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A Tale of Three Cities episode 1 - Vienna
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00:00Throughout the 20th century, great cities have seduced and inspired us.
00:09But sometimes, one city shines brighter than all the others.
00:14Sometimes, one city defines an entire age.
00:19In my opinion, there were a handful of moments in the 20th century
00:24when, for some reason, one particular city exploded into life.
00:30When one city became a hub of new art and ideas that went on to influence the entire world.
00:38This series tells the story of three exceptional cities in three exceptional years.
00:46Vienna in 1908.
00:51Paris in 1928.
00:55And New York in 1951.
01:00Three cities, one century.
01:02The century when so much changed.
01:13And this episode is about Vienna.
01:16At the height of its legendary golden age in 1908.
01:21This was the year Gustav Klimt painted his most famous picture.
01:26And Adolf Loos invented modern architecture.
01:30When Sigmund Freud discovered the Oedipus complex.
01:34And when a new generation took art and music in an unsettling direction.
01:39But 1908 was also the year that would set Vienna and Europe on the road to destruction.
01:55Vienna in 1908 was the crucible of the 20th century.
01:59And it gave birth to the best and worst of the modern world.
02:03Its most beautiful dreams and its most catastrophic nightmares.
02:07If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna was a good place to come.
02:24And at the beginning of that year, one man made his own pilgrimage from the provinces.
02:32He had with him a letter of introduction to a famous painter who worked here at the Royal Opera House.
02:39The letter was supposed to be the young man's ticket to success.
02:48But things did not go quite to plan.
02:51As he reached the threshold, his courage wavered.
02:56He tried to overcome his nerves.
02:59But eventually, they overcame him.
03:06And he fled.
03:08Leaving his one artistic opportunity behind.
03:14Later in life, that young man confessed that things would have been so much easier
03:20had he had the confidence to make that introduction and to become an artist.
03:24He was right.
03:26And it wouldn't only have been easier for him.
03:29It would have been easier for millions of other people too.
03:33Because that young man's name was Adolf Hitler.
03:41Vienna may not have helped Hitler become an artist.
03:44But it did introduce him to the resentment and racism that would inspire his monstrous ambitions.
03:55And that's what I find so fascinating about Vienna in 1908.
04:01In this city, art and politics, dreams and nightmares, creation and destruction were locked in a fatal embrace.
04:16Not that anyone would have known it at the time.
04:18At the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna seemed to be a gilded city.
04:29The grand capital of the thousand-year-old Habsburg Empire.
04:33The largest and most ancient in Europe.
04:38An empire that many believed would last forever.
04:41And in 1908, Vienna was busy celebrating.
04:50For this was the year of the Emperor's Diamond Jubilee.
04:57While the rest of Europe had shifted towards democracy, the now doddering Franz Josef had ruled his empire for 60 years.
05:06To celebrate the Jubilee, Vienna's art world staged a vast exhibition that summed up the optimistic spirit of the times.
05:18And its star attraction was a certain Gustav Klimt.
05:23In 1908, Klimt was 45 years old.
05:28And despite his bohemian reputation, he was now a staunch member of the establishment.
05:33The 1908 art exhibition was Klimt's brainchild, his way of sucking up to the Emperor yet further.
05:51And at the show's opening, he even overcame his usual shyness to give a passionate and inspiring speech about the Empire's artistic excellence.
05:59But he thought nothing was more excellent about it than his own art.
06:08He had a point, for Klimt was about to reveal some of the most irresistible paintings of his career.
06:16Luxuriant portraits of the city's great beauties, surrounded by a sparkling constellation of ornament.
06:29Margarete Wittgenstein, sister of the philosopher Ludwig.
06:37Fritza Riedler, the wife of a wealthy engineer.
06:44And this ravishing portrait of Adele Blochbauer.
06:49But the most famous of them all, and also the most revealing, is surely this one.
07:07The Kiss.
07:08No painting has done more to capture and bottle the myth of Vienna's golden age than this one.
07:21And you can see why.
07:24It's beautiful.
07:26It's sexy.
07:27And it seems to present its entire age as an incandescent fantasy of love, of glamour, and of romance.
