“Vienna’s Golden Autumn: From the Watershed Year 1866 to Hitler’s Anschluss 1938”, by Hilde Spiel

247 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-1555841362

Vienna’s Golden Autumn: From the Watershed Year 1866 to Hitler’s Anschluss 1938 by Hilde Spiel was first published in 1987, and maybe that’s why I have a warm and fuzzy feeling about this book because it looks and feels like an 80’s product: the glossy pages, the typesetting, the page format…it all feels like Morning in America. So, with that out of the way…the timespan covered in this book was the epoch of the Jugendstil (literally “Youth Style”), known better in the English-speaking world as Art Nouveau (literally “New Art”), and was inspired by natural forms and structures as a reaction to the academic art, eclecticism and historicism of 19^th Century architecture and decoration. Suffice to say, the Viennese went mad for it, and Spiel describes in chatty detail just how their city, a European crossroads with a plethora of races, creeds and cults jostling cheek-by-jowl, was forever changed, not only by the stylistic aspects of this new art, but by its cultural inflections, as well. This is important for, as has been remarked upon by other writers – think Frederic Morton in A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (reviewed on March 26, 2012) and again in Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914 (reviewed on March 27, 2012), or Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914 by Peter Gay (reviewed on April 25, 2012), or Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 by Tim Bonyhady (reviewed on September 25, 2014) and even Hitler’s Vienna: a Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man by Brigitte Hamann (reviewed on September 23, 2017) – there was a kind of Weltschmerz (literally “World Pain”) suffusing everything. Everyone had the blues but didn’t know why, and it showed.

Spiel argues that Vienna’s gestalt psyche was rather schizophrenic in that the polyglot, multiethnic mix of the Viennese people themselves contributed to the extreme complexity of the place. This is no small boast, as Vienna was the capital and crossroads of the Habsburg Monarchy, a multistate conglomerate that, at its height, consisted of almost forty-or-more distinct states, covered nearly 240,000 square miles, represented seventeen nations and minority groups, spoke somewhere in the region of sixteen different languages, sheltered well-over a dozen religions and contained upwards of 53 million people at the time of its dissolution in 1918. That such a hodge-podge empire should have a capital that equaled it in complexity and ethnic diversity should come as no surprise. That this diverse population should have an equally diverse intelligentsia, congregating at the famous Viennese coffee houses that seemed to serve as a wellspring of ideas, is, again, hardly shocking, and we find such luminaries as: Johann Strauss the Younger, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss, Adolf Loos, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schoenberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Wittgenstein…okay, better stop there.

To view an era of great aesthetic refinement and artistic achievement in isolation is a fool’s errand; thus, attempting to describe the magical seven decades in Vienna between 1866 and 1938, one may well wonder how that seemingly sudden flowering of talent came about during such a tumultuous period, especially in the fields of literature and philosophy, which had lain barren or borne little crop in previous centuries (or maybe not: as Harry Lime said in Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.) Austria’s cultural revolution really began with the year 1866 and ended with the German annexation of the First Austrian Republic in 1938. Henry James said “[i]t takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature”, and in Vienna, for so long the center of Europe, a surfeit of history rather prevented the spread of poetic invention and contemplative thought. Until, that is, everything hit the fan, and the intellectual promise of the place at last bloomed for one brief, shining moment, before being snuffed out by Nazi Terror and bureaucratic nonsense. Vienna’s Golden Autumn, while brief, shown golden, and lives on into our blighted technocratic age.