Imperial Vienna Research Articles

Collaborative Research in Imperial Vienna: Science Organization, Statehood, and Civil Society, 1848–1914

Abstract This article deals with the goals, practices, and transformations of collaborative research that emerged between and within bureaucratic and bourgeois models of science organization in the late Habsburg monarchy. It offers novel insights into the political, social, and epistemic dimensions of public engagement in research, and evaluates the frameworks, profit expectations, and challenges involved. As will be exemplified by joint undertakings in the High Alps, the “Orient,” and the Adriatic Sea, private-public partnerships in the form of scientific societies or institutional alliances assumed vital functions. Their stakeholders volunteered for large-scale research projects, coordinated and funded infrastructure such as field stations, research vessels, or collecting expeditions, and became driving forces in establishing new forms of intra-imperial and cross-border collaboration. As such, scientific societies are useful indicators for understanding science-related developments and for illuminating the tensions between imperialism, (inter)national aspirations, and civil-society building. Based on sources from the archives of the k.k. Meteorological Society, the Natural Scientific Oriental Society, and the Adriatic Society, this article will analyze scientific collaboration as a purposeful and power-related interaction process, oriented toward mutual benefits, that took place on three levels: between state-owned research facilities and private societies, between bureaucrats and bourgeois, and between scientists and “non-professionals.”

Reviled, Repressed, Resurrected: Vienna 1900 in the Nazi Imaginary

AbstractEncompassing the final decades of Habsburg rule and the rise of modern culture, the cosmopolitan and Jewish Vienna of the fin de siècle was a despised locus in the Nazi historical imaginary. Vienna 1900 was a polyglot, multicultural city, a place where European Jewry had risen to unforeseen heights of economic prosperity and cultural influence; many Nazi ideologues, historians, and authors focused on the verjudet nature of late imperial Vienna. A variety of strategies were employed to distance the Nazi present from Vienna 1900; it was alternately suppressed and ignored, or deeply vilified. Yet the period was also inseparable from two figures celebrated in Nazi Vienna: Mayor Karl Lueger and artist Gustav Klimt. This article examines Nazi discourse on Vienna 1900, especially that originating from Viennese writers, ideologues, and political figures. Reflecting both scholarly and popular views, I examine academic texts, books for popular readers, films, and art exhibitions. After examining the perception and appropriation of Vienna 1900 between the years 1938 and 1945, I end by exploring its instrumentalization in a different context. In an ironic twist of history, the very period suppressed and derided in Nazi discourse would in turn be called upon, by the 1970s, to distract from the shadow of the Nazi era that still hung over the city.

