- 2 days ago
Documentary, BBC - Vienna- Empire, Dynasty and Dream - Part 3 - Habsburg Extinction
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte,
00:08emperor of the French, lost his empire and his throne.
00:14Now Europe's most powerful men arrived in Vienna
00:18for the ultimate summit meeting,
00:21to rebuild the Europe that Napoleon had almost destroyed.
00:27But the Congress of Vienna wasn't all diplomacy.
00:31It turned into the biggest party the continent had ever seen.
00:36Hosted by the family that had dominated Middle Europe
00:40for centuries, the Habsburgs.
00:44Five years after Napoleon and the French had captured Vienna,
00:48the city was at its height.
00:50We follow it from apogee to decline.
00:55From the beauty and self-obsession of Empress Sisi,
00:59to the suicide pact of Crown Prince Rudolf,
01:03to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
01:06I'll follow the Habsburgs to the downfall of the dynasty.
01:12In this final chapter in the story of Vienna,
01:15I'll also discover how the imperial city became the capital of ideas.
01:21From Klimt's exploration of our sexuality,
01:25to Freud's voyage into our minds,
01:28to the angry young artist who hated them both.
01:31Vienna shaped the modern age for both good and evil.
01:36These are the streets warped by Hitler and Stalin,
01:42who, 30 years later, tossed Vienna between them
01:46in history's greatest war of annihilation.
01:52A city of death and tragedy that changed lives,
01:56among them, my own family.
01:59Vienna became the academy of civilisation.
02:03But it was also the battlefield of extremes,
02:08of monarchy versus revolution,
02:11of communism versus fascism,
02:13and of pious formality against wild decadence.
02:18And it all happened here, here in Vienna,
02:22the world city.
02:24In the autumn, 1814, France was vanquished,
02:47and after ruling most of Europe, Napoleon was in exile,
02:51emperor of the tiny island of Elba.
02:57Now that Napoleon was defeated,
02:59all the great men of Europe, and the great women, in fact,
03:02descended on Vienna.
03:07Emperor Francis invited them all to the ultimate summit meeting
03:12and wildly decadent junket in order to put Europe together again
03:17after 20 years of destructive wars
03:20against revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
03:23Francis was the host, but he wasn't really in charge.
03:27The man who was in charge was Prince Clemens von Metnick.
03:32He was vain, he was boastful, he was playful,
03:35he was playful, but he also had a clear and brilliant vision
03:40of how to run Austria, how to position it,
03:43and how to rule Europe.
03:50This is the Austrian chancery,
03:52and Prince Metnick lived and worked here
03:54and ruled Vienna from here and all of Austria for 30 years.
03:59His bedroom was right above us here.
04:01This grand meeting room was the nerve centre
04:06of European political activity during the Congress of Vienna.
04:11As Europe's self-appointed puppet master,
04:14Metnick would be the chief arbiter of a new continental system,
04:19and Habsburg Vienna would be its capital.
04:22But as well as redesigning Europe,
04:25Metnick and the emperor relaunched the very look of Vienna itself.
04:29I've come to see some of the richly embroidered costumes
04:33worn by the dignitaries at the Congress.
04:36Dr. Monica Curzel-Rundsheimer is going to tell me
04:39how they reveal the tawdry state of Vienna.
04:45One of the problems the emperor faced
04:47when he decided to make the Congress in Vienna
04:49was that his population was completely impoverished
04:52after the years of war.
04:54So he feared that he would organize all these glamorous parties
04:58and his court wouldn't come
04:59because they didn't know how to dress.
05:02So he decided to give all his dignitaries and employees
05:05beautiful civil uniforms.
05:07So the roots and the richness of the gold embroidery
05:11is always a symbol of rank, and this is easily to recognize.
05:14This is one of the most important men in the Empire wearing this,
05:17like the Lord Chamberlain, for instance.
05:20And red is a very important color.
05:23So red was reserved for the nobility.
05:25And the children's uniform are also in red
05:29because this is the uniform of a page.
05:31The pages were of young members of the Austrian nobility,
05:34and they made services at the Congress as well.
05:36These extravagant costumes really mattered in an age
05:43when the pomp of power was the expression of its plenitude.
05:48Francis and Metnik were using bling to promote the dynasty.
05:53Of all the VIPs who attended Europe's greatest summit,
05:59its biggest star was Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
06:03The true liberator of Europe,
06:05he and his army had fought all the way from Moscow to Paris
06:08to destroy Napoleon.
06:10Now Alexander wanted Russia, not Austria,
06:14to be the dominant power.
06:16And only one thing stood in their way,
06:18Metnik and the House of Habsburg.
06:22All politics, said the French Prime Minister at the Congress of Vienna,
06:36is women.
06:38And the struggle between Austria and Russia,
06:41Metnik versus Tsar Alexander,
06:43was played out not only in the corridors of power,
06:46but also in the bedrooms of two extraordinary aristocratic megavamps.
06:53And it happened that they lived at the top of the same staircase.
07:02In one apartment was Princess Katia Bagration,
07:06beautiful and promiscuous.
07:08she had been Metnik's mistress.
07:11Now she was the Tsars.
