Episode 3 Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream

In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French,

lost his empire and his throne.

Now Europe's most powerful men arrived in Vienna

for the ultimate summit meeting,

to rebuild the Europe that Napoleon had almost destroyed.

But the Congress of Vienna wasn't all diplomacy.

It turned into the biggest party the continent had ever seen...

..hosted by the family

that had dominated middle Europe for centuries -

the Habsburgs.

Five years after Napoleon and the French had captured Vienna,

the city was at its height. We follow it from apogee to decline.

From the beauty and self obsession of Empress Sisi

to the suicide pact of Crown Prince Rudolf.

To the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

I'll follow the Habsburgs to the downfall of the dynasty.

In this final chapter in the story of Vienna I'll also discover how

imperial city became the capital of ideas.

From Klimt's exploration of our sexuality to Freud's voyage into our

minds, to the angry young artist who hated them both.

Vienna shaped the modern age for both good and evil.

These are the streets walked by Hitler and Stalin, who,

30 years later, tossed Vienna between them

in history's greatest war of annihilation.

A city of death and tragedy that change lives, among them,

my own family.

Vienna became the academy of civilisation.

But it was also the battlefield of extremes,

of monarchy versus revolution, of communism versus fascism,

and of pious formality against wild decadence.

And it all happened here, here in Vienna.

The world's city.

Autumn, 1814.

France was vanquished and after ruling most of Europe,

Napoleon was in exile, emperor of the tiny island of Elba.

Now that Napoleon was defeated, all the great men of Europe,

and the great women, in fact, descended on Vienna.

Emperor Francis invited them all to the ultimate summit meeting,

and wildly decadent junket,

in order to put Europe together again after 20 years of

destructive wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Francis was the host but he wasn't really in charge.

The man who was in charge was Prince Klemens von Metternich.

He was vain, he was boastful, he was playful.

He also had a clear and brilliant vision of how to run Austria

and how to position it and how to rule Europe.

This is the Austrian Chancellery and Prince Metternich

lived and worked here, and ruled Vienna from here,

and all of Austria, for 30 years.

His bedroom is right above us here.

This grand meeting room was the nerve centre of European political

activity during the Congress of Vienna.

As Europe's self appointed puppet master Metternich would be the chief

arbiter of the new continental system,

and Habsburg Vienna would be its capital.

But as well as redesigning Europe,

Metternich and the Emperor relaunched the

very look of Vienna itself.

I've come to see some of the richly embroidered costumes worn by the

dignitaries at the Congress.

Dr Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner is going to tell me how they reveal the

tawdry state of Vienna.

One of the problems the Emperor faced

when he decided to make the Congress in Vienna

was that his population was completely impoverished after the

years of war, so he feared that he would organise all these glamorous

parties and his court wouldn't come,

because they didn't know how to dress.

So he decided to give all his dignitaries these beautiful civil

uniforms, so the richness of the gold embroidery is always

a symbol of rank.

And this is easily to recognise this is one of the most important men

in the Empire, wearing this, like a Lord Chamberlain, for instance.

And red is a very important colour,

so red was reserved for the nobility and the children's uniform

also in red because this is the uniform of a page.

The pages were young members of the Austrian nobility and they made

services at the Congress as well.

These extravagant costumes really mattered in an age when the pomp of

power was the expression of its plenitude.

Francis and Metternich were using bling to promote the dynasty.

Of all the VIPs who attended Europe's greatest summit,

its biggest star was Tsar Alexander I of Russia.

The true liberator of Europe,

he and his army had fought all the way from Moscow to Paris

to destroy Napoleon.

Now Alexander wanted Russia, not Austria, to be the dominant power.

And only one thing stood in their way -

Metternich and the House of Habsburg.

"All politics," said the French Prime Minister

at the Congress of Vienna, "Is women."

And the struggle between Austria and Russia,

Metternich versus Tsar Alexander,

was played out not only in the corridors of power,

but also in the bedrooms

of two extraordinary aristocratic mega-vamps,

and it happened that they lived at the top of the same staircase.

In one apartment was Princess Katya Bagration,

beautiful and promiscuous, she had been Metternich's mistress,

now she was the Tsar's.

She was known as the Naked Angel for her see-through dresses.

In another apartment was Wilhemine, Duchesse de Sagan,

a highly intelligent formidable semi-royal heiress.

Metternich was passionately in love with her.