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

Reviews 197 The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body. By Alys X. George. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2020. 322 pp. £36. ISBN 978–0-226–66998–4. In The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body, Alys X. George rewrites the cultural history of Viennese modernism. In particular, she argues for the centrality of the human body and its close entanglement with art, politics and medicine throughout the long Viennese fin de siècle (1870–1938). The alternative genealogy she proposes extends from imperial Vienna to the First Republic of the interwar years. A timely and pioneering interdisciplinary study, it will be a key text for those interested in rethinking Viennese modernity and bodily culture around 1900. Additionally, The Naked Truth will have immediate relevance for readers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, not least because it provides a historical context of the current cultural crisis, particularly as pandemic protocols repeatedly draw attention to our bodies. In keeping with its contextual approach, The Naked Truth follows Hermann Bahr’s cue that the Austrian form of modernism ‘identified the body as a key locus of modernist cultural production’ (p. 3). It also draws on Elaine Scarry’s argument in The Body in Pain (1985), inasmuch as cultures in crisis ‘result in recourse to the body’ (p. 13), here understood as a site of stability, certainty and concrete materiality. This is another corporeal ‘turn’ that sounds painfully familiar to pandemic-struck readers. And yet the reader keeps wondering about the nature of the truth that might be marked and framed through the body. The study’s thematic approach is well composed and lucidly presented. Each of the four chapters focuses on a corporeal topos, namely bodies on display, bodies in pieces, patients’ bodies and bodies in motion. These, in turn, are examined across various cultural practices, including large-scale human exhibitions, cadaveric dissection, self-vivisection, the medicalization of bodies in the visual arts and literature, bodily gesture in dance, photography and film, as well as the treatment of the bodies of workers and working-class mothers. In this way, The Naked Truth engages with literary studies, the visual arts, the performing arts, popular culture, the history of medicine, medico-scientific cultures and social history, as well as architecture and politics. Given the number of disciplines George interweaves, it would have been helpful to be reminded of the necessary limitations of her study. ‘Why, then, has the body been neglected in the cultural history of Vienna?’ (p. 3), The Naked Truth asks. It links one of the main reasons for the neglect of the human body to ‘fin-de-siècle Vienna’ as an academic phenomenon. The latter was generated through dialogue with Carl Schorske’s landmark series of essays on Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979) and its fascination with the psyche. By tracing a hidden history of fin-desi ècle Vienna, George’s study establishes a new paradigm for Viennese modernism, arguing that homo physiologicus was as important a figure as homo psychologicus. In so doing, George challenges the exclusivity of a ‘psychological Reviews 198 withdrawal into aestheticism’ (p. 235) around 1900. This challenge includes Jewish bodies and working-class bodies, as detailed throughout the remaining three chapters. George complicates Schorske’s narrative by arguing that the ‘unique attentiveness to the materiality of the human body in Viennese culture’ originated ‘from the centrality of the materialist conception of disease under the second Vienna medical school’ (pp. 5–6). In her view, Viennese modernism is obscured when we exclude its interaction with those medical and popular cultures that predated the psychological turn (p. 235). The Naked Truth provides a refreshing discussion of Vienna’s institutional sites in the third and fourth chapters, reading them as practices that cut across modernism, medicine, popular culture, architecture and politics. By bringing two Viennese doctor-writers into conversation, one of whom is truly familiar to the canon, the other largely forgotten, she establishes Marie Pappenheim as a counterpart to Arthur Schnitzler. George reads Pappenheim’s 1906 poem ‘Autopsy Room’ and her work as a physician and social activist through the Anatomical Institute in relation to Schnitzler’s...

Polacy w słowackiej publicystyce i polityce od lat 30. do 60. XIX wieku

Poles in Slovak journalism and politics from the 1830s to the 1860s This paper sheds light on the perception of the Polish people, Polish politics, and their issues in Slovak journalism between 1830 and 1872. On the whole, the views were limited by the social opinions voiced by Slovak nationalists as well as by their interests and the general weakness of their National Movement. Slovak nationalists refused to accept political concepts that, on the one hand, supported the creation of nation states (by “large”nations such as Poland), and on the other hand, called for the assimilation of “small”nations living within them. This would spell the end of the Slavs and Romanians settled in Hungary, as Hungary would reform into one single national Hungarian state. Among all Austro-Slavs, the fear of “Magyarisation”contributed to the most intense and widespread Slavic solidarity and Russophilia in the Slovak-speaking environment. It also determined the difficult approach to the Polish issues. The Slovak nationalists sympathised with the Polish fate, however, at the same time, they had difficulties with accepting the Poland-Russia conflict. That is why we can find quite varied opinions of Poles and Polish issues. Idealising the Poles, Polonophilia, sympathising with Poles as regards their problems, careful and neutral views of those problems, efforts to limit the Poland-Russia conflict, and critical views of Poles were all entwined. For example, pro-Polish sympathies dominated in the Slovak National Movement in the 1830s, whereas in the 1840s the sympathies shifted towards Russia, despite the fact that some nationalists supported the Poles and their Uprising in Halych. The real Slovak-Polish co-operation can be seen particularly during the revolution in 1848–1849. Out of the Slovak political ideology emerged the Pan-Slavic work Slovanstvo a svet budúcnosti [Slavdom and the world of the future] by Ľ. Štúr, which combined the Slav perspective with the connections to Russia. The Polish issues were mainly present in the 1860s. During that time, the more conservative political wing, “Stará škola”[The Old School], was looking for support in the imperial Vienna, showing strong Russophilism and critical attitude to the Polish uprising. In contrast, the more liberal political line, “Nová škola”[The New School], striving for co-operation with Hungarian political parties, showed understanding for the Polish aversion and was critical of the imperial Russia. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the Slovak politics and culture considerably weakened. The interest in glossing over the problems of the northern neighbour also declined. The Polish issues re-entered Slovak journalism again after the 1890s in connection with analysing new geo-political affairs on the continent and polarisation of the European superpowers.