07:13She was known as the naked angel for her see-through dresses.
07:17In another apartment was Vilhelmina Duchesse de Saint-Gaune,
07:22a highly intelligent and formidable semi-royal heiress.
07:26Metnik was passionately in love with her,
07:29but she took other lovers and her infidelities drove him mad.
07:33Each day, Tsar Alexander visited Katia and Metnik visited Saigon.
07:40But there was a problem.
07:42Their apartments were on the same landing.
07:49One day, Tsar Alexander decided to hit Metnik where it would hurt.
07:54That day, instead of turning right to visit Princess Katia,
07:59he turned left to visit Duchess Vilhelmina.
08:03The police agents reported to Metnik
08:06that the Tsar spent many hours with the Duchess.
08:10Vienna was fascinated.
08:13Metnik was distraught and infuriated.
08:17He even talked of challenging the Tsar to a duel.
08:20Instead, he sobbed at his desk in the Chancery.
08:24They could swap mistresses and carve up kingdoms.
08:29But in the end, they had to compromise and run Europe together.
08:43Nine months of political rivalry and social intrigue nearly wrecked the Congress.
08:48But finally, the treaty was ready to sign.
08:51I'm sitting in the chair of the Chancellor of Austria,
08:55and this was and is his Cabinet Office.
09:00In June 1815, in this building, the Congress of Vienna Treaty was finally signed.
09:09The map of Europe had been redrawn.
09:11Legitimate power, Austrian power, had been restored in Germany,
09:16in the Balkans, in Italy, in Hungary.
09:19More than that, from now on,
09:22Metnik and his so-called concert of great powers,
09:26a sort of early version of the UN Security Council,
09:29decided everything in Europe.
09:32Nicknamed the Coachmen of Europe,
09:37Metnik manipulated the continent through a series of mini-Congresses,
09:42crushing revolution wherever it reared its head.
09:47At home, he presided over a dreary stability enforced by his secret police.
09:53Shunning coffeehouse politics, the Viennese turned inwards
09:56and retreated into the dull and safe privacy of their own homes.
10:03The Viennese drank, ate and danced away the Metnik years.
10:07The calm, stability and mildly repressive conservatism of Prince Metnik's rule,
10:17characterised by the regular and reassuring waltzes of Johann Strauss
10:23and his family of composers,
10:26couldn't contain the forces of the age, nationalism and liberalism.
10:31And soon, it was clear that they were seething dangerously just beneath the surface.
10:41In 1835, Emperor Francis died
10:44and he was succeeded by his eldest son, Ferdinand,
10:48who unfortunately suffered from a speech impediment,
10:52epilepsy and water on the brain.
10:55Metnik remained in charge,
10:57but now the sovereign was ailing,
11:00the minister was geriatric,
11:02the regime was sclerotic.
11:04It was all ripe for revolution.
11:14Across Europe, students and radicals seethed with exciting liberal ideas
11:20to destroy Metnik's absolutist regime.
11:22In Vienna, while the old danced, the young dreamed and plotted.
11:31In February 1848, revolutions broke out in Italy, then in Paris,
11:37and then they spread to Vienna.
11:40The Habsburgs panicked, they needed a scapegoat,
11:44and they blamed Prince Metnik.
11:47After almost 40 years in power,
11:52Metnik was forced to resign.
11:54He fled Vienna.
12:00In October, events took a violent turn.
12:04After the shooting of some demonstrators,
12:06the revolutionaries demanded revenge.
12:09The Minister of War was lynched.
12:12The mob strung him up from a lamppost.
12:14The following dawn,
12:16a fleet of imperial black carriages emerged from the Habsburgs' main residence,
12:27the Hofburg Palace.
12:29The mob let them pass.
12:31They fled the capital.
12:34As soon as the Habsburgs were away from revolution-stricken Vienna,
12:38they got their courage back, and they planned their revenge.
12:43They ordered their army to take Vienna back.
12:47And on the 28th of October, a huge Habsburg army,
12:51fortified by Croatian and Montenegrins from the Balkans,
12:55attacked the city.
12:57First, they bombarded it for several hours.
13:00And then, street by street, barricade by barricade,
13:02they fought their way in.
13:05The Croatians and Montenegrins burst into people's houses,
13:08murdering and torturing and plundering.
13:11By the end of the day,
13:13Vienna was back in the fief of the Habsburgs.
13:17The revolution was over.
13:18But it had shaken the dynasty to its core,
13:23and if it was to have a future, young blood was required.
13:30That future was the Emperor Ferdinand's nephew, France Joseph.
13:38His mother, the Arch Duchess Sophie,
13:42described as the only man in the House of Habsburg,
13:44had dedicated her life to preparing young France for power.
13:49Now she schemed to replace Emperor Ferdinand with her son.
13:57In December, at a hastily arranged abdication ceremony,
14:02Ferdinand did go,
14:04and into his place stepped the handsome 18-year-old France Joseph.
14:08From the moment of his accession,
14:14France Joseph always appeared in uniform.
14:17He saw himself as the supreme warlord,
14:20an autocrat presiding with military might over a polyglot empire.
14:26But the empire had almost been torn apart by revolution.
