All language subtitles for BBC Vienna Empire Dynasty And Dream 3

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.