CONTEXT: This picture is from my 2016 visit to Vienna, Austria with my friend Paul. It shows a modest, but deliberately, stridently unique building, created in reaction against the stultifying aesthetics and society of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.

An exhibition hall in proudly non-traditional architecture, this was opened in 1898, to display the work of non-conformist artists, who had “seceded” from the academic official art of the Empire, which they found banal and sterile. This building is emblematic of a remarkable irony: in the early 20th century, as Imperial Austria stagnated, resisting political change happening elsewhere, Vienna was the site of some staggering innovations. Freud, Schiele, Klimt, Schoenberg and Zweig all lived and worked there, creating whole new sciences or paths of creativity. I don’t know why such immense novelty burst forth then, but it was likely one of the things Hitler – an impoverished provincial youth then living in the city, ferociously sensitive to affronts to traditional German culture – most hated about the place.

Further, the adulation painters like Klimt got must have inspired very personal jealousy in Hitler, himself a failed artist (of very limited imagination). I am frankly surprised the Nazis didn’t destroy this structure when they ruled Vienna, as it represented a freethinking Intellectualism that they lethally despised, a violation of their ideal of abandoning the ‘Self’ to the will of a single heroic leader – Fuehrer.