  The setting of Buber’s early childhood was late-nineteenth-century Vienna, then still the cosmopolitan capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic conglomerate whose eventual demise (in the First World War) effectively ended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe. Fin-de-siècle Vienna was the home of light opera and heavy neo-romantic music, French-style boulevard comedy and social realism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and vibrant journalism, a cultural cauldron aptly captured in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930–1932).