14:30It had to be reconquered, province by province.
14:34This is the Rudetsky March that became the anthem of the reconquest of the Habsburg Empire.
14:42Named after Field Marshal Rudetsky, who retook Italy.
14:46But things weren't going well in Hungary.
14:49There, the revolutionaries had defeated the Habsburg Empire.
14:52In desperation, the young Emperor France Joseph had to travel to Russia,
14:58to kneel in front of Tsar Nicholas I,
15:02the arrogant Russian emperor,
15:04who more than anyone else resembles our own President Putin of today.
15:08He begged him for help,
15:10and the Tsar sent 200,000 men to retake Hungary.
15:15France Joseph never got over the humiliation.
15:17He never forgave the Romanov who'd saved him.
15:24But he got his revenge.
15:26In 1853, Britain and France launched the Crimean War against Russia.
15:32France Joseph betrayed Nicholas and backed Britain and France,
15:36though he managed to keep out of the war.
15:38Facing defeat, Nicholas died, cursing France Joseph for his ingratitude.
15:43All the while, France Joseph's hold on his unruly empire was weakening.
15:49To the west, the Italians loathed their Habsburg masters,
15:53and in 1859, they rose again.
15:56The Italians had a big backer, France,
16:01now ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the great emperor.
16:06When France Joseph was provoked into declaring war,
16:09he found himself facing a modern French army,
16:13commanded by Napoleon III himself.
16:16Fancying himself the military autocrat,
16:19France Joseph insisted on taking command himself.
16:23It was a disaster.
16:25The Austrians were defeated, Italy was lost,
16:28and France Joseph never took command again.
16:31Defeat destroyed France Joseph's dream of being a military autocrat.
16:39Austria was now exposed, especially in Germany.
16:44For centuries, the Habsburgs had dominated Germany,
16:48which was still made up of many small kingdoms and principalities.
16:51But now he faced a rising power there, Prussia.
16:57And the new Prussian prime minister saw an opportunity.
17:02This is France Joseph's office at the Hofburg,
17:06and it was from here that he was unfortunate enough
17:09to face the supreme politician of his age,
17:13Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia,
17:16who was determined to unify Germany under his own king.
17:22In 1866, he provoked France Joseph into war,
17:28and the Austrians were soundly defeated at the Battle of Königsgratz.
17:33Within four years, Bismarck had got his way.
17:37The king of Prussia became the emperor of a new power, Germany.
17:41But Bismarck was too clever to destroy Austria.
17:46Instead, he made France Joseph into his ally.
17:50But from now on, the Habsburgs were very much the junior partner.
17:59France Joseph had been defeated in Italy and in Germany,
18:04and now the Hungarians were threatening a revolt again.
18:07The emperor's family proved as difficult to rule as his empire.
18:12The problems went back to his marriage in 1854,
18:15which started like a fairy tale.
18:18France Joseph was the most eligible bachelor in Europe,
18:22and his domineering mother, Archduchess Sophie,
18:25decided he had to marry and soon.
18:28She herself was a Bavarian princess,
18:31and so now she introduced him to two sisters
18:34from her own Bavarian royal family.
18:38He was meant to like the older sister,
18:41but, in fact, he fell immediately in love with the younger one.
18:45She was 15, her name was Elizabeth,
18:48but everyone called her Sisi.
18:53Within two days of meeting, they were engaged.
18:56The following year, in 1854, they were married.
19:00The whole of Europe was captivated.
19:03This is the marital bedchamber of France Joseph and Empress Sisi,
19:19and this is where he brought her in 1854.
19:22It's just been redecorated to be exactly as it was then.
19:27And one can feel the stuffiness and the formality
19:30that she found so difficult to bear.
19:34These two portraits tell you pretty much all you need to know about them at this stage.
19:39France Joseph is dutiful, plodding, dull,
19:42and lives for duty, Catholicism and the monarchy.
19:48She's wild, beautiful, fascinating and self-obsessed.
19:53She grows her hair all the way down to her waist and pleases only herself.
19:58But she did have to deal with her mother-in-law,
20:02the domineering and ever-interfering Archduchess Sophie,
20:06who really was the royal mother-in-law from Imperial Habsburg Hell.
20:10Sisi gave birth to a daughter, Gisela, and then a son, the heir, Crown Prince Rudolph,
20:20seen here sitting on her lap.
20:23Sisi's mother-in-law, Sophie, on the right, forbade Sisi from raising her children.
20:30She said she was too immature.
20:32Sophie took charge instead.
20:35Feeling her life was no longer her own,
20:37Sisi then turned to the one thing she could control, her body.
20:43Olivia Lickscheidl has researched Sisi's life,
20:47and I'm meeting her in Sisi's dressing room at the Hofburg Palace,
20:51which, unusually for the time, was also her gym.
20:55So, we are here in her dressing and gymnastic room, and she made exercises here to stay slim, because she was famous for her figure.
21:06She was very tall, very slim.
21:08Around her waist she had 51 centimeters.
21:1151 centimeters, that's amazing.
21:13It's really extreme, but Sisi was extreme in everything.
21:16So, what kind of exercises did she do on this machine?
