Learning and Suffering in Vienna
the most socially unhealthy of cities. Glittering wealth and revolting poverty alternated abruptly. In the center and in the inner districts one really felt the heart-beat of the empire of fifty-two millions, with all the dangerous magic of this State of nationalities. The Court’s blinding magnificence was like a magnet to the wealth and intelligence of the rest of the State. On top came the extreme centralization of the Hapsburg Monarchy in and of itself.
It offered the only possibility of holding this stew of peoples together. But the result was an extraordinary concentration of high government offices in the capital and Imperial residence.
Vienna was, however, not only the political and intellectual but also the economic capital of the old Danube monarchy. Contrasting with the army of high officers, officials, artists and scholars was a yet larger army of workers—against the wealth of aristocracy and trade a bleeding poverty. Before the palaces of the Ringstrasse lounged thousands of the unemployed, and below this via triumphalis of old Austria the homeless lived in the twilight and slime of the sewers.
There was hardly a German city where the social question could have been better studied than in Vienna. But we must not be misled. This “studying” cannot be done from above. No one who has not himself been in the clutches of this viper can know its venom. Otherwise there is no result but superficial chatter or untruthful sentimentality. Both are harmful the one because it can never reach the heart of the problem, the other because it passes it by. I do not know which is more devastating—to ignore social privation as do most of those favored by fortune or even elevated by their own exertions, or graciously to condescend in a fashion as haughty as it often is tactlessly intrusive, like certain women of fashion in skirts and in trousers who “feel for the people.” In any case these people sin more greatly than their mere intelligence, aided by no instinct, will ever allow them to understand. And for that reason the result of the “social-mindedness” they promote is, to their astonishment, always zero, often actually indignant refusal—which they then regard as proof of the people’s ingratitude.
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