Famous people from Austria include the empress Maria Theresa, who introduced compulsory schooling in 1774; the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756; Sigmund Freud, the Vienna doctor who founded psychoanalysis; the physicist Lise Meitner, who helped explain nuclear fission; the painter Gustav Klimt, creator of The Kiss; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilder from Styria who became governor of California. Austria is a small country of about 9 million people, but for six centuries it was the core of the Habsburg empire, so its famous names fall into two groups. First come the rulers, statesmen and writers who built the state and gave it its symbols. Then come the composers, scientists, artists and athletes who carried the name "Austria" out into the world, several of them as refugees.
Maria Theresa and Joseph II: the reforming Habsburgs of the Hofburg
Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was born in Vienna and ruled the Habsburg monarchy from 1740 until her death, the only woman ever to hold that position in her own right. She came to the throne facing an invasion of Silesia by Prussia and spent eight years fighting the War of the Austrian Succession to keep her inheritance. At home she rebuilt the state: she centralised tax collection and the army, and in December 1774 made law the proposals of the school reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger, which created a system of state primary schools and made attendance compulsory. She also gave birth to sixteen children in nineteen years, among them Marie Antoinette, the future queen of France.
Her eldest son, Joseph II (1741–1790), was born in the Hofburg palace in Vienna and ruled alone for the ten years after her death. He pushed her reforms much further and much faster. In 1781 he issued the Patent of Toleration, giving Lutherans, Calvinists and Orthodox Christians a limited right to worship openly, and in the same year he abolished serfdom. A separate edict of 1782 allowed Jews to attend schools and universities and to work in a wider range of professions. He also made German, in place of Latin, the language of instruction in 1784. Many of his reforms met fierce resistance, and protests in Hungary forced him to withdraw many of them there shortly before his death in 1790.
Franz Joseph, Karl Renner and Leopold Figl: three founders of three Austrias
Franz Joseph I (1830–1916) was born at Schönbrunn Palace and became emperor in December 1848, aged 18, in the middle of a revolution. He reigned for 68 years, until his death at Schönbrunn in November 1916. In 1867 he agreed the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, which split his empire into two halves with a shared monarch, army and foreign policy, creating the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Under his rule Vienna tore down its old city walls and built the Ringstrasse, with its parliament, opera house, museums and university. Two years after his death, in the last weeks of the First World War, the empire itself collapsed.
Karl Renner (1870–1950) is often called the father of the republic, because he founded it twice. Born the eighteenth child of a family of wine growers in Unter-Tannowitz in southern Moravia, now Dolní Dunajovice in the Czech Republic, he became a Social Democrat lawyer and in 1918 the first state chancellor of the new republic of German-Austria, serving until 1920 and doubling as foreign minister. In April 1945, as Soviet troops took Vienna, he formed a provisional government that re-established Austria, and he served as the first president of the Second Republic from 1945 until his death.
Leopold Figl (1902–1965), a farmer's son from Rust im Tullnerfeld in Lower Austria, was deported to Dachau concentration camp in 1938, was released in 1943, and became the first chancellor after the war. As foreign minister he signed the Austrian State Treaty at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna on 15 May 1955, ending the ten-year occupation by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France. Newsreel film of him on the Belvedere balcony holding up the signed treaty, with the words "Österreich ist frei!" ("Austria is free!"), is one of the best-known images in Austrian history, even though he actually spoke them indoors.
Bertha von Suttner and Paula von Preradović: the peace prize and the anthem
Two women gave the modern country some of its symbols. Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) was born Countess Kinsky in Prague, then part of the Austrian Empire, and became a novelist and campaigner for peace. Her 1889 anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms! made her one of the leading figures of the Austrian peace movement, and in 1905 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the first Austrian Nobel laureate of any kind. In 1876 she had briefly worked as secretary to Alfred Nobel in Paris, and the two became friends. The book went through 37 editions and was translated into 15 languages.
Paula von Preradović (1887–1951) was born in Vienna, the granddaughter of the Croatian poet Petar Preradović, and grew up partly in Pula on the Adriatic. In 1947 she wrote the words of the national anthem of the Second Republic, "Land der Berge, Land am Strome" ("Land of mountains, land on the river"), making her one of very few women to have written a national anthem. For the country's older national symbol, the red-white-red banner, see our guide to the flag of Austria.
Salzburg, Rohrau and Vienna: the composers who made Austrian music world music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was born at Getreidegasse 9 in Salzburg. Strictly speaking, Salzburg was then an independent prince-archbishopric of the Holy Roman Empire and did not finally become part of Austria until 1816, but Mozart spent his last ten years in Vienna and is claimed by Austria without dispute today. He completed more than 800 works, among them the operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, before he died at 35.
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) was born in Rohrau, a Lower Austrian village then on the border with Hungary, the son of a wheelwright. He spent most of his career as court musician to the Esterházy princes, and in the 1790s his twelve London symphonies made him the most celebrated composer in Europe. Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was born in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna and died there at 31, leaving more than 600 songs among over 1,000 works, including the cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Johann Strauss II (1825–1899), the "Waltz King", was born in Vienna; his waltzes The Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods played a major role in popularising the waltz in the 19th century, and he also wrote the operetta Die Fledermaus.
Berggasse 19 to Hollywood: the Austrians who took the country's name abroad
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was born in Freiberg in Moravia, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, but grew up in Vienna. From 1891 his family lived and he practised at Berggasse 19, where he developed psychoanalysis and wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). After the Nazi annexation of 1938 he fled to London, where he died a year later. Lise Meitner (1878–1968) was born in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna and in 1906 became only the second woman to earn a physics doctorate at the University of Vienna. She worked for three decades in Berlin, fled in July 1938, and from exile in Sweden worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch that uranium nuclei were splitting; their February 1939 paper in Nature named the process fission. Element 109, meitnerium, is named after her.
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), born in Vienna, formulated the wave equation at the heart of quantum mechanics and shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), born in Baumgarten near Vienna, co-founded the Vienna Secession and painted The Kiss (1907–1908), which hangs in the Upper Belvedere, the same palace where the State Treaty was signed. Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000), born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, became a Hollywood star in films such as Algiers (1938) and Samson and Delilah (1949), and with the composer George Antheil co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes during the Second World War. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge from 1911 and published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921; between his two periods at Cambridge he worked as a village schoolteacher in Lower Austria.
Austria's sporting names come mostly from the mountains. Annemarie Moser-Pröll (born 1953), from Kleinarl in Salzburg state, won the overall alpine skiing World Cup six times, still the women's record, and 62 World Cup races. Marcel Hirscher (born 1989), who has an Austrian father and Dutch mother, won eight consecutive overall World Cup titles for Austria; since 2024 he has raced for the Netherlands. Niki Lauda (1949–2019), born in Vienna, won the Formula One world championship in 1975, 1977 and 1984, returning to racing just six weeks after his near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring in 1976. Arnold Schwarzenegger (born 1947), born in Thal near Graz, won Mr. Universe at 20 and Mr. Olympia seven times, became a film star and served as the 38th governor of California from 2003 to 2011.
Many of the people on this list shared the streets of one city; our guide to Vienna, the capital of Austria shows where the Hofburg, the Belvedere and Berggasse sit in relation to each other.