In
the wake of such influential studies as Allan Janik and
Stephen Toulmin's
Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973) and
Carl Schorske's
Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics
and Culture (1979), scholars from diverse fields have
come to recognize that in the years from about 1890 to
1918 the imperial city of Vienna comprised a unique
historico-cultural nexus. The fact that so much
scholarship since the 1960s has centered on
turn-of-the-century Vienna is a symptom of its relevance
for the turn of the century we are currently
experiencing. Many of the fundamental intellectual and
artistic impulses that have decisively shaped the thought
and influenced the cultural environment of the modern
Western world emerged from the Vienna of this. In art and
architecture, central developments of the "Modernist"
movement, which re-mapped the landscape of Western
culture, took root in fin-de-siècle Vienna. The
architectural work of Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner, for
example, but also of Maks Fabiani, Josef Hoffmann,
Friedrich Ohmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Josef
Plecznik would culminate only decades later in the German
Bauhaus, whose goal was to liberate architecture
from a concern with style. In painting, the Viennese
Secessionist school produced, in the works of Gustav
Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, radical
departures from artistic tradition in its unabashed
exploration of erotic themes. This obsession with the
dynamics and the power of sexuality also informed the
ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytical theories
represent a radical revolution in conceptions of the
nature and constitution of the human psyche. Another set
of revolutionary impulses emerged in the realm of music
with the invention of the twelve-tone system, conceived
by Arnold Schönberg and developed further by his
students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. In the realm of
philosophy, turn-of-the-century Vienna also produced or
furthered major schools of thought, from the
antimetaphysical "sensualism" of Ernst Mach, to the
philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the logical positivism
of Rudolf Carnap, the philosophy of Franz Bentano, and
the Austrian school of economics including the theories
of Menger, Wieser, and Boehm-Bawerk. In creative
literature, finally, such writers as Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and Arthur
Schnitzler, who helped define the high-modernist literary
style of German-speaking Europe, called Vienna their
home.
This uncommon cultural
productivity is just one distinctive dimension of
turn-of-the-century Vienna. Another is the multi-ethnic
complexion of the city itself and of the vast
Austro-Hungarian empire whose capital it was. As the
major metropolis of the Empire, the seat of government,
and the center of commerce, Vienna acted like a magnet
that drew people from throughout Central Europe, with the
result that by the 1870s it was already one of the first
truly multi-ethnic cities. Austro-Germans, Hungarians,
Czechs, Slovenians, Ruthenians, Serbians, Croatians,
Bosnians: these ethnic and national identities are just a
small cross-section of the diverse groups present in
Vienna and in the Habsburg Empire, which was situated at
the interface of Western and Eastern European cultures.
However, this diversity gave rise not only to immense
cultural and intellectual productivity, but also created
tremendous social and political tensions--tensions that
expressed themselves perhaps most vehemently in the rabid
anti-Semitism that marred the sociopolitical landscape of
Vienna. Thus Vienna1900 is marked by the apparent
paradox that it was the birthplace not only of
psychoanalysis, twelve-tone music, and Modernist
architecture, but also of modern political anti-Semitism:
Adolf Hitler learned the vocabulary, rhetoric, and
virulence of his anti-Semitism during the years he spent
in Vienna, whose mayor, Karl Lueger, was elected on an
openly anti-Semitic political platform.
It has often been noted
that the cultural blossoming of Vienna took place at a
time in which the political power of the Empire was
waning and its internal stability was threatened by
ethnic conflicts. These struggles culminated in the
assassination in 1914 of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand
and his wife by Serbian nationalists. This event, as is
well known, gave rise to the cataclysm of World War One,
which ultimately put an end to the Empire itself.
Vienna1900 thus was a crucible of modernism not
merely in terms of the artistic, cultural, and
intellectual movements it spawned, but also because it
functioned as a political and sociological harbinger of
the problems attendant upon the modern multi-ethnic
state. As such, Vienna1900 is uniquely suited as a
historical case study with which one can initiate
discussion about the intellectual and sociopolitical
roots of our present-day world.
Vienna1900
presents a striking instance of disciplinary
cross-fertilization, since its cultural elite literally
constituted a kind of intellectual village within the
metropolitan life of the city itself. A diagram of the
personal contacts among the major figures of Viennese
intellectual life would demonstrate a set of broad but
tightly knit interactions. For example, Gustav Mahler had
himself psychoanalyzed by Freud; Hugo von Hofmannsthal
heard Ernst Mach's university lectures on philosophy;
Arnold Schönberg took painting lessons from the
lesser known Secessionist painter Richard Gerstl (who
then had an affair with Schönberg's wife); Karl
Kraus, one of the most visible writers and journalists of
the period, was a mentor of the young philosopher Otto
Weininger; and Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Ludwig
Wittgenstein's sister on the occasion of her wedding. The
forum for these interpersonal relations was provided by
the institution of the Viennese coffeehouse, that public
space in which people met to voice opinions, debate
ideas, and form schools of thought. In the sense that it
facilitated and managed these interactions, the Viennese
coffeehouse was a pre-electronic form of the
Internet.
This web site on Vienna
1900 represents an attempt not only to study this
productive cross-disciplinary interaction, but to
re-create it on a structural level as a defining feature
of our interdisciplinary research.