Some of Europe’s foremost artists and intellectuals (Freud, Wittgenstein, Loos, Kraus, Kokoschka) lived and worked in the First Austrian Republic, yet its cultural reputation pales beside that of the Weimar Republic. Professor Andrew Barker, author of the recent study Fictions from an Orphan State. Literary Reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler examines the artistic legacy of ‘the state that nobody wanted’ to determine both the extent of its achievements and the reasons for its relative neglect.