Austria History
Think Tanks
HISTORY
Wikipedia. Evidence
has been found of continuous habitation in the Vienna area since 500
BC, when Celts settled the site on the Danube.[34] In 15 BC, the Romans
fortified the frontier city they called Vindobona to guard the empire
against Germanic tribes to the north.
Close
ties with other Celtic peoples continued through the ages. The Irish
monk Saint Colman (or Koloman, Irish Colmán, derived from colm ""dove"")
is buried in Melk Abbey and Saint Fergil (Virgil the Geometer) served
as Bishop of Salzburg for forty years. Irish Benedictines founded
twelfth-century monastic settlements; evidence of these ties persists in
the form of Vienna's great Schottenstift monastery (Scots Abbey), once
home to many Irish monks.
In
976, Leopold I of Babenberg became count of the Eastern March, a
district centered on the Danube on the eastern frontier of Bavaria. This
initial district grew into the duchy of Austria. Each succeeding
Babenberg ruler expanded the march east along the Danube, eventually
encompassing Vienna and the lands immediately east. In 1145, Duke Henry
II Jasomirgott moved the Babenberg family residence from Klosterneuburg
in Lower Austria to Vienna. From that time, Vienna remained the center
of the Babenberg dynasty.[35]
In
1440, Vienna became the resident city of the Habsburg dynasty. It
eventually grew to become the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire
(800–1806) in 1437 and a cultural center for arts and science, music and
fine cuisine. Hungary occupied the city between 1485 and 1490.
In
the 16th and 17th centuries Christian forces twice stopped Ottoman
armies outside Vienna, in the 1529 Siege of Vienna and the 1683 Battle
of Vienna. The Great Plague of Vienna ravaged the city in 1679, killing
nearly a third of its population.[36]
Austrian Empire and the early 20th century
In
1804, during the Napoleonic Wars, Vienna became the capital of the
newly formed Austrian Empire. The city continued to play a major role in
European and world politics, including hosting the Congress of Vienna
in 1814–15. The city also saw major uprisings against Hapsburg rule in
1848, which were suppressed. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of
1867, Vienna remained the capital of what became the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The city functioned as a center of classical music, for which
the title of the First Viennese School (Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven) is
sometimes applied.
During
the latter half of the 19th century, Vienna developed what had
previously been the bastions and glacis into the Ringstraße, a new
boulevard surrounding the historical town and a major prestige project.
Former suburbs were incorporated, and the city of Vienna grew
dramatically. In 1918, after World War I, Vienna became capital of the
Republic of German-Austria, and then in 1919 of the First Republic of
Austria.
From
the late-19th century to 1938, the city remained a center of high
culture and of modernism. A world capital of music, Vienna played host
to composers such as Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. The
city's cultural contributions in the first half of the 20th century
included, among many, the Vienna Secession movement in art,
psychoanalysis, the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern),
the architecture of Adolf Loos and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and the Vienna Circle. In 1913 Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz
Tito, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Stalin all lived within a few kilometers
of each other in central Vienna, some of them becoming regulars at the
same coffeehouses.[37] Austrians came to regard Vienna as a center of
socialist politics, sometimes referred to as ""Red Vienna"" (Das rote
Wien). In the Austrian Civil War of 1934 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss
sent the Austrian Army to shell civilian housing such as the Karl
Marx-Hof occupied by the socialist militia.
Anschluss and World War II
Main article: Anschluss
In
1938, after a triumphant entry into Austria, the Austrian-born German
Chancellor Adolf Hitler spoke to the Austrian Germans from the balcony
of the Neue Burg, a part of the Hofburg at the Heldenplatz. In the
ensuing days the new Nazi authorities oversaw the harassment of Viennese
Jews, the looting of their homes, and their on-going deportation and
murder.[38][need quotation to verify][39] Between 1938 (after the
Anschluss) and the end of the Second World War in 1945, Vienna lost its
status as a capital to Berlin, because Austria ceased to exist and
became part of Nazi Germany.
During
the November pogroms on November 9, 1938, 92 synagogues in Vienna were
destroyed. Only the city temple in the 1st district was spared, as the
data of all Jews in Vienna were collected in the adjacent archives.
