Schorske has chosen a very precise time period in a very precise place, Habsburg Austria in the 40-50 years before the First World War which led to the end of the Empire. He concentrates first of all on Vienna, and then on particular arts - fiction, poetry, music, painting, architecture, psychoanalysis - and then concentrates further on particular persons, Freud, Klimt, Otto Wagner etc. He is fascinating in showing the interconnections of politics (which is peripheral to the study) and art and of the sociology/politics of the art world. It was a particularly rich period and indeed went on to be even richer after the war. Above all it is a deep analysis and it is, for instance, fascinating to see how such a well-known work as The Interpretation of Dreams fits into the cultural, political, social, caste, etc etc milieu.

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is a well written and creative analysis of politics and culture. Schorske mostly analyzes politics through culture, or even more explicitly cultural characters. His analysis is creatively approached, smoothly written, enthusiastic, and at times poetic.

I believe my dissatisfaction with the work relates back to all of these otherwise ingenious characteristics. As a work of history, it fails. It provides an insufficient analysis of the times, politically, and culturally, by focusing on only a handful of individuals and movements. While these offer archetypal experiences of the times, the analysis fails to dig into the greater arena, beyond immediate causes (repeatedly stated to be caused by the declining liberal ideology and politics). Beyond this there are some structural issues, the chapters, in fact individual essays, overlap in a fashion that’s repetitive, and as has been noted in another review here, a little unfocused.

Schorske admits in his introduction that he is not an art historian or a literary critic, so his analysis of such things, the bulk of the work, is from done from the perspective of an historian. And this, most fundamentally, captures the nature of my problem. Analysis by an historian is not necessarily historical analysis.

only read (twice? thrice?) the chapters on klimt and the ringstrasse for my research and didn't read the rest but from those chapters alone you can already tell that schorske's intellectual capability is unparalleled

I am still trying to pin down what to think of Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. It was a very readable book, particularly for one that was assembled from various scholarly publications. The political chapters stood out for me personally, but I can imagine the art and architecture chapters finding favor with other audiences. I also feel better for having read it--more culturally literate and well-rounded. There are a couple of problems, though. The first is that the work falls in an awkward grey region between survey and targeted study. It cannot be the former, since it leaves too many areas untouched. There is no real engagement with turn of the century Viennese philosophy (Ernst Mach) or economics (Bohm-Bawerk), for example. At the same time, chapters are a bit too varied to count as a focused investigation. They include everything from architecture to psychoanalysis to antisemitism. The second and more troubling problem is that, at times, Schorske goes completely off the rails. For instance, in writing on Klimt's Medicine, a painting the features the Greek goddess Hygeia holding a snake (as is traditional), he notes:

Hygeia is ambiguity par excellence; accordingly, she is associated with the snake, the most ambiguous of creatures...The snake, amphibious creature, phallic symbol with bisexual associations, is the great dissolver of boundaries: between land and sea, man and woman, life and death. This character accords well with the concern with androgyny and the homosexual reawakening of the fin de siècle: expressions of erotic liberation on the one hand and male fear of impotence on the other (242)

Is this a general claim about the significance of snakes tout court? If so, it hardly seems obvious. Is it supposed to reflect how Klimt's contemporaries would have seen it? This is more plausible, but would still require more historical support than he gives it. The reader doesn't even get a citation. Passages like this really hurt my reading experience.

I don't yet know what to make of this book, except that I loved it. I'm going to have to think about it a bit more.

Where do I begin?

This was such an engrossing read and I believe Alex Ross must have been inspired by Schorske's groundbreaking collection of essays (both its cohesive structure and magnificent breadth) when writing Wagnerism. Both are stellar works of cultural and intellectual history and I think they have such magic in marrying the academic rigour of history-writing and the compelling vigour of the eclectic subject matter that straddles literature, architecture, music, etc. Schorske takes the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the sketches of Otto Wagner, and the songs of Schoenberg and so marvelously weaves a seamless narrative stretching from 1848 (the beginning of the crisis of liberalism) until the 1st World War; while the reader is faced with the challenging task of stringing together the ideas and works of all these different cultural giants, Schorske makes it much easier by presenting a consistent idea of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna in its cultural glory.

What image of Vienna does Schorske create? What kind of world does he immerse us in?

One of political and social disintegration. One of contradictions, most evident in the modern yet historical Ringstrasse. One of sui generis aestheticism, particularly in the decade before the 1st World War.

Vienna in the late-19th century was a hotbed of intellectual, cultural and political activity and Schorske deftly depicts this with 7 standalone but mutually-enhancing essays:
1) Politics and the Psyche (Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal)
- Their differing responses to the dissolution of liberalism (both affirmed the emergence of the psychological man; Schnitzler approached the problem from the moral and scientific side of the Viennese liberal tradition, Hofmannsthal the aesthetic-aristocratic.
2) The Ringstrasse and Urban Modernism (Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner)
- The Ringstrasse being the liberals' political bastion, economic capital and centre of intellectual life; the differing approaches to architecture (whether historical, as with Sitte, or contemporary and functional, as with Wagner).
3) Mass Politics (Schonerer, Lueger, Herzl)
- Their leading their followers out of the collapsing liberal world (which failed to represent those beyond the middle class) by composing ideological collages of fragments of modernity, glimpses of futurity, and resurrected remnants of a half-forgotten past.
4) Freud's Psychoanalysis
- By reducing his own political past and present to an epiphenomenal status in relation to the primal conflict between father and son, Freud gave his fellow liberals an ahistorical theory of man and society that could make bearable a political world spun out of orbit and beyond control.
- Patricide replaces regicide; psychoanalysis overcomes history.
5) Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego (Klimt)
- That Klimt shared with other intellectuals of his class and generation a crisis of culture characterised by an ambiguous combination of oedipal revolt and narcissistic search for a new self.
6) The Transformation of the Garden
- The garden as a literary idea that captures and reflects the changing outlook of Austria's cultivated middle class.
- Stifter (expurgated reality): an ideal of life that implied social withdrawal and cultural elitism (rural-aristocratic past); that art could join with science and ethics in a progressive and redemptive function
- Saar (abstract social ideal): that the world of art had lost touch with social reality
- Andrian Werburg: self-preoccupation, incapacity to love another, inability to distinguish inner self from outer world
- Hofmannsthal: rescued function of art from hedonistic isolation into which his class had carried it and had tried to redeem society through art's reconciling power
7) Explosion in the Garden: Kokoschka and Schoenberg (Expressionism)
- First appropriation then the disintegration of the garden as the image of order served as the liberating vehicle.
- Kokoschka: unified psyche and corporal reality in portraiture
- Schoenberg: presented wilderness as the proper metaphysical analogue and metaphoric ideal of psychological man

Kokoschka: "Isolation compels every man, all alone like a savage, to invent his idea of society. And the knowledge that every doctrine of society must remain a utopia will also drive him into solitude. This solitude swallows us in its emptiness."

Schoenberg: "Redeem us from our isolation!"

Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free."

"Indeed, Mahler's magnificent setting of the song [in the centre of his Third Symphony] can afford the viewer of Klimt's "Philosophy" another kind of access to that intellectual generation's painful, psychologised world-view -- a view that at once affirms desire and suffers the deathly dissolution of the boundaries of ego and world which desire decrees."

So thankful for this book.