The Vienna University Companion

Founded in 1365 as an act of imperial rivalry with Prague, Vienna became the oldest university in the German-speaking world, home in time to Freud, the Vienna Circle, and a genuinely unmatched musical inheritance, including the night Beethoven himself conducted the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in its own Great Hall. This Companion reads that brilliance honestly alongside the university's own 1938 expulsions, and its genuine, ongoing reckoning with what it did to its own community.