Vienna ( vee-EN-ə; German: Wien [viːn] ⓘ; Austro-Bavarian: Wean [veɐ̯n]) is the capital, most populous city, and one of the nine states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. Its larger metropolitan area has a population of nearly 2.9 million, representing nearly one-third of the country's population. Vienna is the cultural, economic, and political centre of the country, the fifth-largest city by population in the European Union, and the most populous of the cities on the river Danube.
The city lies on the eastern edge of the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald), the northeasternmost foothills of the Alps, that separate Vienna from the more western parts of Austria, at the transition to the Pannonian Basin. It sits on the Danube, and is traversed by the highly regulated Wienfluss (Vienna River). Vienna is completely surrounded by Lower Austria, and lies around 50 km (31 mi) west of Slovakia and its capital Bratislava, 50 km (31 mi) northwest of Hungary, and 60 km (37 mi) south of Moravia (Czech Republic).
The Romans founded a castrum at Vienna, which they called Vindobona, in the 1st century, when the region belonged to the province of Pannonia. It was elevated to a municipium with Roman city rights in 212. This was followed by a time in the sphere of influence of the Lombards and later the Pannonian Avars, when Slavs formed the majority of the region's population. From the 8th century on, the region was settled by the Baiuvarii. In 1155, Vienna became the seat of the Babenbergs, who ruled Austria from 976 to 1246. In 1221, Vienna was granted city rights. During the 16th century, the Habsburgs, who had succeeded the Babenbergs, established Vienna as the seat of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, a position it held until the empire's dissolution in 1806, with only a brief interruption. With the formation of the Austrian Empire in 1804, Vienna became the capital of it and all its successor states.
Throughout the modern era, Vienna has been among the largest German-speaking cities in the world. It was the largest in the 18th and 19th centuries, peaking at two million inhabitants before it was overtaken by Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations, OPEC and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was listed as endangered from July 2017 to July 2026.
Vienna is renowned for its rich musical heritage, having been home to many celebrated classical composers, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Joseph Haydn, Gustav Mahler, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schubert, Johann Strauss I, and Johann Strauss II. It played a pivotal role as a leading European music centre, from the age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The city was home to the world's first psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque palaces and gardens, and the late-19th-century Ringstrasse, which is lined with grand buildings, monuments and parks.
Etymology and exonyms
Vienna was known to the Romans as Vindobona, a borrowing of a Celtic toponym meaning either "white place" or "place of Vindos" (a personal name). This name disappeared from the record after the 6th century, occurring for the last time in Jordanes's Getica. The German name for the city, Wien – of which Vienna is a Latinised form – is unrelated, deriving from the River Wien (compare Steyr, Enns, and Krems, which all take their names from the rivers whose mouths they lie at). It occurs for the first time in the Salzburg Annals, which note that a battle was fought at a place named Wenia in the year 881. The name may ultimately mean "forest river", from Celtic *Vedunia.
Bécs, the Hungarian name for Vienna (borrowed into Serbo-Croatian as Beč and into Ottoman Turkish as Beç), probably derives from a word meaning "kiln", and may date from a period in the 10th century when the region came under temporary Hungarian domination. In Romanian, the city is now called Viena, but the archaic names Beci and Beciu were used in chronicles. Romanian still has beci in use, a common noun meaning "cellar"; linguist Dan Alexe states both it and the aforementioned names of Vienna are believed to ultimately be derived from a word of the Turkic-speaking Avars, originally meaning "fortified place" or "treasury".
In Slovene, the city is called Dunaj, which in other Slavic languages denotes the River Danube.
In the Bavarian dialect of eastern Austria, the city is called Wean; however, this name is hardly used to any significant extent in the local city dialect (Viennese German) anymore.
History
Prehistory
The area of Vienna was inhabited by modern humans already from the Upper Palaeolithic period (37.000–38.500BC) as excavations have found man made cuts in animal bones.
Roman period
In the 1st century, the Romans set up the military camp of Vindobona in Pannonia on the site of today's Vienna city centre near the Danube with an adjoining civilian town to secure the borders of the Roman Empire. Construction of the legionary camp began around AD 97. At its peak, Vindobona had a population of around 15,000 people. It was a part of a trade and communications network across the Empire. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius may have died here in AD 180 during a campaign against the Marcomanni.
After a Germanic invasion in the second century, the city was rebuilt. It served as a seat of the Roman government until the fifth century, when the population fled due to the Huns invasion of Pannonia. The city was abandoned for several centuries.
Evidence of the Romans in the city is plentiful. Remains of the military camp have been found under the city, as well as fragments of the canal system and figurines.
Middle Ages and early modern period
Irish Benedictines established monastic settlements in the 12th century; evidence of these connections includes the Schottenstift ("Scots Abbey") in Vienna, originally home to a community of Irish monks.
In 976, Leopold I of Babenberg was appointed Margrave of the Eastern March, a frontier district of Bavaria centred along the Danube. This march gradually expanded eastward under successive Babenberg rulers, eventually evolving into the Duchy of Austria and incorporating Vienna and its surrounding areas. In 1155, Henry II, Duke of Austria, relocated the Babenberg residence from Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to Vienna, coinciding with the founding of the Schottenstift. Following this relocation, Vienna became the permanent residence of the Babenberg dynasty. Vienna was occupied by Kingdom of Hungary forces between 1485 and 1490.
Around the beginning of the 16th century, Vienna became the seat of the Aulic Council, the central advisory body to the Holy Roman Emperor. Vienna served as the residence of the Habsburg emperors during their reigns from 1611 to 1740 and again from 1745 until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman forces advanced toward Vienna on two notable occasions: the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, both of which resulted in the city's successful defence. In 1679, the Great Plague of Vienna severely afflicted the city; nearly one-third of its inhabitants died of the Bubonic plague.
