All Vienna, all the time

[Mark Kohut]

Wikipedia:
In 1804, Vienna became capital of the Austrian Empire and continued to play a major role in European and World politics, including hosting the 1815 Congress of Vienna. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 Vienna remained the capital of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the latter half of the 19th century the city developed what had previously been the bastions and glacis into the Ringstraße, a major prestige project.
In 1918, after World War I, Vienna became capital of the First Austrian Republic. During the 1920s and 1930s it was a bastion of Socialism in Austria, and became known as "Red Vienna." The city was stage to the Austrian Civil War of 1934, when Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss sent the Army to shell civilian housing occupied by the socialist militia. In 1938, after a triumphant entry into Austria, Adolf Hitler famously spoke to the Austrian people from the balcony of the Neue Burg, a part of the Hofburg at the Heldenplatz. Between 1938 (Anschluß) and the end of the Second World War, Vienna lost its status as a capital to Berlin.
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 Wittgenstein's Vienna:
To make their case that Wittgenstein had profoundly unsettled ethical questions, Janik and Toulmin make important forays into Viennese intellectual history and cultural politics for the period within which Wittgenstein's sensibilities were formed, and up to the moment that he embarked for Cambridge. And what forays they are! That world of coffeehouse writers such as Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, and Hermann Bahr; of Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmansthal, of Robert Musil and Arthur Schnitzler; of Freud; of the painters Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; of the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg: all these and many more are served up by Janik and Toulmin. So too, Vienna's not-so-underground erotic life and erotic preoccupations, its housing problems, its Jewish culture and its anti-semitism: all these are melded into a vivid picture of the Vienna of Wittgenstein's era. If we keep in mind the fact that most of the works that constitute
 the bibliography of the Vienna revival, including Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna [1]and Kirk Varnedoe's Vienna 1900,[2]were published after 1973, we can understand the importance of Janik and Toulmin's efforts. But beyond their explorations of cultural life are those of logic and philosophy of science. If Janik is the cultural historian and Toulmin the philosopher, both have worked together to ensure that their non-specialist readers are carefully guided through the various materials. Rarely does a work combine so much, and remain so readable, at the same time. 
Now to the book's major themes. The authors argue that Wittgenstein's Viennese contemporaries were fundamentally critical of the official culture. The Viennese cultural elite was a wide-ranging group sick to death of the inauthenticity of what Robert Musil would come to characterize as "kakania"--the multi-national and multi-linguistic empire held together by pomp and glitter manufactured by a tired and decrepit monarchical House of Habsburg and imperial bureaucracy that denied that anything was amiss until a crisis occurred. And then there was the "kaka" itself: a corrupted literature, an overly ornamented art and architecture, an over-romanticized music. To take these in order: writers in search of new forms, such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmansthal, found inspiration from physicist Ernst Mach, who argued that too much of contemporary physics was laden with layers of metaphysical and theological meanings inherited from past eras, and called for a
 physics based strictly upon observation. The critic Karl Kraus, waging unending war against corruptions of language, attacked the popular feuilleton, the newspaper column that made a melange of truth and fiction and thereby deprecated the validity of each form. The architect and designer Adolf Loos demanded that objects be designed for maximum use-value and function, rather than for ornamentation, with function in second place. The composer Arnold Schoenberg struggled to find a pure musical language not bound to the diatonic system that had reached its culmination in an overripe post-Wagnerian hyper-romanticism. On each front, the dissidents and secessionists struggled to find new, valid modes of expression to replace the artificial and inauthentic. 
 
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Wikipedia:
From 1905 on, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting," and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture.[8] His memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject:
“The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest."[9]”

Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was the path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for architecture school:
“In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.[10]”

On December 21, 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast cancer at age 47. Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his sister Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists.
After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money. In 1909, he sought refuge in a homeless shelter. By 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men.
Hitler says he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna,[11] which had a large Jewish community, including Orthodox Jews who had fled from pogroms in Russia. But according to a childhood friend, August Kubizek, Hitler was a "confirmed


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