became bitter and his money began to run out.
00:39:43Hitler was reduced to living at this homeless men's shelter
00:39:48and he spent three years here,
00:39:50which he remembered as the saddest and most humiliating time of his life.
00:39:55But he spent many hours studying and reading in its library
00:40:00and despite the fact that many of his friends
00:40:03and the art dealers who bought his postcards were Jewish,
00:40:07he began to ask himself,
00:40:09why was it that he, as a young German artist in a great German city,
00:40:14had failed so miserably,
00:40:16while so many Jews and Czechs and Slavs
00:40:20and their filthy, decadent art were thriving?
00:40:24It took the trauma of World War I to make Hitler into Hitler,
00:40:30but he never forgave Vienna.
00:40:37Adolf Hitler wasn't the only future dictator
00:40:40who stalked Vienna's streets.
00:40:48While Hitler was in Vienna,
00:40:5030-something revolutionary communists
00:40:53arrived from the Russian Empire to study here.
00:40:57He was Georgian.
00:40:59His name was Joseph Jugashvili.
00:41:01His friends called him Koba.
00:41:03And while he was here in Vienna, he adopted a new name.
00:41:07Man of Steel.
00:41:09Stalin.
00:41:11Stalin's factional leader, Vladimir Lenin,
00:41:15had sent him to Vienna to study the big question here,
00:41:19the issue of nationalities,
00:41:22and he arranged for him to stay right here
00:41:25with some noble friends of Lenin's.
00:41:28They're rich people, said Lenin. That's good.
00:41:32When Stalin had written his article Marxism and the National Question,
00:41:37it helped him design the structure of the multinational Soviet Union.
00:41:50Stalin's apartment was right round the corner from the Schönbrunn Palace,
00:41:55and every day, in between working on his new article
00:41:58and flirting with pretty young revolutionaries,
00:42:01he would come and walk around these gardens.
00:42:04Each day, both Hitler and Stalin would see Franz Joseph the Emperor
00:42:09drive in his carriage from his home here at Schönbrunn
00:42:12to his office in the Hofburg.
00:42:14Both were fascinated by Habsburg history,
00:42:17both disdained its obsolescence.
00:42:20Sadly for Europe, they were the future, Hitler and Stalin.
00:42:25And 30 years later, both would take Vienna,
00:42:29and together they would fight the most savage conflict
00:42:33in all of human history.
00:42:401908, the year Hitler moved to Vienna, was the Diamond Jubilee year.
00:42:46Franz Joseph had ruled for 60 long years.
00:42:51Emperor Franz Joseph just lived on and on and on,
00:42:55but the impatient heir to the throne was the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand,
00:43:01who lived here at the Belvedere Palace,
00:43:04where he set up a sort of shadow government in waiting.
00:43:07His relations with Franz Joseph were frosty,
00:43:11because he'd married a commoner, Sophie Czotek, for love,
00:43:15and the Emperor refused to give her the title Archduchess
00:43:19or to let their children succeed to the throne.
00:43:22Yet Franz Ferdinand was intelligent and imaginative.
00:43:26Instead of fighting wars against the Slavs, the Russians or the Serbs,
00:43:31he wanted to set up a Slavic kingdom within the monarchy,
00:43:36a sort of United States of Austria.
00:43:40But while Franz Ferdinand dreamed of reforming the monarchy,
00:43:44the little kingdom of Serbia had big ideas of its own.
00:43:48Its government was infiltrated by a secret organisation
00:43:52of ultra-nationalists called the Black Hand,
00:43:55hell-bent on creating a greater Serbia through war with Austria.
00:44:01In the summer of 1914, the Black Hand dispatched a cell
00:44:05of nationalist teenage terrorists into the province of Bosnia,
00:44:09which had recently been annexed by the Habsburgs.
00:44:12They had a mission and a target in the capital, Sarajevo.
00:44:17On 28 June, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie
00:44:21arrived in the city for an official visit.
00:44:24Despite warnings of terrorism,
00:44:26the Archduke insisted on riding in an open-topped car
00:44:30so he could wave to the crowds that lined the streets.