But she took other lovers and her infidelities drove him mad.

Each day Tsar Alexander visited Katya, and Metternich visited Sagan.

But there was a problem. Their apartments were on the same landing.

One day, Tsar Alexander decided to hit Metternich where it would hurt.

That day, instead of turning right to visit Princess Katya,

he turned left, to visit Duchess Wilhelmine.

The police agents reported to Metternich

that the Tsar spent many hours with the Duchess.

Vienna was fascinated.

Metternich was distraught and infuriated.

He even talked of challenging the Tsar to a duel.

Instead he sobbed that his desk in the Chancellery.

They could swap mistresses and carve up kingdoms but in the end they had

to compromise and run Europe together.

Nine months of political rivalry and social intrigue nearly ripped the

Congress but finally the treaty was ready to sign.

I'm sitting in the chair of the Chancellor of Austria and this was,

and is, his Cabinet Office.

In June 1815, in this building,

the Congress of Vienna Treaty was finally signed.

The map of Europe had been redrawn, legitimate power, Austrian power,

has been restored in Germany, in the Balkans, in Italy, in Hungary.

More than that, from now on,

Metternich and his so-called Concert of Great Powers,

a sort of early version of the UN Security Council,

decided everything in Europe.

Nicknamed the Coachman of Europe,

Metternich manipulated the continent through a series of mini congresses,

crushing revolution wherever it reared its head.

At home he presided over the dreary stability

enforced by his secret police.

Shunning coffee-house politics,

the Viennese turned inwards and retreated into the dull

and safe privacy of their own homes.

The Viennese drank, ate and danced away the Metternich years.

The calm stability and mildly repressive conservatism of Prince

Metternich's rule, characterised by the regular and reassuring

waltzes of Johann Strauss and his family of composers,

couldn't contain the forces of the age, nationalism and liberalism,

and soon it was clear that they were seething dangerously

just beneath the surface.

In 1855, Emperor Francis died and he was succeeded by his eldest son,

Ferdinand, who unfortunately suffered from a speech impediment,

epilepsy and water on the brain.

Metternich remained in charge but now the sovereign was ailing,

the minister was geriatric, the regime was sclerotic.

It was all ripe for revolution.

Across Europe, students and radicals seethed with exciting liberal ideas

to destroy Metternich's absolutist regime.

In Vienna, while the old danced, the young dreamed and plotted.

In February 1848 revolutions broke out in Italy, then in Paris,

and then they spread to Vienna.

The Habsburgs panicked.

They needed a scapegoat and they blamed Prince Metternich.

After almost 40 years in power,

Metternich was forced to resign and fled Vienna.

In October, events took a violent turn.

After the shooting of some demonstrators,

the revolutionaries demanded revenge.

The Minister of War was lynched.

The mob strung him up from a lamppost.

The following dawn,

a fleet of imperial black carriages emerged from

Habsburgs' main residence, the Hofburg Palace.

The mob let them pass.

They fled the capital.

As soon as the Habsburgs were away from revolution-stricken Vienna,

they got their courage back and they planned their revenge.

They ordered their army to take Vienna back.

And on the 28th of October, a huge Habsburg army,

fortified by Croatian and Montenegrins from the Balkans,

attacked the city. First they bombarded it for several hours,

and then, street by street, barricade by barricade,

they fought their way in.

The Croatians and Montenegrins burst into people's houses,

murdering and torturing and plundering.

By the end of the day, Vienna was back in the fief of the Habsburgs.

The revolution was over.

But it had shaken the dynasty to its core and if it was to have a future,

young blood was required.

That future was the Emperor Ferdinand's nephew, Franz Joseph.

His mother, the Archduchess Sophie,

described as the only man in the House of Habsburg,

had dedicated her life to preparing young Franz for power.

Now she schemed to replace Emperor Ferdinand with her son.

In December, at a hastily arranged abdication ceremony,

Ferdinand did go and into his place

stepped the handsome 18-year-old Franz Joseph.

From the moment of his accession,

Franz Joseph always appeared in uniform.

He saw himself as the supreme warlord and autocrat,

presiding with military might over a polyglot empire.

But the empire had almost been torn apart by revolution.

It had to be re-conquered, province by province.

This is the Radetzky March,

that became the anthem of the re-conquest of the Habsburg Empire,

named after Field Marshal Radetzky who retook Italy.

But things weren't going well in Hungary.

