Vienna
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Evidence of continuous habitation has been found since 500 BC, when the site of Vienna on the Danube River was settled by the Celts. In 15 BC, the Romans fortified the frontier city they called Vindobona to guard the empire against Germanic tribes to the north.
Close ties with other Celtic peoples continued through the ages. The Irish monk Saint Colman (or Koloman) is buried in Melk Abbey and Saint Fergil (Virgil the Geometer) was Bishop of Salzburg for forty years, and twelfth century monastic settlements were founded by Irish Benedictines. Evidence of these ties are still evident in Vienna's great Schottenstift monastery, once home to many Irish monks.
In the 13th century, Vienna came under threat from the Mongolian Empire, which stretched over much of present-day Russia and China. Due to the death of their leader Ogedei Khan, the Mongolian armies retreated from the European frontier and did not return.
During the Middle Ages, Vienna was home to the Babenberg dynasty; in 1440, it became the resident city of the Habsburg dynasties. It eventually grew to become the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a cultural centre for arts and science, music and fine cuisine. Hungary occupied the city between 1485–1490.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman armies were stopped twice outside Vienna (see Siege of Vienna, 1529 and Battle of Vienna, 1683). A plague epidemic ravaged Vienna in 1679, killing nearly a third of its population.
In 1804, during the Napoleonic wars, Vienna became the capital of the Austrian Empire and continued to play a major role in European and world politics, including hosting the 1814 Congress of Vienna. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Vienna remained the capital of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city was a centre of classical music, for which the title of the First Viennese School is sometimes applied.
During the latter half of the 19th century, the city 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 capital of the First Austrian Republic.
From the late 19th century to 1938, the city remained a centre of high culture and modernism. A world capital of music, the city played host to composers such as Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. The city's cultural contributions in the first half of the 20th century included, amongst many, the Vienna Secession movement, psychoanalysis, the Second Viennese School, the architecture of Adolf Loos and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Within Austria, it was seen as a centre of socialist politics, for which it was sometimes referred to as „Red Vienna“. The city was a stage to the Austrian Civil War of 1934, when Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss sent the Austrian Army to shell civilian housing occupied by the socialist militia.
In 1938, after a triumphant entry into Austria, Adolf Hitler spoke to the Austrian people from the balcony of the Neue Burg, a part of the Hofburg at the Heldenplatz. Between 1938 (see Anschluss) and the end of the Second World War, Vienna lost its status as a capital to Berlin.
On 2 April 1945, the Soviets launched the Vienna Offensive against the Germans holding the city and besieged it. British and American air raids and artillery duels between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army crippled infrastructure, such as tram services and water and power distribution, and destroyed or damaged thousands of public and private buildings. Vienna fell eleven days later. Austria was separated from Germany, and Vienna was restored as the republic's capital city.
After the war, Vienna was surrounded by the Soviet-occupied zone. As in Berlin, Vienna was divided into sectors by the four powers 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 on a monthly basis. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 raised allied concerns that the Russians might repeat the blockade in Vienna. The matter was raised in the UK House of Commons,
There was a lack of airfields in the Western sectors, and authorities drafted contingency plans to deal with such a blockade. Plans included the laying down of metal landing mats at Schönbrunn. The Soviets did not embark on a wholesale blockade of the city. Some historians have argued that the Potsdam Agreement included written rights of land access to the western sectors, whereas no such written guarantees had covered the western sectors of Berlin. During the 10 years of the four-power occupation, Vienna became a hot-bed for international espionage between the Western and Eastern blocs. In the wake of the Berlin Blockade, the Cold War in Vienna took on a different dynamic. While accepting that Germany and Berlin would be divided, the Russians had decided against allowing the same state of affairs to arise in Austria and Vienna.
They put up barbed wire fences around the perimeter of West Berlin in 1953, but not in Vienna. By 1955, the Russians agreed to relinquish their occupation zones in Eastern Austria, and East Vienna, as well as their sector in the fourth and tenth districts in South Vienna. In exchange they required a permanent neutrality clause to be enshrined into the new Austrian State Treaty – thus ensuring that Austria would not be a member of NATO and that NATO forces would therefore not have direct communications between Italy and West Germany. In 1955, the Russians pulled out of Austria.
The atmosphere of four-power Vienna is captured in the Graham Greene screenplay for the film The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed. Later he adapted the screenplay as a novel and published it. Occupied Vienna is also colourfully depicted in the Philip Kerr novel, „A German Requiem.“
The four-power control of Vienna lasted until the Austrian State Treaty was signed in 1955. That year, after years of reconstruction and restoration, the State Opera and the Burgtheater, both on the Ringstraße, reopened to the public. The State Treaty ensured that modern Austria would align with neither NATO nor the Soviet bloc, and is considered one of the reasons for Austria's late entry into the European Union.
In the 1970s, Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky inaugurated the Vienna International Centre, a new area of the city created to host international institutions. Vienna has regained a part of its former international stature by hosting international organizations, such as the United Nations (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, United Nations Office at Vienna and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United European Gastroenterology Federation.