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historical and philological scholarship of those times, are obvious
examples of national, political, and cultural self-images projected
through significant historical analogies.
Clearly, the Weimar analogy was quasi-historical and super–
ficial. Walter Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger were not John
Kennedy and Martin Luther King; Bob Dylan was not Kurt Weill.
In Weimar Germany, a new postmonarchial, fragile, and poorly
conceived democratic republic struggled in the wake of military
defeat, reparations, inflation, and world depression. The contrasting
economic and political circumstances of America in the sixties made
a serious argument by historical analogy difficult, at best.
The accuracy demanded by professional historians who main–
tain the conceit of objectivity fails to dispel facile analogies like the
Weimar analogy of ten years ago. Some dimension of the past
becomes present myth. In the eighties, the particular past that
fascinates the present has shifted from Berlin of the twenties to
fin-de-siecle Vienna. Clearly, one must ask, who draws these
analogies? What within the mechanisms of the recruitment,
training, and publishing of scholars and their work gives rise to an
apparent concentration of effort on a particular problem or era and,
consequently, the shifts from one to another? What within the world
of journalism, political and cultural, sustains a popular fascination
with a past culture? What, finally, within the careers of gifted
authors like E.L. Doctorow leads them to turn from political
contexts
(The Play
oj
Daniel)
rooted in ideological commitments
reminiscent of the interwar "Weimar" years to the estheticized
pastiche of the fin-de-siecle
(Ragtime)?
What will follow in this short
argument begs these critical questions, and offers only a general
explanation to a surface, but broadly perceived, trend permeating
the borders of scholarship, journalism, and the arts.
Experimentation and the modern, if not an attraction to the
decadent in a context of radical, active politics, drew us back to
Weimar. The absence of politics, a gradual social fragmentation in
our nation, the decline of America as a world power, the retreat into
self, a selective reclaiming of tradition, nostalgia, estheticism, and a
profound, passive pessimism now draw us nearer to fin-de-siecle
Vienna.
Curiously, older scholars like Carl Schorske have only partially
recognized the significance of their own drift to an interest in
Vienna. Schorske describes his attraction to Vienna as an extension
of his interest in the breakdown of liberal polity, in the origins of an
