Ethnic diversity led to the breakdown of the liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire in the decades prior to World War I, when its component nationalities decided they could not live together in a common political structure. Fin de siècle Vienna was a melting pot that had produced Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud. But when the empire’s narrower national identities—Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and Austro-Germans—asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance.
