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Taught in German. The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was the center of extraordinary cultural and intellectual flourishing around the turn of the 20th century. A monumental building campaign along the Ringstrasse, which replaced the old city walls, massively transformed the urban fabric of the city. The founding of the Vienna Secession marked a period of re-birth that spread throughout the visual arts, literature, theater, music, architecture, and design. Literati and intellectuals including Sigmund Freud, who revolutionized psychology through the founding of psychoanalysis, gathered at now-famous Viennese Kaffeehäuser. This course surveys the artistic, cultural, intellectual, and political landscape of Vienna from ca. 1890 to the First World War. Figures to be examined include Hoffmansthal, Schnitzler, Rilke, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Loos, Wagner, Schönberg, Freud, and Wittgenstein, among others.