Vienna 1908 Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities

Throughout the 20th century,

great cities have seduced and inspired us.

But sometimes, one city shines brighter than all the others.

Sometimes, one city defines an entire age.

In my opinion, there were a handful of moments

in the 20th century when, for some reason,

one particular city exploded into life.

When one city became a hub of new art and ideas,

that went on to influence the entire world.

This series tells the story of three exceptional cities

in three exceptional years.

Vienna in 1908.

Paris in 1928.

And New York in 1951.

Three cities, one century -

the century when so much changed.

And this episode is about Vienna

at the height of its legendary Golden Age in 1908.

This was the year Gustav Klimt painted his most famous picture

and Adolf Loos invented modern architecture.

When Sigmund Freud discovered the Oedipus Complex

and when a new generation took art and music

in an unsettling direction.

But 1908 was also the year that would set Vienna

and Europe on the road to destruction.

Vienna in 1908 was the crucible of the 20th century.

And it gave birth to the best and worst of the modern world -

its most beautiful dreams and its most catastrophic nightmares.

If you wanted to be an artist in 1908,

Vienna was a good place to come.

And at the beginning of that year,

one man made his own pilgrimage from the provinces.

He had with him a letter of introduction to a famous painter

who worked here at the Royal Opera House.

The letter was supposed to be the young man's ticket to success.

But things did not go quite to plan...

As he reached the threshold, his courage wavered.

He tried to overcome his nerves.

But, eventually, they overcame him.

And he fled, leaving his one artistic opportunity behind.

Later in life, that young man confessed

that things would have been so much easier

had he had the confidence to make

that introduction and to become an artist.

He was right. And it wouldn't only have been easier for him,

it would have been easier for millions of other people, too.

Because that young man's name was Adolf Hitler.

Vienna may not have helped Hitler become an artist,

but it did introduce him to the resentment and racism

that would inspire his monstrous ambitions.

And that's what I find so fascinating about Vienna in 1908.

In this city, art and politics,

dreams and nightmares,

creation and destruction,

were locked in a fatal embrace.

Not that anyone would have known it at the time...

At the beginning of the 20th century,

Vienna seemed to be a gilded city.

The grand capital of a 1,000-year-old Hapsburg Empire,

the largest and most ancient in Europe.

An empire that many believed would last for ever.

And in 1908, Vienna was busy celebrating.

For this was the year of the Emperor's Diamond Jubilee.

While the rest of Europe had shifted towards democracy,

the now doddering Franz Josef had ruled his Empire for 60 years.

To celebrate the Jubilee,

Vienna's art world staged a vast exhibition

that summed up the optimistic spirit of the times,

and its star attraction was a certain Gustav Klimt.

In 1908, Klimt was 45 years old

and despite his bohemian reputation,

he was now a staunch member of the establishment.

The 1908 Art Exhibition was Klimt's brainchild -

his way of sucking up to the Emperor yet further.

And at the show's opening he even overcame his usual shyness

to give a passionate, inspiring speech

about the Empire's artistic excellence.

But he thought nothing was more excellent about it than his own art.

He had a point.

For Klimt was about to reveal

some of the most irresistible paintings of his career.

Luxuriant portraits of the city's great beauties,

surrounded by a sparkling constellation of ornament.

Margarethe Wittgenstein, sister of the philosopher Ludwig.

Fritza Riedler, the wife of a wealthy engineer.

And this ravishing portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

But the most famous of them all,

and also the most revealing,

is surely this one - The Kiss.

No painting has done more to capture and bottle

the myth of Vienna's Golden Age than this one.

And you can see why.

It's beautiful, it's sexy and it seems to present its entire age

as an incandescent fantasy of love, of glamour and of romance.

And that's why it's become one of the most famous

and one of the most popular paintings in the world.

But I think everyone's got this painting wrong.

I think all of us have fallen for its own myth.

Just look closer. And don't look at him.

Look at her.

Her body is tensed uncomfortably,

one of her hands is trying to pull his away,

the other is scratching his back.