‘Out of All That Is Alive and Felt’: The Austrian Werkbund and the Design of Social Democracy

Abstract This article analyses the interior designs of the Austrian Werkbund in the context of political designs for social democracy, focussing particularly on the 1932 Werkbundsiedlung as a site of aesthetic and cultural inclusion. By embracing the vernacular idioms of Central and Eastern European folk art, the Historicist style associated with nineteenth-century Austrian imperialism and the innovations of modern technology, the Werkbund represented an attempt to come to terms with the cultural legacy of the empire and to define the future of the Austrian state. In doing so, a comfortable, decidedly sentimental approach to design came to function as a site of encounter between history and ethnicity, offering a visual continuity between pre-1918 imperial Vienna and inter-war Red Vienna. Werkbund designers such as Josef Frank, Paul Fischel, Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos, Heinz Siller and Oskar Wlach were thus well positioned to contribute to the programme of eclectic decoration that was sponsored by the social democratic welfare initiatives of 1920s and 1930s Vienna.

Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens

Reviewed by: Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens Michael Burri Katherine Arens, Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. 231pp. Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens places at its center neither a group of canonical Austrian texts, nor a particular literary genre, nor a school of thought, but rather the cultural process of mythmaking in Austria as it takes place from late imperial Austria to the present day. Such mythmaking, Arens argues, is already functioning powerfully in the late imperial era, even as its purposes, contexts, and rhetorical strategies have been rendered unrecognizable by nationalist historiographies and the triumph of the nation-state. Understanding mythmaking matters because it leads to a recovery of a history and a historical sensibility, turning a little-appreciated cemetery into a beautiful necropolis. If those who trivialize Austrian mythmaking win, even the dead are not safe. Belle Necropolis stands behind its theoretical proposition with textual analysis from the outset. Indeed, it opens with a manuscript from an Austrian baroness that performs its own mythmaking on what might be reckoned to be among the most overexposed events of late imperial Austrian history—the murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph and Mary Vetsera at the former’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. But in translating, annotating, and closely reading this manuscript “from the crypt,” which is published as a whole for the first time, Arens shows how its source, Baroness Helene Vetsera, the mother of Mary Vetsera, retells the events leading up to Mayerling in ways that mourn the dead, exonerate (some of) the living, and seek to preserve the [End Page 155] family name, which Mary’s surviving sister still carries. Thus, the Baroness’s Denkschrift is anything but trivial. Much more, given the regime’s own Mayerling disinformation campaign, it is an essential contribution to the mythma-king of the story, a story that “is central to modern memory of the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary.” The example of Baroness Vetsera guides the approach of Belle Necropolis. That is, Austria rewrites its past not to produce a “true tale, but rather a plausible one.” Scholars of Austria, it follows, should be more attentive to the plausibility in the stories that rework the Austrian past and less obsessed with the question of their veracity. Where late imperial Austrian mythmaking is concerned, scholars have much to gain by grasping that the old Habsburg myths are not fixed but are continually being reshaped to address new Austrian realities. From the moral standpoint alone, this is a welcome perspective. After all, one hardly need to be Karl Kraus to note the bad faith of current-day, Habsburg-bashing critics who rage against contemporary presentations of imperial culture as exercises in empty nostalgia driven by the tourist industry, even as they make their careers off of denouncing such nostalgia. But Belle Necropolis validates the mythmaking approach to studying Austria suggested by the inaugural reading of the Vetsera manuscript through its five subsequent chapters, presenting case studies that range from the “Habsburg wraith” Jörg Haider to Carl Schorske’s “Modernist fin de siècle.” In chapter 3, for example, Arens reads Rebecca West classic’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as an instance of how a classic text of wartime Europe could invoke Austria’s imperial past to explain the current suffering of Yugoslavia. Like Empress Elizabeth, whose assassination West recalls from her childhood, Yugoslavia is the victim of Habsburg power and German aggression. For West, the Balkans are a mythic, not a European space, a (female) place, one shaped by (male) Austrian imperialism, a terrain upon which Europe draws its maps. Rebecca West adapted a central myth of late-imperial Austria—the life and death of Empress Elizabeth—to tell a plausible tale that helped English-speaking readers make sense of the continental wartime conflict as it played out in the Balkans. Yet in still more striking ways, post-1945 Austria itself produced a revisionist Habsburg historiography—or what is termed “nostalgia”—to recast its Habsburg past in ways that were “not necessarily a denial of the guilt of collaboration” with National Socialism but “a necessary precondition for thinking in forms...

