As I began to research Operation Vienna, the second book in my Foreign Correspondent series which is set in 1931, I recognised a succession of names that were to become famous throughout the world in a dazzling variety of subjects.  And many, if not most, of these names belonged to Viennese Jews.

Who am I talking about?  Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in psychology; Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in philosophy; Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg in music; Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth in literature; Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang directing in Hollywood; Hedy Lamarr and Peter Lorre acting in it; Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Menger in economics; Otto Bauer (a social democrat) and Theodor Herzl (a Zionist) in politics; the Rothschild and Ephrussi families in banking.  And many, many more.

Why?

This is a question that occurred to Richard Cockett, a correspondent for The Economist, who wrote a book about it: Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.  Some of his answers are obvious.  Education is important in Jewish culture and many intellectually inquisitive Jews migrated to Vienna from all over Austria’s massive Central European empire – which stretched from Trieste to Lviv (formerly Lemberg) and Prague to Sarajevo.

But there is another less obvious and far more interesting reason.

The University of Vienna was one of the oldest and most renowned in Europe.  But by 1900 it was ossifying.  The curriculum was outdated, lectures were dull, professors were unadventurous – experts in their field with little incentive or interest in expanding their knowledge.  As the twentieth century progressed both faculty and student clubs became more anti-Semitic.  From 1922, Jews were prevented from becoming full professors.  So many of the brightest academics in Vienna were excluded from the university or, like Sigmund Freud or Ludwig von Mises, were given part-time roles as Dozenten.

But these Jewish intellectuals still taught and their students still learned.  Rather than droning on in a hall in the university, they used to meet and give lectures at the cafés of Vienna.  These coffeehouses built up reputations for their own specialisms: the Café Central for literature, the Café Landtmann for psychology, others for medicine, philosophy, music and even football.  Anyone could come along: Jews, certainly, even women.  But the real beauty of this parallel education system was that you didn’t have to attend only one café.  You could go and listen to anyone you wanted speaking about anything you were interested in.

Recent scholarship has bemoaned the ‘silos’ that have developed in twenty-first-century academia where academics spend decades on ever more narrow problems.  The theory is that this specialisation hinders creativity by inhibiting the range of ideas a creative mind is exposed to.  This was not a problem for the Viennese. 

Philosophers were interested in zoology, scientists in music, medics in literature.  Take Friedrich Hayek: although he was not Jewish himself, he spent much time in Jewish intellectual circles. His father was a doctor who hosted the Vienna Zoological Society once a week.  Hayek trained at home as a botanist, studied law and then political science at the university, spent most of his time studying psychology outside it, before turning his attention to economics, where he came up with original ideas which dominated global economic thinking in the second half of the twentieth century.  Hayek’s Jewish cousin, Wittgenstein, one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, was a brilliant clarinet player and also a virtuoso whistler.  Plato had his ‘philosopher kings’; Vienna its ‘philosopher whistlers’.

But my favourite example is Hedy Lamarr.  Born to a Jewish banker in Vienna,she became a much sought-after film actress in the 1930s and 40s.  But in the late 1930s, she invented a system for radio-frequency hopping that would prevent jamming of radio signals.  It’s used in Bluetooth technology today.

Only in Vienna.