Her eyes are closed, her face is turned away from his.

And he... He is all over her.

Now, maybe I'm wrong,

but if that's a kiss,

it isn't very mutual.

So what are we to make of this ambiguous embrace?

I think it reveals what was really going on in Vienna in 1908.

Because, behind its serene surface,

violent forces were beginning to gather.

It was this tension that would give Vienna its singular creative energy,

and the best place to find that energy

was in the Viennese coffee house.

The coffee house has long been a Viennese institution.

At the turn of the century,

there were more than 1,000 of them in the city -

providing all classes with a place to drink,

think and set the world to rights.

But they'd never had such an extraordinary

clientele as they did in 1908.

If you had come here to the Cafe Central on any single day in 1908,

you would have seen some remarkable people.

Leon Trotsky, who was in exile from Russia,

used to play chess here.

Apparently, he still owes the place about £3.

Hitler, who was almost always on his own,

would pore over the free newspapers,

obsessed with international politics.

And back here, with a short black coffee

and a long brown cigar, sat Vienna's very own Dr Freud,

watching absolutely everybody.

The coffee house was also where rebellious thinkers

came together to argue about art and politics,

and to question Vienna's old-fashioned ways.

The vibrant atmosphere of the coffee house

led to some spectacular fallings out.

But it also produced a flurry of new, bold

and radical ideas.

And these ideas helped turn ancient Imperial Vienna

into the unlikely centre of a cultural revolution.

One of the most outspoken of the new young rebels

was a firebrand architect called Adolf Loos.

Loos was something of an outsider.

But he was talented, ambitious

and burning to make his mark on the city.

For Loos, Vienna had one pathological problem -

it was addicted to ornament.

To him, its grand interiors weren't beautiful, but dishonest -

covered in fake gold,

fake damask

and fake bronze.

And in 1908, he wrote a manifesto attacking it all

which he called Ornament And Crime.

"I have made the following observations

"and have announced them to the world

"The evolution of culture is synonymous with

"the removal of ornament.

"We have outgrown ornament.

"We have fought our way through to freedom from ornament.

"The ornament disease is recognised by the state

"and subsidised by state funds..."

'They were bold ideas.

'And Loos had a bold solution -

'he would give the Viennese something they'd never seen before.'

"..by the past."

A matter of months after writing his manifesto,

Loos won a commission to design his first building,

right opposite the Emperor's Palace.

Today, it is called the Looshaus.

And it's one of the first truly modern buildings in Europe.

Now, it may look pretty unremarkable today,

but Loos's building was a game-changer

in Viennese architecture.

And to understand quite how revolutionary it was,

all you need to do is compare it to this building,

its neighbour, which was only finished a few years earlier.

This building is a charming example of traditional

Viennese architecture, and above all, it's covered with ornament.

But Loos's building, however,

is covered in nothing.

It's completely plain.

The ornamental facade has been entirely removed.

The people of Vienna were appalled by Loos's new building.

The press called it the "dung-crate", the "prison",

the "matchbox", the "house without eyebrows".

The city council was so horrified

that they tried their best to tear it down.

And the Emperor himself allegedly had his curtains permanently closed

so he didn't have to see it.

The hostility brought Loos close to suicide.

But if only his many critics had stopped

obsessing about the facade and stepped inside.

Because the interior of the Looshaus is staggering.

You know, nothing can prepare you for the experience of this place.

It's like walking into a huge architectural kaleidoscope

because the whole thing shimmers and sparkles

and reflects off itself,

so you never quite know where it ends,

but, above all, it is unbelievably, unbelievably beautiful.

The simple surfaces of the polished mahogany

and the shining brass

and the cut-glass mirror are utterly irresistible,

and they're proof, I think,

that you don't need ornament to be beautiful, because this...

This is a new kind of beauty.

Adolf Loos had produced

one of the first great buildings of the 20th century.

But he'd also exposed an important truth about Vienna.

Trapped between the past and the future,

the city was increasingly ill-at-ease with itself.

And so, too, were its inhabitants.

