When I started to cover Vienna, I had a lot of Austrian history and culture to catch up on. I highlighted below some books I’ve found especially enlightening and enjoyable along the way. Reading any of these would render a Vienna trip all the more meaningful.
A Concise History of Austria, by Steven Beller (2006): When did the Habsburg family appear on the scene? How did they come to rule Carinthia, Tyrol, Salzburg and the other regions that comprise Austria today? What were the policies of the trio of 18th-century progressive rulers who reshaped the Habsburg Monarchy? What should we think of the 68 years that Franz Joseph spent in power? What were the events that led to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938? What constitutes Austrian identity today? Steven Beller is one of the leading historians of Austria and in-depth knowledge imbues every sentence of this dynamic book, which also lends itself to be read piecemeal. Here, my interview with the author.
Vienna: Legend and Reality, by Ilsa Barea-Kulcsar (1967): Ilsa Barea’s erudite and nuanced monograph on Vienna should be required reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in the rollercoaster history of Austria’s capital city. It is through insightful short profiles of people that she brings alive their time: The career of Fischer von Erlach informs the years of Baroque splendor; Franz Schubert and his circle stand for the repressive Metternich-era; the inner conflicts of Franz Grillparzer, Johann Nestroy, and the Johann Strauss duo expose the complexities of the revolution of 1848. Hans Makart, Sigmund Freud, Franz Joseph are also among the featured, as are many others who had been unknown to me.
Born into a Viennese intellectual family in 1902, Barea was a political activist but her convictions only enhance this textured and deeply researched book. Her obvious admiration of Vienna doesn't cloud her judgment when dealing with unsavory elements of the past, for example the horrific Habsburg Counter-Reformation crusades that destroyed the thriving middle-class Lutheran city Vienna once was. The cherry on top is her writing, which verges on the poetic.
The Austrians, by Gordon Brook-Shepherd (1996): Gordon Brook-Shepherd (1918-2004) spent decades in Vienna, first as a British intelligence agent after WWII and later as regional bureau head for the Daily Telegraph. Accordingly, the most thrilling part of the book is the 20th century, especially the character studies of Chancellor Dollfuss – of whom he is more sympathetic than most historians – and Schuschnigg and the events that gave rise to Hitler’s annexation of Austria. He is equally persuasive when describing the road to Austria’s liberation and why the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to withdraw from the country in 1955.
The Habsburg Empire, by Pieter M. Judson (2016): Starting with the 1760s reforms of Empress Maria Theresa, a strong centralized state ruled over the territories of the famously multiethnic Habsburg Monarchy. The focus of the author, who is a professor of history, is understanding where lay the loyalties of the population, which included Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Slovenians, and Italians. Was it with their ethnic group? Their crown land? The Monarchy itself? Despite the common belief that Austria-Hungary was doomed to fail – see below – most historians today hold the opposite view and this detailed and enlightening book provides a persuasive argument for its many merits.
Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth (1932): Joseph Roth’s historical novel poignantly illustrates the twilight years of Austria-Hungary. Through the rise and fall of the ennobled Trotta family, we learn about themes that Roth believes contributed to the collapse of the empire: simmering national and social tensions; favoritism within the civil administration; nihilism and utter boredom among the officer corps; an aging and military-obsessed emperor. Of the many memorable scenes, my favorite is when Kaiser Franz Joseph visits his troops to inspect a military parade.
The Viennese, by Paul Hofmann (1988): Paul Hofmann (1912-2008) was a Vienna-born writer and journalist who fled Austria in the 1930s and returned half a century later as the bureau head of the New York Times. His historical overview of Vienna is more haphazard and anecdotal than those of Beller and Gordon Brook-Shepherd, above, but the value of this book lies in the descriptions of cultural figures – composers, the Young Vienna group of writers (Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus), Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle of thinkers. Published in 1988, Hofmann also deals at length with recent events with nuance and understanding. His unvarnished presentation of the post-war intellectual climate and cultural policy is especially captivating.
The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig (1942): Calm wisdom emanates from the pages of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), once a widely celebrated Austrian novelist but now largely forgotten. Zweig provides thoughtful commentary about life in pre-war Vienna, World War I, the strange post-war Austrian Republic, and the gradual Nazi takeover (which drove him and his wife to suicide while in Brazilian exile). The short vignettes about his famous friends – Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Richard Strauss, Sigmund Freud – are treasures to be savored.
Hitler’s Vienna, by Brigitte Hamann (1999): Historian Brigitte Hamann’s book is a reminder that Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who grew up in Austria, spent his formative years between 1909 and 1914 in Vienna. The book isn’t a typical biography – Hamann is interested in the political and social climate of the city and the toxic intellectual influences that shaped the young Hitler, including absurd race theories. She also provides a window into Hitler’s everydays and his infamous rejection from the Art Academy.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna, by Carl E. Schorske (1979): This cultural history written by the late Princeton professor, Carl E. Schorske, has become an indispensable classic on Vienna’s art and politics around 1900. Schorske believed that the emerging modern art movement in Vienna was a form of reaction to the political nationalism and anti-semitism ushered in by politicians such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer and the Christian Socialist mayor, Karl Lueger. This theory has since been discredited; still, Schorske's profiles of Theodor Herzl, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, and his essay on the Ringstraße construction are brilliant.
Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, by Richard Cockett (2023): Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s is usually remembered for its economic stagnation, domestic unrest, and the Nazi takeover. But the thriving intellectual atmosphere of Austria-Hungary – which had collapsed a few years earlier at the end of WWI – didn’t suddenly disappear; Richard Cockett, who is an editor at The Economist, compiled an impressive group of Vienna-based people, mostly Jewish, who contributed to 20th-century modernism across many fields. Some, such as the sociologist-philosopher-economist Otto Neurath, played leading roles in the creation of “Red Vienna,” a fifteen-year (1919-19134) experiment in utopian democratic socialism. With Hitler’s rise, they fled Vienna and became part of the great generation bitterly known as “Hitler’s gift to America.”
Cockett’s apparent enthusiasm for the Austrian School of neoliberal economics can sometimes feel too on the nose, but the value of this book lies in the short and informative biographical vignettes of the numerous protagonists, which include mathematicians and philosophers (Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper), physicists (Lise Meitner), political economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polányi), architects (Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Josef Frank), film directors (Billy Wilder), and many others.
The Vienna I Knew, by Joseph Wechsberg (1979): Joseph Wechsberg is one of my favorite writers; he grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family in Moravia, fled from the Nazis in 1939 to the United States, where he became a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In his adopted language, he wrote beautiful pieces about fine dining and classical music, but his heart always remained in Central Europe (he moved back in retirement). This book is as much a biography as a mournful ode to Vienna as he remembered it – coated in a beautiful varnish of nostalgia.
Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard (1985): As often is the case with Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), this novel amounts to an endless and sharply funny rant about all things wrong in Austria. The narrator is Reger, a cynical, disillusioned, and world-weary music critic whose outrageous opinions, however, contain an element of truth, like the part about Vienna’s public restrooms being shockingly unclean. No one is spared his venom: Austria’s anti-intellectual elites, the bigoted Habsburgs, the kitschy Gustav Klimt.
Vienna and the Jews, by Steven Beller (1989): As neighboring Budapest, Vienna had a very big Jewish community before WWII, nearly 200,000 people, which contributed massively to the city’s intellectual and artistic development. The majority of Viennese doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and writers were Jewish. Steven Beller’s informative book explains the reasons for this drastic overrepresentation and describes the reactions of the Jewish community to the rising anti-semitism of 1870s Austria, which, ironically, originated from the group that Jews had tried to emulate: the German-Austrian elites.
The Austrian Paradox, by Oliver Rathkolb (2021): Given the prosperity of present-day Austria, it’s easy to forget that not so long ago this was a poor, war-ravaged country occupied in part by Soviet troops. This academic but informative book by University of Vienna historian Oliver Rathkolb explores the reasons behind the “Austrian miracle,” having to do with Nazi-era investments, favorable Cold War dynamics, and a few unusually skilled politicians. For a summary version, read my interview with Professor Rathkolb, who played a central role in the opening of the House of Austrian History (Haus der Geschichte Österreich), an excellent museum inside Vienna's Imperial Palace.
Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900, by David Wyn Jones (2016): This concise volume explores the music of the Habsburg capital while never losing sight of the broader cultural history that shaped this music. Wyn Jones, a Professor of Music at Cardiff University, thoughtfully examines the city's composers, audiences, performance halls, and the gradual retreat of the Habsburg court from its all-embracing patronage, a void initially filled by the aristocracy and eventually the Viennese concert-going public.
The book is drizzled with fascinating details: from musical royals to the role music played in firing up patriotic sentiments during the Napoleonic Wars. From the foundation of the Wiener Musikverein and the Vienna Philharmonic to Gustav Mahler’s impact on the Vienna Opera, for example.
Beyond Nationalism: A History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848-1918, by István Deák (1990)
The Hungarian-born professor of Columbia University, István Deák, whom I knew and admired, was a master of exposing history’s paradoxes and warning about drawing easy conclusions. The famously polyglot and uniform-obsessed Joint Army of Austria-Hungary provides plenty of fodder for Deák, who details its complexities and ironies with wit and apparent relish.
The background and education of the officers, the most and least desirable garrisons, life in the barracks, and the contradictions around dueling and the protection of honor are among the many topics covered. I found it refreshing to learn that ethnic origins and mother tongues were of no consideration in the anti-nationalist Habsburg army. This book isn’t specifically about Vienna, but it provides essential context to understand the country whose capital it was. If you’re like me, Deák's study will also familiarize you with the basics of army units and command structure.
The Habsburgs, by Dorothy Gies McGuigan (1966): Those who prefer juicy gossip to dry historical events will enjoy this book about the family that ruled Austria for more than 600 years (1282-1918). How did Emperor Maximilian’s shrewd marriage policy bring half of Europe under Habsburg sway in the 16th century? Why couldn’t the lightweight Leopold measure up to his French contemporary, Louis XIV? Who was Franz Joseph’s mysterious mistress? Why did Rudolf, the last heir to the throne, kill himself? And so much more!
The Reluctant Empress, by Brigitte Hamann (1981): Those deeply interested in the life of Sisi (1837-1898), the isolated and unhappy wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, will find much to savor in this book. In Brigitte Hamann’s account, it was only logical that the free-spirited, liberal-minded, and very selfish Empress escaped the rigid confines of the Habsburg court lorded over by her arch-conservative mother-in-law, Sophie. This easy-reading biography is heavy on various diary excerpts and gossip that are helpfully contextualized with contemporary events. As I was reading it, I alternated between feeling bad for Sisi and finding it absurd to think that.
My content is free and independent. I rely in large part on readers to support my work. I'm grateful if you make a one-time payment (PayPal, Venmo, Revolut) or subscribe to my weekly newsletter in which I write about Budapest and Vienna.