Fin-De-Siecle Vienna : Politics and Culture

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Summary: The development of a modern identity, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna
Review: Carl E. Schorske has aptly chosen Vienna to explore the development of the birth of modernism. At the turn of the century, Vienna, with its wide lane Ringstrasse and intellectual attracting cafés was a stage; and it is only fitting that people strode across this stage with a sense of purpose and graduer which influences much of what we think of as "modern" whether it be art, music or thought. From Schnitzler to Freud to Klimt, Schorske shows how the stage like facade of Vienna was built during an era of decay; an era where the empire found itself on the brink of destruction and the industrial revolution had cleanly severed peoples' ties to traditions which had given life meaning. And the loam of decay, a well-spring of desperation, caused the great thinkers of Vienna to search for something to hold onto as one century slipped into the next. Schorke, with a clean prose style, captures the search for meaning across a number of intellectual and cultural movements in Vienna. The history of Vienna at the turn of the century reads like the history of modern thought and Schorske does a remarkable job of convincing his readers that, truly, the desperation felt at the end of the Hapsburg empire was not merely an Austrian phenomena, but a cultural wave which swept across the world and which, on stage, in psychology and in art, still carries in its wake the most contemporary of ideas.To learn more about fin-de-sicle Vienna, try Arthur Schnitler's "The Road into the Open." Frederic Morton's, "A Nervous Splendor" and Hilde Spiel's, "Vienna's Golden autumn."

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Summary: A Must For Students of Modernity
Review: Carl Schorske's ambitious attempt and describing the social and political situation at the end of the 19th centrury in Vienna is a must for any person interested in the rise of modernity. Schorscke succeedes in looking at the situation in Vienna from an insiders view. He dives into the culture and politics of the emerging city and closely examins all the factors and people that led to the rise of Vienna as the capital of Europe in the end of the 19th century. His chapter on Gustav Klimt is outstanding and deeply shows how he was an artist who symbolized the Viennese people and the modernity movement. For furthur reading I suggest "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" by Marshall Berman.

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Summary: Need Your Home Interior Remodeled? Call an Historian!
Review: How does an historian, whose job it is to interpret the past, come to terms with a cultural movement built upon the concept of modernity rejoicing in the death of history? This is exactly the question posed by Carl E. Schorske in his book Fin-De-Siecle Vienna Politics and Culture. In a series of essays, which the author admits are not meant to be interlaced, Schorske examines Vienna's cultural reaction to both the decline of Liberalism and the end of the Habsburg Empire. The task of merging politics and culture is not an easy undertaking and the faint-hearted reader should beware. "Just as a knowledge of the critical methods of modern science is necessary for interpreting that science historically," writes Schorske, "so a knowledge of the kinds of analysis practiced by modern humanists is necessary for coming to grips with the makers of twentieth-century non scientific knowledge" (p. xxi). Yet this brand of historical analysis is not that simple as Schorske goes on to explain. It appears, still more separates the historian from the humanist. According to Schorske, a dual approach is required when attempting to analyze cultural history. This binary-method is analogous, he argues, to a vertical and diagonal line. In the "diachronic" or vertical line, the historian more or less places the cultural in its historical context. In the "synchronic" or horizontal line, he or she looks at the relationship of the particular element of culture studied with what else is going on in the world of art, music, literature, and architecture. In a useful analogy, the author believes "The diachronic thread is the warp, the synchronic one is the woof in the fabric of cultural history. The historian is the weaver, but the quality of his cloth depends on the strength and color of the thread" (p. xxii). But what does this all mean? The essays that follow, though providing an enjoyable read, raise some doubts about Schorske's conclusions. The strength lies in the author's ability to place the culture of late nineteenth century Vienna in its historical context. In the opening "Politics and Psyche: Schnitz and Hofmannsthal," Schorske successfully ties the other essays together by introducing the two strands of Austrian fin-de-siecle culture:moralistic-scientific and the aesthetic. A conventional historian may feel more at home with the former, however, the aesthetic aspect is more difficult for many of us, to borrow a trite cliche, to carve in stone. Arguing functionality versus aesthetically appealing, or the placing of ancient Greek statuary on the steps of the Parliament building because Vienna had no past, therefore, it had no political heroes of its own to memorialize in sculpture, needless to say is unconvincing. Since Schorske cites no government documents, to back up his claims of Liberal motives and intentions in urban modernization, for example, his analysis of the connection between politics and culture borders on pure conjecture. The Freudian injection, resulting in the weakest essay of the book should have been omitted. Aside from the above-mentioned flaws, the book is interesting. Schorske's possesses a clear literary style, that helps the reader survive this graduate level sleeper. The addition of color plates, an anachronism in today's budgeted publishing industry was a welcome sight indeed. Yet, one wonders if such abstract concepts as modernity and aesthetics ought to be left to those more qualified outside the historical profession. Such studies, as art criticism itself, surely leave room for varying interpretations that open the doors for open debate.

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Summary: Pretentious pseudo-intellectual drivel.
Review: I can't believe anyone was able to finish, much less recommend, this awful book. Carl Schorske may or may not know his subject -- it was impossible for me to hack my way through his tortured verbiage to find whatever point he was attempting to make. From what I did see, his characterizations of Vienna's leading writers and thinkers seemed very stilted and cardboard -- not at all surprising considering his writing style is exactly the same. This unfortunate man must subscribe to the old-fashioned academic theory that history is not for the average person, but only for those who can decipher a torturous, didactic code. He never uses a simple word when he can find the excuse to use a long one, and if he can't find the word he wants from the rich selection the English language offers, he just makes up a stupid, stuffy-sounding one of his own. He's rife with self-proclaimed expert analyses of everything, told in the most off-puttingly boring language imaginable.

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.

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Summary: Challenging but exemplary read !!
Review: I like this book! It gives me endless ruminations and thought out insights using the work of psychoanalysis to explain and explicate the subject matter- Vienna at the turn of the last century. This fits extremely well considering that psychoanalysis erupted form that very place at that very time. The life of Vienna, in its myriad forms, can be well understood via psychoanalysis - in many ways modern Vienna too is still a psychoanalytic trove - this book needs slow and careful reading; it will need more than one "going-over". Highly recommended - but if you are opposed to psychoanalysis...keep away! Be warned!

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Summary: i want to kill myself!
Review: read this book to fall asleep, actaully no, read the chapter on Freud's interpretation of dreams and then fall asleep. in the morning interpret your dreams! a load of mind numbingly boring, non-sesical drivel!

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Summary: Just like a time machine!
Review: Reading Schorske is like riding a time machine to Vienna around the tumultuous late 1800s to 1900. His covers an electic array of topics. However, he has a central focus: to show the radical changes and interconnection 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 involve 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. These involved "vignettes" are nothing short of entertaining academic marvels. What's surprising is how closely these key figures in 20th century intellectual development were tied; 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.

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Summary: A Freudian Take on Modern Cultural History
Review: 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.