Few countries can say that an entire chapter of European prehistory is named after one of their villages. The Hallstatt culture — named after the village of the same name on the shore of a lake in the Salzkammergut, southeast of Salzburg — is the name given to the great civilisation of the end of the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in central and western Europe, roughly between the 12th and 6th centuries BC. Its wealth did not come from iron but from a humbler and more valuable treasure: salt. In the mountains above Hallstatt, salt mines had been worked for thousands of years — the so-called "white gold", essential for preserving food — and their tunnels have preserved even Bronze Age tools and clothing made of wood and leather. That prosperity is attested by a necropolis with more than a thousand graves, many of them with sumptuous grave goods of bronze, iron, amber and ivory that reveal a hierarchical society connected by trade with the Mediterranean.
On that foundation the Celts spread out. From the 5th century BC, with the La Tène culture, the Celtic peoples organised the territory and by the 2nd century BC had founded the kingdom of Noricum, a confederation of tribes centred on the eastern Alps, around present-day Carinthia and Styria. Noricum owed its fame and its fortune to a resource coveted throughout the ancient world: iron of the very highest quality, the ferrum noricum, exported to Rome to forge the best weapons. Relations between the Celtic kingdom and the Roman Republic were so close that Noricum operated for decades as a trading and political ally before being absorbed.
The Hallstatt culture and the kingdom of Noricum turned this Alpine corner into one of the focal points of protohistoric Europe: a crossroads of the salt, iron and amber routes linking the Mediterranean with the north of the continent. When Rome arrived, it did not find a void but a civilisation thousands of years old, built on mining, trade and remarkable metalworking skill.
Around 15 BC, under the emperor Augustus, Rome peacefully absorbed the kingdom of Noricum and advanced into the eastern Alps. The territory of present-day Austria was divided between three provinces: Noricum and Raetia in the west, and Pannonia in the east. The empire's great defensive line, the limes, ran along the Danube, and on that river a chain of legionary camps and cities was built that still underpins Austria's urban geography. Two names among them stand out above the rest.
The first is Carnuntum, capital of Upper Pannonia, an enormous military and civilian complex on the banks of the Danube, east of present-day Vienna. With its camps, its civilian town, its amphitheatre and its tens of thousands of inhabitants, Carnuntum was for centuries the Roman heart of the region: the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius spent long periods there and wrote part of his Meditations during the wars against the Germanic peoples, and it was there, in the year 308, that the imperial conference met that tried to save the tetrarchy. The second name is Vindobona, a legionary camp and its adjoining town, which gave rise to Vienna: it was in that Danube settlement that, according to tradition, Marcus Aurelius himself died in the year 180.
The Roman presence left roads, walls, vineyards — the Romans introduced or spread viticulture along the Danube — and the layout of towns such as Juvavum (Salzburg), Brigantium (Bregenz) and Lauriacum (Enns/Lorch). When the Western Empire collapsed in the 5th century, the Danube lands emptied and were settled by new peoples; but the Roman substratum — the network of towns, Latin culture, early Christianity — never entirely disappeared beneath what came next.
After the fall of Rome, the Danube lands were occupied by Germanic and Slavic peoples and, above all, by the Bavarians, who colonised the valley and spread Christianity from bishoprics such as Salzburg. In the 8th century, Charlemagne subdued the Bavarians and brought the region into his empire, creating on the eastern frontier a military march facing the Avars and, later, the Magyars (Hungarians). That frontier zone, the "march of the east" (Marcha orientalis), is the embryo of the country. The defeat of the Magyars by Otto I at the Battle of Lechfeld (955) stabilised the border and made it possible to reorganise the march.
In the year 976, the emperor Otto II handed that eastern march to Leopold I of Babenberg, beginning a dynasty that would rule Austria for almost three centuries. The country's very name was born in those years: an imperial document of 996 contains the first written appearance of the form Ostarrîchi ("realm of the east"), the direct ancestor of Österreich. The Babenbergs gradually shifted their centre of power downriver until they settled their residence in Vienna, encouraged the monasteries — Melk, Klosterneuburg, Heiligenkreuz — founded towns and turned the frontier march into a prosperous territory. In 1156, the Privilegium Minus raised Austria from a march to a duchy, with wide privileges of autonomy: a legal milestone that consolidated its identity within the Holy Roman Empire.
Under the last Babenbergs, Austria enjoyed a courtly and cultural flowering; at their court, according to tradition, the Nibelungenlied was composed around 1200. But the dynasty died out in 1246, when Duke Frederick II was killed without heirs in a battle against the Hungarians. That opened a succession crisis — the so-called Interregnum — during which the powerful King Ottokar II of Bohemia seized Austria. That power vacuum would be the opportunity for a family that until then had been a minor one, from what is now Switzerland: the Habsburgs.
In 1273, the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire chose as king a count of modest rank, Rudolf of Habsburg, precisely because they believed he would be weak and easy to manage. They were wrong. Rudolf I took on the all-powerful Ottokar II of Bohemia, who refused to recognise him and was occupying Austria, and defeated and killed him at the Battle of Marchfeld, near Vienna, in 1278. In 1282, Rudolf invested his sons with the duchies of Austria and Styria: this is the founding act of more than six centuries of Habsburg rule over Austria, which would not end until 1918.
Over the following centuries, the Habsburgs consolidated and extended their lands with a legendary talent for marrying well. The phrase that sums up their strategy — "Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube": let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry — is no myth: marriage alliances kept adding crowns. The emperor Maximilian I married his son to the heiress of Castile and Aragon, and from that marriage came Charles, who in 1519 was elected emperor as Charles V and gathered under his sceptre Spain and its American colonies, the Netherlands, southern Italy and the Austrian lands: an empire "on which the sun never set". On abdicating, Charles split the inheritance: the Spanish branch on one side and, on the other, the Austrian branch, headed by his brother Ferdinand I, who as well as the Alpine lands inherited the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526.
From then on, the Austrian Habsburgs monopolised the imperial crown almost without interruption and ruled a conglomerate of kingdoms and duchies of different languages and peoples, held together only by the person of the sovereign. That hallmark — a dynasty that grows by inheritance and marriage, ruling Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Croats and Poles at the same time — would define Austria until the 20th century. And in Vienna, its capital, that monarchy would fight the battles that decided the fate of central Europe: first of all, against the Ottoman Empire.