00:44:33The car is on display at Vienna's Military Museum
00:44:36and I'm here to talk to its director, Dr Christian Ortner,
00:44:39about what happened on that fateful day.
00:44:42From the train station, they took a car,
00:44:45they were driving in a convoy and heading to the town hall of Sarajevo.
00:44:49And on their way, somebody tried to kill them with a hand grenade.
00:44:53But the hand grenade did not hit the original car we can see here,
00:44:57but it hit the next car.
00:45:00After the failed bomb attack,
00:45:03the Archduke's driver took a wrong turn and stalled the engine
00:45:07at the very spot where another black-hand assassin,
00:45:1119-year-old Gavrilo Princip, was waiting.
00:45:15He fired two shots.
00:45:18The first shot, we can see it here directly,
00:45:21hit Sophie and she became unconscious immediately.
00:45:24And by falling down, she gave clear way to the throat of Franz Ferdinand
00:45:29and Gavrilo Princip shot his second shot.
00:45:32The second shot hit the crown prince here in the arteria.
00:45:36The car was heading immediately to the palace
00:45:39because they knew there was a doctor
00:45:41and Franz Ferdinand's uniform was very, very tight
00:45:44so the blood did not go out like this, it went down to the stomach area
00:45:48and the doctor cut off the uniform in the wrong place.
00:45:51And exactly at this time, the duchess was already dead,
00:45:54she died of internal bleeding
00:45:56and Franz Ferdinand exactly died by drowning by his own blood.
00:46:08The moment the news of the murder reached Vienna,
00:46:11the Austrian leadership,
00:46:13particularly the war-crazed, trigger-happy chief of staff,
00:46:17were convinced the Serbian government was behind it
00:46:20and that Serbia must be crushed by war.
00:46:23And it was decided to send an extremely harsh ultimatum
00:46:27that would provide a pretext.
00:46:31After Germany agreed to give Franz Joseph their unquestioning support,
00:46:36Austria could do what it liked.
00:46:38And this was an extremely reckless move
00:46:41because Serbia was allied to Russia
00:46:43and Russia was allied to France and France to Britain.
00:46:47After Serbia's reply to the ultimatum
00:46:50was, of course, deemed unsatisfactory,
00:46:53Austria drafted this telegram.
00:46:56The Royal Serbian Government,
00:46:58not having answered in a satisfactory manner
00:47:01the note of July 23, 1914,
00:47:03considers herself henceforward in a state of war with Serbia.
00:47:11Now, this had no legal power.
00:47:14Now, this had no legal power
00:47:17without the signature of one little old man.
00:47:20And there it is.
00:47:22The little spidery signature of a man of 84
00:47:25is the signature that launched the First World War,
00:47:28in which something like 20 million people perished.
00:47:39At the start of the Great War,
00:47:41the daily commute to the Hofburg proved too much,
00:47:44particularly during the winter,
00:47:46so the old emperor decided to work from here
00:47:49at the Schoenbrunn Palace instead.
00:47:54In the winter of 1916, the old emperor started to fail.
00:47:58He was now 86 and yet he still got up every day
00:48:02and went the small distance to his desk to work.
00:48:05On 20th November, he started to get worse.
00:48:08He went to bed and said his prayers
00:48:10and insisted on being awoken at 3.30am to start work again.
00:48:15There's plenty to be done, he said.
00:48:18In the early hours, Franz Josef died.
00:48:27As Franz Josef's body was laid to rest,
00:48:30millions of Austrian soldiers were being slaughtered
00:48:33by the Russians on the Eastern Front.
00:48:37Among the funeral entourage walked the next emperor,
00:48:41Franz Josef's great-nephew, Karl or Charles.
00:48:45He came to power at the moment of crisis.
00:48:48Austria was losing control of the war it had started.
00:48:52Karl attempted to broker peace,
00:48:54but ended up alienating his German allies.
00:48:59While the emperor and his wife sat out the rest of the war
00:49:02redecorating Schoenbrunn Palace,
00:49:04the liberal socialists and nationalists planned revolution.
00:49:10When the Germans collapsed in November 1918,
00:49:13the Habsburg monarchy went down with them.
