Austria was at the centre of a huge multi-national empire in 1914, and the Viennese archives are full of photographs and documents recalling the wartime service and home front lives of the Habsburg Monarchy’s many subjects. Implicitly recognized by this year’s events is the feeling that Vienna still bears a burden of responsibility towards all those who fought under an Austrian flag. And it’s by no means just the war that the Viennese are commemorating.
This year’s events also draw attention to the twenty-year period of cultural efflorescence that occurred in the lead-up to the conflict, a period when writers, artists and thinkers as diverse as Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schönberg and Sigmund Freud turned Vienna into the unofficial capital of European modernism. The restless cultural energies of fin-de-siecle Vienna have long been an important part of the Austrian capital’s tourist appeal – and it’s no wonder that this year’s centenary provides yet another opportunity to bring this to the fore. Here are six ways to remember the Great War in Vienna.
The Car, the Pistol and the Ostrich-Feather Hat
As every schoolchild ought to know, the outbreak of World War I was provoked by the assassination of Austrian heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The car in which he was travelling, together with his uniform, hat, and one of the pistols used by his assailants, now occupy a completely renovated hall at the Austrian Military Museum. The display will be reopened to the public on June 28, exactly one hundred years after the event itself. As the heir to the military traditions of a multi-national empire, the museum provides a focus of commemoration for all the peoples of Central Europe. Czechs, Hungarians, Slovenes and Croats all served on Austria-Hungary’s Italian and Russian fronts, a point well made by the redesigned permanent exhibition currently being made ready for summer 2014.
From June 28 onwards
The Glory and the Gloom
The biggest and most wide-ranging of the World War I exhibitions, Glory and Gloom: Living With the Great War is the historical blockbuster that most Austrian coach parties will be queueing up to see. Hosted by Schallaburg Castle near Melk, west of Vienna, the exhibition will focus on personal stories of the people – both soldiers and civilians – who were marked by the consequences of the conflict. The exhibition has an international focus, and also shows how truly global the war became for the Austrians themselves: Austro-Hungarian units served in German East Africa, while Austrian sailors caught in the Far East in 1914 spent the war as POWs in Japan.
March 28 – Nov 9