Home/Sick: Locating Billy Wilder’s Cinematic Austria in The Apartment, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes , and Fedora

Although contemporary America is the setting for Billy Wilder’s Hollywood work, Berlin, the site of his first film and by his own accord the motivation for his cinematic art, became the setting for two postwar satires and overt representations. The expatriate Austrian devoted only a single imperial fantasy film to Vienna, The Emperor Waltz (1948), which is as much about the roots of Nazi eugenics as it is a parody of operetta, but overlooked cryptic Austrian references run through his oeuvre. Greater metaphorical statements can be found in comprehending the American corporate hierarchy as a re-vision of imperial Vienna in The Apartment (1960); in drawing parallels between British and Austro-Hungarian monarchism as a failing bulwark against social Darwinism; in a comparison of Wilder and Hitchcock through The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970); and in the examination of Fedora (1978) as an allegory of “nation building” in Second Republic Austria.

Historic preservation and the livable city

Acknowledgments. Chapter 1: What This Book Is About. Chapter 2: Using (and Not Using) The Past. Livable Cities. What Can Historic Preservation Contribute to This Challenge? An Historic Preservation Tale of Two Cities. Is Historic Preservation Legal? Chapter 3: What Is Historic Preservation? The People of Historic Preservation. What Qualifications Do Preservation Professionals Have? How Do Preservationists Decide What Should Be Protected? Who Are We Saving It For? Haven't We Saved Enough? Saving for Everyone. Chapter 4: The Actors: Community Groups and Governments. Greenfield Village in Michigan. The Arthur Ashe Statue in Richmond, Virginia. The African Burial Ground in Lower New York City. Participatory Efforts. Chapter 5: The Actors: Community Groups and Governments Case Study: Station Square, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chapter 6: Intersections: How They Work Together. Denver: Lower Downtown. What Do Planners Do? Historic Preservation. Historic Preservation and Planning. Neighborhood Conservation Districts. Form- Based Zoning. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Coordinate. Chapter 7 Bringing Them Back from the Malls: Revitalizing Downtown. Step 1: Capture the Vision. Step 2: Develop a Strategic Plan. Step 3: Forge a Healthy Private/Public Partnership. Step 4: Make the Right Thing Easy. Step 5: Establish Business Improvement Districts and Other Not- for- Profit Organizations. Step 6: Create a Catalytic Development Company. Step 7: Create an Urban Entertainment District. Step 8: Develop a Rental Housing Market. Step 9: Pioneer an Affordability Strategy. Step 10: Focus on For- Sale Housing. Step 11: Develop a Local- Serving Retail Strategy. Step 12: Re- Create a Strong Office Market. Conclusion. Chapter 8: Bringing Them Back from the Malls: Revitalizing Downtown Case Study: Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chapter 9: Using the Tools We Have: Urban Planning Tools That Preserve Historic Character. Zoning. Comprehensive Plans. Form- Based Codes. Affordable Housing. Planning for Integrated and People- Oriented Spaces. Chapter 10: Using the Tools We Have: Urban Planning Tools That Preserve Historic Character: Case Study: Dallas, Texas. Historic Districts and Conservation Districts. Regulation under the Three- Tier System. Chapter 11: Neighborhoods for Great Living: Historic Districts. The Experience of Colonial Williamsburg. Charleston, South Carolina, Creates an Historic District. Manchester: Historic Districts for All. Historic Districts in Livable Cities. Chapter 12: Neighborhoods for Great Living: Historic Districts Case Study: Manchester, Pennsylvania. Chapter 13: Sustainable Development and Historic Preservation. Community Movements. Preservation as Growth Management. Reusing Our Existing Buildings. The Cobb Building, Seattle, Washington. Waste Management. The Economics of Sustainability. The Role of LEED and the U.S. Green Building Council. Chapter 14: Sustainable Development and Historic Preservation: Case Study: The Cobb Building, Seattle, Washington. Chapter 15: New Urbanism versus the Livable City. The New Urbanism Charter. Ebenezer Howard's Garden City. New Urbanism: The New Garden City? Seaside, Florida. Facing the Criticism. Chapter 16: New Urbanism versus the Livable City: Case Study: Radburn, New Jersey. Chapter 17: The Global Picture. Rebuilding the Past. Vancouver: Queen of the Livability Stakes. Imperial Vienna (Second Place in Global Livability). Melbourne: Recent Heritage (Third Place in Global Livability). Preserving Heritage for Livable Cities around the World. Chapter 18: Afterword. Endnotes. Index.

