Vienna

• 1. Introduction

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  Vienna sits at the edge of two worlds. To the west rise the Vienna Woods, the northeasternmost foothills of the Alps. To the east, the land flattens into the Pannonian Basin, the great plain that stretches toward Hungary and beyond. The city itself occupies this seam, where mountain and steppe meet on the banks of the Danube.

  What is astonishing about Vienna is the weight of what happened here. The Romans built a military camp called Vindobona on this spot in the 1st century, protecting the empire's frontier. Over the following two thousand years, that camp grew into a seat of emperors, a crucible of classical music, a laboratory for radical politics, and the birthplace of psychoanalysis. Today, more than two million people call it home, making it Austria's only true primate city.

  But Vienna is not simply a museum of its own past. It is a living city that has absorbed wave after wave of newcomers, survived plague and siege and aerial bombardment, and emerged in the 21st century as one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe. The story of how it got here involves a cast of characters that includes Marcus Aurelius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freud, and Falco, whose song "Rock Me Amadeus" became the only German-language track ever to reach number one on the American Billboard Hot 100.

  This documentary will move through the layers of that story, from the military camp that became a city to the postwar occupation that inspired a famous film, from the radical housing experiments of Red Vienna to the coffee houses where Stalin, Trotsky, and Hitler once sat just tables apart.

• 2. From Vindobona to the Habsburgs

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  Construction of the Roman legionary camp at Vindobona began around AD 97, positioned to defend the empire's Pannonian border. At its peak, the settlement held around 15,000 people. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius may have died here in AD 180, during a campaign against the Marcomanni. When the Huns swept into Pannonia in the fifth century, the population fled and the city stood abandoned for centuries.

  The region's recovery came through the Babenbergs. In 976, Leopold I of Babenberg was appointed Margrave of the Eastern March, a frontier district of Bavaria running along the Danube. The march expanded steadily under successive Babenberg rulers until it became the Duchy of Austria. In 1155, Henry II, Duke of Austria, relocated the Babenberg residence from Klosterneuburg to Vienna, a move that fixed the city's status as a permanent dynastic capital. The same year saw the founding of the Schottenstift, an abbey established by Irish Benedictine monks whose name, meaning "Scots Abbey", reflects the medieval habit of calling Irish monks Scots.

  The Habsburgs, who succeeded the Babenbergs, turned Vienna into the seat of the Holy Roman Emperors during the 16th century. That position lasted, with only brief interruptions, until the empire's dissolution in 1806. During those centuries, the city faced two existential shocks: the Great Plague of 1679, which killed nearly one-third of the population, and two Ottoman sieges, in 1529 and 1683, both of which the city survived.

  By the time the Austrian Empire was formally declared in 1804, Vienna had already been the largest German-speaking city in the world for more than a century. It would hold that distinction until Berlin overtook it at the beginning of the 20th century.

• 3. Red Vienna and Its End

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  In the May 1919 municipal election, Social Democrats won an absolute majority with 100 of the 165 seats on the city council. Jakob Reumann became the first socialist mayor. What followed was one of the most ambitious municipal experiments in European history, a fifteen-year period known as Red Vienna.

  The centrepiece of the programme was housing. Between 1925 and 1934, the city built over 60,000 new apartments in public housing complexes called Gemeindebauten. Apartments were assigned on a point system that favoured families and less affluent citizens. These buildings were not just housing blocks. They contained libraries, daycare centres, laundromats, indoor pools, and shopping centres. Many were named after socialist figures such as Friedrich Engels and Ferdinand Lassalle, though some carried the names of internationalist figures including George Marshall, Dag Hammarskjöld, and George Washington.

  The most famous Gemeindebau was the Karl-Marx-Hof, a residential estate that would later become a battlefield. In July 1927, a crisis had already signalled how volatile the city had become. After three far-right paramilitary members were acquitted of killing two socialist Schutzbund members, rioters set the Palace of Justice on fire. Police killed at least 84 protesters and five officers also died.

  Right-wing Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved parliament in 1933 and ruled as a dictator, banning the Communist Party and gutting socialist influence. Civil war broke out the following year, beginning in Linz before spreading to Vienna. Socialist fighters barricaded themselves inside the Gemeindebauten. The Austrian Armed Forces ended the battle by shelling the Karl-Marx-Hof directly, forcing the Schutzbund's surrender. The era of Red Vienna was over.

• 4. Anschluss and Occupation

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  On the 15th of March 1938, three days after German troops entered Austria, Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna. Two hundred thousand Austrians gathered at the Heldenplatz as he announced the absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany from a balcony of the Neue Burg. Persecution of the city's Jewish community began almost immediately.

  Adolf Eichmann ran his operation from the expropriated Palais Rothschild, organising the expropriation and forced emigration of Vienna's Jews. Of the nearly 200,000 Jews then living in the city, around 120,000 were driven to emigrate and approximately 65,000 were killed. During Kristallnacht, every synagogue and prayer house in Vienna was destroyed except the Stadttempel, which survived only because its proximity to residential buildings made burning it too dangerous.

