The importance of turn-of-the-century Vienna for modern Western civilization is such that it is difficult for any educated person to be unaware of the political and cultural changes taking place in that city at that time. Against a background of social and political disintegration, the intellectual and cultural elite of Vienna—and particularly its younger members—revolted against the rationalistic, legalistic, and moralistic liberalism of nineteenth-century Europe. Parliamentary politics in Vienna yielded to mass politics, increasingly strident in tone and negative in its goal. At the same time rationalist views of human nature were giving way before the psychoanalytic theories of the Viennese Sigmund Freud. Aestheticism became a refuge from life for many of the city's young intellectuals. Its literary men turned inward to study the psychology of the individual or uphold the goal of art for art's sake. The home of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Strausses gave birth at the turn of the century to the first works of Schoenberg. Academic formalism in painting came under attack from the Viennese Secession. And the city of the monumental historical eclecticism of the Ringstrasse gave rise to architectural critics who sought a new architecture expressing modern, not by-gone, life. The very phrase “turn-of-the-century Vienna” conjures up the names of a disparate group of famous—or infamous—giants of modern culture and politics: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka, Klimt, Schoenberg, Mahler, Lueger, even the young Hitler.