There the revolutionaries had defeated the Habsburg Empire.

In desperation, the young Emperor Franz Joseph

had to travel to Russia to kneel in front of Tsar Nicholas I,

the arrogant Russian emperor who, more than anyone else,

resembles our own President Putin of today.

He begged him for help and the Tsar sent 200,000 men to retake Hungary.

Franz Joseph never got over the humiliation.

He never forgave the Romanov who'd saved him.

But he got his revenge.

In 1853, Britain and France launched a Crimean War against Russia.

Franz Joseph betrayed Nicholas and backed Britain and France,

though he managed to keep out of the war.

Facing defeat, Nicholas died,

cursing Franz Joseph for his ingratitude.

All the while, Franz Joseph's hold on his unruly empire was weakening.

To the west, the Italians loathed their Habsburg masters

and in 1859 they rose again.

The Italians had a big backer,

France, now ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the great Emperor.

When Franz Joseph was provoked into declaring war,

he found himself facing a modern French army,

commanded by Napoleon III himself.

Fancying himself as a military autocrat,

Franz Joseph insisted on taking command himself.

It was a disaster.

The Austrians were defeated.

Italy was lost.

And Franz Joseph never took command again.

Defeat destroyed Franz Joseph's dream of being a military autocrat.

Austria was now exposed, especially in Germany.

For centuries the Habsburgs had dominated Germany,

which was still made up of many small kingdoms and principalities.

But now he faced a rising power there,

Prussia.

And the new Prussian Prime Minister saw an opportunity.

This is Franz Joseph's office at the Hofburg.

And it was from here that he was unfortunate enough

to face the supreme politician of his age -

Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia,

who was determined to unify Germany under his own king.

In 1866, he provoked Franz Joseph into war,

and the Austrians were soundly defeated

at the Battle of Koniggratz.

Within four years Bismarck had got his way.

The king of Prussia became the Emperor of a new power, Germany.

But, Bismarck was too clever to destroy Austria.

Instead he made Franz Joseph into his ally.

But from now on the Habsburgs were very much the junior partner.

Franz Joseph had been defeated in Italy and in Germany,

and now the Hungarians were threatening revolt again.

The Emperor's family proved as difficult to rule as his empire.

The problems went back to his marriage in 1854,

which started like a fairy tale.

Franz Joseph was the most eligible bachelor in Europe

and his domineering mother, Archduchess Sophie,

decided he had to marry and soon.

She herself was a Bavarian princess,

and so now she introduced him to two sisters from her own Bavarian royal

family. He was meant to like the older sister,

but in fact he fell immediately in love with the younger one.

She was 15. Her name was Elizabeth.

But everyone called her Sisi.

Within two days of meeting, they were engaged.

The following year, in 1854, they were married.

The whole of Europe was captivated.

This is the marital bed chamber of Franz Joseph and Empress Sisi.

This is where he brought her in 1854.

It has just been redecorated to be exactly as it was then.

And one can feel the stuffiness and the formality that she found so

difficult to bear.

These two portraits tell you pretty much all you need to know about them

at this stage. Franz Joseph is dutiful, plodding, dull,

and lives for duty, Catholicism and the monarchy.

She's wild, beautiful, fascinating and self-obsessed.

She grows her hair all the way down to her waist,

and pleases only herself.

But she did have to deal with her mother-in-law,

the domineering and ever-interfering Archduchess Sophie,

who really was the royal mother-in-law

from Imperial Habsburg hell.

Sisi gave birth to a daughter, Gisela, and then a son, the heir,

Crown Prince Rudolf, seen here sitting on her lap.

Sisi's mother-in-law, Sophie, on the right,

forbade Sisi from raising her children.

She said she was too immature.

Sophie took charge instead.

Feeling her life was no longer her own,

Sisi then turned to the one thing could control, her body.

Olivia Lichtscheidl has researched Sisi's life,

and I'm meeting her at Sisi's dressing room at the Hofburg Palace,

which, unusually for the time, was also her gym.

So we are here in her dressing and gymnastic room.

And she made exercises here to stay slim,

because she was famous for her figure.

She was very tall, very slim, around her waist she had 51 centimetres.

51 centimetres, that's amazing.

It's really extreme. But Sisi was extreme in everything.

So what kind of exercises did she do on this, on this machine?

You must imagine that Sisi was completely dressed

and finished with the hairstyle, with everything.