07:37And that's why it's become one of the most famous, and one of the most popular paintings in the world.
07:42But, I think everyone's got this painting wrong.
07:50I think all of us have fallen for its own myth.
07:57Just look closer.
07:59And don't look at him.
08:01Look at her.
08:02Her body is tensed uncomfortably.
08:08One of her hands is trying to pull his away.
08:11The other is scratching his back.
08:14Her eyes are closed.
08:15Her face is turned away from his.
08:18And he?
08:20He is all over her.
08:22Now, maybe I'm wrong.
08:31But if that's a kiss, it isn't very mutual.
08:42So what are we to make of this ambiguous embrace?
08:46I think it reveals what was really going on in Vienna in 1908.
08:53Because behind its serene surface, violent forces were beginning to gather.
09:06It was this tension that would give Vienna its singular creative energy.
09:11And the best place to find that energy was in the Viennese coffee house.
09:17The coffee house has long been a Viennese institution.
09:22At the turn of the century, there were more than a thousand of them in the city.
09:27Providing all classes with a place to drink, think and set the world to rights.
09:34But they'd never had such an extraordinary clientele as they did in 1908.
09:46If you had come here to the Café Central on any single day in 1908, you would have seen some remarkable people.
10:00Leon Trotsky, who was in exile from Russia, used to play chess here.
10:04Apparently, he still owes the place about three pounds.
10:11Hitler, who was almost always on his own, would pore over the free newspapers, obsessed with international politics.
10:19And back here, with a short black coffee and a long brown cigar, sat Vienna's very own Dr Freud, watching absolutely everybody.
10:32The coffee house was also where rebellious thinkers came together to argue about art and politics and to question Vienna's old fashioned ways.
10:48The vibrant atmosphere of the coffee house led to some spectacular fallings out, but it also produced a flurry of new, bold and radical ideas.
11:03And these ideas helped turn ancient imperial Vienna into the unlikely centre of a cultural revolution.
11:15One of the most outspoken of the new young rebels was a firebrand architect called Adolf Loos.
11:24Loos was something of an outsider, but he was talented, ambitious and burning to make his mark on the city.
11:33For Loos, Vienna had one pathological problem.
11:38It was addicted to ornament.
11:44To him, its grand interiors weren't beautiful, but dishonest.
11:50Covered in fake gold.
11:53Fake damask.
11:55And fake bronze.
11:57And in 1908, he wrote a manifesto attacking it all, which he called Ornament and Crime.
12:07I have made the following observations and have announced them to the world.
12:15The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament.
12:20We have outgrown ornament.
12:23We have outgrown ornament.
12:25We have fought our way through to freedom from ornament.
12:29The ornament disease is recognised by the state and subsidised by state funds.
12:34They were bold ideas, and Loos had a bold solution.
12:41He would give the Viennese something they had never seen before.
12:46By the past.
12:47A matter of months after writing his manifesto, Loos won a commission to design his first building, right opposite the emperor's palace.
13:00Today, it is called the Loos House, and it's one of the first truly modern buildings in Europe.
13:15Now, it may look pretty unremarkable today, but Loos' building was a game changer in Viennese architecture.
13:23And to understand quite how revolutionary it was, all you need to do is compare it to this building, its neighbour,
13:29which was only finished a few years earlier.
13:32Now, this building is a charming example of traditional Viennese architecture.
13:37And above all, it's covered with ornament.
13:42But Loos' building, however, is covered in nothing.
13:46It's completely plain.
13:49The ornamental facade has been entirely removed.
13:52The people of Vienna were appalled by Loos' new building.
14:06The press called it the dung crate, the prison, the matchbox, the house without eyebrows.
14:13The city council was so horrified that they tried their best to tear it down.
14:23And the emperor himself allegedly had his curtains permanently closed so he didn't have to see it.
14:35The hostility brought Loos close to suicide.
14:38But if only his many critics had stopped obsessing about the facade and stepped inside.
14:57Because the interior of the Loos house is staggering.
15:02You know, nothing can prepare you for the experience of this place.
15:17It's like walking into a huge architectural kaleidoscope.
