Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Summary

A set of linked essays that reads turn-of-the-century Vienna as a laboratory of modernism, tracing how crises in liberal politics found expression in psychoanalysis, painting, architecture, music, and literature. Schorske connects Freud, Klimt, Schoenberg, and the architects of the Ringstrasse to a shared experience of political disillusionment among Vienna's bourgeois elite. The book reshaped cultural history by insisting that aesthetic innovation cannot be separated from political failure.