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international stature; Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Kálmán brought the traditional waltz and operetta to new heights; Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann and Peter Altenberg gave Viennese literature new status in Europe, a rank that it had never before reached even at the time of Grillparzer and Stifter. Sonnenthal and Max Reinhardt revived the international reputation of Vienna as a city of the theatre; Freud and the great scientific experts attracted attention to the famous and ancient university—everywhere, as scholars, virtuoso musicians, painters, directors, architects, journalists, they claimed high and sometimes the highest positions in the intellectual life of Vienna. Through their passionate love of the city and their adaptability they had become entirely assimilated, and were happy to serve the reputation of Austria; they felt that the assertion of their Austrian identity was their vocation. In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it waswhen an attempt was made to force Vienna—a place combining the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders—into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.
     
    We lived well, we lived with light hearts and minds at ease in old Vienna, and the Germans to the north looked down with some annoyance and scorn at us, their neighbours on the Danube who, instead of being capable and efficient like them and observing strict principles of order, indulged themselves, ate well, enjoyed parties and the theatre, and made excellent music on those occasions. Instead of cultivating German efficiency, which finally embittered and destroyed the lives of all other peoples, instead of the greedy will of Germany to rise supreme and forge a way forward, we Viennese loved to chat at our ease; we liked pleasant social gatherings, and in a kindly and perhaps lax spirit of concord we let all have their share without grudging it. ‘Live and let live’ was famous as a Viennese principle, a principle that still seems to me more humane than any categorical imperative, and it reigned supreme in all social circles. Poor and rich, Czechs and Germans, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in spite of the occasional needling remark, and even political and social movements did not have that terrible spitefulness that eventually made its wayinto the bloodstream of the time as a poisonous residue of the First World War. In the old Austria you fought chivalrously; you might complain in the newspapers and parliament, but then the deputies, after delivering their Ciceronian tirades, would sit happily together over coffee or a beer, talking on familiar terms. Even when Lueger, leader of the anti-Semitic party, 4 became mayor of the city, nothing changed in private social