This film on Vienna on the eve of World War 1 purports to tell a parable alluding to the fate of present-day Europe. Around the turn of the century, this European city was the seat of culture and the arts - the rich coagulation of a universal civilization. Freud, Einstein, Mahler, Schönberg, Kelsen and many others lived, stayed or strayed here in the capital of the Danube Monarchy. The Vienna of the new century provided the backdrop for the development of the various natural sciences and the blooming of the different branches of the arts. Simultaneously, however, its doom was made inevitable by the brand of nationalism burgeoning at that time. At the peak of its glory, Vienna's shooting star was, in fact, crashing fast to its extinction. But nobody dared heed this. Only the sentient among them, the Artists, the Philosophers, the Psychoanalysts felt and projected it. Could it be possible that the Europe of the 1980s is waddling in the same mud as did Austria anno 1910?
Elisabeth Trissenaar, Matthieu Carriere, Maja Komorowska, Marcus Vogelbacher, Jan Bycicki
Regie
Krzyszstof Zanussi
Kamera
Slawomir Idziak
ProduzentIn
Regina Ziegler
Sender
ZDF
Genre
Documentary