21:18You must imagine that Sisi was completely dressed and finished with the hairstyle, with everything.
21:25And then she was hanging here and doing some exercises, taking her legs in front of her, moving them to the left, to the right, to make an exercise for her muscles for the abdomen.
21:36So, what did the courtiers think when they came in here and found their empress hanging upside down with her dress on and her hair hanging down?
21:44They were shocked. They were really shocked.
21:46You find lots of sentences in some diaries or something where people said,
21:52Oh my God, I didn't know how to behave when I came in and she was doing exercises.
21:57Do you think she had physical love affairs during her marriage to Franz Josef?
22:01I think not. I think she never had a love affair. I think that she was not interested really in sex, but only in her beauty.
22:09I would compare her to women who go to the gym every day and want to be looked at, but not to be touched.
22:19Sisi didn't just change her own shape, she also changed the shape of the state itself.
22:24She became a great champion of the Hungarians, especially through her close friendship with a dashing former revolutionary named Count Andrasi.
22:35He argued that the Hungarians must become equal partners with the Austrians in the empire.
22:43And only she could have persuaded Franz Josef.
22:46And in 1867, he created the new dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
22:57This new state was to be called the K und K.
23:01The Kaiserlich und Königlich.
23:04The imperial and royal monarchy.
23:06The Viennese called it by another name, the empire under notice.
23:12And the emperor was under notice too.
23:14Two decades after the 1848 revolution, he finally caved in to demands for a constitution.
23:21And this, a new parliament.
23:23In a startling declaration of innovation and confidence in the future, Franz Josef then tore down the old city walls which enclosed the inner city.
23:35And ordered the construction of a magnificent new boulevard.
23:40The Ringstrasse.
23:41Sit on tram number one or two and you can see the dazzling grand new buildings that were built along the Ringstrasse at almost breakneck speed.
23:56The Rathaus, Vienna's new town hall.
24:00The Opera House, the home of the world's greatest music, played by the world's greatest orchestras.
24:06And the Burg Theatre, where the emperor was often seen alone in the imperial box.
24:13Although it turned out, he had his reasons.
24:16By now, Cece had abandoned Franz Josef.
24:20Earlier, she had intervened to rescue Crown Prince Rudolph from a cruel tutor.
24:26But she then concentrated on herself, leaving the sensitive boy to his own devices.
24:31She indulged in endless romantic travels, but on her occasional visits home, Cece did try to help her husband find love.
24:43The emperor had had mistresses for decades, but he craved companionship.
24:49It was at the Burg Theatre that Cece noticed its young star, the beautiful but unhappily married, Katharina Schrat.
24:56Katharina's biggest fan was the emperor himself, Franz Josef, who attended every performance.
25:04He was lonely and his wife, the Empress Cece, now took pity on the poor emperor and tried to provide him with some companionship.
25:14She went to the theatre, she befriended Katharina, she invited her to the Hofburg and she set up the couple.
25:20The affair started and lasted for almost 20 years.
25:28But you couldn't imagine more dysfunctional parents than the imperial couple.
25:33The glacially detached Franz Josef and the narcissistic absentee Empress.
25:38No wonder their relationship with their son, Crown Prince Rudolf, became so troubled.
25:46I've come to Meyerling, just outside Vienna, the fateful destination for this tormented yet talented young man.
25:56As he grew up, he became an avowed liberal and he wrote articles for Jewish owned newspapers.
26:06His father was appalled by these liberal views and by his private life.
26:12He'd married a Belgian princess and had a daughter, but the love of his life was a beautiful courtesan.
26:17And then he embarked on a wildly pre-apic series of sexual escapades, in which finally he contracted syphilis, which was then fatal.
26:29As he approached his 30th birthday, he began to feel that both himself and the Empire were doomed.
26:38Then, in the autumn of 1888, Rudolf was introduced to the 17-year-old Baroness Marie Veturer.
26:52She became infatuated with him.
26:55For months, Rudolf had been asking his many mistresses if they would die with him in a suicide pact.
27:03All had said thanks, but no thanks.
27:08Until Marie, she agreed.
27:18On the 27th of January, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf saw his father, the Emperor, for the last time.
27:25He was very agitated.
27:26The next day, a courtier collected the teenage girl, Baroness Marie Veturer, from her mother's house and brought her to Rudolf.
27:36And the two secretly travelled out to Myerling, Rudolf's hunting lodge outside Vienna.
27:44On the night of the 29th, they talked in serious tones all night.
27:48At six in the morning, Rudolf shot Marie and laid her out in the bed.
27:58He then turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head, blowing off the side of his face.
28:05This altar stands on the site of the bedroom at the hunting lodge, built in memory of the lovers' deaths.
28:21Around noon, on that bleak January day, the Emperor and Empress were told the tragic news.
28:28The roofless Habsburg instinct to survive quickly overcame their grief.
28:35The real victim of Myerling was Marie.
28:39The fact that the Crown Prince had seduced and murdered a 17-year-old girl was literally unspeakable.
28:47Franz Joseph ordered her to be expunged from the record.
28:51In the dead of night, Marie's body was taken by coach down this road, fully dressed and held upright between her two uncles.