15:22Because the whole thing shimmers and sparkles and reflects off itself.
15:26So you never quite know where it ends.
15:29But above all, it is unbelievably, unbelievably beautiful.
15:35The simple surfaces of the polished mahogany and the shining brass and the cut glass mirror are utterly irresistible.
15:44And they're proof, I think, that you don't need ornament to be beautiful.
15:49Because this, this is a new kind of beauty.
15:56Adolf Loos had produced one of the first great buildings of the 20th century.
16:07But he'd also exposed an important truth about Vienna.
16:12Trapped between the past and the future, the city was increasingly ill at ease with itself.
16:18And so too were its inhabitants.
16:22In 1908, the people of Vienna seemed to be unusually unhappy.
16:39The city had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.
16:45And in the coffee houses and the salons, Vienna's intellectuals discussed this widespread malaise.
16:52But none of them knew what caused it.
16:56And none of them knew what to do about it.
16:58One Austrian writer captured the mood.
17:07Our epoch is shot through with a wild torment.
17:14And the pain has become no longer bearable.
17:17Is this, then, the great death which has come upon the world?
17:28Vienna, in short, was sick.
17:32And no one knew why.
17:34But one man was determined to find out.
17:37Sigmund Freud was born into a large Jewish family who had moved to Vienna to give their children the best possible education.
17:57He had originally trained as a doctor.
17:59But gradually he began to grow interested in the inner lives of his patients.
18:08Later in his life, in his only known voice recording, Freud recalled his discovery.
18:14I discovered some important new facts about unconscious in psychic life out of these findings.
18:30Through a new science, psychoanalysis, as a new method of treatment of neurosis.
18:41In 1891, he set up a private clinic in the centre of town.
18:53And the anxious Viennese began to come here, first in a trickle, then in droves,
18:59to see if psychoanalysis could soothe their unquiet minds.
19:05So this is Sigmund Freud's waiting room.
19:09And over the years, hundreds of Viennese men and women would have sat patiently in this very room,
19:17on these very seats, waiting for the great Dr Freud to cure them of their anxieties, their phobias, their obsessions, and their panic attacks.
19:28Problems for which neither they, nor anyone else for that matter, had any explanation.
19:33Freud encouraged his patients to talk about every detail of their lives.
19:43Meanwhile, he was developing his theories about the hidden desires that underpin human behaviour.
19:49You know, being here is a really odd experience, because all I can think of are the thousands of secrets that were revealed within these walls.
20:02The fears, the nightmares, the illicit desires, the affairs.
20:06You know, in many ways it feels like this is the subconscious of Vienna itself.
20:13And it was in 1908 that Freud encountered a patient that would lead him to his most famous theory.
20:20In January, a friend of Freud's told him about a pecuniary anxiety his son had recently and distressingly developed.
20:37The five-year-old boy, known as Little Hands, had acquired a violent fear of horses.
20:51He was scared they'd bite off his finger, afraid of the noise they made.
20:56Freud.
20:58He was particularly terrified of white horses with black mouths and blinkers.
21:07With horses everywhere, poor hands became too scared to even leave the house.
21:16Freud began to study the case for himself.
21:19He questioned the father.
21:23He interrogated the boy.
21:26And then he started to think.
21:30Why is he afraid of horses?
21:32Why horses?
21:34Why horses with black mouths?
21:36Why horses with blinkers?
21:38Why is he afraid of his finger being bitten off?
21:42And what about the father?
21:44Is the father implicated?
21:46And then, at last, the revelation came.
21:56Freud concluded that the horse was a symbol for Little Hands's father.
22:03And his fear of biting was actually a fear of castration.
22:09Why?
22:10Well, Freud believed that Little Hands had begun to develop sexual feelings for his mother.
22:18And his father, now his rival, was going to punish him for it.
22:24But Freud didn't think this phenomenon was unique to Little Hands.
22:29He thought it was a common part of every boy's development.
22:34And he called his theory the Oedipus Complex.
22:41How important was Little Hands in the development of Freud's theory?
22:47His interpretation was to him important, but also to the whole community.
22:55Because he could show how it works.
22:58In concrete, not only theoretically.
23:00Theoretically.
