Austria historical timeline

Origins

Celtic Noricum and then Roman provinces along the Danube gave the region its first towns. The name appears in 996 as Ostarrîchi, the eastern realm, held by the Babenberg margraves; in 1278 the Habsburgs took it, and they did not let go until 1918. What they built they built largely by marriage rather than conquest, to the point that the practice acquired its own Latin tag.

Turning points

Ottoman armies reached the walls of Vienna twice, in 1529 and again in 1683, and the failure of the second siege ended Ottoman expansion into central Europe. Maria Theresa reformed the state in the eighteenth century; the Compromise of 1867 turned the empire into Austria-Hungary; and the assassination of the heir to that throne at Sarajevo in 1914 began the First World War, which destroyed it. A small republic was left, annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. After 1945 four powers occupied the country for a decade, and the State Treaty of 1955 restored full sovereignty on the condition of permanent neutrality — which Austria kept even after joining the European Union in 1995.

Influential people

Maria Theresa, the only woman to rule the Habsburg lands in her own right. Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler, which is a remarkable concentration for one small country. Sigmund Freud, who invented psychoanalysis in a Vienna apartment. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in painting, Wittgenstein in philosophy, Schrödinger in physics, and Stefan Zweig, who wrote the best account of what was lost.

Cultural evolution

Vienna around 1900 produced psychoanalysis, the Secession and atonal music within a single generation and a few square kilometres, and the city has been living with the comparison ever since. The coffee house is a listed cultural practice rather than a business model: one cup buys the table and the newspapers for as long as you want them. The Baroque churches and abbeys of the Catholic counter-reformation shape almost every skyline, and the Alpine west — Tyrol, Vorarlberg — is a different country in dialect, dress and temperament from the east.

Present-day significance

Austria is neutral, prosperous and hosts the United Nations, OPEC and the OSCE in Vienna, which consistently places at or near the top of international liveability rankings. Winter tourism carries the western provinces. The long-standing national story that Austria was Hitler’s first victim rather than a participant was publicly dismantled from the 1980s onward, and the reckoning that followed is comparatively recent.