Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the Danubian monarchy; it was also the industrial centre. In contrast to the vast number of military officers of high rank state officials, artists and scientists,
there was the still vaster army of workers. Abject poverty rubbed shoulders with the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class.
Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring Strasse, and below that Via Triumphalis of the old Austria, the homeless huddled together in the murk and filth of the canals.
There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could be studied better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning against the illusion that this problem can be ‘studied’ from a higher social level.
The man who has never been in the clutches of that gushing viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study it in any other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both are harmful; the first, because it can never go to the root of the problem, the second, because it evades the question entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious—to ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune and those who have risen in the social scale through their own efforts,
or the equally supercilious and often tactless, but always genteel,
condescension displayed by people who have a craze for being charitable and who plume themselves on ‘sympathising with the people.’