Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
By Richard Cockett
(Yale University Press, 464 pages, $35)
A few years ago, I read a very interesting book by Arthur Herman entitled How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Now along comes a book, written by the unfortunately named Richard Cockett, called Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. I hope Cockett and Herman never run into each other, because I imagine it could get ugly fast.
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Vienna is many centuries old, but the three sections of Cockett’s book focus, respectively, on the city’s “golden age” (from the late 19th century to World War I), on “Red Vienna” (the socialist-governed city of the interwar years), and the postwar influence of Viennese émigrés around the world, especially in America and Britain. It sounds like a fine idea for a book, and certainly the cast of characters is a glittering one: You’ve got not only Sigmund Freud but also his daughter, Anna (who “feminise[d] psychoanalysis” and pioneered children’s rights), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (who “made Vienna a European centre for sexology” and coined the words “homosexuality,” “masochism,” “paedophilia,” and “fetishism”), and Wilhelm Reich (who coined the terms “social work” and “sexual revolution” and, later, having relocated to the U.S., became notorious for a piece of pseudo-medical quackery called an “orgone box” that beguiled the likes of Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger).
You’ve got Kurt Gödel, “arguably, the most eminent logician, and possibly mathematician, of the twentieth century,” and the philosopher Otto Weininger, who committed suicide at age 23 in the house where Beethoven had died, and whose misogyny, Cockett tells us, won him such Viennese fans as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the artist Gustav Klimt, and the writer Stefan Zweig. You’ve got pediatrician Hans Asperger (of, yes, the syndrome fame), who “embraced Nazi eugenics and racial hygiene theories,” and the composers Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Arnold Schoenberg. Among the less familiar names is that of Lise Meitner, the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Vienna (and perhaps the third woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in that subject from anywhere), who was a trailblazer in the study of fission but was denied a Nobel Prize. Then, of course, there’s the Austrian school — the economists, most prominently Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper, who formulated their free-market ideas in opposition to the utopian social engineering of “Red Vienna” (the stated goal of which was, rather disconcertingly, to create “The New Man”).
Most of the members of the Austrian school ended up abroad, where they played a huge role in shaping modern Western economic thought. But, thanks to a certain Herr Hitler, they were far from Vienna’s only exiles. Though some — such as the art historian Ernst Gombrich, the impresario Sir Rudolf Bing, and the publisher George Weidenfeld — settled in Britain, most crossed the Atlantic. While Freud did indeed escape to London, where he died in 1939 (he despised the U.S. from afar, calling its inhabitants “savages”), his nephew Edward Bernays moved to the U.S., where he invented modern public relations. Among the other stateside Viennese exiles were the designer Joseph Urban, who did the interiors at Mar-a-Lago, back when it belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post; Victor Gruen, who invented the shopping mall; and Adolf Loos, who, inspired by the Chicago school of architecture, went on to influence a number of postmodernist architects.
Many of the Viennese worthies who crossed the pond didn’t stop until they got to L.A. Joseph Urban created movie sets; Max Steiner composed the scores of Gone With the Wind (which, Cockett to the contrary, was neither an RKO nor a Warner Brothers movie) and Casablanca. Hedwig Kiesler, in addition to becoming one of the most gorgeous stars of the silver screen after Louis B. Mayer changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, was also, improbably enough, a brilliant (and entirely self-taught) inventor who, after installing laboratories in her home as well as in her trailer on the MGM lot, developed, in collaboration with the composer George Antheil, something called the “Spread Spectrum” process, which is now an indispensable element of Wi-Fi, GPS, and other technologies.
Several Viennese exiles became top Hollywood film directors, including Max Reinhardt, formerly maharajah of the Viennese theater; Fritz Lang, who claimed to have conceived the idea for his classic 1927 film Metropolis when he first espied the New York skyline; and Otto Preminger, who said that he chose American, not European, subjects for his films because “Europe is the past and America is the future.” Both he and fellow Viennese transplant Billy Wilder, writes Cockett, “engaged in a very conscious assault on conservative American taste on celluloid”: While Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) put men in dresses — Cockett might also have mentioned The Apartment, Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1960 comedy about casual adultery — Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), about a rape trial, marked the first use in a Hollywood film of the words “contraception,” “climax” (in the sexual sense), and “panties.” (Again, Cockett might have mentioned Preminger’s 1953 comedy The Moon Is Blue, which was famous for breaking the Tinseltown taboo on the word “virgin.”) And let’s not forget Fred Zinnemann, director of High Noon (1952), which, for him, was a parable about the fall of Vienna to the Nazis.
Yes, it’s quite a gallery. And Cockett does a fine job of explaining why Vienna produced so many impressive men and women. For one thing, it was “primarily a city of immigrants,” a “pluralist and inclusive” place that welcomed gifted and ambitious people — including a great many Jews — from the four corners of the Austrian Empire and beyond, a remarkable number of whom “moved easily and fluidly between business and academia, the arts and sciences, philosophy and the design of door handles.” The city was just the right size, too: At its zenith, it was “big enough to absorb incomers, yet small enough for everyone to meet and mix.” Also important was that distinctive institution known as the Viennese café (of which there were about 600 in 1900), which not only provided tons of Gemütlichkeit but also enabled the locals to have encounters that fostered “creativity and innovation.” Other key factors in the unique mix that was Vienna were its strong civic commitment to liberalism, education, and “critical rationalism”; its musical and literary salons and countless cabarets; and, even among literary and artistic and musical types, a lively interest in cutting-edge science.
A heady mix. But somehow, alas, Cockett manages to turn all this promising material into a surprisingly plodding book — a long series of thumbnail portraits, written in a rather stuffy academic prose, in which there are too many abstractions and generalizations and too few engaging anecdotes and colorful details. We never really get the feel of the place, and the people rarely rise off the page. Nor, by the way, would you know, from reading Vienna, that the city of Freud and Klimt is now 38 percent Muslim. (There may not be 600 cafés, but there are at least 85 mosques.) Still, despite its drawbacks, it’s impossible to come away from Cockett’s book without a fresh appreciation of the importance of Vienna and the outsized part that its people played in the formation of the modern world. Just don’t tell the Scots.
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