“Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914”, by Peter Gay

352 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393048933

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an Austrian physician, author and playwright whose works were widely read and criticized for their frank sexuality during his lifetime – and who is virtually unknown today. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, he dealt with human sexuality and the psyche at a time when such matters were taboo; indeed, Freud remarked that Schnitzler seemed to have learned more about sex through intuition than Freud had through decades of psychoanalysis. That is one of the central theses of Peter Gay's Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture 1815-1914, a timeframe that roughly coincides with both the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Peter Gay's choice of Arthur Schnitzler is an interesting one; after all, when we think of Victorian literary figures we usually think of the essayists Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold; the poets Tennyson and Browning; and the novelist Dickens. “Schnitzler” is not a name that readily comes to mind to most readers when speaking of the Victorians (at least to English-speakers, like me). While he wrote plays and stories and novels (which are rarely read today), Gay is not really interested in taking a measure of Schnitzler’s literary achievements. No, what interests Gay about the Viennese author is not his public output but his private input, as Schnitzler kept extensive diaries of his life and times. For Gay, these diaries’ offer a glimpse into the private life of a Victorian gentleman, and Gay quotes liberally from Schnitzler’s diaries because, after all, it’s the unofficial history of the Victorians that Gay is really interested in.

We are all familiar with the public record of the time and the clichés about the Victorian mindset, but Gay wants to peel back those clichés and have a look at the Victorian with his guard down – he wants to tell us what the middle-class Victorians really thought and how they really behaved, and Schnitzler's diary gives Gay access to the private mind and conscience behind the Victorian facade. One of Gay's points is that there is really no typical "Victorian", and that the much disparaged middle-class is really a much more diversified and conflicted group than many historians would lead you to believe. Schnitzler is not exactly a representative Victorian, for in many ways he is a figure (roughly contemporary with Freud) who tells us more about the century to come than the one he was born into. And like Freud, he is concerned less with the general goings-on within society than he is with the goings-on within his own and his character's minds: their hidden motivations and whatnot.

Schnitzler's mind appeals to Gay because Gay is himself a Freudian, and his book is an attempt to reveal the hidden motivations (anxieties, fears, aggressions, desires) driving the age; Gay is a consummate historian, however, and he never lets his Freudian interests lead him into speculative corners: he supports every point with lively data and convincingly shows us that the Victorians are a largely misunderstood people. We assume they were overly shy about sex, but Gay gathers plenty of evidence to counter this misassumption (Schnitzler himself seems to have thought of little else as he moved from one conquest to another). Whether we are to assume that Schnitzler is a typical Victorian or not seems to be beside the point because what Gay wants us to see is that any generalization that we make about the Victorians will quickly be undone by evidence to the contrary. This is not a "biography" of Schnitzler and it is not a typical "history" of the Victorians or middle-class; rather, Schnitzler's Century is an interdisciplinary work which blends biography and history and uses one discipline to challenge another and, in so doing, offers fresh insight into both.

“Let the Sea Make a Noise...: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur”, by Walter A. McDougall

816 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465051526

Let the Sea Make a Noise...: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur is an exceptionally innovative work, as Walter McDougall documents in a mere 800+ pages 400+ years of exciting voyages of discovery, pioneering feats, engineering marvels, political plots and business chicanery, racial clashes and brutal wars. It is a chronicle complete with little-known facts and turning points, but always focused on the remarkable people at the center of events while dividing the narrative into three technological eras: The Age of Sail; The Age of Steam & Rails; and The Age of the Internal Combustion Engine. But this is no mere history, for the author has employed the literary device of telling his tale through the medium of a dreaming professor debating an audience of historical personalities who were themselves at the center of events. Different, I grant you, even a little pretentious perhaps, but I liked it, for all that.

With echoes of Citizens, Shogun, The Fatal Shore, Hawaii, and Modern Times, Let the Sea Make a Noise... is unlike any history you've ever read. Not pure history or pure novel or historical novel, McDougall has written a novelistic history: a kind of impeccable nonfiction in a fantasy setting, if you will. As stated above, imagine a tale told by an historian who seeks to lecture to an audience of historical personages who were themselves key figures in the history the author is relating; and then imagine that historian being frequently interrupted by these historical characters reminiscing and arguing about the meaning of the events through which they lived. This is how this tale covering four never boring centuries is related by the author, a chronicle replete with little-known facts and turning points but always focused on the remarkable people at the center of events. 

Among these very-real but larger-than-life characters are the American-loving Japanese ambassador to Washington on the eve of Pearl Harbor; the Russian builder of the Trans-Siberian railway; a Hawaiian queen from the first period of Western competition for the Islands; the American Secretary of State infamous for his "folly" in purchasing Alaska; and a Spanish missionary from the period when it looked as if the whole area might have become part of the Spanish realm. A stunning saga of human adventure, Let the Sea Make a Noise... is a gripping account of the rise and fall of empires in the last vast unexplored corner of the habitable earth, an area that occupies one-sixth of the surface of the globe and all organized into short, action-packed scenarios that whip the reader from the tropical paradise of Hawaii to the island fortress of Japan, from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the California coastline, and into the power centers of London, Washington, Tokyo and St. Petersburg. McDougall offers dazzling insights into all the twists and turns of the Pacific empire.