For a century and a half, Vienna was the bastion that halted Ottoman expansion into central Europe. After crushing the kingdom of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács (1526), Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent advanced on the Habsburg lands. In the autumn of 1529 he laid siege to Vienna with an army that the sources put at more than 100,000 men, against a garrison of barely 20,000 defenders under the veteran Niklas von Salm. The siege, which began on 27 September, lasted little more than two weeks: the rain, the lack of heavy artillery, the resistance of the walls and the onset of winter forced Suleiman to withdraw on 15 October. Vienna had held out, but the threat did not go away.
The second assault, more than a century and a half later, was even more dramatic. In July 1683, a huge Ottoman army under the grand vizier Kara Mustafa besieged Vienna for two months; the city, defended by Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, was on the verge of collapse from hunger, disease and the mines undermining its walls. Salvation came on 12 September 1683, when an imperial and Polish relief army, commanded by King John III Sobieski of Poland, came down from the Kahlenberg hills and crushed the besiegers at the Battle of Vienna, with one of the greatest cavalry charges in history, that of the Polish winged hussars.
The Ottoman defeat of 1683 marked a turning point. The Turks would never threaten Vienna again, and in the following decades the imperial troops — under the brilliant general Eugene of Savoy, victor at Zenta (1697) and Belgrade (1717) — reconquered Hungary and pushed the frontier towards the Balkans. Austria emerged from those wars as a great power. The cultural mark left by the episode survives even in legend: coffee — from the sacks abandoned by the Ottoman army — and the croissant (the crescent-shaped kipferl) are said to have been born in the liberated Vienna of 1683, a myth the city happily keeps alive.
The Austrian 17th century was marked by the Counter-Reformation: the Habsburgs, champions of Catholicism, harshly imposed the return to Rome in their territories, expelled or converted the Protestants and entrusted the Jesuits with re-Catholicisation. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), set off by the Protestant revolt of Bohemia against the emperor, devastated central Europe; its outcome consolidated the dynasty's power over hereditary lands that were now fully Catholic. Out of that confessional victory also came the splendour of the Austrian baroque: the churches, monasteries and palaces that still define the country's landscape today, from Melk Abbey to the Belvedere palace.
The great turning point came in the 18th century with Maria Theresa, who ruled from 1740 to 1780 and was the only woman to govern the Habsburg dominions. She had to defend her inheritance in the War of the Austrian Succession, in which she lost the rich province of Silesia to Prussia, but she came out of those wars determined to modernise the state. She drove through a vast programme of reform: she centralised the administration, created a standing army and a professional bureaucracy, put the finances in order, introduced compulsory schooling in 1774 — one of the first in Europe — and eased the conditions of peasant serfdom. The mother of sixteen children, among them Marie Antoinette, queen of France, she embodied a monarchy that was at once conservative, Catholic and reformist.
Her son and successor, Joseph II (1780-1790), took the reforms much further, becoming the emblem of "enlightened despotism". He abolished serfdom, issued a Patent of Toleration in 1781 granting freedom of worship to Protestants and Orthodox Christians and lifting restrictions on Jews, dissolved hundreds of contemplative monasteries and subordinated the Church to the state, reformed the justice system and abolished the death penalty. Many of his measures, applied with authoritarian haste and without consensus, provoked resistance and had to be reversed; but his reign left Austria an enlightened legacy — religious tolerance, a more rational state, the end of serfdom — on which the modern country would be built.
The Vienna of the late 18th century became the musical capital of Europe. At court and in the palaces of the aristocracy the great masters of Viennese classicism flourished: Joseph Haydn, "father" of the symphony and the string quartet, in the service of the Esterházy family; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756 and settled in Vienna, where he composed his immortal operas and symphonies before dying young and in debt in 1791; and, at the turn of the century, Ludwig van Beethoven, who made Vienna his city. That musical ferment went hand in hand with years of war: the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon shook the European order and hit Austria head-on.
The Habsburgs fought revolutionary and Napoleonic France in one war after another, almost always losing. Napoleon occupied Vienna in 1805 and in 1809, and humiliated the monarchy in battles such as Austerlitz (1805) and Wagram (1809). In 1806, faced with the French advance, the emperor Francis dissolved the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire, having proclaimed himself two years earlier emperor of Austria (Francis I): the Austrian Empire was formally born. Napoleon's final defeat, in 1814-1815, gave Austria the chance to take centre stage again.
That return to centre stage was called the Congress of Vienna. Between 1814 and 1815, the sovereigns and diplomats of Europe met in the Austrian capital — amid balls, intrigues and receptions — to reorder the continent after the Napoleonic era. The soul of the Congress was the Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich, architect of a conservative system designed to restore the monarchies and stifle revolution. For more than three decades, the "Metternich era" imposed an authoritarian order and iron censorship on Austria and much of Europe. That system blew apart in 1848, when a revolutionary wave swept the empire: liberal and nationalist uprisings broke out in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and northern Italy. Metternich fell and fled, and although the revolts were finally crushed by the army, they forced the emperor to abdicate and brought to the throne, at barely eighteen years of age, Franz Joseph I, who would reign for almost seventy years.
The long reign of Franz Joseph I (1848-1916) was that of an empire torn between grandeur and decline. Militarily, the second half of the 19th century was a run of setbacks: Austria lost its Italian territories to Piedmont and France in 1859, and above all was defeated by Prussia in the short, decisive war of 1866, which pushed it out of Germany for good. Prussia, under Bismarck, would unify Germany without Austria; the Habsburgs, shut out of the German world, had to reorganise their empire looking eastwards.
That readjustment was the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867. Weakened by defeat and pressed by Hungarian nationalism, the monarchy turned into a dual monarchy: the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria and Hungary became two equal states, each with its own parliament, government and prime minister, joined by the person of the sovereign — Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary — and by three joint ministries: Foreign Affairs, War, and the finances of those departments. It was a singular political architecture, a two-headed empire stretching from the Alps to the Carpathians and the Balkans.