And 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.

So what did the courtiers think when they came in here and found the

Empress hanging upside down with her dress on and her hair hanging down?

They were shocked, they were really shocked.

And you find lots of sentences in some diaries

or something where people said, "Oh, my God,

"I didn't know how to behave when I came in

"and she was doing exercises."

Do you think she had physical love affairs

during her marriage to Franz Joseph?

I 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.

I would compare her to women who go to the gym everyday and want to be

looked at, but not to be touched.

Sisi didn't just her own shape,

she also changed the shape of the state itself.

She became a great champion of the Hungarians,

especially through her close friendship with a dashing former

revolutionary named Count Andrassy.

He argued that the Hungarians must become equal partners with the

Austrians in the Empire.

And only she could have persuaded Franz Joseph.

And in 1867 he created the new dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

This new state was to be the 'K und K', the Kaiserlich und Koniglich,

the Imperial and Royal monarchy.

The Viennese called it by another name, the empire under notice.

And the Emperor was under notice, too.

Two decades after the 1848 revolution,

he finally caved in to demands for a constitution

and this, a new parliament.

In a startling declaration of innovation

and confidence in the future,

Franz Joseph then tore down the old city walls which enclosed the

inner city, and ordered the construction

of a magnificent new boulevard -

the Ringstrasse.

Sit 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.

The Rathaus, Vienna's new town hall.

The Opera House, the home of the world's greatest music,

played by the world's greatest orchestras.

And the Burgtheater,

where the Emperor was often seen alone in the Imperial box.

Although, it turned out, he had his reasons.

By now, Sisi had abandoned Franz Joseph.

Earlier, she had intervened to rescue Crown Prince Rudolf

from a cruel tutor, but she then concentrated on herself,

leading the sensitive boy to his own devices.

She indulged in endless romantic travels,

but on her occasional visits home,

Sisi did try to help her husband to find love.

The Emperor had had mistresses for decades but he craved companionship.

It was at the Burgtheater that Sisi noticed its young star,

the beautiful but unhappily married Katharina Schratt.

Katharina's biggest fan was the Emperor himself, Franz Joseph,

who attended every performance.

He was lonely, and his wife, the Empress Sisi,

now took pity on the poor Emperor

and tried to provide him with some companionship.

She went to the theatre, she befriended Katharina,

she invited her to the Hofburg, and she set up the couple.

The affair started and lasted for almost 20 years.

But you couldn't imagine more dysfunctional parents

than the Imperial couple.

The glacially detached Franz Joseph

and the narcissistic absentee Empress.

No wonder their relationship with their son, Crown Prince Rudolf,

became so troubled.

I've come to Mayerling, just outside Vienna,

the fateful destination for this tormented, yet talented young man.

As he grew up he became an avowed liberal, and he wrote articles for

Jewish-owned newspapers.

His father was appalled by these liberal views,

and by his private life.

He'd married a Belgian Princess and had a daughter,

but the love of his life was a beautiful courtesan,

and then he embarked on wildly priapic series of sexual escapades

in which, finally, he contracted syphilis, which was then fatal.

As he approached his 30th birthday,

he began to feel that both himself and the Empire were doomed.

Then, in the autumn of 1888,

Rudolf was introduced to the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera.

She became infatuated with him.

For months, Rudolf had been asking his many mistresses

if they would die with him in a suicide pact.

All had said "Thanks, but no, thanks", until Mary.

She agreed.

On the 27th of January 1889,

Crown Prince Rudolf saw his father, the Emperor, for the last time.

He was very agitated.

The next day, a courtier collected the teenage girl,

Baroness Mary Vetsera, from her mother's house,

and brought her to Rudolf,

and the two secretly travelled out to Mayerling,

Rudolf's hunting lodge outside Vienna.

On the night of the 29th, they talked in serious tones all night.

At six in the morning Rudolf shot Mary and laid her out on the bed.

He then turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head,

blowing off the side of his face.

This altar stands on the side of the bedroom at the hunting lodge,

built in memory of the lovers' deaths.

Around noon on that bleak January day,

the Emperor and Empress were told the tragic news.

The ruthless Habsburg instinct to survive

quickly overcame their grief.

The real victim of Mayerling was Mary.

The fact that the Crown Prince had seduced and murdered

a 17-year-old girl was literally unspeakable.

Franz Joseph ordered it to be expunged from the record.

