In the evenings they dressed for dancing, for the opera, the theater or the concert hall. Here newspapers and magazines were provided in all languages.
By day the middle class congregated in cafes, spending hours in conversation over a single cup of coffee and a glass of water. The Viennese were regarded abroad as a good-natured, easygoing, and highly cultured people. A majority of the administration's employees are Zechs, and the Hungarians have most influence in the affairs of the government.
An American diplomat describing the city in 1898 wrote:Ī man who had been but a short time in Vienna, may himself be of pure German stock, but his wife will be Galician or Polish, his cook Bohemian, his children's nurse Dalmatian, his man a Servian, his coachman a Slav, his barber a Magyar, and his son's tutor a Frenchman. Entering a small dark room the ceiling is covered with soot and the furniture crowded close together."Ī German might step onto a Viennese streetcar and find himself unable to exchange a word with any of his fellow passengers, for the city then was home to a rapidly expanding population of Magyars, Rumanians, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Slovenes, Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians, Dalmatians, Istrians and Bosnians, all of whom lived together apparently in happiness. As one ascends the stair the rickety banister sticks to one's fingers, and the walls on either side ooze. Her book describes parts of the Innere Stadt or city center as "dark, dirty and gloomy" and of the Jewish quarter she wrote: "The interiors of the houses are unspeakably squalid. Maria Hornor Lansdale's once-indispensable guide of 1902 draws a portrait of the Hapsburg capital that is at once grubbier and more dynamic than anything suggested in our modern guidebooks. In those days it was not marketed at all. The Vienna of the early twentieth century was not marketed in this way. Vienna is described-over-described-as a city of paradox but for those who do not know this or have never been there, it may be pictured as a capriccio drawn from the flat sound bites of the Austrian Tourist Board, a place defined by its rich cream cakes, Mozart mugs and T-shirts, New Year's waltzes, grand, bestatued buildings, wide streets, old fur-coated women, electric trams, and Lipizzaner stallions.
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