Vienna: City of Dreams

My notes on the BBC 4 programme Vienna: City of Dreams, where 'Joseph Koerner (Harvard University) explores the art, architecture and music of fin de siecle Vienna'.

At the close of the 19th century, Vienna, ancient fortress city turned capital of the vast, multinational, 'antiquated' Hapsburg Empire was 'politically the last bastion of medieval Europe'. It was also a hotbed of 'freethinking', its cafés full of 'artists, visionaries and political revolutionaries'.

Vienna was also the home of the 'greatest interpreter of dreams the world had ever known', Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), for whom dreams were the 'road to the primal urges of the human psyche'. Freud was a medical doctor treating 'nervousness' in patients (mainly Jewish women) who exhibited incapacitating physical symptoms without being physically sick. Freud pioneered the 'talking cure', where the patient is made to 'remember and re-remember' to get at the truth of the matter, while the analyst remains silent. He argued that we never forget our past - it returns in the form of 'haunting dreams and crippling symptoms', for both individuals and cultures. 'What we cannot remember, we are doomed to repeat'.

In the late 19th century, the emperor finally got round to having the city's medieval walls demolished in order to build a great boulevard, the Ringstraße built, serving as an interface between the growing suburbs and the old town. This is where the bourgeoisie erected their cultural institutions (the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Naturhistorisches Museum and the opera) and their political institutions (the Rathaus and the imperial parliament). The Ringstraße was the setting for the 'golden age' of Vienna.

In golden age Vienna, architecture was taken very seriously - the architect of the opera house (constructed 1861-9) killed himself after the building was panned by the critics. The first building on the Ringstraße was a great imperial monument, the neo-gothic Votive Church (constructed 1856-79), built on the site of a failed assassination attempt in 1853 on Emperor Franz Joseph by a Hungarian revolutionary. The Ringstraße is a mishmash of inconsistent architectural styles, from renaissance to Graeco-Roman to gothic, all built at the same time - it 'evokes' different histories and styles but is itself 'without' a history or a style. For example, the Flemish-gothic Rathaus (1872-83) is based on the fantasy that 19th century Vienna is like one of the great late medieval powerhouses of northern Europe (like Bruges or Antwerp). But the building is much bigger than anything that medieval people themselves actually built, and the real-life counterparts of the sturdy medieval craftsmen featured in the stonework were imperial bureaucrats, capitalist speculators and the vast proletarian poor.

13.00: Leopoldstadt - Jewish Vienna.

Late 19th century Viennese artists were trained at the conservative Academy of Fine Arts, where they underwent a rigorous training in the styles of every historical era. They were expected to have encyclopaedic knowledge of the past, repressing the present moment. This repression came to a head during the building of the University (1877-84). Progressives demanded a modern building, suited to being a temple of science and reason. But the building was constructed in an Italian renaissance style, because that was where the university had its historical roots. They employed the most spectacular young painter in 1890s Vienna to paint a ceiling cycle representing the academic faculties - Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). However, the paintings that he came up with were totally different to the conventional Ringstraße style, much more enigmatic and sexually explicit. Klimt's paintings provoked outrage among the conservative university professors and among the popular press, and were ultimately never put in place.

Klimt subsequently helped found the Secession in 1897, and used this new institution as his public stage. When it came to constructing a permanent home for their work, the Secessionists came up with one of the most radical departures in architectural history - a 'windowless temple of art', 'a white space in which art can appear in a pristine environment'. The building (popularly known as the 'cabbage head' because of its characteristic dome of golden leaves, and built in 1897-8) was designed by the young architect Joseph Olbrich (1867-1908). The facade was inscribed with the Secessionist creed - "der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit". Members of the Secession chose to rebel against the backward-looking, 'historicist' approach of their teachers, celebrating the 'new'. Its interior was an exhibition space, not a museum, with movable walls, used to exhibit painting, sculpture and the applied arts. Klimt's vision was of a humanity, fallen prey to carnal pleasures, but ultimately redeemed by artistic genius, embodied by Vienna's demigod, Beethoven. Klimt's most important subsequent works were portraits, represting his 'retreat from the public to the private in the face of savage criticism'.

Viennese cafés were the 'nerve centre' of the city's cultural avant-garde, home to literary circles like the Jung-Wien. The real-life hero of this cult was the poet Hugo von Hoffmanstal (1874-1929), whose poetry was the sensation of literary Vienna in 1891, especially when the author turned out to be a 17-year-old schoolboy rather than an ageing aristocrat - 'Might experience itself be just a dream?'. Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was a Jewish writer, with roots in Leopoldstadt. Influenced by Freud's 'talking cure', he pioneered the 'inner monologue' (or 'stream of consciousness') technique, to get inside the minds of his characters. Schnitzler also kept a careful record of all his orgasms, reflecting a 'clinical approach' to his sexuality. He explored the 'facades' of Viennese society - the bourgeois facade and the hidden world of sexual exploitation of poor women ('süsse Mädel').

The sewer system (memorably featured in the film The Third Man) was the underbelly of golden age Vienna. Due to a local housing shortage, it was home to thousands of people. They recycled metal, bones (for making glue) and grease (for making soap) from the sewers and sold them to factories to buy cheap alcohol.