00:49:16Karl and his family were driven out of Vienna.
00:49:20In exile in Switzerland, Karl plotted his return
00:49:24until his early death in 1922.
00:49:30In the Treaty of Versailles,
00:49:32the victorious Western Allies carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire
00:49:36into five new independent countries.
00:49:39Vienna became the monumental and palatial capital
00:49:43of a tiny republic named Austria.
00:49:48German pride had been deeply dented by the defeat in the Great War,
00:49:52but from the ashes, a new leader emerged,
00:49:55promising to make the German people great once again.
00:50:00Adolf Hitler rose to power
00:50:02at least partly fuelled by his experiences of Vienna
00:50:06and the ideology of Karl Luger,
00:50:08but also by shameless pseudo-history,
00:50:11vicious anti-Semitism and intolerant ultra-nationalism
00:50:16that, together with violence and thuggery,
00:50:19formed his own brand of fascism.
00:50:23Prince Vatnik had directed the affairs of Europe from this office,
00:50:28but now in the 1930s,
00:50:30the Austrian Chancellor ran a tiny, insignificant country
00:50:34with a terrifying threat to the north-west.
00:50:37In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power in Germany
00:50:43and from the very beginning of his career,
00:50:45Hitler, who'd spent so much time in Vienna and was Austrian,
00:50:49had insisted that Germany must swallow Austria
00:50:54and if the Austrian Chancellors wouldn't give it to him,
00:50:57then he would take it.
00:51:02The Chancellor was an authoritarian Catholic conservative
00:51:06named Dr Kurt von Schuschnigg.
00:51:09On 12th February 1938,
00:51:12Schuschnigg arrived at Hitler's mountain lair in Bavaria.
00:51:17For five hours, he received a spittle-flecked tirade from Hitler,
00:51:23demanding that he undermine Austrian independence.
00:51:26Schuschnigg tried to resist.
00:51:28Hitler threatened him,
00:51:29don't you realise that in half an hour
00:51:31I could blow your defences to smithereens?
00:51:34There'd be blood and that would be on your shoulders.
00:51:38Schuschnigg almost wept.
00:51:40By the time he returned to the Chancellery here,
00:51:44he was a broken man and, in effect, Austria was doomed.
00:51:50In a final act of desperation, on 9th March 1938,
00:51:55Schuschnigg announced a referendum
00:51:57to let the Austrian people decide
00:51:59if they wanted to be a part of Hitler's Germany.
00:52:03Hitler was incensed.
00:52:05If the Austrians voted no,
00:52:07his justification for invasion would be blown apart.
00:52:13On 12th March 1938,
00:52:16he ordered German troops to cross the border into Austria.
00:52:20This was frightening news for the Jews of Vienna.
00:52:24Their leading family was the banking dynasty, the Rothschilds,
00:52:29who had been made barons of the Austrian Empire
00:52:32as long ago as the 1820s.
00:52:35This is one of their many palaces in the city.
00:52:38Now it's the Brazilian embassy.
00:52:41They felt they were Viennese.
00:52:43They felt they belonged.
00:52:45And now they were about to discover that they didn't.
00:52:54One of the Austrian Rothschilds was a relative of mine.
00:52:57Clarice Seebeck-Montefiore was married to Baron Alphonse de Rothschild
00:53:03and, as the German troops crossed the borders,
00:53:06they learned from a friend in the government
00:53:09that the Nazis had collected a list of eminent Jews to be arrested.
00:53:14Quickly, they piled their belongings into a fleet of cars
00:53:18and escaped across the border.
00:53:20They weren't the only ones.
00:53:22Sigmund Freud also got out of Vienna.
00:53:25He wrote in his diary,
00:53:27Austria is finished.
00:53:29And he was right.
00:53:31This was the death of cosmopolitan Vienna.
00:53:40MUSIC CONTINUES
00:53:49Three days after entering the country,
00:53:52Adolf Hitler drove to the seat of Habsburg power,
00:53:56the Neu-Hofburg.
00:53:58Received by delirious crowds,
00:54:00he addressed the Viennese from the balcony.
