At the turn of this century, when a great empire was dying, Vienna, the grand capital of that empire, witnessed an outburst of creativity so rare that one must think back to Renaissance Florence or ancient Athens to find moments in history that surpassed it in variety and influence and beauty. In literature and music, in art and architecture, in science and politics, in cinema and design, Vienna set a pattern and a pace for modernity in our century. Yet the rest of the world, content with images of fancy-uniformed Hapsburgs and lighthearted operettas and lilting Strauss waltzes and warm coffeehouses, does not always think of imperial Vienna as a center of extraordinary creative activity. Of course, it is no secret that Sigmund Freud transformed the awareness and way of thinking of Western society, that Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg loom as two giants of 19th- and 20th-century music, that Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most popular writers in the German language for many decades, that Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were powerful painters of sensitivity and anguish, that Adolf Loos influenced the path of modern architecture, that Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized the study of philosophy, that Erich von Stroheim and Fritz Lang helped pioneer the transformation of cinema into art, that journalist Theodor Herzl turned Zionism into a mass movement. But even admirers of these men do not often realize that all of them came from the same time and the same place - fin de siècle Vienna...