The Ringstraße also featured the so-called 'red palaces' - opulent apartment blocks built in the 1880s for the wealthy bourgeoisie to rent, with shops and offices on the ground floor. Unlike the townhouses of the aristocrats, the symbols are abstract - the bourgeois renter is a 'private individual' rather than the public heir to a long and distinguished history. Indeed, it was the bourgeoisie who invented the very concept of 'privacy'. A good example of these is Otto Wagner's (1841-1918) art nouveau style apartments (1898). These eliminated the traditional distinctions between the storeys (rich at top, poor at bottom), except for the basic distinction between public (shops at street level) and private (apartments on upper floors). The facade consists of ceramic tiles decorated with flower motifs, and is hence weatherproof.

Otto Wagner was Vienna's great city planner, who understood architecture in 'total terms'. His most ambitious project was designing Vienna's urban railway. He was one of the first people to understand that transport is the key to modern city life. For example, Hernals station in the Vienna suburbs was designed by Wagner. The details (lighting and tiles) introduce efficiency, rationality and beauty into the everyday lives of commuters. The proportions are unrationally, uneconomically generous - to make people happy when they go to work. Wagner's vision was 'democratic' - he expected everyone to use his railway, and even built a pavilion-like station near the emperor's country palace (in 1899). The emperor only used it once - during the opening ceremony.

The parliament building was built to represent all the empire's peoples, in a city with absolutely no democratic tradition. Thus, the architects turned to ancient Athens for their inspiration. There were eleven different languages and no translators, so parliament was 'an embarassing babble to its supporters'. However, parliament was popular theatre for the Viennese, who queued up for hours to watch the spectacle, including a young Adolf Hitler. Hitler came to the conclusion that the German 'master race' had ceded too much power to the other peoples of the empire. He went on to obliterate parliamentary democracy.

Karl Lueger (1844-1910) was Vienna's most popular mayor, commemorated to this day in countless statues and street names. He was responsible for inventing the 'jews' as a popular enemy - the capitalists and bankers oppressing the little man, and the avant-garde artists scandalising petit-bourgeois sensibilities. He famously said: 'I decide who is a jew'. Lueger was not an extreme anti-semite, but he made jew-hating 'mainstream'.

The Leopold Museum features works by Klimt's scandalous successor, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), who eroticised the art of drawing itself. Schiele was the most obsessive self-portraitist of the 20th century, in the way he painted himself naked, viewed in a mirror, with particular focus on his exposed genitals. The curator of the collection is the artist Peter Weibel, who himself scandalised Vienna in the 1960s, by for example inviting passers-by to fondle his girlfriend's breasts from inside a box attached to her chest. Weibel tells how Schiele mastered the technique of 'nervous lines' - shakey lines caused by the artist's nervous excitement as he approached the genital area of his model, and also his foregrounded use of armpit hair - at that time, a woman opening her armpits was a 'promise of sexual pleasure'. Schiele often used prebuscent girls as models; in fact, he was jailed for corrupting minors. But then as now, 'bad publicity was better than no publicity' - in 1900 Vienna, breaking taboos made people famous.

Michaelerplatz punctuates Vienna's old city, and includes the Baroque entrance facade for the Hofburg, the old imperial castle. The city authorities tore town some of the old buildings and commissioned a 'firebrand architectural critic', Adolf Loos (1870-1933), to design a new structure. Loos had written that 'ornament is a crime' and dismissed the Ringstraße as a 'paper facade'. He wanted to do away with the deceit of using poured concrete nailed on to the front of a building as a substitute for marble or stucco ('the twin monsters of falsehood and bad taste'). He used expensive materials (wood, stone, metal, glass, leather) for his interiors and used them simply, thus bringing out their sensual appeal, 'foreshadowing all the best of modern design'. The emperor hated the Loos house, with its unornamented facade ('windows without eyebrows'). This house represents the birth of the modern in Vienna, rather than Klimt or Schiele - 'representation stripped bare', the 'blank canvas or zero point of Austrian modernism'.

This point in time is perfectly represented by the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister, with its 'obsessive functionality' (bare light bulbs, no carpets or curtains). Wittgenstein's philosophy was centrally concerned with 'establishing the narrow limits of what it can saw and what it can do'. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, made him the most influential philosopher of the modern age. He sought to describe what the world looks like to a completely isolated individual. He tried to explain how the mind, through language, can possibly reflect the world, using the powerful tools of modern logic. He strips language bare, demonstrating that there are certain concepts which cannot be put into words (god, art, history). They are unsayable and meaningless. Language can only refer to facts. Everything else lies outside of language - 'That whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.'

Ethnic hatred, assassination of Franz Ferdiniand, WWI and WWII.

In 1938, Vienna had 96 synagogues (all but one completely destroyed during Kristallnacht). In 1900, 220,000 Jews in Vienna (10%). Barabara Timmermann (Vienna Walks)

Gerhard Roth. ('Vienna's great chronicler of silence')

Vienna was where the classical style of music was born. It was also here that this legacy was 'shaken to the core' Arnold Schönberg, 'liberated dissonance' or 'transformed music into noise'. Caused a literal riot in the music hall in 1913 at the premiere of ??. 'Strictly anarchic, atonal music'. Influenced Kandinksy.

Steinhof, Otto Wagner's church, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirche_am_Steinhof