‘Vienna’ Review: Where the World Went Modern

In 1980, the intellectual historian Carl E. Schorske published “Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture,” noting that he had turned his attention to the Austrian capital to better understand the “fertile breeding grounds” that produced the 20th century’s ahistorical society. Schorske was concerned that the modernist rejection of history was linked to a general disengagement from politics, a loss of faith in our capacities to make sense of the world in order to improve it. The roots of this rejection he found in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century.

Richard Cockett, a historian and journalist, holds a similar view of Vienna’s importance. In “Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World,” he expands Schorske’s time frame to include the interactions of artists, politicians, scientists and writers through the interwar period. “To understand the trajectories of contemporary societies and politics, particularly in the West,” he writes, “we first have to understand how and where so many of them started.”