The Pittsburgh Press (April 7, 1945)
Background of news –
Vienna in its decline
By Bertram Benedict
Moscow dispatches say the onrushing Red Armies virtually have encircled Vienna and are battling in the city’s outskirts.
Vienna (the Germans call it “Wien”) is traditionally the bulwark of Western Europe against invaders from the east, just as Budapest is traditionally the outlying bastion protecting Vienna.
Through much of the Middle Ages, Hungary was in the hands of the Turks, but the Turks could never take Vienna, just as earlier the Moors could never make good a foothold beyond the Pyrenees. Great Turkish sieges of Vienna came to naught in 1529 and again in 1683.
From Budapest to Vienna, the Danube lies in a wide plain which at Vienna broadens out at all points of the compass – giving access to Bohemia (Czechoslovakia) on the north, to Southern Germany (Bavaria) on the west, to Hungary on the south, and thence to Northern Yugoslavia and the northeast corner of Italy.
And Vienna stands at the crossroads linguistically and racially as well as geographically, marking the dividing line of German, Magyar (Hungarian) and Slav.
Capital of the Hapsburgs
In its heyday, Vienna disputed with Paris the title of the greatest capital of the continent of Europe. Away back in the Crusades the early importance of the city was increased by the steady flow of traffic from Western to Southeastern Europe.
As early as 1276, Vienna was made the capital of the Hapsburgs, who were to become the oldest, the proudest, and, even more than the Bourbons, the greatest reigning house of Europe. And Vienna grew even more important as the heads of the House of Hapsburg became heads of the Holy Roman Empire.
The wealth and power of Vienna throve with the wealth and power of the nobility. Its great palaces, its art museums, its music halls, its university (the medical school was especially notable), its churches, all provided a fitting setting for the gaiety which was symbolized in the Viennese waltz.
Over the city towers the medieval Cathedral of St. Stephen; and the Ringstrasse, built in the latter half of the 19th century on the site of the old fortifications, was long one of the most famous streets of the world. Curiously enough, the city proper has always sat a little apart from the Danube, and is traversed only by a canal of the river.
City eclipsed by Berlin
The decline of Vienna began with the decline of the theory of the divine right of kings. The city was twice occupied by the troops of Napoleon. In the revolutionary ferment that swept Europe in 1848, the radicals seized control of Vienna, which the Hapsburg armies reoccupied only after a bombardment. The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 subordinated the Hapsburgs to the Hohenzollerns, and Vienna was eclipsed by Berlin.
The defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I ended the long Hapsburg reign, and Austria became a republic. Much rich territory was shorn from the old Austria, and Vienna became poverty-stricken from the absence of economic hinterland able to support it in the style to which it was accustomed.
The Austrian Socialist movement had long been strong, well organized, and intelligent, and Vienna, once a mirror of the might of monarchy, became a mirror of Socialist experimentation, especially housing.
The degradation of the Vienna of old was completed in 1938 when Adolf Hitler, native of Austria and once an obscure corporal in the Austrian Army, annexed Austria outright to the German Reich, in which it is called the Ostmark (eastern territory).
In 1939, Vienna, with slightly less than two million inhabitants, was only the seventh largest city of Europe.