The dual monarchy brought decades of stability and remarkable economic and cultural development, but it did not solve its underlying problem: it was a state of many nations — Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Italians — at a time when nationalism was eating away at everything. Czechs, Croats and other peoples demanded the same rights that had been granted to the Hungarians, and national tensions paralysed politics. Beneath the surface of imperial Vienna and its pageantry, Franz Joseph's empire was dragging along contradictions that the new century would blow wide open.
In the decades around the turn of the century, Vienna went through a creative explosion that made it one of the cradles of 20th-century thought and art. In its cafés, universities and salons, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis was born and revolutionised our understanding of the human mind; in painting, Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession, and later Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, opened the way to modernity; in literature, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and Karl Kraus dissected a society in crisis with great clarity; in music, Gustav Mahler directed the Court Opera and Arnold Schoenberg blew tonality apart; in philosophy, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein changed the way language is thought about for ever. Much of that culture was driven, nourished or created by the vibrant Jewish community of Vienna.
That splendour was staged on a new set: the Ringstrasse, the great circular boulevard that Franz Joseph ordered to be laid out in 1857 over the old city walls, lined with monumental historicist buildings — the Opera, the Parliament, the City Hall, the museums, the university — that put the pride of the empire and of its liberal middle class on display. Vienna was one of the great capitals of Europe, brilliant, cosmopolitan and contradictory.
Because beneath that brilliance a poison was also growing. In the same Vienna of genius, a new antisemitic mass politics prospered, embodied by Karl Lueger, the city's mayor between 1897 and 1910 and leader of the Christian Social Party, who made antisemitism an effective electoral tool while modernising the city. A failed young man scraping by in Vienna in those years, Adolf Hitler, openly admired Lueger and his methods, and absorbed in the capital's streets and pamphlets the racial hatred he would later carry to power. The Vienna of 1900 was at once a laboratory of modernity and a laboratory of its worst demons: Freud and political antisemitism lived side by side there, the avant-garde and the seed of the catastrophe that would fall on Europe.
On 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. The attack set off the July crisis: a month later, on 28 July 1914, the elderly Franz Joseph signed the declaration of war on Serbia at his villa in Bad Ischl, and the European system of alliances dragged the whole continent into the First World War. Four years of total war bled the empire dry: millions of soldiers from all its nations died on the fronts of Galicia, Serbia, Italy and the Alps, and the home front suffered hunger and exhaustion.
The empire did not survive defeat. In 1916 Franz Joseph died after 68 years on the throne; his successor, Charles I, tried in vain to negotiate a separate peace and last-minute reforms. In the autumn of 1918, with defeat complete, the nations of the empire proclaimed their independence: Czechoslovakia was born, along with the Yugoslavia of the southern Slavs and an independent Hungary, and Poland recovered territory; Italy and Romania annexed other lands. On 11 November 1918, Charles renounced any part in government, and the following day the Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed. Of an empire of more than fifty million inhabitants there remained a small German-speaking Alpine state of barely six and a half million, with a capital, Vienna, disproportionately large for the country it now led.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919) set the harsh terms for this new Austria: it expressly forbade union with Germany — the Anschluss that many wanted — took away German-speaking territories such as South Tyrol (ceded to Italy) and the Sudetenland (to Czechoslovakia), and left the country shrunken and economically weakened. The First Austrian Republic was born fragile, split between a social democratic left that was strong in Vienna and a Catholic, conservative right that dominated the provinces, each with its own armed militias. That fracture, made worse by the world economic crisis of 1929, pushed the country towards confrontation: in February 1934 a brief but bloody civil war broke out that ended with the defeat of the socialists and the banning of their parties. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss then established an authoritarian, corporatist regime, "Austrofascism"; he himself would be assassinated in July 1934 in an attempted coup by the Austrian Nazis.
On 12 March 1938, German troops crossed the Austrian border without meeting resistance, and the following day Hitler — Austrian by birth — proclaimed in Vienna the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria into the Third Reich. Austria ceased to exist as a state and became a German province, the "Ostmark". A plebiscite held weeks later, under conditions of propaganda and coercion, produced support of close to 99%. The images of those days show crowds cheering Hitler on Vienna's Heldenplatz: a substantial part of the Austrian population welcomed the Anschluss with enthusiasm, and many Austrians actively joined the machinery of the regime.
The persecution was immediate and brutal. As soon as the annexation was complete, a wave of antisemitic violence broke out: Viennese Jews were publicly humiliated by being made to scrub the streets, shops and synagogues were looted — the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938 was especially ferocious in Vienna — and dispossession and expulsion began. Of the roughly 190,000 Jews living in Austria, tens of thousands managed to emigrate and some 65,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. The Mauthausen concentration camp and its network of subcamps operated on Austrian soil, and close to half of its roughly 190,000 prisoners died there, many from slave labour in the granite quarries. Austrians held positions of responsibility in the machinery of the genocide, in a proportion greater than their demographic weight within the Reich.
For decades, post-war Austria took refuge in the so-called "victim thesis" (Opferthese): leaning on the Moscow Declaration of 1943, which had described Austria as "the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression", the country presented itself as an occupied nation rather than an accomplice, sidestepping its responsibility. That narrative has been revised. The turn came with the Waldheim affair in 1986 — when President Kurt Waldheim's past in the Wehrmacht came to light — and, above all, with Chancellor Franz Vranitzky's speech to Parliament on 8 July 1991, in which Austria acknowledged its share of responsibility for the first time: many Austrians, he admitted, welcomed the Anschluss, supported the Nazi regime and took part in its crimes. In 1995 the National Fund for the victims of National Socialism was created. The current consensus among historians holds a nuanced position: Austria was both the first country annexed by Hitler and an active participant in Nazism; neither collective exculpation nor indiscriminate blame does justice to a reality in which there were perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders and also Austrian victims and resisters.
After the defeat of the Reich in 1945, Austria was restored as a state and, like Germany, was divided into four occupation zones — American, British, French and Soviet — with Vienna in turn shared among the four powers. Unlike Germany, however, Austria had a government of its own from the very first moment, and it never split in two. For ten years the country lived under Allied occupation while a treaty that would give it back its sovereignty was negotiated in the middle of the Cold War; the sticking point was Soviet mistrust.
The outcome came in 1955. On 15 May, in Vienna's Belvedere palace, the ministers of the four powers and the Austrian government signed the State Treaty (Staatsvertrag), which restored Austria's full independence and expressly banned any new Anschluss with Germany. In exchange for the Soviet withdrawal, Austria committed itself to neutrality: on 26 October 1955, a day after the last occupation troops left the country, Parliament passed as constitutional law the Declaration of Perpetual Neutrality, by which Austria renounced military alliances and foreign bases on its territory. Since then, 26 October has been the national holiday. The cry of that day — "Austria is free!", from Chancellor Leopold Figl — is engraved in the collective memory.
The Second Republic settled into a prosperous, stable democracy, governed for decades by alternation and by the "grand coalition" between social democrats and conservatives, with a solid welfare state and a social market economy. Neutral between the two blocs, Vienna became the seat of international organisations — the UN, OPEC, the IAEA — and a bridge between East and West. In 1995, with the Iron Curtain already down, Austria joined the European Union while formally maintaining its military neutrality. Today it is one of the richest countries in the world and one of those with the highest quality of life, proud of its imperial heritage, its music and its Alpine landscapes, and at the same time committed — after the long road travelled since the victim thesis — to a critical memory of its own 20th century.
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In a spectacular corner of the Salzkammergut, wedged between a steep mountain and a lake of still water, lies Hallstatt, perhaps the most photographed village in Austria. But its fame goes far beyond the picturesque: this place gave its name to a whole era of European prehistory. The Hallstatt culture is the name given to the civilisation of the end of the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in central Europe, between the 12th and 6th centuries BC. The key to its importance lies under the mountain: salt mines worked for more than seven thousand years, among the oldest known in the world.
Salt — "white gold" — was a precious commodity in antiquity, essential for preserving meat and fish, and whoever controlled it grew rich. The prehistoric inhabitants of Hallstatt extracted salt from galleries driven into the mountain, and traded it the length and breadth of Europe. That wealth is reflected in their great necropolis, excavated since the 19th century: more than a thousand graves with goods of bronze, iron, amber, ivory and objects brought from the Mediterranean, revealing a rich, hierarchical society connected with half a continent. Thanks to the salt, the mines have also preserved organic materials — wooden tools, leather, textiles — of astonishing age.
The exceptional value of this landscape led Unesco to inscribe the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut region on the World Heritage List in 1997, as evidence of an activity — salt extraction — that has shaped life in these mountains continuously from prehistory to the present day. Visiting the Hallstatt salt mines means looking into the very origins of Iron Age Europe.
The very name of Salzburg — "salt castle" — proclaims the origin of its wealth. Founded on the old Roman Juvavum and refounded as a bishop's seat in the 8th century by Saint Rupert, the city owed its power to the salt mines nearby, at Hallein-Dürrnberg and in the Salzkammergut. For centuries, the archbishops of Salzburg were not only religious authorities: as prince-archbishops of the Holy Roman Empire, they governed a state of their own, independent of Austria and Bavaria, whose prosperity flowed from the salt trade and the gold mines of the Alpine valleys.
With that fortune, the prince-archbishops turned Salzburg into one of the most beautiful baroque cities north of the Alps, a small "Rome of the north". Above all in the 16th and 17th centuries, prelates such as Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau and his successors hired Italian architects who built the cathedral, palaces, squares and monumental fountains, crowning the city with the imposing Hohensalzburg fortress on the hill, one of the largest preserved medieval fortresses in Europe. That almost intact urban ensemble was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996.
Salzburg kept its independence as an ecclesiastical principality until the early 19th century. Only in 1816, after the Napoleonic wars and the secularisation of the ecclesiastical states, were the city and its territory definitively incorporated into Austria. Until then, for more than a thousand years, this small salt city had been a sovereign state governed by its archbishops, a power that left as its legacy one of the most harmonious cities in Europe.
Beneath the Catholic surface of the principality, a clandestine Protestant community survived for two centuries, above all in the southern Alpine valleys, where many peasants and miners secretly followed the Lutheran faith. In 1731, the prince-archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian decided to be rid of them. On 31 October of that year — a symbolic date: the anniversary of the start of the Reformation — he issued an edict of expulsion ordering all Protestants to leave Salzburg. The measure was brutal: in the middle of winter, landless labourers were given barely eight days to go, forced to leave behind even their children under twelve.
Between 1731 and 1732, more than 20,000 Salzburg Protestants were driven from their homes. Their plight moved Protestant Europe. King Frederick William I of Prussia, looking to repopulate his eastern territories, took them in and organised their journey: the emigrants walked hundreds of kilometres, in columns of about 800 people each, crossing Germany to distant East Prussia, where they were given land. Other groups emigrated to the Netherlands, and some, years later, crossed the Atlantic and founded colonies in North America, such as Ebenezer in Georgia.
The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants was one of the greatest episodes of religious persecution in 18th-century Europe and had an enormous impact: it became a rallying cry for the Protestant cause and fed into Enlightenment thinking on tolerance. For Salzburg it meant the loss of thousands of hard-working inhabitants; for the emigrants, the start of an exile that scattered their memory across half of Europe and even to America. Decades later, Joseph II's Patent of Toleration (1781) would put an end to that kind of persecution in the Habsburg dominions.
On 27 January 1756, in a house on the Getreidegasse in Salzburg, the most famous musician in history was born: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The son of Leopold Mozart, a violinist and composer in the service of the prince-archbishop's court, Wolfgang was a child prodigy who at the age of six was already playing before the European aristocracy; his father took him on tour around the courts of the continent, including that of Maria Theresa in Vienna. In his youth, Mozart worked as a musician at the Salzburg archiepiscopal court, but the relationship with his patron, Archbishop Colloredo, was tense and ended in a break: in 1781 Mozart left for Vienna, where he composed his great operas and symphonies and where he died, young and poor, in 1791.
Although Mozart had an ambivalent relationship with his home city, Salzburg has made him its universal symbol. The house where he was born and the house where his family lived are today much visited museums; his image presides over squares and shop windows, and even the famous marzipan and chocolate balls bear his name (Mozartkugeln). Above all, the city honours his memory with the Salzburg Festival (Salzburger Festspiele), founded in 1920, one of the most prestigious classical music and opera festivals in the world, which fills the city with concerts and performances every summer.