In 1908, the people of Vienna seemed to be unusually unhappy.

The city had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe

and in the coffeehouses and the salons,

Vienna's intellectuals discussed this widespread malaise.

But none of then knew what caused it

and none of them knew what to do about it.

One Austrian writer captured the mood.

"Our epoch is shot through with a wild torment

"and the pain has become no longer bearable.

"Is this then the great death which has come upon the world?"

Vienna, in short, was sick, and no-one knew why.

But one man was determined to find out.

Sigmund Freud was born into a large Jewish family

who had moved to Vienna

to give their children the best possible education.

He had originally trained as a doctor,

but gradually, he began to grow interested

in the inner lives of his patients.

Later in his life, in his only known voice recording,

Freud recalled his discovery.

In 1891, he set up a private clinic in the centre of town

and the anxious Viennese began to come here,

first in a trickle, then in droves,

to see if psychoanalysis could soothe their unquiet minds.

So, this is Sigmund Freud's waiting room and over the years,

hundreds of Viennese men and women would have sat patiently

in this very room, on these very seats,

waiting for the great Dr Freud

to cure them of their anxieties, their phobias,

their obsessions and their panic attacks -

problems for which neither they,

nor anyone else for that matter, had any explanation.

Freud encouraged his patients to talk

about every detail of their lives.

Meanwhile, he was developing his theories

about the hidden desires that underpin human behaviour.

You know, being here is a really odd experience,

because all that I can think of

are the thousands of secrets that were revealed within these walls,

the fears, the nightmares, the illicit desires,

the affairs, and in many ways,

it feels like this is the subconscious of Vienna itself.

And it was in 1908 that Freud encountered a patient

that would lead him to his most famous theory.

In January, a friend of Freud's told him about a peculiar anxiety his son

had recently, and distressingly, developed.

The five-year-old boy - known as Little Hans -

had acquired a violent fear of horses.

He was scared they'd bite off his finger,

afraid of the noise they made.

But he was particularly terrified of white horses

with black mouths and blinkers.

With horses everywhere,

poor Hans became too scared to even leave the house.

Freud began to study the case for himself.

He questioned the father, he interrogated the boy,

and then he started to think,

"Why is he afraid of horses?"

"Why horses? Why horses with black mouths?

"Why horses with blinkers?

"Why is he afraid of his finger being bitten off?

"And what about the father?

"Is the father implicated?"

And then, at last, the revelation came.

Freud concluded that the horse was a symbol

for Little Hans's father,

and his fear of biting

was actually a fear of castration.

Why? Well, Freud believed that Little Hans

had begun to develop sexual feelings for his mother,

and his father, now, his rival, was going to punish him for it.

But Freud didn't think this phenomenon

was unique to Little Hans.

He thought it was a common part of every boy's development.

And he called his theory the "Oedipus Complex".

How important was Little Hans in the development of Freud's theory?

His interpretation was to him important

but also to the whole community

because he could show how it works.

In complete, not only theoretically.

Saying that Little Hans is jealous,

that his father is with his mother,

and he projected his fear to horses

which was connected with his father.

-And do you think he was right?

-Yes, sure.

He showed that already, children have sexuality.

That was, it's hard to say - not polite,

but right.

-So this was very shocking at the time?

-It was shocking.

Do you think Freud could have come up with his ideas in any other city?

Some say Freud could only do it in Vienna

because the Viennese are so neurotic.

But I also say Freud could do it

because it was a place for creativity.

And it was this creative conception of a theory

needs to have a lot of emotional back-up.

And this he found in Vienna.

Freud's legacy is, of course, bigger than the Oedipus Complex.

He showed that behind all of our public facades

lies a huge reservoir of hidden,

but powerful sexual urges.

And in doing so,

he transformed our understanding of human nature itself.

While Freud's theories shocked old Vienna,

a new generation was ready to embrace them.

Amongst them were two painters

and a composer.

All three would use their art to attack Viennese conventions

and to test the dangerous limits of psychological expression.

