Volume 35, Number 2 · February 18, 1988
Coming Up for Air
By James Joll
Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich
by Harold B. Segel
Columbia University Press, 418 pp., $30.00
Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870–1925
by Elaine Brody
Braziller, 359 pp., $19.95
Authors, publishers, and, presumably, readers show no signs of becoming bored with the cultural history of the decades before the First World War. And indeed the fin de siècle, the belle époque, remains fascinating because it can be seen both as the end of an age in Europe, the last years of a triumphant bourgeois liberalism, doomed, as we now see it, by the catastrophe of 1914, and as a period of unusual brilliance in the arts during which the foundations of twentieth-century modernism were being laid. However, the popularity of the period poses problems for the writer as the main topics become exhausted and as the principal centers of cultural life (Paris in the 'banquet years,' Vienna 1900) have been intensively studied.
Review, 3393 words
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