Beyond Mozart, Salzburg became a cultural icon by another, unexpected route: The Sound of Music was filmed here in 1965, based on the true story of the Von Trapp family, who fled Austria after the Anschluss. The city of salt and archbishops is today, above all, the city of music, a baroque stage at the foot of the Alps where Mozart's name echoes on every corner.
The Salzkammergut — literally "the salt estate", after the mines that for centuries were the direct property of the crown — is a region of mountain lakes and Alpine peaks east of Salzburg, dotted with postcard villages such as St. Wolfgang, on the shore of the Wolfgangsee, from where a rack railway climbs to the summit of the Schafberg. In the 19th century, this landscape of water and mountains became fashionable as a summer destination for the aristocracy and the imperial Habsburg court, drawn by its salt baths and its mountain air.
The centre of that imperial Salzkammergut was Bad Ischl, an elegant spa town that became the summer residence of Emperor Franz Joseph I. The imperial family spent its summers there in the Kaiservilla; there the young emperor became engaged to the future empress Elisabeth ("Sisi") in 1853; and there the great figures of Europe came for decades. But Bad Ischl was tied for ever to a far graver event: it was in its imperial villa that, on 28 July 1914, the elderly Franz Joseph signed the declaration of war on Serbia that set off the First World War. In that peaceful mountain spa the catastrophe was set in motion that would sink the empire and bleed Europe dry.
Today the Salzkammergut keeps its stately Belle Époque air: the villas, the cafés, the jetties, the steam train. In recognition of its heritage, in 2024 Bad Ischl and the Salzkammergut were European Capital of Culture, a tribute to this region that combines the thousand-year-old memory of salt, the summer splendour of the Habsburgs and the historical weight of that July day in 1914.
In the heart of the Salzkammergut, next to the village of Altaussee, the salt mines hold one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Second World War. Between 1943 and 1945, the Nazis turned the galleries of this mine — dry, at a stable temperature and safe from bombing — into a gigantic store for the art looted across Europe, much of it destined for the planned "Führermuseum" in Linz. Its tunnels came to hold close to 6,500 paintings and thousands of sculptures, drawings and objects, among them universal masterpieces such as the Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers and Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges.
In the last days of the war, that treasure came close to disappearing. The local gauleiter, August Eigruber, a fanatical Nazi, gave orders to blow up the mine with explosives before it fell into Allied hands, so that the works would not survive the defeat of the Reich. The destruction was averted at the last moment thanks to the miners themselves, the mine's managers and some officials, who sabotaged the plan by removing the bombs and sealing the galleries with controlled explosions until the American troops arrived in May 1945.
The rescue at Altaussee was one of the feats of the so-called Monuments Men, the Allied unit charged with protecting Europe's artistic heritage, and it has inspired books and films. Thanks to that chain of brave acts, thousands of stolen masterpieces could be recovered and, in many cases, returned to their countries and their owners. The Altaussee mine is still working today and can be visited; its galleries, which came within a whisker of becoming the tomb of European art, are a silent witness to that rescue.
Styria (Steiermark) occupies the southeast of Austria, a territory of wooded mountains, fertile valleys and vineyards that has earned it the nickname of the country's "green heart". Once Celtic and Roman territory, it was a duchy of the Holy Roman Empire that passed into Habsburg hands in the 13th century, along with Austria. For much of the early modern period, Styria was far more than an inland province: it was the first line of defence of the Habsburg hereditary lands against the Ottoman advance coming up from Hungary and the Balkans.
Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the region lived in a state of almost permanent alert. Turkish raids — often accompanied by looting, massacres and the capture of prisoners to be sold as slaves — periodically devastated southern Styria and neighbouring Carinthia. To defend itself, the territory filled up with castles, watchtowers and fortified churches, and a provincial militia was organised, always ready to mobilise. Graz, the capital, became a military bastion and the centre of "Inner Austria", the group of lands (Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and the Adriatic littoral) that the Habsburgs administered as a unit against the threat from the east.
That frontier status left a deep mark on Styrian identity and explains one of its most unusual monuments: the great armoury of Graz, the Landeszeughaus, a memory in stone and steel of the centuries when this land was central Europe's shield against the Ottomans.
Graz, Austria's second city, grew up beside the river Mur at the foot of a hill crowned by a fortress, the Schlossberg, of which only the Clock Tower remains today, the city's emblem. As the capital of Inner Austria and the residence of a branch of the Habsburgs, Graz was an important political and military centre in the 16th and 17th centuries; from that period comes its old town, one of the best preserved in central Europe, with Italian-style Renaissance courtyards, medieval lanes and baroque buildings, declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1999.
The monument that best sums up Graz's frontier past is the Landeszeughaus, the provincial armoury. Built in the mid-17th century, when Styria was on the front line against the Ottomans and against the Hungarian revolts, it was used to arm the Styrian militia quickly. Today it is the largest historic armoury in the world preserved in its original state: four floors packed with some 32,000 pieces — armour, helmets, muskets, pikes, swords, cannon — enough in their day to equip several thousand men. When Maria Theresa wanted to close it in the 18th century, as part of her military centralisation, the Styrians managed to have it kept as a symbol of the province's contribution to the defence of the empire.
Graz is also an old university city — its university dates from 1585 — and an intellectual centre: Johannes Kepler taught there and so, in the 20th century, did the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and it is the home of the astronomer whose name is borne by the birthplace of more than one Austrian Nobel laureate. That mixture of history, student youth and creativity still runs through its streets today.
If one metal defines Styria, it is iron. The Celtic kingdom of Noricum already owed its fame to the ferrum noricum, the very high quality steel it exported to Rome, and much of that ore came out of the Styrian Alps. In the centre of the province rises the Erzberg, the "ore mountain": a hill of iron worked without interruption for more than a thousand years, whose stepped silhouette, carved by centuries of open-cast mining, is one of the most distinctive landscapes in Austria. It is the largest siderite mine in the world and one of the oldest continuously working mines in central Europe.