In the dead of night, Mary's body was taken by coach down this road,

fully dressed, and held upright between her two uncles.

Just a few miles from Mayerling she was buried in a cheap wooden coffin,

in the corner of this cemetery.

The official version of Rudolf's death made no mention of Mary.

Instead, the postmortem stated that his death was not suicide,

but the result of morbid nervous exhaustion.

In spring, 1889,

Mary was discreetly reburied in this growth by her grieving family,

and then the whole incident was never mentioned again.

Franz Joseph soldiered on like the military man he was, driven by duty.

For once, Sisi rose to the occasion,

and sustained Franz Joseph in his grief.

In a little side chapel at Mayerling

can be found a statue of the Madonna,

donated by the Empress, her heart pierced by a dagger of anguish.

This statue was to prove strangely prophetic.

On the 10th of September 1898,

Empress Sisi was walking beside Lake Geneva,

when she was stabbed in the chest by an anarchist with a sharpened file.

So sharp was it, that she didn't realised she'd been stabbed at all

and walked on, before she collapsed and died.

Poor Franz Joseph had lost his son and now his wife.

By 1900, Franz Joseph was 70 years old,

to some, he was a beacon of continuity, to others,

the relic of an obsolescent past.

But while the Emperor stood still, Vienna moved on.

The influx of immigrants from around the empire,

especially Czechs and Jews, combined to create a febrile, if doom-laden,

explosion of creativity.

Its crowning achievement was the art and architecture of the so-called

Secession movement.

The Secessionists rejected Vienna's dull conservative past

and proclaimed their mission with this motto -

"For every age its art.

"To every art its freedom."

And it certainly was free.

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss

is an uninhibited celebration of eroticism.

Egon Schiele's The Embrace shocked stuffy Viennese.

To some, like Franz Joseph and his courtiers,

this seemed like pornography.

But to us this is an exciting celebration,

the beginning of the new modern age.

No-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.

# The loveliest girl in Vienna was Alma

# The smartest as well

# Once you picked her up on your antenna

# You'd never be free of her spell... #

She 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.

Her first kiss was with the artist Gustav Klimt.

She then married the composer Gustav Mahler.

And on his death she married Walter Gropius,

the founder of the Bauhaus movement.

And then, lastly, came Oskar Kokoschka, the artist,

who often put her in his paintings, and Franz Werfel,

the novelist and author of The Song of Bernadette.

What a roster of geniuses.

She was truly the queen, the muse of an entire age.

And, of course, of Vienna.

# And be the swan to get Gustav and Walter

# You never did falter

# With Gustav and Walter and Franz. #

Gustav, Walter and Franz, and many others,

helped give birth to the Modernist movement.

Their work was not only a rejection of the past but the quest to explore

the unconscious and to reveal the primal and sexual drives

that another immigrant to Vienna was writing about at the time -

Sigmund Freud.

Freud was from a Jewish family.

He married, he had children, and he moved here in 1891.

After qualifying as a doctor,

he started to treat men and women who were

suffering from the anxiety in those days known as hysteria.

As he did that he started to create a new way of looking at the human

mind. He called it psychoanalysis.

This is Dr Freud's waiting room.

When patients went into the consulting room,

they lay on a couch.

He sat chain-smoking cigars and let them talk.

He believed all human behaviour was partly founded on the subconscious,

that reservoir of hidden instincts and memories,

and the drive towards sexuality and death.

These ideas would change the world

and our very understanding of ourselves.

Freud's genius was quintessentially Viennese.

He was inspired by its obsession with sex and death and art,

and its combination of the stilted formality

of the Habsburg monarchy in court,

his own background of Jewish angst and its unique atmosphere of

unbridled sexual libertinism.

Vienna created Freud and his patients.

Freud in some ways typified the hundreds of thousands of immigrants

who arrived in Vienna in the late 19th century.

But as well as transforming the city,

this bubbling cauldron of ethnicities also brought trouble.

The backlash against immigrants is personified by one man, Karl Lueger,

who was mayor of Vienna for 13 years, from 1897 to 1910.

Lueger created not only modern ultra-German nationalism but also

modern anti-Semitism with all its vicious tropes.

He blamed the Jews for all the evils of modernity -

science, liberalism, decadent art, capitalism itself.

And all of these things, he said,

tainted the purity of the German nation.

Franz Joseph did not like this rabble rousing

but, naturally, he did nothing about it.

