In Europe

and the working-class neighbourhoods that lay beyond. And, just as in Paris, the broad arterial had an important military function as well: in the event of rioting, troops could be brought in quickly everywhere. Barracks were built at strategic locations, as well as an impressive arsenal complex.
    Alongside Berlin, Vienna was the fastest-growing metropolis on the continent. But at the same time it was a city stuck in the past. Telephones and elevators were a rarity, most clothing was still sewn by hand and,until 1918, typewriters were banned from government offices. Around the turn of the century more than half the population lived from the proceeds of their small businesses, which they bitterly defended against outside competition. Until 1900, department stores were banned in Vienna.
    Unlike Berlin, Vienna had always been a city of conspicuous consumption, a hub where the aristocrats lived lavishly from the revenues of their estates and other holdings. Surrounding them was an enormous network of services: tailors, cobblers, doormen, architects, doctors, psychiatrists, artists and, lest we forget, musicians, actors and the
Süsse Madel
. But Vienna, unlike London or Berlin, never became a dynamic industrial or financial centre.
    Here too arose a city with a great internal contradiction: due to the great dependency on the power of the emperor and the aristocracy, the atmosphere was, on the one hand, very conservative and formal; on the other hand, rationality and intellect reigned supreme, for this was also the locus of all the empire's talent.
    The city's structure was just as ambiguous as all other facets of Viennese life. It did its utmost to generate awe for the emperor's power, and more than that: the layout of the city's streets actually formed a direct reflection of imperial order. At the same time, for many young Viennese, the Ring was
the
symbol of theatrical falsehood, a Potemkin project full of obscurantism and counterfeit history, the product of stage designers who wanted everyone to think that Vienna was populated only by nobility, and by no one else.
    Somewhere I saw a group portrait by the painter Theo Zasche, painted in 1908 and showing all of Vienna's prominent citizens on the Sirk corner of the Ring, the haunt of the elite across from the Opera – what the pamphleteer Karl Kraus called the ‘cosmic intersection’ of Vienna. I see ‘Direktor Gustav Mahler’ walking along, ‘Hofoperund Kammersängerin Selma Kurtz’ turning to look over her shoulder, ‘Erherzog Eugen’ being greeted by ‘Fürst Max Egon Fürstenberg’, ‘Baron Oton Bourgoin’ put-putting past in an automobile, and so ‘all Vienna’ passes before my eyes.
    In one corner of the watercolour is a bright advertising pillar. It is one of the kiosks which, as people claimed later, camouflaged the entrancesto underground Vienna, the secret network of tunnels beneath the houses, the murky world where dozens of
Kanalstrotter
made a living by collecting old buttons and dropped coins. In the city above, no one even knew it was there.
    It is quiet in Vienna's U-Bahn. In early 1914, Robert Musil spoke of the Viennese tram as a ‘shimmering, rattling box … a machine in which a few hundred kilos of human beings are shaken back and forth, to make of them a future … A hundred years ago they sat in the post-chaise with just such expressions on their faces, and a hundred years from now God only knows what they will be up to, but as new people in the new machines of the future they will sit there in just this way.’
    I am in that future now, and I take a good look around me. To my right sits a chubby-cheeked lady wrapped in furs, wearing gold spectacles and a sort of brown turban by way of a hat. She looks to be in her fifties, but I can tell by her complexion that she's no older than thirty. Across from her sits her husband, grey coat, glum beard. In the seat in front of me is a man in a leather jacket and a thick woollen cap, his head bowed. This is how he averts his face to keep an eye on the world, for his twinkling eyes are sharp and observant, all the better to anticipate or ward off its blows.
    I have gone walking, taken the tram, visited the home of artist-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The Hundertwasser house looks like a brightly coloured Hobbit den, with bulging floors, trees growing out of the windows, naughty ornaments and a photograph of the architect himself in the 1960s, wild and completely naked, as befits an