Their own spectacular Oedipal rebellion

would make the city the centre of a new, introspective modernism.

And astonishingly,

they would all make their dramatic entrance in 1908.

The first of them was a 22-year-old artist called Oskar Kokoschka.

Kokoschka was inspired by Freud throughout his long life,

and he'd certainly have made a revealing case history,

because his childhood was unusually dark and violent.

Oskar Kokoschka grew up in poverty and misery.

His father was bitter, his mother was controlling,

and the whole family seemed to lurch from one disaster to another.

Unsurprisingly, Oskar turned out to be a lonely,

and socially awkward child.

And he sought escape from his depression here, in his local park.

In the park, the young Oskar took a fancy to a genteel young girl.

One day he noticed an ant colony

near where she played and desperate to impress her,

he set an explosive charge on top of it.

But things went terribly wrong.

The explosion was so powerful

it catapulted the girl off the swing.

She survived, but little Kokoschka was thrown out of the park for good.

This mood of lust, violence,

guilt and transgression never left Kokoschka.

It informed everything he ever made as an artist.

And in 1908, it shocked the whole of Vienna.

Kokoschka was thrust into the limelight

when he was asked to exhibit at Gustav Klimt's prestigious art show.

But one of his works caused an uproar.

It was a fairy tale that Kokoschka had been asked

to write and illustrate for some children.

But it was certainly not suitable for the young.

This is The Dreaming Boys.

Kokoschka wrote it, he illustrated it, he printed it

and he bound it.

And look who he dedicated it to -

his hero, Vienna's hero, Gustav Klimt.

But this so much darker, so much more mysterious

than Klimt's work...

It begins charmingly,

like nearly all fairy tales.

We have a beautiful young maiden with this long blonde hair.

She's trapped on a little island

and she's waiting for this noble white stag to come and rescue her.

The images that follow capture this fairy-tale world

of exotic plants and animals,

and waving seas and epic journeys.

But the text is much, much darker.

"Red fishling, fishling red,

"with a triple-bladed knife, I stab you dead.'

This is no fairy tale.

This is the product of a really major artist.

It's so beautiful, so magnificent to look at.

The use of colour, the use of line, the way the text

and the images are organised.

Yet, underneath it,

there lies an explosive emotional charge.

And I think that's the point of it,

I think Kokoschka wants to show that, beneath us all,

behind all of our facades, there are uncontrollable, writhing emotions.

Kokoschka, like Freud, had explored the sexual

frustrations of the Viennese people.

But another artist would go even further.

Egon Schiele.

A man gripped by a desire to strip the human form naked

and to capture its most painful secrets.

Egon Schiele was four years younger than Kokoschka,

but he had had something of a head start.

According to his mother,

he was drawing before he was even two years old.

And in 1906, at the age of just 16,

the young prodigy was admitted

to the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,

where he was the youngest student in his class.

When it came to life class, Schiele outperformed all of his peers.

Students here were required to make one drawing a day.

But while the others struggled to complete that task,

Schiele produced an exquisite drawing every single hour.

Schiele grew frustrated with the Academy's conservative approach,

and so, in 1908,

in the same year that Kokoschka broke onto the arts scene,

he decided to mount an exhibition of his own.

From that point on, Schiele developed

an expressionistic style that was unlike anyone else's

and a far-cry from Klimt's Kiss.

His pictures portray bruised and emaciated people...

..contorted with pain and desire...

..where every beautiful line becomes an insidious act of transgression.

But his greatest works are, in my opinion, his self portraits.

And none is greater than this one...

Where does one even begin with an image like this?

It is a portrait of Egon Schiele when he was 20 years old.

But it's also a portrait of isolation and despair.

Schiele is alone, trapped in this white emptiness.

So, the picture and the frame itself becomes a kind of cell.

And he has no way of making contact with anyone.

His feet have been chopped off.

His hands are missing, his eyes are dead.

Everything he would normally use to make contact

with the outside world has been taken away.

And the figure itself... is haunting.

It looks like an emaciated corpse.

