Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Don't believe me? Here's an excerpt: "The new culture-makers in the city of Freud thus repeatedly defined themselves in terms of a kind of collective oedipal revolt. Yet the young were revolting not so much against their fathers as against the authority of the paternal culture that was their inheritance. What they assaulted on a broad front was the value system of classical liberalism-in-ascendancy within which they had been reared. Given this ubiquitous and simultaneous criticism of their liberal-rational inheritance from within the several fields of cultural activity, the internalistic approach of the special disciplines could not do justice to the phenomenon. A general and rather sudden transformation of thought and values among the culture-makers suggested, rather, a shared social experience that compelled rethinking. In the Viennese case, a highly compacted political and social development provided this context."

Not asleep yet? Okay: "What the historian must now abjure, and nowhere more so than in confronting the problem of modernity, is the positing in advance of an abstract categorical common denominator--what Hegel called the Zeitgeist, and Mill 'the characteristic of the age'. Where such an intuitive discernment of unities once served, we must now be willing to undertake the empirical pursuit of pluralities as a precondition to finding unitary patterns in culture. Yet if we reconstruct the course of change in the seperate branches of cultural production according to their own modes, we can acquire a firmer basis for determining the similarities and differences among them. These in turn can bring us to the shared concerns, the shared ways of confronting experience, that bind men together as culture-makers in a common social and temporal space."

A dictionary can be a dangerous thing, when it falls into the wrong hands.

Hello! Mr. Schorske, et al.! History does NOT have to be boring! Try reading the wonderful books of Frederic Morton (A Nervous Splendor and Thunder at Twilight) to see how exciting this period in Viennese history in fact was. And please, read Strunk and White's Elements of Style before you attempt to write any more books.


A Freudian Take on Modern Cultural History   April 24, 2002
a guy (Victoria, BC Canada)
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

Some of the previous reviewers of this book, both favourable and unfavourable, seem to have misunderstood it's content. This book is written as a Freudian interpretation of early modern cultural history. Written in the early 1960's, a time unfavourable to socialist criticism, this book is a radical non-socialist critique of early liberalism written from a psychoanalytic perspective.
This book is difficult and is not recommended as a general introduction to modern culture. It is written in a sometimes annoyingly pedantic style, and repays close study only from the most serious student of early modern history.


Challenging but exemplary read !!   September 11, 2003
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

This is simply a phenomenal book. Schorske jumpstarted an interest in fin-de-siecle Vienna in the 1960's and opened the door for a plethora of scholars to build upon his work. Schorske's ideas are nothing short of brilliant and profound.

Granted, this is a tough read. The language is difficult, often verbiose. But never unnecessarily so. The subject matter is intrinsically complex and Schorske's diction only mirrors that.

One need not be a specialist to read this, though perhaps a good level of intelligence and fortitude to make it through some very complex ideas. It is a book to be read and re-read, at various intervals in life, particularly after a visit to Vienna where Schorske's words really come to life.

I lived in Vienna for two years, and in fact wrote my Masters thesis on the Viennese identity crisis at the fin-de-siecle. Schorske's book is one I can always go back to and still get something out of. It is ever-challenging and ever-fascinating.

If you are interested in a particular spin to traditional theories on Viennese modernity, read Jacques LeRider's "Modernity and Identity Crisis," whose thesis is that turn-of-the-century Vienna forshadowed postmodernism. LeRider takes Schorske up several notches, and therefore the two books are good to read one after another.

This book in not for everyone, but at the same time I feel it does not exclude either. If you've come across this review with no particular interest in Viennese modernity or intellectual history, I urge you to try this book anyway. It is rich enough to enrapture even the mildly curious mind.


Just like a time machine!   January 2, 2004
David Kim (High Point, NC)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

Reading Schorske is like riding a time machine to Vienna around the tumultuous late 1800s to 1900. He covers an electic array of topics. However, he has a central focus: to show the radical changes and interconnection between arts & politics at the turn of the century vienna (fin de siecle). But, be warned, Schorske is an intellectual historian, and though his exposition is easy to read, his themes are academic and copiously detailed.

Schorske first lays out the setting of a growing city. He describes the monumental architectural project of the Ringstrasse (the Ring Street around central Vienna) and the rising liberalism and shifting wealth this represented.

The more interesting, and key, episode of the book involves the reactions to this change in Austria, in the form of new politics, anti-semitism, Zionism, and of the ramifications in Arts, Sciences and Music. Specifically, Schorske writes about transformations of viennese politicians, medical doctor Sigmund Freud, artist Gustav Klimt, and musician Arnold Shoenberg. The "vignettes" of these figures are academic and marvelously entertaining. What's surprising is how closely these key figures in 20th century intellectual development were connected; Vienna was a small city, after all. As I said, you'll feel like you're walking through the bustling streets of Vienna, and spotting Freud or Mahler (though Schoerske doesn't cover Mahler) on a leisurely stroll.