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Did You Know?

Vienna Built a Clock to Celebrate an Empire, and It Started Working the Year the Empire Ended

The City of Vienna owns around 220,000 flats.

They sit in more than 2,300 municipal buildings and house over 500,000 people — which makes the city government the largest municipal landlord in Europe. Add the roughly 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with city subsidies and you reach a striking figure: somewhere between half and 60% of all Viennese live in subsidised housing.

Only about 20% of Vienna's residents own their home. For Austria as a whole the figure is around 51%. Vienna is a city of renters, and appears content to be one.

It was built deliberately, and slowly. The Social Democrats won Vienna's first post-war election in 1919, inheriting a city where overcrowding was so severe that tuberculosis was known as "the Viennese disease." Their first housing programme called for 25,000 flats in five years. By 1935 about 11% of the population lived in some 400 municipal estates. After the Second World War the city built another 96,000 flats between 1947 and 1970, and it has never sold the stock off — not in the 1980s, not in the 1990s, not since.

Karl-Marx-Hof, opened in 1930, runs for more than a kilometre and contains over 1,200 flats. At the opening, Mayor Karl Seitz said that "when we are no longer here, these stones will speak for us."

The clock: which is a useful thing to know before looking at what Vienna put on its most famous clock.

At Hoher Markt, Vienna's oldest square, an Art Nouveau clock spans a ten-metre bridge between two halves of an insurance company's building. It was designed by the painter Franz von Matsch, commissioned by the Anker insurance company, and built between 1911 and 1914. It is known as the Ankeruhr.

The mechanism is a parade. Twelve historical figures — Marcus Aurelius, Charlemagne, Maria Theresa, Haydn and others — cross the four-metre clock face, one per hour, all day. At noon all twelve process across in turn, each accompanied by music from its own era. The show runs about ten minutes and it still draws a crowd every single day.

It was built to walk the Habsburg centuries across a bridge, once an hour, forever.

Then the First World War stopped everything.

Between its completion and 1918, the clock ran twice. Once on Emperor Franz Joseph's birthday in 1915, and once on his birthday in 1916. That was it. A monument to imperial continuity, switched on twice as a birthday gesture, in a war that was dismantling the empire it commemorated.

The Ankeruhr entered full-time operation in 1918 — the year the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist. The following year, the party that would spend the next century building 220,000 flats won the city.

There was one adjustment. The noon music had been the Imperial Hymn. With no empire left to have an anthem, it was replaced by a selection from Haydn's The Creation. The composer stayed the same — Haydn had written the Imperial Hymn too, and Haydn is himself one of the twelve figures who walks across the bridge.

Vienna is one of the few cities where the local clock is a piece of civic theatre rather than infrastructure. The Ankeruhr is not accurate to the second, does not synchronise with anything, and is not trying to.

It has one job, and it is a strange one: to remind you, once an hour and properly at noon, that centuries walk past whether or not anyone is watching. The empire it was built for lasted four years after the clock was finished. The clock has now been running for more than a hundred.