And for the Jews of Vienna,

many began to feel that they could never be safe in Europe.

Lueger unleashed some of the most evil forces that shook

and shamed the 20th century.

And that dark influence reached a younger generation,

and among them was a young Austrian painter of postcards,

then living in Vienna, who was inspired by Lueger.

His name was Adolf Hitler.

In 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.

At first he loved Vienna,

he walked along the Ringstrasse and painted its grand buildings,

like the Opera house,

where he loved to listen not only to the Germanic Wagner,

but also the Jewish Mahler.

But above all,

he admired the German nationalism

and the strident anti-Semitism of the mayor, Karl Lueger.

And he disdained the weak obsolescent figure of the Emperor,

who he saw daily riding through the city in his carriage.

He loathed his cosmopolitan and shambolic Habsburg Empire.

Now he was rejected, first by the artists' school,

and then by the architects' school.

He became bitter, and his money began to run out.

Hitler 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.

But he spent many hours studying and reading in its library and, despite

the fact that many of his friends

and the art dealers who bought his postcards were Jewish,

he began to ask himself, why was it that he,

as a young German artist in a great German city,

had failed so miserably, while so many Jews and Czechs

and Slavs and their filthy decadent art were thriving?

It took the trauma of World War I to make Hitler into Hitler,

but he never forgave Vienna.

Adolf Hitler wasn't the only future dictator

who stalked Vienna's streets.

While Hitler was in Vienna, a 30-something

Revolutionary Communist arrived from the Russian Empire to study here.

He was Georgian, his name was Joseph Jughashvili.

His friends called him Koba, and while he was here in Vienna,

he adopted a new name, Man of Steel.

Stalin.

Stalin's factional leader, Vladimir Lenin,

had sent him to Vienna to study the big question here,

the issue of nationalities.

And he arranged for him to stay right here

with some noble friends of Lenin's.

"They're rich people," said Lenin. "That's good."

When Stalin had written his article Marxism And The National Question,

it helped him design the structure of the multinational Soviet Union.

Stalin's apartment was right round the corner

from the Schonbrunn Palace,

and every day, in between working on his new article,

and flirting with pretty young revolutionaries,

he would come and walk around these gardens.

Each day, both Hitler and Stalin would see Franz Joseph the Emperor

driving his carriage from his home here at Schonbrunn to his office in

the Hofburg. Both were fascinated by Habsburg history,

both disdained its obsolescence.

Sadly for Europe, they were the future, Hitler and Stalin, and,

30 years later, both would take Vienna,

and together they would fight the most savage conflict

in all of human history.

1908, the year Hitler moved to Vienna,

was the Diamond Jubilee year.

Franz Joseph had ruled for 60 long years.

Emperor Franz Joseph just lived on and on and on,

but the impatient heir to the throne

was the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand,

who lived here at the Belvedere Palace,

where he set up a sort of shadow government in waiting.

His relations with Franz Joseph were frosty,

because he'd married a commoner, Sophie Chotek, for love,

and the Emperor refused to give her the title archduchess

or to let their children succeed to the throne.

Yet Franz Ferdinand was intelligent and imaginative.

Instead of fighting wars against the Slavs, the Russians or the Serbs,

he wanted to set up a Slavic kingdom within the monarchy,

a sort of United States of Austria.

But while Franz Ferdinand dreamed of reforming the monarchy,

the little kingdom of Serbia had big ideas of its own.

Its government was infiltrated by a secret organisation of

ultranationalists called the Black Hand,

hell-bent on creating a greater Serbia through war with Austria.

In the summer of 1914,

the Black Hand dispatched a cell of nationalist

teenaged terrorists into the province of Bosnia,

which had recently been annexed by the Habsburgs.

They had a mission and a target in the capital, Sarajevo.

On the 28th of June, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie,

arrived in the city for an official visit.

Despite warnings of terrorism,

the Archduke insisted on riding in an open topped car

so he could wave to the crowds that lined the streets.

The car is on display at Vienna's military museum,

and I'm here to talk to its director, Doctor Christian Ortner,

about what happened on that fateful day.

From the train station they took a car, they were driving in a convoy,

and heading to the town hall of Sarajevo.

And on their way somebody tried to kill them with a hand grenade.

But the hand grenade did not hit the original car we can see here,

but it hit the next car.

