Contradictions, Repression, and the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

By Daniel Goff

Vienna of the late Nineteenth Century was a city of contradictions. A grand capital city, the center of a great empire, Vienna was also a city with much poverty. Though a middle class of merchants and industrialists had begun to take control of the Austrian economy, Vienna felt very little of the class conflict that rocked other cities of comparable size. The forces of industrialization, though thoroughly entrenched throughout Western Europe, were only in their infancy in Austria. Austria was barely industrial, and therefore nearly backward economically; its massive government was extremely inefficient, its military in shambles, barely capable of self-defense. Yet its citizens considered themselves to be the most civilized, the most cosmopolitan of any people in the world, though their empire was on the verge of self-destruction, the most cosmopolitan of any people in the world, though their empire was on the verge of collapse. Vienna, in spite of all its grandeur, was the center of, at best, a second rate power, and a power governed almost solely by an Emperor. Unlike most monarchs, who, in the late nineteenth century saw their power over their subjects diminish dramatically as middle class driven capitalism led to democratic and socialist agitation, the Austrian people adored their emperor, Franz Joseph.

But very few people living in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna were willing to notice the signs of the collapse of the Empire. They all saw a city of beauty, of riches, of balls, of opera, with a certain self-assured attitude that only a great capital could have, while ignoring the growing nationalism outside the city threatening to pull the empire apart. The Austrians covered up the signs of imminent ruin through the arts, which were manifested in the magnificence of Vienna as a whole. It was hard to imagine disaster in the most regal of cities, during the most beautiful of imperial balls. They saw Vienna as greater than other cities, with its mix of cultures, of people from throughout the empire. "Here was at least partially achieved that supranational, cosmopolitan consciousness which was the dynasty’s only hope for survival," Say Janik and Toulmin in Wittgenstein’s Vienna. But for a variety of reasons, the Empire didn’t survive. On these pages are a few of these reasons.

Economic Problems in the Empire