00:54:04HE SPEAKS GERMAN
00:54:15CHEERING
00:54:22As the Nazis terrorised Vienna's Jews,
00:54:25the better off tried to leave,
00:54:28but it would cost them everything they had.
00:54:31He sent down to Vienna his SS Jewish expert.
00:54:35His name was Adolf Eichmann,
00:54:38and he came to extort the wealth of the departing Jews.
00:54:43Perversely, he set up his headquarters
00:54:46in the biggest of the Rothschild palaces in the city.
00:54:50But he didn't stay long in Vienna.
00:54:53He was recalled when World War II began to Berlin
00:54:57and mastermind a much bigger operation,
00:55:01the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
00:55:21Starting in 1941,
00:55:23the Jews of Vienna were deported to the ghettos and death camps
00:55:28set up by the Nazis in the east.
00:55:31Around 65,000 of them were murdered,
00:55:36and their fates are marked by these plaques around the city.
00:55:41And it just seems amazing that this terrible thing ever happened
00:55:46in the most civilised city in Europe.
00:55:541945, the Allies were pushing the Nazis back
00:55:59on the western and eastern fronts.
00:56:02Stalin's Russia had seen the harshest fighting,
00:56:05and now they marched on Vienna.
00:56:08The street fighting for Vienna was ferocious.
00:56:12The climax of the battle for the city
00:56:15was the storming of the Hofburg.
00:56:19Joseph Stalin first came to Vienna as a penniless revolutionary.
00:56:24Now he was the most powerful man in the world,
00:56:27the supreme warlord who liberated the city in April 1945.
00:56:33This monument is dedicated to the unknown soldier.
00:56:37It congratulates the Soviet army for the liberation of Vienna,
00:56:41and it's signed by their triumphant dictator, Stalin.
00:56:47Stalin was familiar with many of the city's treasures,
00:56:50and now he set about looting Vienna for war reparations.
00:56:55Its once cosmopolitan culture was pillaged and devastated.
00:57:00But within weeks, the French, Americans and British
00:57:03arrived and placed Vienna under full power control.
00:57:08After the war, Stalin wanted to grab as much of Eastern Europe as he could,
00:57:14an empire bigger than the Tsars had ever dreamed of.
00:57:18He petitioned Germany,
00:57:20but that was because Germany had been a threat in two world wars.
00:57:25Provided Austria was separate from Germany,
00:57:28he was happy to let Vienna go.
00:57:31He didn't try and keep it.
00:57:33Even though he'd been here as a young revolutionary,
00:57:36it meant nothing to him.
00:57:46In 1955, two years after Stalin's death,
00:57:49the four powers agreed to finally withdraw from Austria.
00:57:54The Austrian state treaty was signed at the Belvedere Palace.
00:57:58Once the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
00:58:01and announced to cheering crowds from this balcony.
00:58:11After centuries of Habsburg absolutism,
00:58:14seven years of Hitler's dictatorship,
00:58:17ten years of Allied rule,
00:58:19Austria became an independent democratic republic
00:58:23and, for decades, a member of the European community.
00:58:28But the family who ruled Austria for almost a millennia
00:58:31remained politically active.
00:58:34Otto Habsburg, the boy who walked beside the last emperor
00:58:38at Franz Joseph's funeral, became a European MP.
00:58:43The Habsburgs, through the Holy Roman Empire,
00:58:46and then their monarchy,
00:58:48had struggled and failed to rule a multinational state.
00:58:52Today, the European community
00:58:54shares some of those aspirations.
00:58:57But the Habsburgs' real legacy was their capital.
00:59:01Vienna helped give birth to the modern age,
00:59:04but also became the laboratory of its destruction.
00:59:09Today, Vienna is the magnificent capital of a small country.
00:59:15Imperial city no more,
00:59:17it will always be the capital of the empire.
00:59:24The empire of the mind.
00:59:33What happened to Austria's imperial city next?
00:59:38Find out more about the life, times and language of Vienna
00:59:44by heading to bbc.co.uk forward slash vienna
00:59:50and follow the links to The Open University.
00:59:54The Open University
00:59:59The Open University
01:00:04The Open University
01:00:09The Open University
01:00:14The Open University
01:00:19The Open University