The Last Days of Fin de Siècle Vienna?
Steven Beller wonders if the Vienna of 1900 is the key to this century's thought and achievements.

At the end of the last century Paris was seen as the undisputed cultural capital of the world. During the inter-war period Weimar Berlin seemed for a moment to have captured the blue riband for cultural avant-gardism, and since the middle of this century New York has, with some heckling from the European backbenches, carried the mantle for modernity. Since post-modernity arrived on the scene, though, many have looked for alternative centres of inspiration, and a remarkable number in the English-speaking world have, for the last quarter century or so, found it in fin de siècle Vienna. When the classic texts of this subject were published, William Johnston's The Austrian Mind (1972), Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973), William McGrath's Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (1974) and Carl Schorske's magisterial collection of essays, Fin de Siècle Vienna at the end of the decade, the modern culture of the former Habsburg capital shot from relative obscurity to a dazzling, and surprising fame.

Klimt and Schiele, Mahler and even Schoenberg were suddenly everywhere; the Edinburgh Festival devoted itself to Vienna, there were major conferences and exhibitions in Paris, New York, London, Vienna and Venice in the early 1980s. The level of excitement now for things Viennese is not as high as it was then, yet Vienna still seems to retain its attraction. In the coming months Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud will each have a major conference devoted to him in the United Kingdom alone.

One of the biggest theatre hits of the last couple of years has been David Hare's The Blue Room, an adaptation of Schnitzler's Reigen, and Nicole Kidman, the nakedly sensational star of that production, seems to be on a one-woman mission to resuscitate Schnitzler's reputation, starring as she now is next to her husband in 'the sexiest movie ever', Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream Story, Tr. J.M.Q.Davies, Penguin 1999).

At the same time it is difficult to shake off the sense that fin de siècle Vienna has been overtaken by the events of the last decade or so. Next to a resurgent Berlin, and the radical transition of the new democracies of East Central Europe, the psychological niceties and aesthetic subtleties of the decadent world it conjures up, no longer seem to be as relevant as they were in the early 1980s. If the concept was the epitome of the modernist ennui, and hence seen as a precursor of the post-modernist ennui, then it has itself become the subject of post-post-modernist boredom with post-modernism itself.

We are, it would seem, living in an era of 'neo-modernity', the world of Tony Blair, where things can be fixed by throwing over ideological sacred cows and wars can be both just - and won. This is not an age in which Viennese 'therapeutic nihilism' is in vogue, nor is it one in which the retreat from politics, seen by Schorske as the epitome of Viennese modernity, makes nearly as much sense as it did for artists and intellectuals in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. What, if anything, has fin de siècle Vienna really got to offer this newly optimistic world?

Fin de siècle Vienna might not have that much to offer; yet shifting the emphasis just a little, 'Vienna 1900' still offers an enormous amount. It is not so much as a capital of post-modern doubt, but rather as a centre of intellectual and cultural achievement, of critical thought, combined with the emancipatory thrust provided by the Jewish background of so many in the city's intellectual elite, that Vienna in the first third of the twentieth century should, and I think does, retain our loyalty. It is because of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Vienna Circle's logical positivism, and the economics of the Vienna School, but also the brilliant, ethical and prophetic insights into the nature of modern mass culture provided by Karl Kraus, and the subtle analyses of human feelings and relations - so often presented in decadent garb, but always within a framework of an ethical rationalism - in the work of Arthur Schnitzler, that Vienna remains a truly significant source of this century's thought.

Perhaps it is only fitting that Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, a short story which explores the depths of the human psyche in all its horrors of jealousy, betrayal and sex, yet which is ultimately, in spite of all and perhaps because of all, a rather moral 'bourgeois' hymn to marital fidelity and love, should be Vienna 1900's parting gift to the century which saw its triumph - and its destruction.

Steven Beller is the author of Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: a Cultural History and Francis Joseph.