  Wartime bombing began in 1942 with a Soviet air raid. From the 17th of March 1944, a total of 51 air raids targeted the city, aimed primarily at oil refineries. But around a third of the city centre was destroyed anyway. The State Opera and the Burgtheater burned. The Albertina suffered heavy damage. Soviet forces entered Vienna on the 6th of April 1945, working inward from the eastern and southern suburbs before surrounding the centre by the 8th. The Danube Flotilla arrived with reinforcements and the remaining defenders surrendered the same day.

  What followed was a divided city. The four powers split Vienna into sectors, with the central first district rotating between American, British, French, and Soviet control every month. The four powers policed the city together using the "four soldiers in a jeep" method, one soldier from each nation riding in a single vehicle. The atmosphere of mutual suspicion and espionage in this period became the backdrop for Graham Greene's screenplay for The Third Man in 1949. Its haunting theme was composed and performed by Viennese musician Anton Karas on a zither. The four-power occupation lasted until the Austrian State Treaty came into force on the 27th of July 1955.

• 5. A City of Music

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  Franz Schubert, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Johann Strauss I and II were all born in Vienna. The city also pulled composers from across Europe: Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, and Antonio Salieri all came to work here. The term First Viennese School is sometimes applied to the triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern formed the Second Viennese School a century later.

  The Wiener Musikverein is home to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, famous worldwide for its annual New Year's Concert. The Wiener Konzerthaus is the base of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Vienna also hosted the world premieres of Fidelio, Die Fledermaus, The Gypsy Baron, The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro.

  Popular music has its own chapter in Vienna's story. The Austropop movement produced artists including Georg Danzer, Rainhard Fendrich, Wolfgang Ambros, and Peter Cornelius. Falco, the internationally best-known Viennese pop artist, held number one on the American Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in 1986 with "Rock Me Amadeus". His other hits, "Der Kommissar" and "Jeanny", also charted internationally. Joe Zawinul, who founded the American jazz fusion band Weather Report and collaborated with Miles Davis, was born in Vienna and studied at the Conservatory of Vienna.

  Every year, the Donauinsel stages the Donauinselfest, described as the largest open-air music festival in the world, drawing approximately 3 million attendees over three days. The festival is organised by the SPÖ Wien and is free to enter. The Vienna Jazz Festival has taken place almost every year since 1991, with past performers including Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Ravi Shankar.

• 6. Science and the Mind

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  Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in Vienna, making it the birthplace of that discipline. Freud's old residence is now the Sigmund Freud Museum. Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl also worked in the city, and together these three figures constitute a remarkable concentration of psychological thought in a single place.

  The list extends across disciplines. In physics, the city produced Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, Christian Doppler, Josef Stefan, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Lise Meitner, and Anton Zeilinger. In medicine, Ignaz Semmelweis, Karl Landsteiner, and Julius Wagner-Jauregg all worked here. In philosophy, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein both came from Vienna. Kurt Gödel transformed mathematics. Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises developed economic theories in the city that would later influence policy around the world.

  The Vienna Circle, an early-20th-century group of philosophers centred on Moritz Schlick, made logical positivism an international movement. The Vienna Secession, founded as an art movement closely related to Art Nouveau, left deep marks on the city's architecture through designers such as Otto Wagner, who built the Secession building, the Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station, the Kirche am Steinhof, and the Austrian Postal Savings Bank.

  Architect Adolf Loos pushed against ornament in buildings including the Looshaus of 1909 and the Kärntner Bar of 1908. The University of Vienna, founded in 1365 by Duke Rudolph IV, is the oldest and largest university in the German-speaking world. Today, with 197,209 students enrolled in the winter semester of 2023/2024, Vienna holds the largest student population of any city in the German-speaking world.

• 7. The Living City

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  In 1910, Vienna had more than two million inhabitants and ranked as the third largest city in Europe after London and Paris. The wars and political upheavals of the 20th century drove that population down and kept it suppressed through most of the century. The population did not demonstrate significant growth again until the census of 2000.

  By 2020, more than 660,000 residents, or 38.8% of the Viennese population, had full or partial migrant backgrounds, mostly from the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. The 2021 census found that 49% of Viennese were Christian, 34.1% had no religious affiliation, and 14.8% were Muslim. Vienna is also the seat of the Metropolitan Roman Catholic Archdiocese, led by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.

  The first Viennese coffee house was opened in 1685 by Armenian businessman Johannes Diodato. The cafes became so central to intellectual life that by 1913, figures including Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, and Josip Broz Tito were all living in Vienna simultaneously and frequenting the same establishments. The Viennese dialect itself carries traces of this history, drawing loanwords from Czech and other languages of the former Habsburg Empire.

  Vienna holds the title of fifth-largest city in the European Union by population and is the most populous city on the Danube. It hosts the United Nations, OPEC, and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Its historic centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001, then moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger in July 2017. The Vienna Central Cemetery, spanning 2.4 square kilometres and holding over 330,000 graves, is the final resting place of Ludwig van Beethoven, Falco, and all Austrian presidents who have died since World War II. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lies not there but in the nearby St. Marx Cemetery, now closed to new interments.