There is no other book that covers these same subjects in this wealth of detail and with such chronological scope, nor with such creativity.

“The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century”, by Peter Watson

992 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-0060760229

My, my, my, what a difference several decades can make. On November 28th, 2011, the Financial Times ran the headline "Germany told to act to save Europe". It wasn't so long ago that the Germans were the go-to bugaboos of the world, with Nazis goosestepping over all and sundry and sneering that ve haf vays of making you talk! No longer, it would seem. We moderns must now put away our historical blinders that showed us a Germany always stuck in World War Two with all of its accompanying atrocities and the dissatisfying aftermath and open our eyes to the German's many contributions to science, philosophy, music and modern thought and their effects on our 21^st Century’s sensibilities. Which is just what Peter Watson does in The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, his massive survey of this most perplexing of nations and reacquaints the reader (if reacquaint is the right word) to the German phenomenon, with his in-depth research and cultural sensitivity, all without leaving unaddressed the mere dozen years of Nazi rule. Reading The German Genius is a sumptuous feast on Germanic erudition, philosophical thought and achievement by an author with a keen eye for detail and a gift for synthesis.

And there is a lot to talk about; Germany's complexities and intricacies are many and invite the reader to carefully ponder many a subject, from the roots of Western philosophical thought, to the wellsprings of 19th Century symphonic music (mostly Germanic, of course), to the scope of Western artistic achievement, to the nature of politics and political dialogue in our modern societies and to the engines of science over the past 200 years. Watson plies his deep knowledge of the German character in his concluding chapter with five traits of German culture worthy of thoughtful consideration; an educated middle class inhabiting the world of scholarship (and by scholarship, he includes research), the arts (music, film, stage and literature), science, the legal, medical, and religious professions based not on the acquisition of knowledge but "as a process of character development"; a personal reflective character "inwardness" leading one to observe "new structures of our minds"; the German concept of Bildung, the German tradition of self-cultivation, resulting in a harmonization of research with scholarship leading as "a defining phenomenon of modernity"; and a redemptive community "sustaining a moral community in the face of rampant individualism". These are thought-provoking concepts for a people as controversial – and consequential – as the Germans have been for the last century.

The introduction alone was worth the purchase price and is what pulled me into purchasing the book to begin with. Given that The German Genius was written by a British intellectual historian and former journalist who discusses England's relationship to Germany and some of his motivations for writing the book is also a plus. The German Genius is not a fast read and, at times, I wished for more of a synthesis of information that Watson displayed in his Introduction, but one soon realizes the problem as he appears to really be trying to bring in every German of significant contribution. And as an author he appears to be able to stand in the background. I'd have liked to have read this book faster, but it doesn't lend itself to that because of the level of detail, but I found out things about Germany I have never seen in other contexts.

“An Unlikely Prince: The Life and Times of Machiavelli”, by Niccolo Capponi

360 pages, Da Capo Press, ISBN-13: 978-0306817564

16th Century Italy (Florence in particular) are favorite destinations for pleasure readers of history and armchair time travelers alike, but who woulda thunk that Niccolo Machiavelli would be such an enjoyable traveling companion? Far from being the deceitful, shadowy character sprung from the nightmares of good civil libertarians everywhere, Machiavelli was in fact a gifted writer and philosopher who just happened to find himself in the middle of just about anything and everything and full of piss and vinegar, ego, humor, political fervor and dreams. While at his peak, his life among the great and powerful of Europe was a roller-coaster affair, and after his fall his struggle for place and purpose was nothing less than poignant. For An Unlikely Prince: The Life and Times of Machiavelli, author Niccolo Capponi researched and annotated this book as a scholar but wrote it like a novelist. The writing is bright, clever and insightful, while his personal translations of historic documents are fresh and often fun.

No historical novel will transport you quite like a good historical biography, such as this. If all you've read is Machiavelli's The Prince you've missed the best part of the story. Capponi does a great job of explaining the political and social environment during Machiavelli's career and connecting his writings to his career needs when he wrote them; in this light, some of the more controversial sections of The Prince make sense, for rather than being a handbook for tyrants that most scholars seem to think it is, it is in fact just a how-to manual for rulers of the day and age, a practical guide for rulers on how to live, thrive and survive in the world as Machiavelli found it, not a fantasy on the world as he wished it to be, i.e. Utopia by Thomas Moore. Machiavelli's political environment in his native Florence was a class-conflicted republic, embedded in a fractured Italy where contending foreign powers invaded at will; hence, it was better for a ruler to be feared rather than loved as Machiavelli contended, even if he would rather have been loved.

An Unlikely Prince is a much-needed addition to the canon on this most insightful, misunderstood and necessary philosopher, one whose thoughts and ideas may be distasteful but, for all that, needed and useful.