During the 1920s and early 1930s, "every visitor to Europe who had any interest whatsoever in reform, housing, social progress, went as a matter of course to look at the magnificent workers' apartments that Vienna had built," the distinguished American journalist Marquis Childs observed. Between 1923 and 1934, the city's socialist administration launched an extraordinary campaign to provide housing for working-class residents, who were among the party's most enthusiastic backers.

The Judenplatz Monument Carries the Burdens of a Troubled Past, and, Perhaps, Understanding. Wandering around central Vienna not far from the crowds around St. Stephans Cathedral, I turned a corner and found myself suddenly at Judenplatz. It's a quiet square where a stone monument stands like a small block house toward one end of the cobbled square, carrying the burdens of a troubled past, yearning perhaps, for a moment of remembrance from passers by.

Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms (among others) are symbolized in Vienna not only with monuments but also with museums (two, in Schubert's case: his birthplace, and the house in which he died), but it is Beethoven who is represented most. With several museums devoted to him, some of which contain his own personal effects, there exist in and around Vienna more sites associated with Beethoven than with any other composer who graced the city. A walk in Vienna and its environs can reveal some of the places where Beethoven lived.

The city of Vienna can be regarded as a world metropolis, even though there are then two million inhabitants. Through the course of history, Vienna has always been a melting pot for a variety of nationalities. A real Viennese has Slav as well as Hungarian and Italian, German, Jewish and sometimes even Turkish blood, since Turkish captives of the wars against the Ottoman Empire were generally converted to the Catholic faith and then led life like and as an Austrian.  

It was an "experience which probably changed my life", says "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal: "Two or three months after we established our own office in Linz [in 1947], three rabbis visited me one day and told me they had information that in a castle in Carinthia, in the vicinity of Villach, there was a big Jewish library full of all kinds of books.

Over 1,700 Austrian parks and gardens from five centuries were documented in a work spanning 20 years. With the publication of the last of the three-volume series, this enormous survey of Austria's historic gardens has now been concluded. With aid from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Institute of Landscape Architecture and Garden Design of the Vienna University of Technology has thus succeeded not only in creating a consolidated basis for further scientific work, but also in delighting the hearts of Austria's garden lovers.

On August 8, 1703, the first number of a newspaper was printed which would then continue to exist through times of war and peace - with only one interruption - until today: The "Wiennerisches Diarium" which was later renamed "Wiener Zeitung".

Only a short time after Austria’s “Anschluss” (annexation) to the German Reich construction of a concentration camp was begun in the village of Mauthausen on the Danube to take the declared opponents of the Nazi regime into “protective custody”. The Mauthausen Concentration Camp was to become the first concentration camp outside the “Old Reich” and one of the most notorious camps within the entire Nazi camp system.

Another clear sign that the Austrian party system is loosening up was the emergence during the early 1980s of organized environmental, or Green, parties. A major catalyst in the birth of the Green movement in Austria was the narrow defeat of the November 5, 1978, national referendum on nuclear energy. The Kreisky government, seeking to build a nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf near Vienna, decided to let the people decide on the question of nuclear energy.

The Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs--FPÖ) was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, who had served in the Seyss-Inquart national socialist government formed in collaboration with Hitler after the Anschluss in 1938. Anticlerical and pro-German, the FPÖ was the party of persons who were uncomfortable with the domination of Austrian politics by the "red-black" (socialist-clerical) coalition governments of the SPÖ and ÖVP. The party had liberal and nationalist wings, which frequently disagreed over strategy. Although the FPÖ was not an extremist party, it attracted many former Nazis with its philosophy that Austrians should think of themselves as belonging to a greater German cultural community.

The Austrian People's Party (Österreichische Volkspartei-- ÖVP) was created in Vienna in 1945 by leaders of the former Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei--CSP). The founders of the ÖVP made sure that the new party was only loosely tied to the Roman Catholic Church, unlike its predecessor. The ÖVP emerged as a conservative, democratic party based on Christian values that sought to include diverse interests. From 1945 to 1966, ÖVP politicians filled the post of chancellor in a series of grand coalition governments with the SPÖ (from 1945 to 1947, KPÖ members were also in the cabinet). From 1966 to 1970, the ÖVP ruled alone and thereafter entered a long period of opposition to the SPÖ, which ended in early 1987 when the two parties formed a new coalition government.

The Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs--SPÖ), until 1991 known as the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs--SPÖ), has its roots in the original Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei--SDAP), founded in 1889 by Viktor Adler, a young doctor.

Since 1920 the legal successor of the Imperial Court Library of the Habsburg monarchy - has over six million holdings and is the largest and most important library in the country. It is the only library which receives, according to the Austrian Law on Media, depository copies of publications from all federal provinces, and hence it has complete archives of publications appearing in Austria (including doctoral dissertations, master's theses).

No matter how heavy the traffic in modern Vienna, there always is room for the horsedrawn cab known as the Fiaker. The German word " Fiaker’ refer to both the two-horse cab itself and to the cabby, who is generally dressed in pepita-check trousers, a velvet jacket and derby hat.

Pattern and design cards dating back as far as the 16th century were used, and magazines contained petit-point instructions and designs to copy. As early as 1770, Charles Germain was reporting in his " L’art du brodeur " that semi-finished embroidery patterns were for sale, and they were eagerly snapped up.