23:01Saying that little Hans is jealous.
23:07That his father is with his mother.
23:10And he projected his fear to horses, which was connected with his father.
23:17And do you think he was right?
23:19He was right, yes, sure.
23:20He showed that already children have sexuality.
23:24That was, so to say, not polite, but right.
23:31So this was very shocking at the time.
23:33It was shocking.
23:35Do you think Freud could have come up with his ideas in any other city?
23:38Some say Freud could only do it in Vienna because the Viennese are so neurotic.
23:44But I also say Freud could do it because it was a place for creativity.
23:53And it was this creative conception of a theory needs to have a lot of emotional backup.
24:03And this he found in Vienna.
24:05Freud's legacy is, of course, bigger than the Oedipus complex.
24:12He showed that behind all of our public facades lies a huge reservoir of hidden but powerful sexual urges.
24:23And in doing so, he transformed our understanding of human nature itself.
24:28While Freud's theories shocked old Vienna, a new generation was ready to embrace them.
24:42Amongst them were two painters and a composer.
24:47All three would use their art to attack Viennese conventions and to test the dangerous limits of psychological expression.
24:55Their own spectacular Oedipal rebellion would make the city the centre of a new introspective modernism.
25:05And astonishingly, they would all make their dramatic entrance in 1908.
25:14The first of them was a 22 year old artist called Oskar Kokoschka.
25:18Kokoschka was inspired by Freud throughout his long life.
25:25And he'd certainly have made a revealing case history.
25:28Because his childhood was unusually dark and violent.
25:37Oskar Kokoschka grew up in poverty and misery.
25:41His father was bitter.
25:43His mother was controlling.
25:44And the whole family seemed to lurch from one disaster to another.
25:49Unsurprisingly, Oskar turned out to be a lonely and socially awkward child.
25:54And he sought escape from his depression here in his local park.
25:58In the park, the young Oskar took a fancy to a genteel young girl.
26:12One day, he noticed an ant colony near where she played.
26:16And desperate to impress her, he set an explosive charge on top of it.
26:26But things went terribly wrong.
26:29The explosion was so powerful it catapulted the girl off the swing.
26:33She survived, but little Kokoschka was thrown out of the park for good.
26:46This mood of lust, violence, guilt and transgression never left Kokoschka.
26:53It informed everything he ever made as an artist.
26:56And in 1908, it shocked the whole of Vienna.
27:13Kokoschka was thrust into the limelight when he was asked to exhibit at Gustav Klimt's prestigious art show.
27:19But one of his works caused an uproar.
27:28It was a fairy tale that Kokoschka had been asked to write and illustrate for some children.
27:35But it was certainly not suitable for the young.
27:49So this is The Dreaming Boys.
27:55Kokoschka wrote it.
27:57He illustrated it.
27:59He printed it.
28:01And he bound it.
28:03And look who he dedicated it to.
28:07His hero, Vienna's hero, Gustav Klimt.
28:12But this is so much darker, so much more mysterious than Klimt's work.
28:17It begins charmingly, like nearly all fairy tales.
28:24We have a beautiful young maiden with this long blonde hair.
28:29She's trapped on a little island and she's waiting for this noble white stag to come and rescue her.
28:35The images that follow capture this fairy tale world of exotic plants and animals and waving seas and epic journeys.
28:47But the text is much, much darker.
28:51Red fishling, fishling red, with a trickle-bladed knife.
28:57I stab you dead.
29:00This is no fairy tale.
29:02You know, this is the product of a really major artist.
29:14It's so beautiful, so magnificent to look at.
29:17The use of colour, the use of line, the way the text and the images are organised.
29:21Yet underneath it there lies an explosive emotional charge.
29:31And I think that's the point of it.
29:33I think Kokoschka wants to show that beneath us all, behind all of our facades, there are uncontrollable, writhing emotions.
29:41Kokoschka, like Freud, had explored the sexual frustrations of the Viennese people.
29:56But another artist would go even further.
29:59Egon Schiele, a man gripped by a desire to strip the human form naked and to capture its most painful secrets.
30:15Egon Schiele was four years younger than Kokoschka, but he'd had something of a head start.