29:03Just a few miles from Myerling, she was buried in a cheap wooden coffin in the corner of this cemetery.
29:10The official version of Rudolf's death made no mention of Marie.
29:14Instead, the post-mortem stated that his death was not suicide, but the result of morbid nervous exhaustion.
29:22In spring 1889, Marie was discreetly reburied in this grave by her grieving family.
29:29And then the whole incident was never mentioned again.
29:38Franz Joseph soldiered on like the military man he was, driven by duty.
29:45For once, Cece rose to the occasion and sustained Franz Joseph in his grief.
29:51In a little side chapel at Myerling can be found a statue of the Madonna donated by the Empress,
29:58her heart pierced by a dagger of anguish.
30:02This statue was to prove strangely prophetic.
30:06On the 10th of September 1898, Empress Cece was walking beside Lake Geneva when she was stabbed in the chest by an anarchist with a sharpened file.
30:18So sharp was it that she didn't realise she'd been stabbed at all and walked on before she collapsed and died.
30:25Poor Franz Joseph had lost his son and now his wife.
30:31By 1900, Franz Joseph was 70 years old.
30:41To some, he was a beacon of continuity.
30:45To others, the relic of an obsolescent past.
30:48But while the Empress stood still, Vienna moved on.
30:57The influx of immigrants from around the empire, especially Czechs and Jews, combined to create a febrile, if doom-laden, explosion of creativity.
31:08Its crowning achievement was the art and architecture of the so-called secession movement.
31:17The secessionists rejected Vienna's dull conservative past and proclaimed their mission with this motto.
31:26For every age, it's art.
31:29To every art, it's freedom.
31:32And it certainly was free.
31:33Gustav Klimt's The Kiss is an uninhibited celebration of eroticism.
31:42Egon Schiller's The Embrace shocked stuffy Viennese.
31:49To some, like Franz Joseph and his courtiers, this seemed like pornography.
31:55But to us, this is an exciting celebration, the beginning of the new modern age.
32:02No one so personified the creativity, the freedom, the permissiveness of early 1900s Vienna than the amorous life of the woman celebrated in this song by Tom Lehrer, Alma Schindler.
32:19The loveliest girl in Vienna was Alma the smartest as well.
32:26Once you picked her up on your antenna, you'd never be free of her spell.
32:32She was herself a talented artist and composer and musician, but she was also the wife, the mistress, the femme fatale, the temptress and the muse of five of the geniuses of this time.
32:46Her first kiss was with the artist Gustav Klimt.
32:52She then married the composer Gustav Mahler, and on his death, she married Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement.
33:01And then, lastly, came Oskar Kokoschka, the artist who often put her in his paintings, and Franz Werfow, the novelist and author of The Song of Bernadette.
33:12What a roster of geniuses. She was truly the queen, the muse of an entire age, and, of course, of Vienna.
33:22The swans who get Gustav and Walter, you never did falter with Gustav and Walter and Franz.
33:29Gustav and Walter and Franz and many others helped give birth to the modernist movement.
33:45Their work was not only a rejection of the past, but a quest to explore the unconscious and to reveal the primal and sexual drives that another immigrant to Vienna was writing about at the time.
33:56Sigmund Freud.
33:59Freud was from a Jewish family.
34:02He married, he had children, and he moved here in 1891.
34:06After qualifying as a doctor, he started to treat men and women who were suffering from the anxiety in those days known as hysteria.
34:15And as he did that, he started to create a new way of looking at the human mind.
34:23He called it psychoanalysis.
34:25This is Dr Freud's waiting room.
34:33When patients went into the consulting room, they lay on a couch, and he sat chain-smoking cigars and let them talk.
34:40He believed all human behaviour was partly founded on the subconscious, that reservoir of hidden instincts and memories, and the drive towards sexuality and death.
34:57These ideas would change the world and our very understanding of ourselves.
35:10Freud's genius was quintessentially Viennese.
35:13He was inspired by its obsession with sex and death and art, and its combination of the stilted formality of the Habsburg monarchy and court, his own background of Jewish angst, and its unique atmosphere of unbridled sexual libertinism.
35:34Vienna created Freud and his patients.
35:41Freud, in some ways, typified the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived in Vienna in the late 19th century.
35:48But as well as transforming the city, this bubbling cauldron of ethnicities also brought trouble.
35:56The backlash against immigrants is personified by one man, Karl Luger, who was mayor of Vienna.
36:04For 13 years, from 1897 to 1910.
36:08Luger created not only modern ultra-German nationalism, but also modern antisemitism with all its vicious tropes.
36:18He blamed the Jews for all the evils of modernity, science, liberalism, decadent art, capitalism itself.
36:26And all of these things, he said, tainted the purity of the German nation.
36:34France Joseph didn't like this rabble-rousing, but naturally, he did nothing about it.
36:42And for the Jews of Vienna, many began to feel that they could never be safe in Europe.
36:47Luger unleashed some of the most evil forces that shook and shamed the 20th century.
36:58And that dark influence reached a younger generation.
37:02And among them was a young Austrian painter of postcards, then living in Vienna, who was inspired by Luger.
37:10His name was Adolf Hitler.