The body is so brittle and angular

it seems like it's on the verge of snapping.

Schiele was a famously brilliant draughtsman,

and the line here, the quality of line, is so sharp, so precise.

It looks like it was drawn with a razor blade.

And that's a good way to think about this picture.

It's not just about getting under the skin,

it's almost as though Schiele has used a knife

to cut away his own epidermis,

to cut away his own surface self to reveal what's going on underneath.

For me, this is a portrait of the true Vienna.

The Vienna beneath the surface and behind the facade.

But I think it's more than this.

It's also a portrait of humanity itself,

of what it's really like to be human.

Unsurprisingly, Vienna did not respond well

to this uncompromising new art.

Kokoschka was attacked in the press...

..and Schiele was arrested for making indecent images.

But, across town, the last of Vienna's young rebels

was about to transform the city's favourite art form -

music.

His name was Arnold Schoenberg.

Schoenberg was born into a poor Jewish family in 1874.

When his father died suddenly,

he had to quit school at the age of 16 and earn his living in a bank.

He didn't like the work one bit.

Counting out money.

Filling out forms.

Kowtowing to the rich and pompous bourgeoisie of Vienna.

This was not for Arnold Schoenberg,

because Arnold Schoenberg wanted to be a composer.

Like Kokoschka and Schiele and Freud before him,

Schoenberg wanted to explore the darkest depths of human nature.

"Art belongs to the unconscious!

"One must express oneself! Express oneself directly.

"Not one's taste, or one's upbringing,

"or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill.

"But that which is inborn, instinctive."

Luckily for him, the bank went bust.

Schoenberg was liberated.

And 1908 would be the most explosive year of his life.

Because in that year, Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde,

would fall in love with this man -

a young painter called Richard Gerstl.

The affair nearly destroyed their marriage

and ended with Gerstl's suicide.

Yet, it was during this catastrophic period

that Schoenberg produced a revolutionary piece of music -

his second string quartet.

We'll never know if it was the crisis in his marriage

that led Schoenberg to turn the whole

of musical history on its head.

But we do know that on the front page of his score,

he wrote a dedication of three, short words that read,

"To my wife".

Four days before the Christmas of 1908,

Schoenberg's Second String Quartet premiered in Vienna.

The piece starts conventionally.

But it quickly transforms.

Plunging the listener into an unsettling world.

And it does so by doing something

that had never really been done before.

It changes key, again and again,

slipping from one mood to another.

As if the notes themselves,

like his emotions, are all at sea.

SHE SINGS HAUNTINGLY

Now, I'll admit, it doesn't sound like Mozart,

but it is a haunting piece of music,

and, my God, does it carry an emotional punch.

It's almost as if a wave of intense emotion is washing over you.

SHE SINGS HAUNTINGLY

It would be fair to say that it didn't go down well.

At the first performance, in 1908,

the audience booed, hissed and laughed throughout.

One 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.

Later in life, Schoenberg still felt the pain

of being so roundly attacked.

Personally, I have the feeling,

I seem to have fallen into an ocean of boiling water

and, not knowing how to swim,

I do not know what saved me, why I was not drowned or cooked alive.

There was nobody to help me.

Schoenberg's music is challenging

because it rips up the rules of classical composition,

replacing familiar harmonies with atonal harmonies.

-Thanks for having me.

-Pleased to meet you.

'It's an acquired taste, as pianist Susana Zapke explains.'

-I hoped you enjoy Vienna?

-I'm loving it.

-I think I will play something, yes?

-OK.

These will be a tonal scale, yeah?

SHE PLAYS HARMONIOUS CHORDS

And then... SHE PLAYS HARMONIOUS CHORDS

-These are tonal intervals.

-Right.

And now, I play atonal intervals.

SHE PLAYS DISCORDANT CHORDS

You can hear the difference?

-I can hear the difference. It doesn't sound so good.

-No!

BOTH LAUGH

-Maybe you have to hear more.

-OK, get used to it.

-More familiarity, and then you will know it.

-OK.

-That's the way.

