Viennese intellectuals, artists and nationalists, with a dash of Freud

Review of Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske

It is easier to say what this book is not than what it is: not a narrative history, not an analysis of causes, not even a basic introduction. It lacks clear definitions of the movements it is supposed to cover, such as liberalism, modernism, psychoanalysis, and the birth of mass nationalistic politics. That means that readers will either have to be familiar with these movements – it is written at the high undergraduate level – or have an encyclopedia on hand.

Unfortunately, I got the book to get an idea of why it was in Vienna that the extraordinary flowering of the ideas that defined much of the 20^th century came to fruition. It was an era of fundamental reinvention, similar to the Renaissance. Instead, what I found is a description of the evolution of these ideas, as embodied in architecture, the rise of nationalist demagogues, artistic rebellion, and of course, the invention of depth psychology by Sigmund Freud. The only attempt at explanation is a sketchy analysis of the political situation at the time, in which the more cosmopolitan "liberal" era was in decline as its politicians were being pushed out by nationalist demagogues.

The book is artificially broken down by discipline. It starts with a 100-page description of the transition from Baroque architecture, which brought the focus of urban activity onto a princely palace, to a decentralized kind of "flow" to the advantage of merchants, the rising bourgeois middle class, and other professionals; those who were losing out were the military, discredited by defeat at the hands of the Prussians, as well as aristocrats and the monarchy. The new buildings were less ornamental, more functional, and better situated to serve a more diverse public in a rapidly developing economy. To put it mildly, it moves from very interesting to exhaustively boring by the end of the chapter.

Then, there is a long-winded description of the political movements, focusing on 3 pivotal individuals. All of them were nationalists of a sort, in particular George von Schoenerer (upon whom Hitler later modeled his pan-German brand of fascism). But there is also Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, whose reaction according to Schorske to proto-fascism and anti-semitism was to give birth to his own brand of ethnic-based nationalistic ideology. The third was Christian Democrat Karl Lueger, a nationalist somewhat milder than Schoenerer. These three men led their own movements, destroying "liberalism" in a 19^th century sense (i.e. the market-oriented industrial economy as it was run by a cosmopolitan class of entrepreneurs; they put their faith in rationalism, a constitutional monarchy, and aspired to function as equals to the traditional aristocracy, who never accepted them). I wanted much more context in this than the book offered, which was both stimulating and irritating as I struggled to understand it.

The chapter on Freud was perhaps the worst in the book. It is full of the odd generalizations that employ the qualitative vocabulary of Freud. For example, a big part of the intellectual "rebellion" underway was against rigid "father figures", hence Oedipal. What?! Indeed, the entire book is riddled with this kind of outdated reasoning, but then it was written in the 1960s. It doesn't do much to explain the great mystery of why Vienna? It doesn't even explain much about the development of Freud's ideas in themselves. I was surprised that this chapter spoke so little to me, because my father was a psychiatrist, whose psychoanalyst colleagues talked like this over meals. The book added absolutely nothing to my understanding of them.

The concluding chapters were the most interesting, moving from Klimt's career and leadership of the Secession movement to the radical expressionism of Kokoschka and Schoenberg. Taken together, they threw out the conventions they learned at the "academy" – rules that required rococo excess and traditional formula at the expense of emotion and experimentation – and created a wonderfully free brand of modernism that reflected the darker, subjective impulses of the unconscious mind in innovative forms. While I would have liked more on the Jugendstil craft movement, the art is indeed well covered and worth the price of admission. Schorske attempts to explain the energy of their work as a kind of sublimation of the frustrated desire by the bourgeoisie to be accepted by the decadent aristocracy – they put their energy instead into artistic appreciation – but I found that a disappointingly weak explanation. Nonetheless, by seeing their careers in historical context, it forever changed my perception of these artists.

It is beyond me why this book won a Pulitzer. Schorske fails to explore or adequately explain the inter-relationships between all these movements. Chapter by chapter, they just appear in a kind of vacuum, without even much comparison to similar movements in France and elsewhere. Throughout the book, the conscientious reader will find many very interesting tidbits, but the overall reading experience is dull and incomplete. I am glad I read it, but there must be better treatments somewhere. (If anyone has suggestions on good narrative histories, please communicate them.)

A related review that offers a better explanation:

Coda: I recently read The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric Kandel, which I highly recommend. It is mostly about cognitive neuroscience and art, but brings a lot of this together in a way that supplements this book. The review":