Fin-De-Siecle Vienna/A Nervous Splendor/ The Vienna I Knew
Toulmin, Stephen
Vienna waltzes FM-DE SIECLE VIENNA: Politics and Culture Carl E. Schorske Knopf, $15.95, 378 pp. A NERVOUS SPLENDOR: Vienna 1888/1889 Frederic Morton Atlantic-Little Brown, $14.95, 340...
...Americans find themselves fascinated by the final years of Habsburg Vienna—what Karl Kraus ironically referred to as "the last days of mankind.1' The two Gustavs now hold dominating positions in their respective branches of our "high" culture, Klimt with his glittering metallic portraits...
...True, a lot of it is not about Vienna at all, but about the Wechsberg family, and their misadventures in what is now Czechoslovakia...
...The perception and significant detail with which Schorske builds up his portraits of individual painters and politicians, writers and architects, are as fine and impressive in the new essays as in their predecessors...
...he gives us nothing of Robert Musil beyond a single quotation...
...We had assumed that the existing essays were merely chips, or sketches of a much vaster work...
...Mahler with his nostalgic song cycles and challenging symphonies...
...With so much that is quite excellent to be found in this book, it may seem unfair if, nonetheless, I confess to a sense of disappointment...
...Again and again, his essays begin by discussing (say) the academic politics surrounding Klimt's frescoes for the University, only to end in the depths of Klimt's own psyche...
...Through his lectures at Princeton and his published articles, Schorske established himself long since as the doyen of scholars in this field, and all others writing in the same area have worked in his shadow...
...and the present series of autobiographical essays is well up to his usual standard...
...and it turns out that, all along, the 50-page essay or vignette has been Schorske's natural medium...
...It is in hope of finding answers to questions like these that one turns to each new batch of "Vienna books...
...It is as though we had been expecting Beethoven's Choral Symphony, only to be given one more beautiful song cycle...
...All told, the fashion for late Habsburg Vienna is well served by all three books...
...and we had come to expect from Schorske a titanic, comprehensive politico-psychological analysis of Habsburg culture and society...
...He alludes to Ernst Mach only as having Commonweal: 476 been a contemporary of Schoenberg...
...It reprints his four earlier essays on the period, dating from 1961 to 1973, and adds three further, hitherto unpublished essays...
...Here, for instance, one can recommend two books written by Vienna-born authors who have spent large parts of their lives in the United States...
...yet the book is a joy to read...
...he nowhere discusses Wittgenstein, Weininger, or any other serious writers on philosophy...
...A NERVOUS SPLENDOR: Vienna 1888/1889 Frederic Morton Atlantic-Little Brown, $14.95, 340 pp...
...29 August 1980: 477...
...As a result, his colleagues have perhaps been tempted to discount the merits of this book in advance...
...Metternichian themes and Josefian policies play an increasing part in our national and international politics...
...Readers of The New Yorker will already be familiar with his charm and style...
...although, as little as 20 years ago, neither of them was held in very general regard...
...Carl Schorske's book, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, was long awaited...
...Is it the spectacle of a multiracial superpower caught in the posture of retreat...
...What is it about the society and culture of that time and place to which we are so responsive...
...so that the psychologically perceptive Kulturhistoriker can afford to disregard, not merely philosophy, but die natural sciences also...
...Our furniture and interior decoration are once again picking up echoes of the Wiener Werkstatte...
...Or is it a recognition of Vienna 1880-1914 as the birthplace of our own mid-20th century phase in Western culture...
...For the list of absentees from Schorske's pages is at least as distinguished as the list of those present...
...Schorske's feeling for the many different kinds of factors lying behind the development of Klimt's style, subjects and iconography is extraordinary...
...Though it would be wrong to underestimate Schorske's present book, it is not unreasonable for us to hope for something more from him...
...THE VIENNA I KNEW: Memories of a European Childhood Joseph Wechsberg Doubleday, $10.95, 263 pp...
...Frederic Morton wrote a previous best-seller on The Rothschilds: his present picture of Vienna at the time of Crown Prince Rudolph's spectacular suicide at Mayerling is as compulsive and well-written as the earlier book...
...The new essay on Gustav Klimt is particularly good...
...And, above all, publishers are finding Vienna from 1860 on a fruitful field for near-best sellers...
...Joseph Wechsberg grew up in a provincial town in Moravia, and has returned to Vienna in his retirement...
...Is it the social problems that we share with the Viennese liberals of a hundred years ago: the problems of the politically excluded minorities (blacks 29 August 1980:475 and Hispanics for us, Slovenes, Ruthenians and the rest for them), or the inflexibilities built into an institutional framework established more than 200 years before...
...Although it does not pretend to be a product of serious primary research, it is nevertheless well documented and generally reliable...
...Now the previous essays are simply reprinted here, in all their perfection, along with their new fellows...
...and his picture of the intellectual life of late Habsburg Vienna—as contrasted with its cultural, artistic and psychological life—remains surprisingly thin and sketchy...
...I carried away from these vessays the puzzling impression that, perhaps, Schorske sincerely regards all the achievements of the intellect as significant only to the extent that they are- sublimations of a deeper creative/sexual libido...
...For there are a great many persons and topics about which he has certainly thought deeply, yet never touches on in this collection, and we are entitled to wonder what he would say about them...
...Or is it our natural sympathy for those individual thinkers, writers and artists who had to grow up into communities that were themselves exposed to continual stress, and our admiration for all that they achieved in the face of the resulting psychosocial strainseven a sneaking hope that, with a little Grace and some good luck, we may yet be as productive ourselves...
...Anyone who is primarily interested in social issues and stresses, and regards the inner psychic conflicts of individuals as being, at least in part, the internalized forms of external conflicts, will therefore have to look beyond Schorske for enlightenment...
...Yet, in the event, I only wish that Marcuse's comment had proved apt...
...When Allan Janik and I published our book on Wittgenstein and Vienna in 1972, it was hard to write up our own research without an uneasy fear of plagiarizing: and, indeed, Herbert Marcuse greeted me at the time with the words, "I see you have written Carl Schorske's book...
...Stephen Toulmin THESE days...
...So, along with Schorske's earlier treatments of Arthur Schnitzler, Adalbert Stifter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Herzl, Karl Lueger and the others, we now have further studies of Klimt, Kokoschka and Schoenberg, together with a fascinating account of the "urban renewal" projects which, from I860 on, created the circling Ringstrasse that still imposes its architectural unity on Central Vienna today...
...Despite current skepticism among professional psychiatrists, Freud's ideas about neurosis and narcissism continue to rule the popular psychotherapeutic culture...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
