On the 18 of June 2002 a memorial plaque was unveiled in Lange Gasse 21 in Vienna's 8th district. It is in honour of Hugo Bettauer, a Jewish writer and journalist born in 1872 and author of the prophetic 1922 novel "The City Without Jews". He was gunned down in his office in 1925 by a young Nazi sympathizer and died several days later.

"Das Land des Lächelns" - "The Land of Smiles" - by Franz Lehár is still one of the most popular operettas on the stage today and one of the Hungarian-born composer's most famous works. While Lehár has gone down in music history as one of the leading exponents of the Golden Age of the Viennese operetta, Fritz Löhner-Beda, the man who co-authored the libretto for "The Land of Smiles" and countless other operetta hits, has, by and large been forgotten.

If one thinks of Vienna and music, one spontaneously thinks of the Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss or else the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss the Elder. But Vienna is just as much associated with the Harry Lime Theme from the 1949 film classic "The Third Man". Brigitte Timmermann and Frederick Baker tell all about the making of the movie and the people involved - including the young Viennese musician who sparked off "zithermania" … in their book called "The Third Man. In the Footsteps of a film classic".

For professional and hobby gardeners the new season is just around the corner. The daffodils will soon be making room for tulips, the most popular of all garden flowers. There are roughly 100 species which are native to Eurasia, but the common association between tulips and The Netherlands is erroneous for the Dutch tulip isn't Dutch!

It was an "experience which probably changed my life", says "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal: "Two or three months after we established our own office in Linz [in 1947], three rabbis visited me one day and told me they had information that in a castle in Carinthia, in the vicinity of Villach, there was a big Jewish library full of all kinds of books.

"A SORT OF INTRODUCTION" - "A SORT OF ENDING" It was in 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War and seven years after the Austrian writer's death that an English-language publication, the prestigious Times Literary Supplement announced the rediscovery of a forgotten writer. His name: Robert Musil.