"Austria-Hungary was a predominantly rural society, but Vienna was toasted as one of the most cultured and cosmolitan capitals on earth, beloved of Franz Lehar and Thomas Mann. Lenin thought it a 'mighty and vivacious city.' Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' was sung there in English, and in 1913 it played host to the world premiere of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. It is an oddity of history that in the same year Stalin, Trotsky, Tito, and Hitler alike lived for some months in Vienna. The great American boxer Jack Johnson was star turn of that winter's season at the Apollo Theatre. Among a host of popular cafés, the Landtmann was the favorite of Sigmund Freud. The city represented a global pinnacle of snobbery: bowing, scraping, and even hand-kissing shopkeepers flattered their middle-class customers by adding an aristocratic 'von' to their names, and addressing them as 'Your Grace.' Domestic servants were subject to almost feudal routines: employment law entitled housemaids to only seven hours off a fortnight, every alternate Sunday. Aristocratic Viennese had a New Year's custom of pouring gobbets of molten lead into buckets of iced champagne, then trying to predict the future when they hardened."