Perhaps the cultural survival and indeed veneration of figures such as Kraus, Freud, Hašek, Kafka, Schiele and Webern flatters and distorts how we think of the Empire. It would be a grotesquely demeaning thing to set up and it would be visited by nobody, but perhaps a major exhibition should be put together celebrating all the figures who were often very successful at the time but who are now forgotten – the heroic realist sculptors, the anti-Semitic cartoonists, the insipid society portraitists, the writers of slim bestsellers on how German Austrians should join the Reich or why Jews,
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