🎻 Vienna: a history

Vienna was the capital of an empire for six hundred years, and then the empire vanished from under it. What was left was a city of two million in a country of nine - a palace on too large a plot.

It has learned to live with that better than anyone expected.

Vindobona

It began as a Roman camp on the Danube guarding the frontier, with some six thousand soldiers in it. Tradition says the emperor Marcus Aurelius died here in 180; it is not certain, and historians lean towards Sirmium, but Vienna sticks to its version.

The outline of the camp can still be read in the streets of the first district. Naglergasse bends exactly where the rampart bent, and anyone walking along it is going round a corner two thousand years old.

The ransom for an English king

In 1192 Richard the Lionheart was coming back from the crusade, in disguise and without an escort. Near Vienna he was recognised and captured - Duke Leopold had a score to settle, because Richard had earlier thrown his banner down from the walls at Acre.

The ransom England paid for him was so enormous that Vienna built new walls with it and Austria founded a whole town besides. The English king thus paid, without meaning to, for the fortifications that stopped the Turks three hundred years later.

Besieged twice

In 1529 and again in 1683 an Ottoman army stood before the walls. The second time it was a close-run thing: the city held for two months, ate what was left, and relief came down from the Kahlenberg - allied armies led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski.

Vienna took two things from that. A lasting conviction that it is the last city of the West, and a building boom, because the suburbs had burned and had to be built again.

Baroque on credit

What was built after 1683 is what makes Vienna Vienna. Prince Eugene of Savoy had the Belvedere built, the emperor Schönbrunn, the nobility their palaces in the centre - all at once, in the same style, and by a handful of the same architects.

In its first design Schönbrunn was to outdo Versailles. The budget brought it back to earth and something more usable came of it: a palace you can live in.

Down come the walls

In 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the walls pulled down. The Ring took their place, a boulevard fifty-seven metres wide, and along it in thirty years went up the opera, the parliament, the city hall, the university and the museums.

Every building is in a different style, and that is deliberate: the parliament is Greek, because democracy; the city hall Gothic, because free cities; the university Renaissance, because humanism. Vienna built itself an architectural textbook and lives in it.

Vienna around 1900

At the turn of the century Freud, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Wittgenstein and Loos were all in one city. They met in the cafés, mostly could not stand one another, and influenced one another anyway.

The café was not a luxury but an office and a living room at once. Rented flats were unheated, so people sat there instead; one coffee lasted all day and the newspapers were free. The city has never given up the habit.

Red Vienna

After 1918 the social democrats won the city and turned Vienna into a social laboratory. In fifteen years they built sixty thousand flats - the Karl-Marx-Hof is over a kilometre long and had its own laundries, nurseries and library.

It ended in February 1934, when the government sent artillery against the workers' housing blocks. The blocks are still there and people still live in them. Vienna still has so much municipal and cooperative housing that roughly six Viennese in ten live in it.

Four sectors and one film

After 1945 Vienna was divided into four occupation sectors, and the first district was administered by all four armies at once - a patrol was four soldiers in one jeep. The city was broken, penicillin was traded on the black market and there were more spies than taxis.

The British made The Third Man out of it, and Vienna has a film souvenir from that time that it never asked for: a tour of the sewers.

A city that is good to live in

The occupation ended in 1955 and Vienna has since got used to being smaller than it was built for. One of the four main United Nations centres sits here, the metro runs on time, and in quality-of-life rankings the city comes first or second with monotonous regularity.

The rest is still there too: cafés from which nobody moves you on, the Prater with its Ferris wheel from 1897, and the Central Cemetery, of which the actor Helmut Qualtinger said that it is half the size of Zurich but twice as much fun.