Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

"Schorske deals with some of the issues that come up in John Boyer’s book, but in a very different way. There is, for example, an essay juxtaposing Lueger, Georg von Schönerer (a pan-German, racist populist) and Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism) under the rubric of “Politics in a New Key.” But where John Boyer is meticulous on local politics, party formation, policies and politicians, Schorske generally addresses the period from the perspective of high culture. So there are famous essays on Gustav Klimt, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arnold Schoenberg, the architect Otto Wagner, Sigmund Freud. It’s a dazzling array of intellectual talent. It is a very famous book and what Schorske shows is how incredibly fertile Vienna was at the turn of the century. The book has created, in the popular mind, an idea of ‘Vienna 1900.’ For example, a recent play by Tom Stoppard has an episode set in Vienna around 1900. There are also many memoirs, especially from members of Jewish families , about Vienna and the rich intellectual life of the city in that period. Yes, it’s a beautiful book. I did think about putting it in here as one of my five recommendations. Zweig’s sense of Vienna is a retrospective view from an Austrian Jew in the late 1930s who now feels excluded from European culture and European history. He makes the case that in the old days of the monarchy, the Jews had been part of European culture and could participate in it. Yes, they had been attacked by Lueger and had faced many difficulties. But, nevertheless, many felt at home in European culture, they loved it, and the Emperor protected their place within it. Zweig sees it as a glorious time (Gustav Mahler was running the opera, for example) with a highly developed cultural and intellectual life. From his memoirs, it seemed to be a time when everyone knew everyone. This is a point Schorske emphasizes, that somehow these figures all knew each other and interacted. There is a cliché that ‘Vienna is a village’. It is quite a small town. Schorske’s book is very powerful because it has a central thesis that holds the essays together; namely, that the background to Vienna 1900 was the failure or collapse of liberalism and the flight to culture of the middle classes. Now, I don’t agree entirely with Schorske’s thesis, but the book provides a central thread running through the detailed and deep analyses of different thinkers, writers and intellectuals."