Lamarr died January 19, 2000, Casselberry, Florida. Antheil died February 12, 1959, New York.
## The Vienna She Left Behind
To understand what Hedy Lamarr was leaving when she fled to London in 1937, it helps to understand what Vienna had been. Not the Vienna of the annexation, the yellow stars, the deportation trains, but the Vienna of the decades before — the city that had formed her, the city her father had walked her through explaining streetcar systems and printing presses.
Vienna in the early decades of the twentieth century was, by any serious measure, one of the intellectual and artistic capitals of the world. Sigmund Freud was practicing and publishing. Ludwig Wittgenstein was reconceiving the philosophy of language. The Vienna Secession had transformed the visual arts. The Second Vienna School — Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern — was remaking music’s harmonic vocabulary from the ground up. In physics, in architecture, in medicine, in economics, in literature, Vienna was a place where serious people were doing serious work.
Emil Kiesler’s daughter grew up inside this world at a particular angle — not as a participant in its highest intellectual circles, but as the child of an educated professional family that was part of the wide social network through which ideas circulated. The conversations at the Kiesler table were not the conversations of an ordinary household. Her father talked to her about how things worked. Her mother played piano. The culture she absorbed — the curiosity, the willingness to take mechanisms apart, the assumption that intelligence was something to be exercised rather than concealed — was a product of that particular city at that particular moment.