Volume 36, Number 11 · June 29, 1989
The Rise and Fall of Vienna's Jews
By Michael Ignatieff
The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph
by Robert S. Wistrich
Oxford University Press, 720 pp., $96.00
Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880s–1980s
by George E. Berkley
Madison Books/Abt Books, 422 pp., $24.95
A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918
by William O. McCagg Jr.
Indiana University Press, 289 pp., $27.50
Judentum in Wien: Sammlung Max Berger November 12, 1987–June 5, 1988
catalog of the exhibition at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien,
260 pp., ASch320
The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
(revised edition) Peter Pulzer
Harvard University Press, 357 pp., $14.50 (paper)
The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight and Exile
by Paul Hofmann
Doubleday/Anchor, 346 pp., $22.50
Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History
by Steven Beller
Cambridge University Press
Our image of fin de siècle Vienna is encrusted with clichés. In the sediment of cultural residue left behind by the Viennese art shows at the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum, films like Colonel Redl, and magazine article popularizations of the fine work by Carl Schorske and others, the image is endlessly reproduced of Vienna waltzing itself toward the abyss. In these clichés, only a few clairvoyant génies maudits—Karl Kraus, Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler—are exempt from the genial complacency of Viennese Gemütlichkeit, while in the underworld of rooming houses, taverns, and cafés lurks the odious paper-hanger and failed art student. The cliché is completed by dubious identifications between their fin de siècle neuroses and ours. E.M. Cioran has written that the disappearance of imperial Viennese culture prefigures the collapse of Western culture itself, and the Italian critic Claudio Magris has said that the civilization of Austria was modernism's last adventure before its exhaustion in the postmodern.[1] Thus modish 1980s angst vests itself in the decadent glamour of dubious historical antecedents.
Review, 5068 words
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