The Steel Magnate’s Revenge: How Vienna Invented Modern Democracy’s Self-Destruction

A tale of two Karls.

I wasn’t going to write this week, so forgive a rush job…

Standing inside Vienna’s Secession building in early September, I looked at the names in gold relief: Rudolf von Alt, Theodor Hörmann, Karl Wittgenstein. Two minor Austrian artists providing political cover and then that last name – the philosopher Ludwig’s father, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, and Austria-Hungary’s second richest man. A steel magnate who had funded a temple to artistic freedom with a fortune forged from crushing workers and stealing companies.

He once forced a Jewish negotiating partner – another tycoon who owned a Ringstrasse palace bought with 750,000 guilders cash – to take him to dinner at the Hotel Sacher, where neither would be welcome. Then he bought the man’s company using its own money.

Wittgenstein had expelled striking families from company housing in winter, their children dragged from beds. The Arbeiter-Zeitung called him an exploiter who extracted “the marrow of his workers.”

Yet this was the fortune built the Secession, funded Klimt, and supported the artists who would define modernism. The building’s motto gleams above its lintel: “Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit” – to every era its art, to art its freedom. But what kind of freedom emerges from such origins?

The answer came when I discovered what else was happening in April 1897, as the Secession’s doors opened.