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Just as Freud was first publishing on dreams, another Jewish doctor, Arthur Schnitzler, son of a Hungarian throat surgeon, who knew Freud, was writing La Ronde, which, starting and ending with a prostitute, told the story of ten sexual liaisons in decadent Vienna. Schnitzler was accused of writing pornography, but replied, ‘I write about love and death. What other subjects are there?’ Working in the War Ministry’s archive, an aspiring writer, son of a Jewish banker, Stefan Zweig, a committed cosmopolitan who in a cosmopolis glowing with rabid racism and universalist liberalism disdained all sides, wrote in his autobiography The World of Yesterday, ‘From the start, I was sure in my heart of my identity as a citizen of the world.’ Son of an Austrian gold-engraver, Gustav Klimt painted seething erotic paintings The Kiss and Woman in Gold, agleam with gold leaf, depicting his lover Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish financier’s daughter married to an older banker. Klimt became famous, but many aspiring artists were penniless.

The Austrian official’s son Adolf Hitler wanted to study art at the Vienna Academy of Arts but, twice failing to win a place, he moved to the city in 1907 aged eighteen, living in a bed-and-breakfast, reading in bed – ‘books were his whole world’ – about Frederick the Great and Germanic mythology, and attending Wagner operas.

That December, Hitler was poleaxed by the death of his forty-seven-year-old mother, Klara, from cancer. He kept her portrait in his pocket and a painting of her in his room until his own death. He was grateful to the Jewish doctor who cared for her, promising he would never forget; much later, Dr Bloch was the only Jew he protected. For a while he lived cushily on his mother’s inheritance. When her money ran out, he lived in workers’ hostels, doing menial work and lived by selling his sketches on postcards, all the while observing the tensions between Germans, Jewish bourgeoisie and Slavs.

The native Viennese were almost overwhelmed by a deluge of immigrant Czechs, Jews and Poles. Between 1880 and 1910, the city’s population doubled; a fifth of the inhabitants were Czech, while 8.7 per cent were Jewish, higher than in any other European city. A new German nationalism targeting these immigrants was rallied by ‘Handsome Karl’ Lueger, the long-serving mayor who horrified Franz Josef with his vulgar racism: the Habsburgs were the only dynasty whose multi-ethnic empire meant they could not embrace nationalism. ‘Vienna mustn’t become Jerusalem!’ said Lueger. Yet he joked, ‘I decide who’s a Jew,’ adding, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish.’

Young Hitler respected Handsome Karl, whom he recalled as ‘an excellent speaker’, but he particularly admired Georg Ritter von Schönerer, aristocratic Führer (leader) of an antisemitic, anti-Catholic movement who favoured the Roman salute. Hitler often watched debates in the Imperial Council, disgusted by the jabbering Slavic parliamentarians, and noticed the senescent Emperor Franz Josef conveyed in his carriage between palaces.

In the same streets and cafés, Josef Djugashvili, the Georgian Bolshevik, nicknamed Koba, was living in a boarding house next to Schönbrunn, working on an article for Lenin about the nationalities of the Russian empire. Djugashvili, a student priest, failed poet, prolific lover and handsome if pockmarked loner with a withered arm and hazel-coloured eyes, was a fanatical Marxist who had spent years in Siberian exile, frequently escaping. The tsar’s secret police, the Okhranka, the only efficient organization in the Russian empire, had smashed the revolutionaries, sending many to Siberia and even more into exile.

In late 1912, Djugashvili went to visit Lenin in Kraków, in Habsburg Galicia. In his Bolshevik faction, filled with garrulous windbags whom he called ‘the tea-drinkers’, Lenin appreciated the toughness of Djugashvili and his brigands. He funded his Party by ordering Koba to raid banks: in June 1907, in Tiflis, Djugashvili had pulled off a spectacular (but bloody) heist. Lenin praised this ‘wonderful Georgian’ as ‘exactly the type we need’. For his Viennese article, Djugashvili chose a new name, emulating Lenin, by adopting a proletarian pseudonym: Stalin – Steelman. While in Vienna, he met a bouffant-haired, barrel-chested Marxist journalist, a glamorous if arrogant hero of 1905, Leon Trotsky, son of a rich Jewish farmer in Ukraine. The two hated each other on sight. Neither of them met Hitler.

Down the road, in his gorgeous Belvedere Palace, Franz Ferdinand sought a creative solution to the Slavic problem. In 1906, he promoted a new chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was equally obsessed with destroying the Serbs and annexing Bosnia to save the empire. But the tsar and his nationalistic public supported their fellow Orthodox Slavs. Both worm-eaten empires looked to ferocious and uncontrollable Balkan nations to bolster their obsolescent swagger.