In 1900, the events of the 20th century still lay ahead, its horrors and epochal upheavals unknown. But in one European metropolis, signs of that future could be gleaned from the social, political, and artistic unrest that roiled it.

Vienna in the years leading up to World War I was the capital of an unstable dual-state domain, Austria-Hungary, whose decrepit monarch, Emperor Franz Joseph I, presided over a powder keg of ethnic groups. These included Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Slovenes, among others, each with their own language, traditions, and aspirations to independence. Intermingled among them were the Jews, who lived with the onus of anti-Semitism while also disproportionately populating the cultivated and affluent elite of Viennese society.

The city was the crossroads for individuals who would instigate various convulsions to come: Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, whose concept of the unconscious utterly altered our understanding of the human condition; Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, two composers who radically transformed classical music; and a young Adolf Hitler, who would emerge from a life of failed artistic ambitions and vagrancy on Vienna’s streets to author the Holocaust.

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