-Do you like the Second String Quartet?

-I love it. I love it.

Why do you love it?

It's a completely new world

with metaphorical associations.

It's so full of emotions

and of, of very inspiring ideas.

What do you think makes it such a revolutionary piece of music?

I think this is the culmination of this

kind of searching for a new musical language.

I think he was an amazing artist with incredible,

strong conviction to change

the direction of the music, of the classical music.

He strikes me as being so strong, and he never gave up, did he?

No, he never gave up, he was absolutely convinced by his music

and he said, "My music will be understood in 100 years, not now."

I don't know if we have attained this level, this stage.

Schoenberg, like Kokoschka, Schiele, and of course, Freud,

had captured the restless angst-ridden mood

of the Viennese people. But the city had problems of its own

and by 1908, it could no longer afford to ignore them.

One of these problems was prostitution.

According to the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig,

prostitution was like "a dark underground vault

"over which rose the gorgeous structure

"of middle-class society."

For behind the facade of traditional family values,

Vienna's husbands, fathers and sons

kept more than 50,000 prostitutes

gainfully employed across the city.

While the women themselves were unprotected by law,

vulnerable and voiceless.

Until one remarkable woman decided to tell their story.

Her name was Else Jerusalem.

In 1908, Else Jerusalem started writing

an audacious book that would capture

the miserable reality of life for women in Vienna.

It would perhaps be the first Viennese novel

in history to be set in a brothel.

It begins...

"Just around the corner from the city's glowing heart

"begins the realm of darkness.

"The houses shrink in on themselves,

"doorways disappear in shadow,

"and a single red lantern encloses its immediate vicinity

"in a circle of blood."

The Red House tells the harrowing story of a young woman

called Katerine who ends up working in a brothel.

She's used by one man after another until her health gradually declines.

When 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.

The Red House became a huge best-seller.

In fact, within two years of its publication,

it went through 22 editions.

The people of Vienna couldn't stop buying it

and they couldn't stop talking about it either.

I asked professor of German literature, Brigitte Spreitzer,

why so little is known about this extraordinary writer.

We 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, and at 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.

So, she did irregular studies.

So, she forced away into the university?

Yes, yes. She was a strong woman, I think.

And, at the age of 22,

she already wrote short stories.

I would say she invented the stream of consciousness

in German literature.

She was a really remarkable woman, wrongfully forgotten.

So, what do you think Else Jerusalem

was trying to tell the people of Vienna

with this novel? What was her ambition? What was her agenda?

She wanted to do a sharp critique of hypocrisy in Vienna.

She wanted to break taboos. It was a city of double standards.

On the one hand, bourgeois daughters should have been virgins,

on the other hand, young men should have made...

should make their experiences.

So, what would they do other than to go into brothels?

And on the other hand, she wanted to show

-that women want to have a sexuality, too...

-Yes.

..without being prostitutes.

I just think... I just find her tremendously impressive, as a woman.

Because there was so much against her, and yet,

she fought through all of the prejudice

and made a voice for herself and a voice for women.

I think she was a really outstanding woman.

She was courageous,

she didn't care about taboos.

She made her way through modernity.

Else Jerusalem is virtually forgotten today.

But she had exposed one of Vienna's darkest secrets.

And it was by no means the only one.

That same year, a photographer called Hermann Drawe

and an investigative journalist called Emil Klager,

embarked on a project

to tell the story of Vienna's other forgotten victims.

Many of whom had taken refuge in a second Vienna,

a city BENEATH the city.

I'm now standing right in the middle of Vienna's sewer system

and I'll be honest with you, it's dark, it's cold,

it stinks and there are rats everywhere.

And to think that back in 1908,

there were people actually living down here,

is too appalling for words.

And 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.

Klager and Drawe journeyed deep into Vienna's underworld

to interview and photograph the lost souls who lived there.

They found people struggling to survive

in the most desperate of circumstances.

When they'd finished, they showed these images

to the public in a series of illustrated lectures.