Austrian Empire and early 20th century
In 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars, Vienna became the capital of the newly formed Austrian Empire. The city continued to play a major role in European and world politics, including hosting the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. The city also saw major uprisings against Habsburg rule in 1848, which were suppressed. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Vienna remained the capital of what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city functioned as a centre of classical music, for which the title of the First Viennese School (Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven) is sometimes applied. During the latter half of the 19th century, Vienna developed what had previously been the bastions and glacis into the Ringstraße, a new boulevard surrounding the historical town and a major prestige project. Former suburbs were incorporated, and the city of Vienna grew dramatically. In 1918, after World War I, Vienna became the capital of the Republic of German-Austria, and then in 1919 of the First Republic of Austria.
From the late-19th century to 1938, the city remained a centre of high culture and of modernism. A world capital of music, Vienna played host to composers such as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
The city's cultural contributions in the first half of the 20th century included, among many, the Vienna Secession movement in art, the Second Viennese School, the architecture of Adolf Loos, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle.
Red Vienna
The city of Vienna became the centre of socialist politics from 1919 to 1934, a period referred to as Red Vienna (Das rote Wien). After a new breed of socialist politicians won the local elections, they engaged in a brief but ambitious municipal experiment. Social democrats had won an absolute majority in the May 1919 municipal election and commanded the city council with 100 of the 165 seats. Jakob Reumann was appointed by the city council as city mayor. The theoretical foundations of so-called Austromarxism were established by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler.
Red Vienna is perhaps most well known for its Gemeindebauten, public housing buildings. Between 1925 and 1934, over 60,000 new apartments were built in the Gemeindebauten. Apartments were assigned based on a point system favoring families and less affluent citizens.
July Revolt and Civil War
In July 1927, after three nationalist far-right paramilitary members were acquitted of the killing of two social democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund members, a riot broke out in the city. The protestors, enraged by the decision, set the Palace of Justice ablaze. The police attempted to end the revolt with force and killed at least 84 protestors, with 5 policemen also dying. In 1933, right-wing Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved the parliament, essentially letting him run the country as a dictatorship, banned the Communist Party and severely limited the influence of the Social Democratic Party. This led to a civil war between the right-wing government and socialist forces the following year, which started in Linz and quickly spread to Vienna. Socialist members of the Republikanischer Schutzbund barricaded themselves inside the housing estates and exchanged fire with the police and paramilitary groups. The fighting in Vienna ended after the Austrian Armed Forces shelled the Karl-Marx-Hof, a civilian housing estate, and the Schutzbund surrendered.
Anschluss and World War II
On 15 March 1938, three days after German troops first entered Austria, Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna. 200,000 Austrians greeted him at the Heldenplatz, where he delivered a speech from a balcony of the Neue Burg, announcing that Austria would be absorbed into Nazi Germany. Vienna was where most of Austria's Jews lived, and it was where the techniques of genocide were tested and refined. The persecution of Jews began almost immediately: Viennese Jews were harassed and hounded, and their homes and businesses plundered. Some were forced to scrub pro-independence slogans off the streets. In August 1938 the Nazis published a law ordering Jews to register with the police and have the middle names Israel or Sara added to their identity cards. In November 1938 the persecution culminated in the Kristallnacht, a nationwide pogrom against Jews carried out by the Schutzstaffel and the Sturmabteilung, with the support of the Hitler Youth and German civilians. All synagogues and prayer houses in the city were destroyed, except for the Stadttempel, due to its proximity to residential buildings. In March 1939 the authorities began to forcibly centralize Vienna's Jews in Judenhauser (Jewish houses). Vienna lost its status as a capital to Berlin, as Austria had ceased to exist. The few resistors in the city were arrested. In October 1939 the Nazis began deporting Jews from Vienna. Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the escape route to America closed.
Adolf Eichmann held office in the expropriated Palais Rothschild and organised the expropriation and persecution of Jews. Of the almost 200,000 Jews in Vienna, around 120,000 were driven to emigrate, and approximately 65,000 were killed. After the war, Vienna's Jewish population was only about 5,000.
In 1942, the city suffered its first air raid, carried out by the Soviet air force. Only after the Allies had taken Italy did the next raids commence. From 17 March 1944, a total of 51 air raids were carried out in Vienna. Targets of the bombings were primarily the city's oil refineries. However, around a third of the city centre was destroyed, and culturally important buildings such as the State Opera and the Burgtheater were burned, and the Albertina was heavily damaged. These air raids lasted until March 1945, just before the Soviet troops started the Vienna Offensive.
The Red Army, which had previously marched through Hungary, first entered Vienna on 6 April. Initially, they attacked the eastern and southern suburbs before advancing to the western suburbs. By the 8th, they had surrounded the city centre. The following day, the Soviets started with the infiltration of the city centre. Fighting continued for a few more days until the Soviet Navy’s Danube Flotilla naval force arrived with reinforcements. The remaining defending soldiers surrendered that same day.
Four-power Vienna
After the war, Vienna was part of Soviet-occupied Eastern Austria until September 1945. That month, Vienna was divided into sectors by the four powers: the US, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union and supervised by an Allied Commission. The four-power occupation of Vienna differed in one key respect from that of Berlin: the central area of the city, known as the first district, constituted an international zone in which the four powers alternated control every month. The city was policed by the four powers on a day-to-day basis using the "four soldiers in a jeep" method, with one soldier from each nation seated together. The four powers all had separate headquarters: the Soviets in Palais Epstein next to the Parliament, the French in Hotel Kummer on Mariahilferstraße, the Americans in the National Bank, and the British in Schönnbrunn Palace. The division of the city was not comparable to that of Berlin. Although the borders between the sectors were marked, travel between them was freely possible.