Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
by Richard Cockett
A fascinating study of Vienna between the wars and its immense contributions to modernism and to computing. Vienna was a huge capital city that governed what had become a small country. Austria had lost her empire and her markets, the economy had been shredded, and vast numbers of people from the former provinces converged on a city with insufficient housing, a place that had long seen itself as governed by schleppers. Yet, for a decade, it became the intellectual center of the world, before the Viennese threw it all away for the satisfactions of Fascism.