A whole civilisation of iron grew up around the Erzberg. The region known as Eisenerz ("iron ore") and the steel towns of the Mur valley — Leoben, Bruck, Kapfenberg — lived for centuries from smelting and forging the metal from the mountain. Styrian iron armed the Habsburg armies, forged the tools of half of Europe and, in the industrial age, sustained a powerful steel industry that is still a pillar of the provincial economy today. The old "Iron Road" (Eisenstraße) recalls that mining and metalworking past.
Beyond iron, Styria is a land of contrasts: mountains and ski resorts in the north, and in the south a gentle landscape of hills, vineyards and pumpkin fields whose seeds yield the famous dark green pumpkin seed oil, the emblem of Styrian cooking. Thermal spas, wines and a strong rural identity complete the portrait of this province, which combines the memory of iron and the frontier with a prosperous, peaceful life.
South of Styria, between the Alps and the border with Italy and Slovenia, lies Carinthia (Kärnten), Austria's southernmost province, famous for its many lakes with water that is warm in summer — the Wörthersee, next to its capital, is the best known — which have made it a summer holiday destination. Its capital, Klagenfurt, preserves an old town of Renaissance courtyards and Italian-style arcades, and its emblem is the Lindwurm, a fabulous dragon whose fountain presides over the central square and which legend links to the mythical origin of the city.
Carinthia is also a land of linguistic frontier. In the Gail valley and in the south of the province there has been a Slovene-speaking minority for centuries, the Carinthian Slovenes, whose presence goes back to the Middle Ages, when the region was part of the old Slavic principality of Carantania. That duality — German and Slovene — was the background to one of the decisive episodes in Carinthian history.
After the collapse of the empire in 1918, the newly created kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the future Yugoslavia) claimed southern Carinthia, whose population was partly Slovene, and there was fighting between Austrian militias and Slovene troops. To settle the question, the Treaty of Saint-Germain provided for a plebiscite, held on 10 October 1920: in the disputed zone, mostly Slovene-speaking, close to 59% of voters chose to remain part of Austria rather than join Yugoslavia. That vote fixed the country's southern border and is still a central date in Carinthian identity today, although coexistence with the Slovene minority and the recognition of its rights — such as bilingual signs — remained a subject of debate decades later.
In recent decades, Graz has managed to combine the preservation of its historic heritage with a firm commitment to contemporary architecture and design. In 2003 it was European Capital of Culture, and that push left the city some of the boldest buildings in Austria today. The most famous is the Kunsthaus Graz, a contemporary art museum opened that year, whose organic, bluish shape — nicknamed the "friendly alien" — deliberately contrasts with the red roofs of the medieval centre around it, in a dialogue between old and new.
Next to the Kunsthaus, in the middle of the river Mur, the Murinsel was built: an artificial island of steel and glass shaped like a shell that serves as a café and a footbridge. These interventions, together with an active design scene, earned Graz a place in 2011 in the Unesco Creative Cities network in the Design category, the first German-speaking city to be given that distinction.
So the old capital of Inner Austria, the bastion city of the armoury and the Ottoman frontier, has reinvented itself as a youthful cultural and university hub, with tens of thousands of students bringing its streets to life. Graz packs the long history of Styria into a few kilometres: the fortress on the hill, the frontier armoury, the Renaissance courtyards and, now, the luminous buildings that look to the future without disowning the past.
Tyrol was born in the Middle Ages as an Alpine county, straddling the Germanic and Italian worlds, controlling the mountain passes through which trade between Germany and Italy flowed — above all the Brenner Pass, the lowest and most accessible route through the central Alps. That control of the routes and of the salt and silver mines gave the county remarkable wealth and strategic importance. The counts of Tyrol ruled a mountainous, hardy territory whose peasant inhabitants enjoyed freedoms and a right to bear arms that were uncommon in feudal Europe.
In 1363, Countess Margaret "Maultasch" ("pitcher mouth"), the last of her line and without heirs, ceded Tyrol to the Habsburgs. From then on, and for more than five centuries, Tyrol was one of the dynasty's patrimonial lands, although it always kept a strong spirit of autonomy and institutions of its own. Its frontier position and its value as a corridor towards Italy made it a key piece of the Habsburg dominions.
That mountain character, jealous of its liberties, forged a very marked Tyrolean identity, made up of attachment to the land, fervent Catholicism, a tradition of arms — the rifle companies, the Schützen — and a close relationship with the mountains. An identity that would burst out with force in 1809, when Tyrol staged one of the most famous popular rebellions of the Napoleonic era.
Innsbruck, the capital of Tyrol, spreads across a valley on the banks of the river Inn — hence its name, "bridge over the Inn" — surrounded by mountains that rise a few minutes from the centre. Around 1500, the city enjoyed its period of greatest splendour when the emperor Maximilian I chose it as one of his favourite residences and as a seat of imperial government. Maximilian, the "last knight", loved Tyrol for its mountain hunting and its strategic position, and turned Innsbruck into a court capital.
From that imperial period comes the city's most famous monument: the Goldenes Dachl or "Golden Roof", a balcony covered with 2,657 gilded copper tiles that Maximilian had built around 1500 so that he could watch the entertainments in the square. He is also linked to the Hofkirche, the church that houses his monumental cenotaph, surrounded by twenty-eight large bronze statues of ancestors and heroes — the "black men" — symbolically standing watch over his tomb, one of the masterpieces of European funerary art. Later, a branch of the Habsburgs lived in Innsbruck and left palaces and collections, such as Ambras Castle.
Ringed by peaks, Innsbruck has been a capital of mountain sport in the modern era: it hosted the Winter Olympic Games in 1964 and 1976, and cable cars leave from the city centre itself and reach the high mountains in minutes. The city thus combines its imperial heritage — the Golden Roof, the palaces, the baroque architecture — with its status as the gateway to the Alps, a crossroads of history and mountain that makes it unique in Austria.
In 1805, after another Austrian defeat at Napoleon's hands, Tyrol was taken from the Habsburgs and handed to Bavaria, France's ally. The new Bavarian government, steeped in enlightened reformism, clashed head-on with the deep religiosity and attachment to tradition of the Tyroleans: it imposed military conscription, church reforms and new taxes that the population experienced as an attack on their faith and their liberties. The discontent exploded in 1809, when Austria went back to war against Napoleon.