Images of the Urban Spaces of Cieszyn

A number of specific characteristics of the town of Cieszyn are inherently related to its history. Since 1920, Cieszyn has been divided by a state border along the Olza river (except for the war time of 1938-1945). Before that, since the 17th century, the town was part of the Austrian Habsburg empire and was under imperial Vienna's cultural influence. The contemporary structure of the Polish part of Cieszyn includes numerous elements reflecting the town's specificity. Therefore, the social cognitive image of Cieszyn comprises those components of its spatial structure too.

Editorial: Fuchs’ uveitis: from Imperial Vienna to global appraisal

At the beginning of the last century, a uveitis entitylinked to heterochromia was identified. It was firstdescribed in 1902 by Ernst Fuchs, working inHabsburg Imperial Vienna, in these terms: ‘‘Whenthe colours of both eyes are different, it can happenthat in one of the two eyes, always in the eye with thebrighter iris, a cataract develops. In addition thesebrighter eyes present also a chronic cyclitis withcorneal keratic precipitates’’ [1]. This observationwas published in 1902 in the 9th edition of ErnstFuchs’ ophthalmology textbook (Fig. 1).Of course heterochromia, a very obvious clinicalsign, had been described much earlier. Aristotlenamed it heteroglaucos. A famous heterochromic inantiquity was Alexander the Great, who rode a horse,‘‘Bukephalos’’, which was itself heterochromic.In 1904, Georges Weill from Strassburg, at thetime in German-ruled Alsace, described seven caseswhere ‘‘heterophthalmus’’ was associated with cata-ract and cyclitis with keratic precipitates (KPs). Hesaid that he had performed a widespread literaturesearch and had not found any previous report of thisparticular association, and therefore claimed that hewas the first to have mentioned the association of‘‘heterophthalmus, cataract and cyclitis’’ [2] (Fig. 2).Weill had not found any mention of this triad, asFuchs’ first observation was not published in ajournal but in his textbook (Fig. 1). In response toWeill’s article, Ernst Fuchs published an article in1906 that is now considered the primary article onthis entity (Fig. 3). The title, ‘‘About complicationsof heterochromia’’, shows that heterochromia was atthe center of interest [3]. In the 15th edition of hisophthalmology textbook published in 1926 and editedby his pupil Salzmann, Fuchs gave a completedescription of the features of the entity that came tobe known under the eponym of ‘‘Fuchs’ heterochro-mic cyclitis’’, including heterochromia, cataract,cyclitis with KPs and, most importantly, vitreousinvolvement (Fig. 4). He also mentioned that theseeyes tolerated surgery very well [4].Ernst Fuchs (Fig. 5) had already retired, in 1915, asDirector of the Second Vienna Eye Hospital [5]. HebecameDirectorofthisinstitutionin1885,1 yearafterthe Austrian ophthalmologist, Karl Koller, working atthe Vienna General Hospital, had introduced cocaineas a topical anesthetic in ophthalmology. This discov-ery represented a tremendous leap forward for oph-thalmology as it came at the start of a marvelousexpansion in ocular surgery. Ophthalmology inVienna, thanks to people like Ernst Fuchs, was then,

Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: sex, science, and self in imperial Vienna, Chicago series on Sexuality, History, and Society, University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. x, 239, £20.50, $29.00 (hardback 0-226-74867-7).

Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: sex, science, and self in imperial Vienna, Chicago series on Sexuality, History, and Society, University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. x, 239, £20.50, $29.00 (hardback 0-226-74867-7). - Volume 46 Issue 1

Otto Weininger: Sex, science, and self in imperial Vienna

Otto Weininger: Sex, science, and self in imperial Vienna

<sc>Chandak Sengoopta</sc>. <italic>Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna</italic>. (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 239. $29.00

Chandak Sengoopta. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna. (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 239. $29.00 Sengoopta Chandak. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna. (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 239. $29.00. Gerald N. Izenberg Gerald N. Izenberg Washington University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 3, June 2001, Pages 1074–1075, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.3.1074 Published: 01 June 2001

Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897-1918 by John W. Boyer

BOOK REVIEWS121 Moreau's prize. But then personal piety is not,and should not be,bound by academic criteria. Marvin R. O'Connell University ofNotre Dame Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897-1918. ByJohnW Boyer. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press. 1995. Pp. xvi, 702. $37.50.) Like its predecessor, this second and final volume ofJohn Boyer's history of the Christian Social Party in Habsburg Austria can be described as detailed, exhaustive , and definitive. In terms of its scholarship alone, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna verges on the monumental, and when viewed in tandem with the earlier Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, it provides the conclusion for what collectively is now the standard work on the subject. That having been said, however, it must also be pointed out that this volume is more interpretively ambitious than the first and, therefore, contains more points for potential disagreement and debate. Boyer argues that the period from 1897 to 1918 is one of dramatic social, political , and cultural transition in which the Christian Socials played a significant and sometimes determinant part. Central to this process is die Christian Social Party's own transformation from an urban to a provincial political movement and its ultimate adoption of a more clerical and conservative character such that after 1918 it would no longer be recognizable as the party of Karl Lueger. This change was linked to Albert Gessmann and his vision of a Christian Social Reichspartei that would go beyond controlling Vienna and Lower Austria to encompass all of the German Crownlands. Such a party could more effectively defend the supranational character of the state, combat the revolutionary threat represented by social democracy, and push for parliamentary-based ministerial government. AU these goals were partiaUy realized, but at the ultimate cost of compromising Christian Socialism's urban and moderate Hberal origins in favor of a provincial and CathoUc conservative character. After the party's loss of its Viennese parliamentary constituency to the Social Democrats in 1911 its provincial character became more pronounced and its control of Vienna less important until it was completely eroded by the war and lost to the socialists in 1919. WhUe Boyer's main argument is convincing, his handling of related issues is more uneven. Central among these is that of state reform. Aside from the inconclusive results of universal manhood suffrage and Franz Ferdinand's problematic plans for change by fiat, Boyer lays heavy responsibiUty for the faUure to solve the Monarchy's political and nationality problems on the state administration , i.e., the ministers and bureaucrats. Given the opportunity to become more 122BOOK REVIEWS effective through reforms recommended by a pariiamentary commission in 191I-I913 it balked, and seemed ever too willing to resist party government and too anxious to play ethnically based interest poUtics. Perhaps, but in this analysis the possibUity of the state acting on its own initiative to solve its problems , as in the Ausgleiche for Moravia, Bukovina, and Galicia, is given Uttle credibiUty . FranzJoseph also has practicaUy no role in this scenario. Despite Boyer's introductory statements to the contrary, he comes close to making a Sonderweg argument about the coUapse ofthe Empire in which a somewhat compUcit Christian Socialism nevertheless tends to be on the side ofthe normative angels against a benighted state. More successful is Boyer's contention that the relationship between the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats became that of" opposing world views of conservative CathoUc versus revolutionary anticlerical. This resulted in a Kulturkampf that brought into being the CathoUc inteUectual leadership under Ignaz Seipel that would dominate the Christian Social Party in the First RepubUc. Indeed, the conclusion to the book emphasizes the pre-1918 origins of subsequent conflicts,yet that connected with die Christian Social heritage of anti-Semitism is given Uttle emphasis. For the time up to 1914, Boyer handles the issue of anti-Semitism weU, arguing its containment within the bounds of the Rechtsstaat and the party's essential insincerity on the issue. He declines, however, to say what the party's revival of anti-Semitism during the war and its incorporation into Seipel's program indicates about Christian Social responsibiUty for...