30:23According to his mother, he was drawing before he was even two years old.
30:29And in 1906, at the age of just 16, the young prodigy was admitted to the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,
30:42where he was the youngest student in his class.
30:59When it came to life class, Schiele outperformed all of his peers.
31:04Students here were required to make one drawing a day.
31:08But while the others struggled to complete that task, Schiele produced an exquisite drawing every single hour.
31:15Schiele grew frustrated with the academy's conservative approach.
31:26And so, in 1908, in the same year that Kokoschka broke onto the art scene,
31:31he decided to mount an exhibition of his own.
31:33From that point on, Schiele developed an expressionistic style that was unlike anyone else's,
31:46and a far cry from Klimt's kiss.
31:48His pictures portray bruised and emaciated people.
32:01Contorted with pain and desire.
32:03Where every beautiful line becomes an insidious act of transgression.
32:16But his greatest works are, in my opinion, his self-portraits.
32:21And none is greater than this one.
32:25Where does one even begin with an image like this?
32:31It is a portrait of Egon Schiele when he was 20 years old.
32:37But it's also a portrait of isolation and despair.
32:43Schiele is alone, trapped in this white emptiness.
32:48So the picture and the frame itself becomes a kind of cell.
32:55And he has no way of making contact with anyone.
33:00His feet have been chopped off.
33:03His hands are missing.
33:05His eyes are dead.
33:07Everything he would normally use to make contact with the outside world has been taken away.
33:14And the figure itself is haunting.
33:19It looks like an emaciated corpse.
33:23The body is so brittle and angular, it seems like it's on the verge of snapping.
33:30You know, Schiele was a famously brilliant draughtsman.
33:35And the line here, the quality of line, is so sharp, so precise.
33:40It looks like it was drawn with a razor blade.
33:45And that's a good way to think about this picture.
33:48Because it's not just about getting under the skin.
33:51It's almost as though Schiele has used a knife to cut away his own epidermis,
33:57to cut away his own surface self, to reveal what's going on underneath.
34:01For me, this is a portrait of the true Vienna.
34:10The Vienna beneath the surface and behind the facade.
34:15But I think it's more than this.
34:18It's also a portrait of humanity itself.
34:22Of what it's really like to be human.
34:25It's a portrait of humanity itself.
34:26It's a portrait of humanity itself.
34:28It's a portrait of humanity itself.
34:30It's a portrait of humanity itself.
34:32Unsurprisingly, Vienna did not respond well to this uncompromising new art.
34:38Kokoschka was attacked in the press.
34:41And Schiele was arrested for making indecent images.
34:46But across town, the last of Vienna's young rebels was about to transform the city's favourite art form.
35:02Music.
35:08His name was Arnold Schoenberg.
35:11Schoenberg was born into a poor Jewish family in 1874.
35:18When his father died suddenly, he had to quit school at the age of 16 and earn his living in a bank.
35:25He didn't like the work one bit.
35:28Counting out money, filling out forms, kowtowing to the rich and pompous bourgeoisie of Vienna.
35:35This was not for Arnold Schoenberg.
35:38Because Arnold Schoenberg wanted to be a composer.
35:44Like Kokoschka and Schiele and Freud before him, Schoenberg wanted to explore the darkest depths of human nature.
35:54Art belongs to the unconscious.
35:57One must express oneself. Express oneself directly.
36:00Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill.
36:06But that which is inborn.
36:09Instinctive.
36:11Luckily for him, the bank went bust.
36:14Schoenberg was liberated.
36:17And 1908 would be the most explosive year of his life.
36:22Because in that year, Schoenberg's wife Matilda would fall in love with this man.
36:31A young painter called Richard Gerstel.
36:34The affair nearly destroyed their marriage, and ended with Gerstel's suicide.
36:48Yet it was during this catastrophic period that Schoenberg produced a revolutionary piece of music.
36:56His second string quartet.
36:59We will never know if it was the crisis in his marriage that led Schoenberg to turn the whole of musical history on its head.
37:11But we do know that on the front page of his score, he wrote a dedication of three short words that read,
37:19to my wife.
