Viyana

Habsburg imparatorluğunun başkenti, Wittgenstein'ı, Freud'u, Mahler'i ve Klimt'i tek bir kuşakta yetiştiren şehir. Hiçbiri işini bitirmeden bu uygarlık çöktü.

Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one of the strangest concentrations of genius in modern history. It produced Wittgenstein, Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Schönberg, Kraus, and the Vienna Circle of logical positivists — all within a few decades and a few square miles. The city was the capital of a collapsing empire, and the dissonance between its imperial grandeur and its crumbling foundations may have had something to do with the intensity of its intellectual life. Wittgenstein grew up here in one of the richest and most cultivated families in Europe. Husserl came here to study with Brentano. Popper was born here and formed his ideas in reaction to its competing ideological certainties.