„Once, Vienna reinvented the modern world. Now it has to reinvent itself.“
The best thing about being a freelancer is getting to work from anywhere. For me, this summer it was from the hood of my Fiat Panda somewhere in the Pyrenees, if the Wifi allowed it. Right now it’s from a cafĂ© at Naschmarkt, not far from the Strauss Museum – an exhibition I helped shape about two years ago. Back then, while researching Vienna’s fin-de-siècle creative boom, I kept thinking: what a fever dream that must’ve been!Â
Roaming through Europe these past months has resparked my curiosity: How do people perceive my hometown on an international stage today – if they even perceive it at all?
To get the usual namedropping out of the way: A hundred years ago, Vienna was a whole petri dish for new ways and systems of thinking (Freud, Kraus), seeing (Klimt, Schiele), and living (Wagner, Loos). Vienna wasn’t just neat, clean, and safe. It was turbulent, unpredictable, and sometimes even radical (yes, Vienna!). A breeding ground for bold ideas. Looking up from my oat-milk melange and into the enchanted faces of tourists drifting through Naschmarkt, I ask myself: Can today’s Vienna still do that? Do we still have what it takes to be one of the world’s leading creative capitals; a place that launches progressive potential instead of just consuming it? Or have we traded curiosity for comfort as a nation?
The City That Invented Ideas
As British historian Richard Cockett writes in Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, a European capital on the Danube once “lit the spark for most of Western intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century.” Between 1870 and the early 1900s, the city functioned like an open-source lab. Decades of repression under Metternich had given way to a sudden hunger for debate: coffeehouses buzzed with argument; salons (most famously hosted by Berta Zuckerkandl and Alma Mahler) turned living rooms into laboratories where painters, composers, scientists and radicals collided.
The old empire was fading, but its capital was still magnetic; still pulling in talent from every corner of its former territories: writers from Prague, architects from Budapest, philosophers from Galicia. This mix of languages and temperaments fed a dense creative current. For a while, variety itself felt like Vienna’s main export.
 When Borders Close, So Do Minds
This delicate ecosystem collapsed when fascism rose and cultural exchange came to a grinding halt. Over the span of a few years, Vienna’s cafés and salons emptied, and a city built on conversation was turned into a silence chamber. Fascism doesn’t just kill people. It kills potential. The thinkers who had once defined Vienna scattered across the world – to London and New York, but also to Jerusalem, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai – taking their ideas with them. What they built elsewhere became the blueprint for the modern world. Only with Vienna itself, for many years, no longer being part of it.
It’s a bittersweet truth but also a timeless reminder: creativity needs migration. Ideas need to move, mutate, and collide. Vienna’s creative pulse has always depended on how open its doors are to immigration, collaboration, and friction. If the fin-de-siècle proved anything, it’s that diversity and debate are non-negotiables for the kind of momentum the city once had. And could have again.
Bureaucracy Berlin Would Never
Back then, Vienna’s creative collapse had more obvious villains. Today’s barriers are less ideological and more simply put: a bureaucratic pain in the ass. Compared to other creative capitals, the scene can feel sealed off, orbiting around a handful of universities and institutions with little social permeability. Sure, we have generous cultural funding – but also some of the world’s most rigid immigration laws. For international talent, the calculation rarely adds up: too many hoops for too little opportunity. Cities like Berlin issue freelance visas that invite experimentation and exchange, while Vienna’s paperwork and prestige systems quietly discourage the very diversity that once made it thrive.
Vienna, again
Good news at last: Today, Vienna’s creative charge is flickering again. Not in imperial salons or concept store coffeehouses, but in studios, Stadtbahnbögen, and shared spaces across the city.
You feel it in collectives like Kids of the Diaspora, who turn fashion, culture, and community into stories about identity, migration, and belonging.
You see it in the lingerie brand Full of Desire, pushing beyond gender and aesthetic norms to explore intimacy, body politics, and pleasure as ways to stay in touch with yourself and the world around you.
You experience it in Klub Halal, where music, political activism, and nightlife blur into an eclectic and refreshingly outspoken collective, and a home at that for queer and brown folks.
To name just a few.
This is the Vienna I recognise: not a museum of its past, but a playground for plurality. It’s the same pulse I get to help amplify as exec. editor of CAINNÉ ANGSTE Magazine: a Vienna-born collaborative project shaped by an international team of contributors. Together, we map and showcase that manifold, in-and-out-of-Vienna energy, giving its shameless creativity a space to live, breathe, and also misbehave.
If Vienna wants to keep up, it needs to open up and reembrace what once made it cutting-edge: allowing for new voices, new aesthetics, and new ways of thinking. Let’s reclaim our experimental spirit not as heritage, but as practice, and make friction feel like home again.