37:13In 1908, the 19-year-old Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna to pursue his dream of becoming a raffish art student in the city of art.
37:35At first, he loved Vienna.
37:40He walked along the Ringstrasse and painted its grand buildings like the Opera House,
37:46where he loved to listen not only to the Germanic Wagner, but also the Jewish Mahler.
37:53But above all, he admired the German nationalism and the strident antisemitism of the mayor Karl Luger.
38:00And he disdained the weak, obsolescent figure of the emperor, whom he saw daily riding through the city in his carriage.
38:10He loathed his cosmopolitan and shambolic Habsburg empire.
38:16Now, he was rejected, first by the artist's school and then by the architect's school.
38:22He became bitter and his money began to run out.
38:25Hitler was reduced to living at this homeless men's shelter and he spent three years here, which he remembered as the saddest and most humiliating time of his life.
38:45But he spent many hours studying and reading in its library.
38:51And despite the fact that many of his friends and the art dealers who bought his postcards were Jewish,
38:57he began to ask himself why was it that he, as a young German artist in a great German city, had failed so miserably,
39:05while so many Jews and Czechs and Slavs and their filthy, decadent art were thriving.
39:14It took the trauma of World War I to make Hitler into Hitler, but he never forgave Vienna.
39:22Adolf Hitler wasn't the only future dictator who stalked Vienna streets.
39:38While Hitler was in Vienna, a 30-something revolutionary communist arrived from the Russian Empire to study here.
39:46He was Georgian. His name was Joseph Jugashvili. His friends called Nkoba.
39:54And while he was here in Vienna, he adopted a new name, Man of Steel, Stalin.
40:01Stalin's factional leader, Vladimir Lenin, had sent him to Vienna to study the big question here, the issue of nationalities.
40:11And he arranged for him to stay right here with some noble friends of Lenin's.
40:19They're rich people, said Lenin. That's good.
40:22When Stalin had written his article, Marxism and the National Question,
40:27it helped him design the structure of the multinational Soviet Union.
40:41Stalin's apartment was right round the corner from the Schoenbrunn Palace.
40:46And every day, in between working on his new article and flirting with pretty young revolutionaries,
40:52he would come and walk around these gardens.
40:55Each day, both Hitler and Stalin would see Franz Joseph the Emperor,
41:00driving his carriage from his home here at Schoenbrunn to his office in the Hofburg.
41:05Both were fascinated by Habsburg history, both disdained its obsolescence.
41:12Sadly for Europe, they were the future, Hitler and Stalin.
41:17And 30 years later, both would take Vienna,
41:21and together they would fight the most savage conflict in all of human history.
41:261908, the year Hitler moved to Vienna, was the Diamond Jubilee year.
41:37Franz Joseph had ruled for 60 long years.
41:42Emperor Franz Joseph just lived on and on and on.
41:47But the impatient heir to the throne was the Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand,
41:51who lived here at the Belvedere Palace, where he set up a sort of shadow government in waiting.
41:58His relations with Franz Joseph were frosty,
42:02because he'd married a commoner, Sophie Ciotek, for love,
42:06and the Emperor refused to give her the title arch-duchess
42:10or to let their children succeed to the throne.
42:13Yet Franz Ferdinand was intelligent and imaginative.
42:16Instead of fighting wars against the Slavs, the Russians or the Serbs,
42:22he wanted to set up a Slavic kingdom within the monarchy,
42:27a sort of United States of Austria.
42:30But while Franz Ferdinand dreamed of reforming the monarchy,
42:34the little kingdom of Serbia had big ideas of its own.
42:38Its government was infiltrated by a secret organisation
42:41of ultra-nationalists called the Black Hand,
42:45hell-bent on creating a greater Serbia through war with Austria.
42:51In the summer of 1914, the Black Hand dispatched a cell
42:55of nationalist teenage terrorists into the province of Bosnia,
43:00which had recently been annexed by the Habsburgs.
43:02They had a mission and a target in the capital, Sarajevo.
43:07On the 28th of June, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie,
43:12arrived in the city for an official visit.
43:14Despite warnings of terrorism,
43:16the arch-duke insisted on riding in an open-topped car
43:20so he could wave to the crowds that line the streets.
43:23The car is on display at Vienna's military museum,
43:27and I'm here to talk to its director, Dr Christian Ortner,
43:30about what happened on that fateful day.
43:32From the train station, they took a car they were driving in a convoy
43:37and heading to the town hall of Sarajevo.
43:40And on their way, somebody tried to kill them with a hand grenade.
43:44But the hand grenade did not hit the original car we can see here,
43:48but it hit the next car.
43:52After the failed bomb attack,
43:54the arch-duke's driver took a wrong turn and stalled the engine.
43:57At the very spot where another black-hand assassin,
44:0219-year-old Gavrilo Princip, was waiting.
44:06He fired two shots.
44:09The first shot, we can see it here directly,
44:12hit Sophie and you became unconscious immediately.
44:15And by falling down, she gave clear way to the throat of Franz Ferdinand
44:19and Gavrilo Princip shot his second shot.
44:23The second shot hit the crown prince here in the Arteria.
44:27The car was heading immediately to the palace
44:30because they knew there was a doctor.
