Leon Botstein
THE VIENNESE CONNECTION
Why has there been a surge of interest in the world of
fin-de-siecle Vienna among American intellectuals and scholars, the
urbane audience, our fellow consumers of high culture? Carl
Schorske's widely reviewed recent book,
Fin de Siecle Vienna (1980),
(which sold over 15,000 hardbound copies just months after its
appearance - many more than the most optimistic projections of its
publisher) capped off a remarkable array of fin-de-siecle Viennes–
iana which has come out since the mid-seventies. Consider this
sampling: academic works such as William McGrath's
Dionysian Art
and Populist Politics
(1974); Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin's
Wittgenstein's Vienna
(1973); Alexander Gerschenkron's
An Economic
Spurt That Failed
(1977); John Boyer's huge
Political Radicalism in Late
Imperial Vienna
(1981); William Johnston's
The Austrian Mind (1972);
in 1980 popular books by Frederic Morton and Joseph Wechsberg
and in 1981 Johnston's coffee-table book,
Vienna, Vienna: The Golden
Age
1815-1914;
in music a Mahler and Bruckner revival on records
and in concert programs, now a dominant factor in musical life; a
host of new and reissued biographies and letter collections of Wolf,
Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In psychology,
consider the run of books and magazine pieces in the past two years
on the "historical" Freud. In the arts, there was the 1979 "Vienna
Moderne" exhibit in New York, Chicago, and Houston and a series
of art and coffee-table books on the Vienna Secession , on Vienna's
fin-de-siecle architectural innovators, and on Klimt and Schiele.
In the gradual shift during the past several years in
architectural fashion from a standardized and vulgarized post–
Bauhaus modernism to a so-called "postmodernist" esthetic,
buildings with a mixture of ornamentation and structural and
functional lines have emerged, reminiscent of the work of two
Viennese, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos . Both Philip Johnson's
dubious new AT&T building in New York and the successful new
building for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, evoke fin-de-siecle Viennese archi-
