Beschreibung:
Françoise Knopper : Viennese cosmopolitanism. Vienna, throughout the century a meeting-place for artists, diplomats, civil servants, traders and financiers, one-fifth of whose population was not Austrian, was the most frequently visited and described city of the Empire. Thanks to its social infrastructure, it was apparently easier to establish links between different social groups who shared the same amusements, but this cosmopolitanism hid many defects. German, English, Italian and French descriptions, guides and travel accounts show that cultural transfers between nations were rare. Unwittingly, most of the topographers were victims of Eurocentrism. While the young gentry praised the hospitality which allowed them to learn the ways of high society, they mixed with each other and rarely ignored questions of rank. The representatives of the Viennese intellectual élite, who criticised the aristocrats for preferring their public image and ignoring the interests of the state, tried to reconcile cosmopolitanism and patriotism. But they ran the risk of chauvinism, as some transformed a truly hospitable nature into a specific patriarchal virtue.