Vienna discovers its past
Peter Pulzer
- Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and their Experiences by Lewis Coser
Yale, 351 pp, £25.00, October 1984, ISBN 0 300 03193 9 - The Viennese Enlightenment by Mark Francis
Croom Helm, 176 pp, £15.95, May 1985, ISBN 0 7099 1065 7 - The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity by Marsha Rozenblit
SUNY, 368 pp, $39.50, July 1984, ISBN 0 87395 844 6
A city without a past is a city without a future. It may exist as a set of buildings, but not as a culture. But not every city with a past has a future, except as a set of buildings. The springs of innovation may dry up, the crossroads that first gave it its importance may no longer lead anywhere. It is then that a city that still has a present most needs its past, but that is also the moment when it has most reason to fear that past. There are no doubt many cities in this condition – with a little insight and a dose of malice each of us could draw up impressive lists. But everyone’s list would surely include Vienna.
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[*] The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1918 by William Johnston (University of California Press, 1972); Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria by William McGrath (Yale University Press, 1974); Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl Schorske (Weidenfeld, 1980); Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (Simon and Schuster, 1973); The Socialism of Fools: Georg von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism by Andrew Whiteside (University of California Press, 1975); Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna by John Boyer (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
[†] This episode is related in Von der Kunst Osterreicher zu sein by Hans Thalberg (Böhlau, 1984).