All language subtitles for Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds; A Tale of Three Cities 1x01 Vienna 1908

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.