FIN-DE-SIECLE VIENNA: Politics and Culture

by Carl E. Schorske ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 1979

In a series of justly renowned articles published during the last two decades, Carl Schorske has emerged as the leading American authority on the cultural history of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Now these articles have been assembled in one handsome volume--a showcase for Schorske's subtle, thought-provoking treatment of the multi-faceted relationship between Vienna's artistic explosion and the failures of Austrian liberalism. For Schorske, the Austrian liberal middle class was strangely isolated in its society; because they came to power almost by default after the failures of traditional politics in the 1860s, the liberals neither merged with the aristocracy nor created a viable power base. By the end of the century, liberal power was completely overshadowed by the new, mass parties based in the lower classes. Thus, the artists and intellectuals of Vienna were in an unusual position: their rebellion was not solely against their own class, as in France, where middle-class artists turned violently against the ascendant values of bourgeois culture. Rather, as Schorske puts it, ""most of the pioneering generation of culture-makers [in Vienna]. . . were alienated along with their class in its extrusion from political power, not from and against it as a ruling class."" Thus, in Vienna, the total sense of the decay of old values was stronger than elsewhere in Europe, and the search for new solutions led thinkers to dig deeper. In all areas, Schorske demonstrates, this search led to a rediscovery of the instinctual: in politics, Zionism and the new parties of anti-Semitism tapped dark sources of political energy unavailable to liberalism's conscious rationalism; in literature, Hugo von Hofmannsthal came to view the artist's task as the awakening of the instinctual and its reconciliation with life. Sigmund Freud, in turn, escaped from liberalism's public impotence by reducing politics to an epiphenomenon of the inner reaches of the human psyche; and in the work of Oscar Kokoschka and Arnold Schoenberg, Schorske sees the final destruction of the old and an attempt to constitute new values. Reading these essays is a joy: they combine scholarship with an extraordinary ability to bring together the most disparate elements of culture.

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1979

ISBN: 0394744780

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION