Alys X. George. The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body.

Abstract

“A golden thread,” Alys George explains in this beautiful and evocative book, runs “throughout the cultural production of Viennese modernism.” It is the impulse (quoting art historian Werner Hofmann) “to recognize the flesh” (5), to appreciate and to study the materiality of human being. As its title suggests, The Naked Truth lays bare the importance of the body to culture, society, science, and politics in Vienna from the 1880s to the 1930s. Readers will not be disappointed by chapters on exhibits and “exotic” bodies; anatomy and corpses; working women’s bodies before, during, and after pregnancy; and bodies in dance and other forms of motion. And yet there is much more to this volume than updating Carl Schorske’s “psychological man” by adding bodies. The pervasiveness of the paradigm Schorske created with the 1979 publication of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture is so great that in 2016 Robert Dassanowsky lamented that “fin-de-siècle” was a “heavily coded term” that had become “the perceived totality for [the] canonical representation of Austria” (Robert Dassanowsky, “The Many Fins de Siècle of Austrian Studies, or: What Follows Vienna 1900?” The German Quarterly 89, no. 2 (Spring 2016), 230.). George does not nip at Schorske’s heels like a scold who has noticed a missing footnote. Instead, she offers a fresh perspective on what was interesting about Vienna over the six decades she studies, as well as a guide on how to combine the familiar and the unfamiliar to offer up a new canon.