It was in Vienna in 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries. Here also the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Vienna was internationally celebrated as the intellectually pulsating city of Freud and Jung, Kafka and Wittgenstein. And here, in the spring of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had a troubled and fateful audience with Emperor Franz Joseph. A few months later, the bullet that killed the archdukewould set off the Great War destined to kill ten million more.With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton limns the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis-Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.