37:26Four days before the Christmas of 1908, Schoenberg's Second String Quartet premiered in Vienna.
37:43The piece starts conventionally, but it quickly transforms.
37:49Plunging the listener into an unsettling world.
37:57And it does so by doing something that had never really been done before.
38:02It changes key.
38:05Again and again.
38:08Slipping from one mood to another.
38:11As if the notes themselves, like his emotions, are all at sea.
38:16The sea.
38:17The sea.
38:18The sea.
38:19The sea.
38:20The sea.
38:21The sea.
38:22The sea.
38:23The sea.
38:24The sea.
38:25The sea.
38:26The sea.
38:27The sea.
38:28The sea.
38:29The sea.
38:30The sea.
38:31The sea.
38:32The sea.
38:33The sea.
38:34The sea.
38:35The sea.
38:36The sea.
38:37The sea.
38:38The sea.
38:39The sea.
38:40The sea.
38:41The sea.
38:42The sea.
38:43The sea.
38:44The sea.
38:45The sea.
38:46The sea.
38:47Now, I'll admit, it doesn't sound like Mozart, but it is a haunting piece of music.
39:14And my God, does it carry an emotional punch.
39:21It's almost as if a wave of intense emotion is washing over you.
39:44It would be fair to say, it didn't go down well.
39:48At the first performance in 1908, the audience booed, hissed and laughed throughout.
39:54One newspaper wrote that it sounded like a convocation of cats, and another concluded that Schoenberg must have been tone deaf and needed to be examined by the Department of Health.
40:05Later in life, Schoenberg still felt the pain of being so roundly attacked.
40:13Personally, I had a feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water and not knowing how to swim.
40:23I do not know what saved me, why I was not drowned or cooked alive.
40:29There was nobody to help me.
40:34Schoenberg's music is challenging because it rips up the rules of classical composition, replacing familiar harmonies with atonal harmonies.
40:43Thanks for having me.
40:44Pleased to meet you.
40:45It's an acquired taste, as pianist Susanna Zabka explains.
40:50I hope you enjoy Vienna.
40:51I'm loving it.
40:53I think I will play something else.
40:55Okay.
40:56This will be a tonal scanner.
41:02And then, see, these are tonal intervals.
41:08Right.
41:08And now I play a tonal intervals.
41:15You can hear the difference?
41:20I can hear the difference.
41:21Okay.
41:21It doesn't sound so good.
41:23No, thanks.
41:26Maybe you have to hear more.
41:28Okay, get used to it.
41:30More at a melody and then you will love it.
41:32Okay.
41:33That's the way.
41:35Do you like the string quartet, the second string quartet?
41:37I love it.
41:39I love it.
41:40Why do you love it?
41:41It's a completely new world with metaphorical associations.
41:49It's so full of emotions and of very inspiring ideas.
41:57What do you think makes it such a revolutionary piece of music?
42:01I think this is the culmination of this kind of searching for a new, new musical language.
42:10I think he was an amazing artist with incredible, strong conviction to change the direction of the music, of the classical music.
42:25He strikes me as being so strong.
42:27And he never gave up, did he?
42:29No, no.
42:30He never gave up.
42:32He was absolutely convinced by his music.
42:36And he said, my music will be understood in 100 years.
42:42Not now.
42:43I don't know if we have attained this level, this stage.
42:49Schoenberg, like Kokoschka, Schiele and, of course, Freud, had captured the restless, angst-ridden mood of the Viennese people.
43:01But the city had problems of its own.
43:04And by 1908, it could no longer afford to ignore them.
43:09One of these problems was prostitution.
43:28According to the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig,
43:31Prostitution was like a dark, underground vault over which rose the gorgeous structure of middle-class society.
43:42For behind the facade of traditional family values,
43:46Vienna's husbands, fathers and sons kept more than 50,000 prostitutes gainfully employed across the city.
43:55While the women themselves were unprotected by law.
44:00Vulnerable.
44:01And voiceless.
44:03Until one remarkable woman decided to tell their story.
44:08Her name was Elsa Jerusalem.
44:11In 1908, Elsa Jerusalem started writing an audacious book that would capture the miserable reality of life for women in Vienna.