Adolf Eichmann held office in the expropriated Palais Rothschild and
organized the expropriation and persecution of the Jews. Of the almost
200,000 Jews in Vienna, around 120,000 were driven to emigrate and
around 65,000 were killed. After the end of the war, the Jewish
population of Vienna was about only 5,000.[40][41][42][43]
Vienna
was also the center of the important resistance group around Heinrich
Maier, which provided the Allies with plans for V-1, V-2 rockets,
Peenemünde, Tiger tanks, Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163
Komet and other aircraft. The information was important to Operation
Crossbow and Operation Hydra, both preliminary missions for Operation
Overlord. In addition, factory locations for war-essential products were
communicated as targets for the Allied Air Force. The group was exposed
and most of its members were executed after months of torture by the
Gestapo in Vienna.[44][45][46][47] The group around the later executed
Karl Burian even tried to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel
Metropole.[48]
On
2 April 1945, the Soviet Red Army launched the Vienna Offensive against
the Germans holding the city and besieged it. British and American
air-raids, as well as artillery duels between the Red Army and the SS
and Wehrmacht, crippled infrastructure, such as tram services and water-
and power-distribution, and destroyed or damaged thousands of public
and private buildings. The Red Army was helped by an Austrian resistance
group in the German Wehrmacht. The group tried under the code name
Radetzky to prevent the destruction and fighting in the city. Vienna
fell eleven days later.[49] At the end of the war, Austria again became
separated from Germany, and Vienna regained its status as the capital
city of the Republic of Austria, but the Soviet hold[citation needed] on
the city remained until 1955, when Austria regained full sovereignty.
Four-power Vienna
Further information: Allied-occupied Austria
After
the war, Vienna was part of Soviet-occupied Eastern Austria until
September 1945. As in Berlin, Vienna in September 1945 was divided into
sectors by the four powers: the US, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union
and supervised by an Allied Commission. The four-power occupation of
Vienna differed in one key respect from that of Berlin: the central area
of the city, known as the first district, constituted an international
zone in which the four powers alternated control on a monthly basis. The
control was policed by the four powers on a de facto day-to-day basis,
the famous ""four soldiers in a jeep"" method.[50] The Berlin Blockade
of 1948 raised Western concerns that the Soviets might repeat the
blockade in Vienna. The matter was raised in the UK House of Commons by
MP Anthony Nutting, who asked: ""What plans have the Government for
dealing with a similar situation in Vienna? Vienna is in exactly a
similar position to Berlin.""[51]
There
was a lack of airfields in the Western sectors, and authorities drafted
contingency plans to deal with such a blockade. Plans included the
laying down of metal landing mats at Schönbrunn. The Soviets did not
blockade the city. The Potsdam Agreement included written rights of land
access to the western sectors, whereas no such written guarantees had
covered the western sectors of Berlin. Also, there was no precipitating
event to cause a blockade in Vienna. (In Berlin, the Western powers had
introduced a new currency in early 1948 to economically freeze out the
Soviets.) During the 10 years of the four-power occupation, Vienna
became a hotbed for international espionage between the Western and
Eastern blocs. In the wake of the Berlin Blockade, the Cold War in
Vienna took on a different dynamic. While accepting that Germany and
Berlin would be divided, the Soviets had decided against allowing the
same state of affairs to arise in Austria and Vienna. Here, the Soviet
forces controlled districts 2, 4, 10, 20, 21, and 22 and all areas
incorporated into Vienna in 1938.
Barbed
wire fences were installed around the perimeter of West Berlin in 1953,
but not in Vienna. By 1955, the Soviets, by signing the Austrian State
Treaty, agreed to relinquish their occupation zones in Eastern Austria
as well as their sector in Vienna. In exchange they required that
Austria declare its permanent neutrality after the allied powers had
left the country. Thus they ensured that Austria would not be a member
of NATO and that NATO forces would therefore not have direct
communications between Italy and West Germany.
The
atmosphere of four-power Vienna is the background for Graham Greene's
screenplay for the film The Third Man (1949). Later he adapted the
screenplay as a novel and published it. Occupied Vienna is also depicted
in the 1991 Philip Kerr novel, A German Requiem.
Austrian State Treaty and afterwards
The
four-power control of Vienna lasted until the Austrian State Treaty was
signed in May 1955. That year, after years of reconstruction and
restoration, the State Opera and the Burgtheater, both on the
Ringstraße, reopened to the public. The Soviet Union signed the State
Treaty only after having been provided with a political guarantee by the
federal government to declare Austria's neutrality after the withdrawal
of the allied troops. This law of neutrality, passed in late October
1955 (and not the State Treaty itself), ensured that modern Austria
would align with neither NATO nor the Soviet bloc, and is considered one
of the reasons for Austria's delayed entry into the European Union in
1995.
In
the 1970s, Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky inaugurated the Vienna
International Center, a new area of the city created to host
international institutions. Vienna has regained much of its former
international stature by hosting international organizations, such as
the United Nations (United Nations Industrial Development Organization,
United Nations Office at Vienna and United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime), the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
