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tecture. The latter example does so explicitly with its woodworked
interior lights, sculptured mner terracing and Vienna-style
furniture.
Curiously, in the 1965 edition of H.W. Janson's standard
History
oj
Art,
the Vienna Secession and Klimt and Schiele are
nowhere mentioned. In literature, there have been new paperback
editions and theatrical productions of Schnitzler, and a Stefan Zweig
centennial conference took place in May, 1981, with a book of essays
to follow. There is a growing body of younger American scholarly
research on Vienna. Last but perhaps not least, consider the
extraordinary appreciation in the price of art and utilitarian objects
from the period, especially from the Vienna "Werkstatte" (not to
mention thin imitators and copiers). A culinary afterthought: two
Viennese restaurants, "Vienna '79" in New York and a smaller
offshoot, have become smashing "three-star" successes .
This cultural and historical revival reminds one of the attention
given in America to Weimar culture and politics during the sixties
and early seventies . About ten years ago, frequent discussions of a
"Weimar analogy" for the America of the sixties reflected a fascin–
ation with Weimar culture . Between 1960 and 1970 we saw Brecht
come into the American scene as a seminal poet, playwright, and
theoretician of art, politics, and drama. Ten years ago, interwar
German films were in vogue . America was then in an age of esthetic
experimentation, with a visible avant-garde in the academy, music,
poetry, and drama, an avant-garde often self-consciously remi–
niscent of Berlin in the 1920s. The sixties and early seventies
brought new scholarship on the Weimar period. To many of us who
were graduate students in European history during the sixties, the
interwar years were engrossing and meaningful. A sense of a
Weimar analogy, especially among liberal and radical intellectuals,
given the public presence of Herbert Marcuse as symbol of the new
politics, helped to draw scholars to neo-Marxism , to the Frankfurt
School, to critical theory, to Walter Benjamin, and to the Georg
Lukacs of the twenties and thirties. The Bauhaus, with its agenda of
artistic modernism and radical social change, attained status as an
historical precedent for artists and architects. All that was new,
especially with conscience, with daring, with a sharp critique of
monopoly capitalism, utilitarianism, bourgeois sanctimoniousness,
liberalism, and nationalism, seemed to evoke in the sixties the spirit
of the Weimar period. For students, intellectuals, and artists,
freedom of expression, an intense and thoroughgoing modern revo-