At the head of the uprising was Andreas Hofer, an innkeeper and cattle dealer from the Passeier valley, a pious man with great sway over the people. Under his command, the Tyrolean peasant militias — the Schützen, with their hunting rifles — rose against the Bavarian and French troops and beat them time and again on the Bergisel mountain, above Innsbruck, in the summer of 1809. For a few weeks, Hofer effectively governed Tyrol in the name of the emperor of Austria. But when Austria made peace with Napoleon and left the rebels to their fate, the resistance collapsed: Hofer, betrayed, was captured and shot on Napoleon's orders in Mantua, in February 1810.
Andreas Hofer became a national hero and the symbol of Tyrol: his figure, his song and his memory embody the spirit of a mountain people who rose up for their faith, their land and their loyalty to the emperor. The Bergisel hill, where he fought, is today a place of remembrance crowned by a museum and by a modern ski jump. A century after his exploit, however, the Tyrol for which Hofer died would be split in two.
For centuries, Tyrol was a single unit stretching from the Bavarian Alps to the gates of Verona, taking in both German-speaking and Italian-speaking lands. That unity was broken at the end of the First World War. Italy, which had entered the war in 1915 on the side of the Entente in exchange for the promise of Austrian territory (the secret Treaty of London), claimed as its spoils the southern part of Tyrol up to the Brenner watershed, even though much of that territory was inhabited by German-speaking people.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain, signed on 10 September 1919, sealed that partition: Italy annexed Trentino, with its Italian majority, but also so-called South Tyrol (Südtirol / Alto Adige), with its German-speaking majority, whose border was fixed at the Brenner Pass. Close to a quarter of a million German-speaking Tyroleans found themselves inside Italy overnight. Under Mussolini's fascism, from the 1920s on, they suffered a harsh policy of forced Italianisation: German was banned in schools and in the administration, place names and surnames were Italianised, and Italian immigration was encouraged to alter the make-up of the population.
The South Tyrol question poisoned relations between Austria and Italy for decades and led, in the 1960s, to a period of tension and bomb attacks. The solution came through self-government: an autonomy statute, negotiated between Rome and Vienna and fully in force since the 1970s and 1980s, gave the province wide self-government, bilingualism and protection for the German-speaking minority. Today South Tyrol is one of the most prosperous regions in Italy and a model of coexistence between language communities, although the memory of the 1919 partition is still alive on both sides of the Brenner.
When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the front between the two countries opened along hundreds of kilometres of high mountain, from the Stelvio Pass to the Dolomites and the Isonzo valley. In Tyrol and the Dolomites, the armies fought in one of the most extreme settings of the entire First World War: peaks above three thousand metres, glaciers, vertical walls and freezing temperatures. That struggle in ice and rock was named the "White War" (Weißer Krieg).
On that front, the enemy was not only the opposing army but the mountain itself. Austro-Hungarian and Italian soldiers dug trenches, tunnels and even entire cities into the ice of the glaciers; they strung cable cars and cut paths across the rock faces; and they fought a war of position at altitudes where simply surviving was a feat. The biggest killer was nature: it is estimated that tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides died buried by avalanches, especially in the terrible "black December" of 1916, when slides set off by the snowfalls — and sometimes by their own artillery fire — buried thousands of men in a few days.
Today, the retreat of the glaciers caused by climate change periodically gives back remains of that war — bodies, weapons, letters, personal belongings — preserved for a century in the ice. The Dolomites and the Tyrolean Alps are strewn with blockhouses, tunnels, cemeteries and open-air museums that recall the White War. It was one of the harshest and least known chapters of the Great War, fought on the roof of Europe, in the mountains that are today a paradise for Alpine tourism.
At the western tip of Austria, beyond Tyrol, lies Vorarlberg, the country's smallest province after Vienna, wedged between Switzerland, Germany and Lake Constance (Bodensee). With an Alemannic dialect related to Swiss German and a strong identity of its own, Vorarlberg was historically somewhat apart from the rest of Austria; after the First World War, in 1919, a large majority of its inhabitants went so far as to vote in a referendum to join Switzerland, a wish the powers did not allow. Its capital, Bregenz, on the lakeshore, is famous for its summer festival, with operas staged on a gigantic floating stage on the waters of the Bodensee.
But if anything transformed western Austria in the 20th century, it was mountain tourism. The same peaks that had been a frontier, a refuge for rebels and a battlefield became, first, a destination for mountaineering and summer walking and, above all, the cradle of alpine skiing. In the valleys of Tyrol and the Arlberg — where one of the first modern ski schools was developed at the beginning of the 20th century — the industry was born that would make Austria one of the world's great winter sports powers.
The emblem of that boom is Kitzbühel, a medieval Tyrolean town that reinvented itself as a luxury ski resort and that every January hosts the legendary Hahnenkamm downhill race, the most feared and prestigious on the world circuit. Along with Innsbruck, an Olympic host city, and dozens of resorts scattered through the Alps, western Austria today lives largely from tourism: skiing in winter, hiking and mountaineering in summer. The mountain, which shaped Tyrol's hard history for centuries, is now its greatest asset.
Vienna was born Roman. On the Danube, at the edge of the limes, the Romans built the legionary camp of Vindobona and its civilian town, a frontier outpost where — according to tradition — the emperor Marcus Aurelius died in the year 180. After the fall of Rome and centuries of obscurity, the city re-emerged in the Middle Ages: the Babenberg dukes moved their residence here in the 12th century, walled it and turned it into a Danube trading centre. In 1155, Henry II Jasomirgott established his court in Vienna, and shortly afterwards the city's first great church went up.
With the arrival of the Habsburgs in the 13th century, Vienna established itself as the capital of their dominions. St Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom), with its unmistakable roof of coloured tiles and its tall Gothic tower, became the symbol of the city and the country's symbolic pantheon. A university city from 1365, a bishop's seat, a trading and military stronghold, Vienna grew as the head of an ever larger conglomerate of lands, although for centuries it was also a frontier city, exposed to the threat coming from the east.
