Toward a Surreal Destiny

By Paul Gray

FIN-DE-SIECLE VIENNA: POLITICS AND CULTURE by Carl E. Schorske Knopf; 378 pages; illustrated; $15.95

When Vienna was good it glittered, and when it turned bad it phosphoresced. This shimmer of decay, 80 years later, still lights up the contemporary terrain so pervasively that the city seems less a historical place than a state of mind. Psychoanalysis was born there, as well as atonal music, several schools of urban planning and modern Zionism. Vienna also spawned the brand of hooligan anti-Semitism that was admired, studied and perfected by an Austrian named Adolf Hitler. The powerful impulses sent out from turn-of-the-century Vienna have made it difficult to imagine the place as it actually was, to sense how and why people converged there in ways that would alter the world. In Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Historian Carl E. Schorske gives the city back to itself. The book's seven related essays carefully reconstruct a Vienna of bricks and beliefs, a real place building toward a surreal destiny.

Politics and culture intersect somewhere in all societies, but in 19th century Vienna they positively embraced. That alone made the city unusual. The middle-class liberals who gained parliamentary control in the 1860s were ingenuously industrious and earnest.

Schorske describes their self-assigned mission: "The principles and programs which made up the liberal creed were designed to supersede systematically those of 'the feudals,' as the aristocrats were pejoratively called. Constitutional monarchy would replace aristocratic absolutism ... Science would replace religion. Those of German nationality would serve as tutor and teacher to bring up the subject peoples, rather than keep them ignorant bondsmen as the feudals had done." Unlike their counterparts in Victorian England, though, these reformers were not grim. They were as bewitched as the rest of the world by Viennese high culture, the sheer sensuous pleasures of concert hall and opera house. They became crusading dilettantes, promising themselves a secular paradise, "Strong Through Law and Peace" and "Embellished Through Art."

They transformed the band of undeveloped land that had once fortified the medieval city into the Ringstrasse, a sweeping monument to reason and prosperity. Museums and apartment houses went up in profusion, stony rebukes to the older aristocratic arrogance of church and palace. Lacking a past of their own, the bourgeois builders raided history for architectural facades. Critics arose to deride this use of art to disguise true functions. Something else about this vast project seems to have escaped notice: in its broad circularity, the Ringstrasse led nowhere.

The rational ideal had scarcely been erected before dismantling began. Schorske describes this process as both a siege and a mutiny. Disaffected peasants, artisans and Slavs, among others, began massing politically, demanding certainties and absolutes. Taking to the streets, they cared nothing for the hallowed liberal creed: "Wissen macht frei" (Knowledge makes us free). Poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal saw what was happening: "Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow." All too soon Wissen macht frei was degraded into the cruelly deceptive slogan of Nazi death camps: Arbeit [work] macht frei.

Threats from without the liberal camp prompted a collective breakdown within. Reason was not working, the center could not hold. Art now seemed a temple of refuge, an increasingly rarefied place to escape ugly reality. But the best young artists worked not to comfort or distract but to disturb. Gustav Klimt appalled older liberals with painting that celebrated naked Eros. Oskar Kokoschka, a bit later, produced portraits with the visual impact of grenades. Sigmund Freud watched this symbolic annihilation of fathers by sons, and was reminded of Oedipus.

Freud could conceivably have launched his epic journey into the self from anywhere, but Schorske demonstrates what a perfect laboratory Vienna was for his researches. The society's rapid disintegration forced Freud and other intellectuals to search for explanations of chaos. "Was it," Schorske writes, "because the individuals ... contained in their own psyches some characteristics fundamentally incompatible with the social whole? Or was it the whole as such that distorted, paralyzed and destroyed the individuals who composed it? Or again, was there perhaps never a rhythmic social whole at all, only an illusion of unified movement resulting from an accidental articulation of funda mentally incohesive, individuated parts?"

Increasingly, Freud came to suspect that the demons tearing Vienna apart resided deep within her defenders as well as her enemies.

The father of psychoanalysis did more than observe Vienna; he suffered it too.

Schorske argues that The Interpretation of Dreams, written during the 1890s, was in part Freud's apologia to himself for having failed in the public sphere; the book was also his subtle, perhaps uncon scious revenge on a city that continued to deny him the professorship he deserved.

In his dreams Freud first reduced all political activity to a struggle with the fa ther and then conjured up a triumph over his own. He gave, Schorske writes, "his fellow liberals an ahistorical theory of man and society that could make bear able a political world spun out of orbit and beyond control."

Schorske's choreography for the descent from Vienna waltz to danse macabre is masterly. To capture the city's di versity and fragmentation, he has drawn on art history, urban theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and political science. Given the specialization that reigns in academe (Schorske teaches history at Princeton), such breadth of learning is doubly impressive. Better still, the author never strains after the easy relevance or trite generalization that so often spices up popular histories. His Vienna retains its integrity as a unique place in a special time. In the end, though, his book is ad monitory. Vienna's ideal of a peaceful and just society is no less valuable for having failed. Even in its fragility, the vision yielded up genius. -- Paul Gray

Excerpt

Beginning roughly in the 1860s, two generations of well-to-do children were reared in the museums, theaters and concert halls of the new Ringstrasse. They acquired aesthetic culture not, as their fathers did, as an ornament to life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed ... The two children of the Wertheimsteins, one of Vienna's wealthiest intellectual society families, were privately tutored to be artists, and the 'artistic natures' of these melancholy neurotics were the subject of general appreciation. The great psychiatrist Theodor Meynert encouraged his son to a career in painting, his daughter tells us, 'as if all those talents and inclinations which, passed on for generations, germinated in [the] father ... now broke through energetically in the son.' The great pathologist Carl von Rokitansky had his paternal dreams of glory fulfilled when he could boast of his four sons that they were divided in their careers between singing and medicine: 'Two howl and -- two heal.'

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