The Age of Emperor Franz Joseph. Part 2: Splendor and misery

The first part of this provincial exhibition, which attracted almost 400,000 visitors to Grafenegg Castle in 1984 with the subtitle “From the Revolution to the Gründerzeit 1848-1880”, already revealed the fascination that emanated from this complex and tense period of Austrian history.

This was even more the case for the period from 1880 to 1916, as “the domestic and foreign policy events took an almost dramatic course, with successive strokes of fate inflicted on the House of Habsburg with the suicide of the Crown Prince, the assassination of Empress Elisabeth in Geneva and the assassination of the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo”, explained exhibition director Harry Kühnel.

Despite all this, the public was often euphoric about what had been achieved and about progress in all areas of the economy, technology, art and culture. The scientific discoveries were viewed with pride and an upswing could be felt.

Stefan Zweig, born in 1881, raved about the growth of the cities, the wide, magnificent streets, the powerful public buildings and the luxurious stores in his memoirs “The World of Yesterday”, published in 1944: “New theaters, libraries, museums sprang up everywhere; conveniences which, like bathrooms and telephones, had previously been the privilege of narrow circles, penetrated into the petty bourgeois circles, and from below, since working hours had been shortened, the proletariat rose to take a share at least in the small pleasures and comforts of life. ”

Curator Harry Kühnel was aware that the design of this provincial exhibition was a great challenge: “The enormous amount of material and the topics and problems to be presented left no other choice but to illustrate this fascinating period of time by focusing on specific areas and in a tight form to enable the interested public to understand it. Two factors of the era, charm and flair, should not be neglected here, but the oppressive hardship and misery are also taken into account in an appropriate form.”

In all parts of the monarchy, the period around 1900 was a time of contrasts of varying intensity, whether economic, ethnic or religious. Progress and reaction were just as omnipresent as upheaval and restoration, a “creative basis for numerous innovative movements as well as static persistence, and despite all the economic progress, much hardship and misery” (Kühnel).

Artistic, literary and scientific endeavors and tendencies were present in the monarchy to an unprecedented extent; it was the great age of cafés as intellectual meeting places, whether in Vienna, Budapest, Prague or Krakow. At the same time, however, it was also a time when Austria-Hungary, as the second largest country in Europe, had only a six percent share of European industrial production and when 80,000 “bed-goers” lived in the capital and residential city of Vienna - people who were rented a place to sleep by working-class or other low-income families.

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