44:22It would perhaps be the first Viennese novel in history to be set in a brothel.
44:28It begins.
44:29Just around the corner from the city's glowing heart begins the realm of darkness.
44:37The houses shrink in on themselves, doorways disappear in shadow, and a single red lantern encloses its immediate vicinity in a circle of blood.
44:50The Red House tells the harrowing story of a young woman called Katarina, who ends up working in a brothel.
45:00She's used by one man after another until her health gradually declines.
45:07When she dies, her young daughter, who has grown up in the brothel, becomes a prostitute in her place, dreaming of escape and a better life.
45:19The Red House became a huge bestseller.
45:24In fact, within two years of its publication, it went through 22 editions.
45:31The people of Vienna couldn't stop buying it, and they couldn't stop talking about it either.
45:36I asked professor of German literature Brigitte Spreitzer why so little is known about this extraordinary writer.
45:46We have no documents and no autobiographical texts, but what we know is that she was born in Vienna in 1877 in a bourgeois Jewish family.
45:58At the age of 16, she wanted to study at the university, but the doors of the university in Vienna were closed at this time for women.
46:08So she did irregular studies.
46:12So she forced her way into the university.
46:14Yes, yes. She was a strong woman, I think.
46:17And at the age of 22, she already wrote short stories.
46:23I think, I would say, she invented the stream of consciousness in German literature.
46:29She was a really remarkable woman, wrongfully forgotten.
46:34So what do you think Elsa Yerusalem was trying to tell the people of Vienna with this novel?
46:40What was her ambition? What was her agenda?
46:43She wanted to do a sharp critic of hypocrisy in Vienna.
46:47She wanted to break taboos.
46:49It was a city of double standards.
46:51On the one hand, bourgeois daughters should have been virgins.
46:55On the other hand, young men should make their experiences.
47:00So what should they do other than to go into brothels?
47:05And on the other hand, she wanted to show women want to have a sexuality too.
47:13Yes.
47:14Without being prostitutes.
47:15I just think, you know, I just find her tremendously impressive as a woman.
47:20Because there was so much against her.
47:23Yeah.
47:24And yet she fought through all of the prejudice and made a voice for herself and a voice for women.
47:29I think she was a really outstanding woman.
47:33She was courageous.
47:35She didn't care about taboos.
47:37She made her way through modernity.
47:45Elsa Yerusalem is virtually forgotten today.
47:48But she had exposed one of Vienna's darkest secrets.
47:56And it was by no means the only one.
47:59That same year, a photographer called Hermann Drauer and an investigative journalist called Emil Kleeger embarked on a project to tell the story of Vienna's other forgotten victims.
48:18Many of whom had taken refuge in a second Vienna, a city beneath the city.
48:31I'm now standing right in the middle of Vienna's sewer system.
48:52And I'll be honest with you.
48:54It's dark.
48:55It's cold.
48:56It stinks.
48:57And there are rats everywhere.
49:01And to think that back in 1908 there were people actually living down here is too appalling for words.
49:09And for those people, the Vienna that we know, the Vienna of coffee houses, the Vienna of grand palaces, the Vienna of Gustav Klimt, must have seemed like an altogether different world.
49:22It's a very different world.
49:29Kleeger and Drauer journeyed deep into Vienna's underworld to interview and photograph the lost souls who lived there.
49:39They found people struggling to survive in the most desperate of circumstances.
49:52When they'd finished, they showed these images to the public in a series of illustrated lectures.
50:12Kleeger and Drauer's lectures were a pioneering piece of social investigation.
50:22And in 1908, they were the hottest ticket up in town.
50:27Their harrowing images of this world beneath the city amazed and appalled the people of Vienna.
50:33They made it difficult to deny that the city was in the midst of a crisis.
50:43Its population had quadrupled in just four decades.
50:47And the result was poverty, overcrowding and homelessness.
50:58These ever-growing problems needed scapegoats.
51:01And one man was all too ready to provide them.
51:16Karl Lueger was the city's mayor and its most powerful man.
51:24Lueger was handsome and effective.
51:26He installed the city's street lights, its water supply and its famous electric trams.