That threat had a name: the Ottoman Empire. Vienna withstood the two great Turkish sieges of 1529 and 1683, and drew much of its identity from its status as a bastion of Christendom. After the victory of 1683 and the Ottoman retreat, the city was finally able to expand beyond its walls and enter its most splendid period: that of the imperial baroque, when the Habsburgs, now a great power, decided to give their capital a face to match their ambition.
Freed from the Ottoman siege, Vienna became one of the great baroque capitals of Europe. The aristocracy and the court competed to build palaces: Prince Eugene of Savoy built the Belvedere, and the Habsburgs extended their winter residence, the Hofburg, and raised their great summer palace, Schönbrunn, on the edge of the city. Conceived in imitation of Versailles and completed under Maria Theresa, Schönbrunn, with its 1,441 rooms, its gardens, the Gloriette at the top of the hill and the oldest zoo in the world (founded in 1752), was the stage for the dynasty's court life; here Mozart played as a child before Maria Theresa, and here Franz Joseph lived and died. Today it is a World Heritage Site and the most visited monument in Austria.
Vienna's second great face is the Ringstrasse. In 1857, Franz Joseph ordered the old walls to be pulled down and a majestic circular boulevard, the Ring, opened in their place, lined over the following decades with monumental buildings: the State Opera, the neo-Greek Parliament, the neo-Gothic City Hall, the great twin museums, the Burgtheater, the university. That ring of stone was the great stage for imperial pride and for the liberal middle class that made 19th-century Vienna a European metropolis.
At the beginning of the 20th century, that Vienna was the cultural laboratory out of which came Freud, Klimt, Schnitzler, Mahler and Wittgenstein, and also the city of the antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger, admired by the young Hitler. The capital of an empire of fifty million people until 1918, Vienna was then left as the outsized head of a small republic. But its imperial heritage — the palaces, the Ring, the coffee houses, the music — still defines it: it is the legacy of the centuries when it was one of the capitals of the world.
After the collapse of the empire in 1918, Vienna went through one of the boldest social experiments in interwar Europe: "Red Vienna" (Rotes Wien). Between 1919 and 1934, the city — turned into an autonomous Land governed by the social democrats — carried out a pioneering municipal policy. Taxes on the rich and on luxury goods financed an ambitious social housing programme: huge blocks of workers' flats, with courtyards, laundries, kindergartens, libraries and clinics, of which the most famous is the Karl-Marx-Hof, a building more than a kilometre long. Health, education and welfare services were created that made Vienna a model admired by the left all over the world.
But Red Vienna clashed head-on with the conservative, Catholic Austria that dominated the provinces and the federal government. The tension between the social democratic left and the right, each with its own armed militias — the socialist Schutzbund and the right-wing Heimwehr — poisoned the First Republic. The economic crisis of 1929 made everything worse, and in 1933 Chancellor Dollfuss suspended Parliament and set up an authoritarian regime.
The final clash came in February 1934. On 12 February, a police search for weapons at a social democratic headquarters in Linz triggered a workers' uprising that spread to Vienna and other industrial cities. For four days, the army and the Heimwehr shelled the workers' housing blocks — including the Karl-Marx-Hof — where the socialist militiamen were holding out. The brief civil war left hundreds dead and ended with the defeat of the left: the Social Democratic Party was banned, several of its leaders were executed and Red Vienna was buried. Months later, in July, the Austrian Nazis murdered Dollfuss. The republic was heading for the abyss of the Anschluss.
Upstream from Vienna, the Danube crosses Lower Austria and traces one of the most beautiful river landscapes in Europe: the Wachau valley, a stretch of some 35 kilometres between the towns of Melk and Krems, declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2000. Here the river runs hemmed in between hills covered with vineyards and stone terraces, dotted with medieval villages, castles, ruins and monasteries. It is one of the oldest wine regions in Austria, famous for its white wines — Grüner Veltliner and Riesling — and for its apricots.
The Wachau is also a corridor loaded with history. At its western end stands the Benedictine abbey of Melk, a colossal baroque monastery perched on a crag above the river, founded on a former Babenberg residence and rebuilt in the 18th century as one of the high points of central European baroque, with its gilded church and its magnificent library. Downstream, Göttweig Abbey crowns another hill, and the town of Krems preserves a medieval centre of steep streets and old gateways. In the village of Dürnstein, in the ruins of a castle, the English king Richard the Lionheart was held prisoner at the end of the 12th century, captured on his way back from the Crusades.
These banks have also yielded some of the oldest traces of European art: the Venus of Willendorf, a small limestone figurine some 30,000 years old, was discovered in 1908 in the Wachau and is today one of the most celebrated pieces of world prehistory, kept in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. From the Palaeolithic to the baroque monasteries, the Austrian Danube packs millennia of history into a few kilometres.
Linz, Austria's third city, stretches along the banks of the Danube upstream from Vienna. A former Roman (Lentia) and medieval trading town, it was for centuries a quiet provincial city; Adolf Hitler spent his school years here and always considered it his sentimental "home town". That personal link had dark consequences. During the Third Reich, Hitler designated Linz as one of the five "Führer cities" (Führerstädte) and planned to turn it into the great cultural capital of the Reich, meant to eclipse Vienna, with monumental avenues, museums and a gigantic "Führermuseum" to house the art looted across Europe. The project, scheduled for 1950, was never built; almost the only thing that went up was the Nibelungen bridge over the Danube.
Some of the stone for those works came from a place of horror. A few kilometres from Linz, in 1938 the Nazis set up the Mauthausen concentration camp, next to a granite quarry. Mauthausen and its network of subcamps made up a slave labour camp of the harshest category, where prisoners were forced to quarry and carry blocks of granite up the 186 steps of the "stairs of death". Of its roughly 190,000 prisoners, close to half died. Today the site is a national memorial, a place of mourning and education visited in silence; its preservation is part of Austria's commitment to the memory of the victims of National Socialism.
After the war, Linz rebuilt itself as an industrial city — steel and chemicals — and, in recent decades, has actively reworked its past and reinvented its identity. Today it is a recognised centre of art and technology: it hosts the Ars Electronica festival and museum, devoted to digital art, and the Lentos, a modern art museum by the river. European Capital of Culture in 2009, Linz embodies the passage from a city marked by the shadow of Nazism to a hub of contemporary creativity that does not hide its history but confronts it.