In Europe

the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy had played a crucial role in Central and Eastern Europe. The Habsburgemperors had brought the southern German peoples back into the fold. They had driven the Ottoman Turks from the gates of Vienna. They had made it possible for Germans, Hungarians, Rumanians, Italians, Rhaetians, Serbs, Croatians, Poles, Slovenes, Slovaks, Czechs, Jews and Gypsies to live together in peace. Furthermore, they had launched a cultural counter-offensive in the near-oriental regions of the Balkans. There too, a Western administration and a workable system of law was imposed.
    After that the empire gradually creaked to a halt, it became a crazy quilt of nationalities bound together by an elderly emperor, Franz Josef I. ‘The emperor was an old man. He was the oldest emperor in the world,’ wrote Joseph Roth in
The Radetzky March
, his classic tale of that world's decline. ‘Death walked around him, in a circle, in a circle, and mowed and mowed. The field was already empty, only the emperor still stood there, waiting, like a forgotten silver haulm.’
    In the early twentieth century the empire was still seen as a super-power. With almost fifty million inhabitants in 1910, it was second in size only to Germany (sixty-five million). After that came Great Britain (forty-five million) and France (almost forty million). From just over 230,000 in 1801, the population of Vienna had increased to more than two million in 1910. Aristocrats from all over the empire gathered there with all the coachmen, maids, carpenters, whores and lackeys they needed for a comfortable life. Impoverished farmers also came pouring into the imperial capital, dreaming of a little prosperity and happiness. And to them were added tens of thousands of impoverished Jews, driven west by the pogroms in Russia, Poland and Galicia.
    Vienna was considered the Arcadia of the middle class, and authors such as Roth and Zweig would write about it later with profound nostalgia. But for those who did not belong to the moneyed classes, life was hard there. The housing shortage in Vienna was worse than anywhere else in Europe. In 1910, barely one per cent of all Viennese families had their own home, only seven per cent of the houses had a bathroom, and fewer than twenty-five per cent of them a toilet. There were many
Bettgeher
, people who rented, not a room, but merely a bed to sleep in. Countless citizens of Vienna spent their days coughing and nauseous, with tuberculosis and intestinal ailments from the city's filthy drinking water.
    ‘Today, long after the great storm has destroyed it, we know that that world of security was merely a castle in the air,’ Stefan Zweig wrote many years later. ‘Yet still, my parents inhabited it as though it were a house of stone.’ For him, as for most of his contemporaries, the sudden collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 was a disconcerting experience. Almost every Viennese writer has since puzzled over the question. How could it have been? How could the Germans have been so willing to bid farewell to the Hohenzollerns in 1918? How could life in Great Britain and France go on as usual? Why was it only in Austria that everything fell apart? And then Vienna: how could this symbol of the illustrious empire suddenly have become a monstrous fish floundering on a dry seabed?
    Along the Ringbahn, the entire history of European architecture is tipped out over unsuspecting passers-by. This was the ‘
via triumphalis
’ of Emperor Franz Josef and the liberal moneyed classes, the eternal Ring along which every self-respecting
flâneur
took his daily steps between the Kärntnerstrasse and the Schwarzenbergplatz, and along which today old ladies show off their fur coats as the trams go crawling past.
    The Ring was built around medieval Vienna in 1865, in the space freed when the city's old fortifications were torn down. A space 500 metres wide and 4 kilometres long was created and filled with hotels, the palaces of both old and new wealth, expensive apartments for the rich and huge public buildings: the parliament (neo-Hellenistic), the town hall (neo-Gothic) and the Burg theatre, the Royal Opera, the stock exchange and the university (neo-Renaissance).
    Here the old city was not torn down, as it was in Paris and Brussels, but set like a gem in a broad corona of new construction. Musty medieval Vienna, long immured in its city walls, was suddenly thrown open. The Ring served as an area of transition to the suburbs