After the failed bomb attack, the Archduke's driver took a wrong turn

and stalled the engine,

at the very spot where another Black Hand assassin,

19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, was waiting.

He fired two shots.

The first shot, we can see it here, directly hit Sophie and she became

unconscious immediately.

And by falling down, she gave clear way to the throat of Franz Ferdinand

and Gavrilo Princip shot his second shot.

The second shot hit the Crown Prince here in the artery.

The car was heading immediately to the palace

because they knew there was a doctor

and Franz Ferdinand's uniform was very, very tight

so the blood did not go out like this,

it went down to the stomach area.

And the doctor cut off the uniform in the wrong place.

And exactly at this time the Duchess was already dead,

she died of internal bleedings, and Franz Ferdinand exactly died by

drowning by his own blood.

The moment the news of the murder reached Vienna,

the Austrian leadership,

particularly the war-crazed, trigger-happy chief of staff,

were convinced the Serbian government was behind it

and that Serbia must be crushed by war.

And it was decided to send an extremely harsh ultimatum

that would provide a pretext.

After Germany agreed to give Franz Joseph

their unquestioning support, Austria could do what it liked.

And this was an extremely reckless move,

because Serbia was allied to Russia, and Russia was allied to France,

and France to Britain.

After Serbia's reply to the ultimatum was of course deemed

unsatisfactory, Austria drafted this telegram.

"The Royal Serbian government, not having answered

"in a satisfactory manner the note of July 23rd 1914..."

"..considers herself henceforward in a state of war with Serbia."

Now, this had no legal power without the signature of one little old man,

and there it is, a little spidery signature of a man of 84,

is the signature that launched the First World War,

in which something like 20 million people perished.

At the start of the Great War,

the daily commute to the Hofburg proved too much,

particularly during the winter,

so the old Emperor decided to work from here,

at the Schonbrunn Palace instead.

In the winter of 1916, the old Emperor started to fail.

He was now 86, and yet he still got up every day

and went the small distance to his desk to work.

On the 20th of November, he started to get worse.

He went to bed and said his prayers

and insisted on being awoken at 3.30am to start work again.

There was plenty to be done, he said.

In the early hours, Franz Joseph died.

As Franz Joseph's body was laid to rest,

millions of Austrian soldiers were being slaughtered by the Russians

on the Eastern front.

Among the funeral entourage walked the next Emperor,

Franz Joseph's great-nephew, Karl, or Charles.

He came to power at the moment of crisis.

Austria was losing control of the war it had started.

Karl attempted to broker peace

but ended up alienating his German allies.

While the Emperor and his wife sat out the rest of the war redecorating

Schonbrunn Palace, the liberals,

socialists and nationalists planned revolution.

When the Germans collapsed in November 1918,

the Habsburg monarchy went down with them.

Karl and his family were driven out of Vienna.

In exile in Switzerland,

Karl plotted his return until his early death in 1922.

In the Treaty of Versailles,

the victorious Western Allies carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire into

five new independent countries.

Vienna became the monumental

and palatial capital

of a tiny republic named Austria.

German pride had been deeply dented by the defeat in the Great War,

but from the ashes, a new leader emerged,

promising to make the German people great once again.

Adolf Hitler rose to power at least partly fuelled by his experiences of

Vienna and the ideology of Karl Lueger,

but also by shameless pseudo-history,

vicious anti-Semitism and intolerant ultra-nationalism, that,

together with violence and thuggery, formed his own brand of fascism.

Prince Metternich had directed the affairs of Europe from this office.

But now in the 1930s, the Austrian Chancellor ran a tiny insignificant

country with a terrifying threat to the north-west.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power in Germany

and from the very beginning of his career, Hitler,

who had spent so much time in Vienna and was Austrian,

had insisted that Germany must swallow Austria.

And if the Austrian Chancellors wouldn't give it to him,

then he would take it.

The Chancellor was an authoritarian Catholic Conservative

named Doctor Kurt von Schuschnigg.

On the 12th of February 1938,

Schuschnigg arrived at Hitler's mountain lair in Bavaria.

For five hours he received a spittle-flecked tirade from Hitler,

demanding that he undermined Austrian independence.

Schuschnigg tried to resist.

Hitler threatened him,

"Don't you realise that in half an hour I could blow your defences to

"smithereens, there'd be blood and that would be on your shoulders?"

Schuschnigg almost wept.