51:38Yet his charming exterior disguised the ugliness of his politics.
51:45Lueger rose to power on a tide of anti-Semitism.
51:48Winning the votes of small shopkeepers by convincing them that their business had been stolen by wealthy Jewish industrialists.
51:59Lueger latched onto Vienna's growing resentment of Jews and turned anti-Semitism into nothing less than city policy.
52:06It was under his rule that anti-Semitic children's books were introduced into Vienna's schools and Jewish teachers were sacked.
52:13And he became famous for one chilling phrase.
52:17I decide who is a Jew.
52:19Lueger's racism might have been opportunistic, but it had consequences worse than he could ever have imagined.
52:30Because listening to his speeches and consuming his every word was the young Adolf Hitler.
52:35After burning his letter of introduction back in February, Hitler hadn't quite given up on art.
52:48He'd applied to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he would have been classmates with Egon Schiele.
52:53But once again, things didn't go to plan.
52:58I have here a copy of the Academy's admissions papers.
53:02This has a list of all the applicants.
53:04And at the top, Adolf Hitler was the 24th applicant to be rejected.
53:10And underneath there's a sentence,
53:13which means he wasn't even allowed to take the test.
53:16It's not hard to see why Hitler didn't get in.
53:23When you compare him with his contemporaries,
53:26his quaint pictures of Vienna's historic landmarks seem embarrassingly old fashioned.
53:41This is a typical watercolour by Adolf Hitler.
53:44And I'm slightly pained to admit, it's not actually that bad.
53:50There's plenty of precise architectural detail.
53:54There's some evidence of perspective.
53:56And actually, his handling of the paintbrush is quite confident.
54:00But you know what I find so interesting about it?
54:03This building, the National Theatre, didn't even exist.
54:07In fact, it had been demolished 20 years before Hitler even arrived in Vienna.
54:11But that's because Hitler was painting Vienna 100 years out of date.
54:16A harmonious, eternal Vienna.
54:19The city that would never die.
54:26Unlike the great artists and thinkers of Vienna in 1908,
54:30Hitler was terrified by the modern world.
54:32He wanted to turn back time and recreate a lost Germanic past.
54:38He rejected art and threw himself into the factional politics that were taking over the Empire.
54:44One of his frequent haunts was the Reichsrat, Austria's parliament, a rowdy babel where politicians argued in 11 different languages for the interests of dozens of ethnic groups, many of whom were straining to be free of imperial rule.
55:05And as it happened, 1908 was the year that the Empire made its most fateful decision.
55:16On the 6th of October 1908, the Austro-Hungarian Empire here annexed this small part of the Balkans called Bosnia-Herzegovina.
55:30Now, at the time, the Viennese were delighted. Without a single shot being fired, the Habsburg Empire, the great Habsburg Empire, had grown even bigger.
55:42But that one small act would destroy Vienna.
55:47It would destroy the Empire.
55:50And eventually, it would bring down the whole of Europe with it.
55:54Austria's occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina ignited a crisis in the Balkans.
56:05A bitter struggle for independence that would lead to one of the most notorious assassinations of the century.
56:11The shooting of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand on the 28th of June 1914 set in motion a catastrophic chain of events.
56:24It led every major nation into battle.
56:31And it dragged Europe into the most devastating war in its history.
56:371908 had been an exceptional year for Vienna.
56:47For it was a crossroads of the past and the future of old and new.
57:02And its artists and thinkers had faced that crossroads with strength, with bravery and with staggering creativity.
57:17It was their argument with the past that transformed our art, our architecture, our music.
57:30And above all, our understanding of human nature itself.
57:35One of the more prophetic writers in fin de siècle Vienna called the city a laboratory for the end of the world.
57:56And that's what it turned out to be.
57:58But it was also a beginning.
58:01The beginning of a dangerous, experimental, exhilarating century.
58:10And in the next episode, we'll travel forward by 20 years to explore another exceptional city in another exceptional year.
58:21Paris in 1928.
58:28Life on the edge here on BBC4 next tonight.
58:35We head north of the Great Wall to meet some of the most colourful inhabitants of wild China.
58:40Stay with us.
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