Erwin began his career in physics during the last peaceful years of the Danube monarchy. Old Franz Josef still retained the respect and affection of the lower and upper classes among his subjects, but his control over the bourgeois politicians and their nationalistic tendencies began to falter. The Hungarian leaders consistently placed the privileges of the great Magyar landowners above all else, and extorted special concessions as the price of loyalty to the throne. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 created a large population of disaffected Slavs and Muslims in the southern borderlands. The K&K structure was becoming more unstable, and as for a radioactive atom, the question was not if but when it would disintegrate.

Before the war

The chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad, was a persistent warmonger, urging the emperor to embark upon ‘preventive war’, one year against Serbia, the next against Italy. At the end of 1911, he was dismissed, not so much for meddling in foreign policy as for his affair with a married woman, Gina Reininghaus, which offended the religious sensibilities of the old emperor. After a year in disfavor, he was called back, but soon thereafter Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, was appointed General Inspector of all the Armed Forces. In May, 1913, the war machine was shaken by the revelation that Colonel Alfred Redl, one of the chiefs of military intelligence, was a Russian spy and a member of a homosexual coterie among the army officers. Since he had sold the Russians all the plans for a prospective eastern theater of war, a hasty revision of K&K strategy was required. Meanwhile, the two Balkan wars of 1912-1913 had left Serbia as a much stronger military force in the region. Even Conrad realized that it was now too late for preventive war.

The musical, literary, and dramatic life of Vienna still made the city the cultural center of the German-speaking world, but this eminence was increasingly a creation of the Jews. In October, 1912, the Censorship prohibited the Wiener Deutsches Volkstheater from presenting Schnitzler's play Professor Bernhardi, which deals with antisemitism in the medical profession. Many Jews became converted to Christianity, and a few even to antisemitism.