By the time he returned to the chancellery here,

he was a broken man and, in effect, Austria was doomed.

In a final act of desperation, on the 9th of March 1938,

Schuschnigg announced a referendum to let the Austrian people decide

if they wanted to be a part of Hitler's Germany.

Hitler was incensed.

If the Austrians voted no,

his justification for invasion would be blown apart.

On the 12th of March 1938,

he ordered German troops to cross the border into Austria.

This was frightening news for the Jews of Vienna.

Their leading family was the banking dynasty the Rothschilds,

who had been made barons of the Austrian Empire

as long ago as the 1820s.

This is one of their many palaces in the city,

now it's the Brazilian embassy.

They felt they were Viennese, they felt they belonged,

and now they were about to discover that they didn't.

One of the Austrian Rothschilds was a relative of mine.

Clarice Sebag-Montefiore was married to Baron Alphonse de Rothschild.

And, 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.

Quickly, they piled their belongings into a fleet of cars and escaped

across the border. They weren't the only ones.

Sigmund Freud also got out of Vienna.

He wrote in his diary, "Austria is finished."

And he was right, this was the death of cosmopolitan Vienna.

Three days after entering the country,

Adolf Hitler drove to the seat of Habsburg power, the Neue Hofburg.

Received by delirious crowds,

he addressed the Viennese from the balcony.

IN GERMAN:

CHEERING

As the Nazis terrorised Vienna's Jews, the better off tried to leave.

But it would cost them everything they had.

Hitler sent down to Vienna his SS Jewish expert,

his name was Adolf Eichmann,

and he came to extort the wealth of departing Jews.

Perversely, he set up his headquarters

in the biggest of the Rothschild palaces in the city.

But he didn't stay long in Vienna.

He was recalled when World War II began to Berlin,

to mastermind a much bigger operation -

the extermination of the Jews of Europe.

Starting in 1941, the Jews of Vienna were deported to the ghettos

and death camps set up by the Nazis in the East.

Around 65,000 of them were murdered.

And their fates are marked by these plaques around the city.

And it just seems amazing that this terrible thing ever happened in the

most civilised city in Europe.

1945, the Allies were pushing the Nazis back

on the western and eastern fronts.

Stalin's Russia had seen the harshest fighting

and now they marched on Vienna.

The street fighting for Vienna was ferocious.

The climax of the battle for the city

was the storming of the Hofburg.

Joseph Stalin first came to Vienna as a penniless revolutionary.

Now he was the most powerful man in the world, the supreme warlord,

who liberated the city in April 1945.

This monument is dedicated to the Unknown Soldier.

It congratulates the Soviet Army for the liberation of Vienna

and it's signed by their triumphant dictator, Stalin.

Stalin was familiar with many of the city's treasures

and now he set about looting Vienna for war reparations.

Its once cosmopolitan culture was pillaged and devastated.

But within weeks, the French, Americans and British arrived

and placed Vienna under four-power control.

After the war,

Stalin wanted to grab as much of Eastern Europe as he could.

An empire bigger than the Tsars had ever dreamed of.

He partitioned Germany,

but that was because Germany had been a threat in two world wars.

Provided Austria was separate from Germany,

he was happy to let Vienna go.

He didn't try and keep it.

Even though he'd been here as a young revolutionary,

it meant nothing to him.

In 1955, two years after Stalin's death,

the four powers agreed to finally withdraw from Austria.

The Austrian State Treaty was signed at the Belvedere Palace,

once the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

and announced to cheering crowds from this balcony.

After centuries of Habsburg absolutism,

seven years of Hitler's dictatorship,

ten years of Allied rule,

Austria became an independent democratic republic

and, for decades, a member of the European Community.

But the family who ruled Austria for almost a millennia

remained politically active.

Otto Habsburg,

the boy who walked beside the last

Emperor at Franz Joseph's funeral,

became a European MP.

The Habsburgs, through the Holy Roman Empire

and then their monarchy,

had struggled and failed to rule a multinational state.

Today, the European Community shares some of those aspirations.

But the Habsburgs' real legacy was their capital.

Vienna helped give birth to the modern age,

but also became the laboratory of its destruction.

Today, Vienna is the magnificent capital of a small country.

Imperial city no more,

it will always be the capital of the Empire of the mind.

What happened to Austria's Imperial city next?

Find out more about the life, times and language of Vienna

by heading to...

..and follow the links

to the Open University.