Then came some very difficult years for Cottage and Vienna. To start with, there was the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. Vienna and the Cottage had to assimilate itself from being an imperial metropolis to the capital of a small ailing republic. In the aftermath of the war came worldwide economic strife and then the advent of the Second World War and with it, the ’Anschluss’ of Austria to Germany from 1938 until 1945. From 1938, with the arrival of the Nazis (National Socialists), a substantial part of the population of Cottage, mostly the Jewish families, were brutally driven away. This was followed by the influx of ’important’ families close to the new regime and with this, the whole composition of the type of people that lived in Cottage changed. Then came the physical destruction of the neighborhood, where some 20% of the houses, that is 107 homes, in the area were destroyed or damaged through acts of war, mostly air strikes between September 1944 and March 1945. In the reconstruction after the war, many of these houses, due to lack of funds and materials, were re-built without thought in the cheapest possible way. Today, these houses, along with other houses that have not adhered to the Cottage concept, cast a shadow over the overall ambience of Cottage.