Klager and Drawe's lectures

were a pioneering piece of social investigation,

and in 1908, they were the hottest ticket up in town.

Their harrowing images of this world beneath the city

amazed and appalled the people of Vienna.

They made it difficult to deny

that the city was in the midst of a crisis.

Its population had quadrupled in just four decades

And the result was poverty, overcrowding and homelessness.

These ever-growing problems needed scapegoats

and one man was all too ready to provide them.

Karl Lueger was the city's mayor, and its most powerful man.

Lueger was handsome and effective.

He installed the city's street lights,

its water supply and its famous electric trams.

Yet his charming exterior disguised

the ugliness of his politics.

Lueger rose to power on a tide of anti-Semitism -

winning the votes of small shopkeepers

by convincing them that their business had been stolen

by wealthy Jewish industrialists.

Lueger latched onto Vienna's growing resentment of Jews

and turned anti-Semitism into nothing less than city policy.

It was under his rule that anti-Semitic children's books

were introduced into Vienna's schools,

and Jewish teachers were sacked.

And he became famous for one chilling phrase -

"I decide who is a Jew."

Lueger's racism might have been opportunistic,

but it had consequences worse than he could ever have imagined.

Because listening to his speeches and consuming his every word,

was the young Adolf Hitler.

After burning his letter of introduction back in February,

Hitler hadn't quite given up on art.

He'd applied to the Academy of Fine Arts,

where he would have been classmates with Egon Schiele.

But once again, things didn't go to plan.

I have here a copy of the Academy's admissions papers.

This has a list of all the applicants and at the top,

Adolf Hitler was the 24th applicant to be rejected.

And underneath there's a sentence.

"Nicht zur probe zugelassen"

which means he wasn't even allowed to take the test.

It's not hard to see why Hitler didn't get in.

When you compare him with his contemporaries,

his quaint pictures of Vienna's historic landmarks

seem embarrassingly old-fashioned.

This is a typical watercolour by Adolf Hitler,

and I'm slightly pained to admit, it's not actually that bad.

There's plenty of precise architectural detail,

there's some evidence of perspective, and actually,

his handling of the paintbrush is quite confident.

But you know what I find so interesting about it?

This building, the National Theatre, didn't even exist.

It had been demolished 20 years

before Hitler even arrived in Vienna.

But that's because Hitler was painting Vienna

100 years out of date -

a harmonious, eternal Vienna, the city that would never die.

Unlike the great artists and thinkers of Vienna in 1908,

Hitler was terrified by the modern world.

He wanted to turn back time and recreate a lost Germanic past.

He rejected art and threw himself into the factional politics

that were taking over the Empire.

One 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.

And, as it happened,

1908 was the year that the Empire made its most fateful decision.

On 6th October, 1908,

the Austro-Hungarian Empire here

annexed this small part of the Balkans called Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Now, at the time, the Viennese were delighted,

without a single shot being fired, the Hapsburg Empire,

the great Hapsburg Empire, had grown even bigger.

But, that one small act

would destroy Vienna.

It would destroy the Empire.

And, eventually, it would bring down the whole of Europe with it.

Austria's occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina

ignited a crisis in the Balkans,

a bitter struggle for independence that would lead

to one of the most notorious assassinations of the century.

The shooting of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand

on the 28th June, 1914,

set in motion a catastrophic chain of events.

It led every major nation into battle...

..and it dragged Europe into the most devastating war in its history.

1908 had been an exceptional year for Vienna.

For it was a crossroads of the past and the future, of old and new.

And its artists and thinkers had faced that crossroads

with strength, with bravery and with staggering creativity.

It was their argument with the past

that transformed our art,

our architecture, our music.

And above all, our understanding of human nature itself.

One of the more prophetic writers in fin-de-siecle Vienna

called the city "a laboratory for the end of the world".

And that's what it turned out to be.

But it was also a beginning.

The beginning of a dangerous,

experimental, exhilarating century.

And in the next episode, we'll travel forward by 20 years

to explore another exceptional city in another exceptional year.

Paris in 1928.