44:32And Franz Ferdinand's uniform was very, very tight,
44:35so the blood did not go out like this.
44:37It went down to the stomach area.
44:39And the doctor cut off the uniform in the wrong place.
44:42And exactly at this time, the Duchess was already dead.
44:45She died of internal bleedings.
44:48And Franz Ferdinand exactly died by drowning by his own blood.
44:59The moment the news of the murder reached Vienna.
45:03The Austrian leadership, particularly the war-crazed,
45:06trigger-happy chief of staff, were convinced
45:09the Serbian government was behind it
45:11and that Serbia must be crushed by war.
45:15And it was decided to send an extremely harsh ultimatum
45:19that would provide a pretext.
45:23After Germany agreed to give Franz Joseph their unquestioning support,
45:28Austria could do what it liked.
45:30And this was an extremely reckless move
45:33because Serbia was allied to Russia
45:35and Russia was allied to France and France to Britain.
45:38After Serbia's reply to the ultimatum was, of course, deemed unsatisfactory,
45:45Austria drafted this telegram.
45:49The royal Serbian government, not having answered in a satisfactory manner
45:54the note of July 23rd, 1940,
45:57considers herself, henceforward, in a state of war with Serbia.
46:01Now, this had no legal power without the signature of one little old man.
46:10And there it is.
46:12The little spidery signature of a man of 84 is the signature that launched the First World War,
46:18in which something like 20 million people perished.
46:21At the start of the Great War, the daily commute to the Hofburg proved too much, particularly during the winter,
46:37so the old emperor decided to work from here, at the Schoenbrem Palace instead.
46:41In the winter of 1916, the old emperor started to fail.
46:49He was now 86, and yet he still got up every day and went the small distance to his desk to work.
46:55On the 20th of November, he started to get worse.
46:59He went to bed and said his prayers and insisted on being awoken at 3.30am to start work again.
47:07There's plenty to be done, he said.
47:09But in the early hours, Franz Josef died.
47:12As Franz Josef's body was laid to rest, millions of Austrian soldiers were being slaughtered by the Russians on the Eastern Front.
47:27Among the funeral entourage walked the next emperor, Franz Josef's great-nephew, Karl or Charles.
47:35He came to power at the moment of crisis.
47:38Austria was losing control of the war it had started.
47:43Karl attempted to broker peace, but ended up alienating his German allies.
47:49While the emperor and his wife sat out the rest of the war, redecorating Schoenbrem Palace,
47:55the liberals, socialists and nationalists planned revolution.
48:00When the Germans collapsed in November 1918, the Habsburg monarchy went down with them.
48:06Karl and his family were driven out of Vienna.
48:10In exile in Switzerland, Karl plotted his return until his early death in 1922.
48:20In the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious Western allies carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire into five new independent countries.
48:29Vienna became the monumental and palatial capital of a tiny republic named Austria.
48:36German pride had been deeply dented by the defeat in the Great War.
48:43But from the ashes, a new leader emerged, promising to make the German people great once again.
48:49Adolf Hitler rose to power at least partly fuelled by his experiences of Vienna and the ideology of Karl Luger.
48:59But also by shameless pseudo-history, vicious anti-Semitism and intolerant ultra-nationalism.
49:06That together, with violence and thuggery, formed his own brand of fascism.
49:14Prince Bettenig had directed the affairs of Europe from this office.
49:19But now in the 1930s, the Austrian Chancellor ran a tiny, insignificant country with a terrifying threat to the North West.
49:27In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power in Germany.
49:34And from the very beginning of his career, Hitler, who'd spent so much time in Vienna and was Austrian,
49:40had insisted that Germany must swallow Austria.
49:45And if the Austrian Chancellors wouldn't give it to him, then he would take it.
49:49The Chancellor was an authoritarian Catholic conservative named Dr Kurt von Schuschnik.
49:59On 12 February 1938, Schuschnik arrived at Hitler's mountain lair in Bavaria.
50:07For five hours, he received a spittle-flecked tirade from Hitler,
50:13demanding that he undermine Austrian independence.
50:16Schuschnik tried to resist.
50:19Hitler threatened him.
50:20Don't you realise that in half an hour, I could blow your defences to smithereens?
50:25There'd be blood, and that would be on your shoulders.
50:28Schuschnik almost wept.
50:31By the time he returned to the Chancellory here, he was a broken man.
50:36And in effect, Austria was doomed.
50:39In a final act of desperation, on 9 March 1938, Schuschnik announced a referendum to let the Austrian people decide if they wanted to be a part of Hitler's Germany.
50:57Hitler was incensed.
50:58If the Austrians voted no, his justification for invasion would be blown apart.
51:06On 12 March 1938, he ordered German troops to cross the border into Austria.
51:12This was frightening news for the Jews of Vienna.
51:17Their leading family was the banking dynasty, the Rothschilds, who had been made barons of the Austrian Empire as long ago as the 1820s.
51:26This is one of their many palaces in the city.
51:31Now it's the Brazilian embassy.
51:33They felt they were Viennese.
51:35They felt they belonged.
51:37And now they were about to discover that they didn't.