Culture and political crisis in Vienna: Christian socialism in power, 1897-1918

In this sequel to Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, John Boyer continues the history of the Christian Social Movement after founder Karl Lueger's rise to power in Vienna in 1897. He traces its evolution from a group of disparate ward politicians, through its maturation into the largest single party in the Austrian parliament by 1907, to its major role in Imperial politics during the World War I. Boyer argues that understanding the unprecedented success that this dissident bourgeois political group had in transforming the basic tenets of political life is crucial to understanding the history of the Central European state and the ways in which it was slowly undermined by popular electoral politics. The movement's efforts to save the Austrian Empire by trying to create an economically-integrated but ethnically-pluralistic state are particularly enlightening today in the shadow of ethnic violence in Sarajevo, where the end of the Austrian Empire began in 1914.

Some Cultural Aspects of Alban Berg's Vienna

The purpose of this paper is to throw some light on the sociohistorical and cultural background of the milieu in which Alban Berg was raised and educated and where he eventually created his musical compositions. In this attempt I am following the composer's cues, taking up some of his often brief and cryptic remarks about conditions or personages in his native city, elaborating on them and making them somewhat more translucent. To say that Alban Berg was born, grew up, lived and died in Vienna, while not incorrect, is an oversimplification. He actually spent his life in two very different cities: Vienna, the glittering center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and postwar Vienna, the immense head of a pollywog called the First Republic or the unloved state that nobody wanted. There are, in nature and culture, suggestive sites that have traditionally invited a great deal of mythologizing. This can be easily observed in cities such as Rome, New York or Paris, whose legendary fame defies time and space. Art and literature abound in images, topoi, evocations, descriptions, transfigurations, and even demonizations, all engendered by these places. The imaginative forcefield irradiated by the city of Venice, for example, has been so potent in the course of its variegated history that it has given rise to a series of divergent projections in writing and painting. Imperial Vienna, too, has always been a sought-after milieu for myth-makers. In song and operetta, in poems and on canvas, in novels, plays and films, its qualities, fed by fiction as much as fact, have been celebrated a thousandfold. The splendor of the Hapsburg court, the sponsorship of the arts by ambitious wealthy families, the motley crowds of a multiethnic culture, its role as mediator between East and West, the late intrusion of capitalist enterprise and liberal ideas into an essentially feudal order, the relative affluence of the middle classes, the ceaseless arrival of foreign artists, lured to Vienna by the rumor of a light-hearted, sybaritic lifeall of these factors

Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897. John W. Boyer

<i>Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897</i>. John W. Boyer

Political Radicalism in Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

Political Radicalism in Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna. Origins of the Christian Social Movement 1848-1897, by John W. Boyer

<i>Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna. Origins of the Christian Social Movement 1848-1897</i>, by John W. Boyer

Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897. John W. Boyer

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPolitical Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897. John W. Boyer Klemens von KlempererKlemens von Klemperer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 54, Number 1Mar., 1982 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244125 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1982 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.