51:45One of the Austrian Rothschilds was a relative of mine.
51:49Clarice Siebeck Montefiore was married to Baron Alphonse de Rothschild.
51:54And as the German troops crossed the borders, they learned from a friend in the government that the Nazis had collected a list of eminent Jews to be arrested.
52:06Quickly, they piled their belongings into a fleet of cars and escaped across the border.
52:12They weren't the only ones.
52:14Sigmund Freud also got out of Vienna.
52:17He wrote in his diary,
52:18Austria is finished.
52:21And he was right.
52:22This was the death of cosmopolitan Vienna.
52:25Two days after entering the country,
52:28Adolf Hitler drove to the seat of Habsburg power.
52:32The Neuhofburg.
52:353 days after entering the country, Adolf Hitler drove to the seat of Habsburg power, the Neuhofburg.
52:48Received by delirious crowds, he addressed the Viennese from the balcony.
53:05As the Nazis terrorised Vienna's Jews, the better off tried to leave, but it would cost them everything they had.
53:20Hitler sent down to Vienna his SS Jewish expert.
53:25His name was Adolf Eichmann, and he came to extort the wealth of the departing Jews.
53:32Perversely, he set up his headquarters in the biggest of the Rothschild palaces in the city.
53:39But he didn't stay long in Vienna.
53:43He was recalled when World War II began to Berlin to mastermind a much bigger operation,
53:51the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
54:02Starting in 1941, the Jews of Vienna were deported to the ghettos and death camps set up by the Nazis in the east.
54:21Around 65,000 of them were murdered.
54:26And their fates are marked by these plaques around the city.
54:31And it just seems amazing that this terrible thing ever happened in the most civilised city in Europe.
54:391945, the Allies were pushing the Nazis back on the western and eastern fronts.
54:54Stalin's Russia had seen the harshest fighting, and now they marched on Vienna.
55:00The street fighting for Vienna was ferocious.
55:04The climax of the battle for the city was the storming of the Hofburg.
55:09Joseph Stalin first came to Vienna as a penniless revolutionary.
55:15Now he was the most powerful man in the world, the supreme warlord,
55:20who liberated the city in April 1945.
55:25This monument is dedicated to the unknown soldier.
55:28It congratulates the Soviet army for the liberation of Vienna,
55:32and it's signed by their triumphant dictator, Stalin.
55:37Stalin was familiar with many of the city's treasures,
55:40and now he set about looting Vienna for war reparations.
55:45Its once cosmopolitan culture was pillaged and devastated.
55:50But within weeks, the French, Americans and British arrived
55:54and placed Vienna under full power control.
56:03After the war, Stalin wanted to grab as much of Eastern Europe as he could,
56:08an empire bigger than the Tsars had ever dreamed of.
56:12He petitioned Germany, but that was because Germany had been a threat
56:16in two world wars.
56:19Provided Austria was separate from Germany,
56:21he was happy to let Vienna go.
56:24He didn't try and keep it.
56:26Even though he'd been here as a young revolutionary,
56:29it meant nothing to him.
56:31In 1955, two years after Stalin's death,
56:42the four powers agreed to finally withdraw from Austria.
56:46The Austrian state treaty was signed at the Belvedere Palace,
56:51once the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
56:54and announced to cheering crowds from this balcony.
57:04After centuries of Habsburg absolutism,
57:07seven years of Hitler's dictatorship,
57:10ten years of Allied rule,
57:12Austria became an independent democratic republic,
57:15and for decades a member of the European community.
57:20But the family who ruled Austria for almost a millennia
57:24remained politically active.
57:26Otto Habsburg, the boy who walked beside the last emperor
57:30at Franz Joseph's funeral, became a European MP.
57:35The Habsburgs, through the Holy Roman Empire,
57:38and then their monarchy,
57:40had struggled and failed to rule a multinational state.
57:45Today, the European community shares some of those aspirations.
57:51But the Habsburgs' real legacy was their capital.
57:54Vienna helped give birth to the modern age,
57:57but also became the laboratory of its destruction.
58:03Today, Vienna is the magnificent capital of a small country.
58:08Imperial city no more.
58:11It will always be the capital of the empire of the mind.
58:23What happened to Austria's imperial city next?
58:27Find out more about the life, times and language of Vienna
58:33by heading to bbc.co.uk forward slash Vienna
58:40and follow the links to the Open University.
58:48Sir Mortimer Wheeler considers some of the outstanding features
58:52of the Roman Empire, the grandeur that was Rome,
58:55available to watch as a box set on BBC iPlayer now.
58:59Coming up on BBC Four, the pursuit of an ideal in beauty.
59:03The fairytale castles of King Ludwig II with Dan Cruickshank next.
59:08Producers of King Ludwig II
59:11Next
59:14We are going to be the rest of the Basic특ers
59:18Power Rangers
59:19West
59:19اء
59:21Nestle
59:22A
59:24Field
59:25Cool
59:27모ë“
59:28Moh
Recommended
58:23
|
Up next
58:41
58:33
54:04
50:24
44:00
1:10:41
48:20
49:00
1:19:02
45:44
44:00
48:09
47:23
59:01
59:13
58:58
58:45
46:56