1 - Cultural Parameters between the Wars: A Reassessment of the Vienna Circles

Summary

THE AIM OF THIS ESSAY IS TO PROVIDE an overview of the field of cultural production in Vienna between the world wars based on a wide range of historical documentation and scholarly research. In a celebrated study entitled Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) Carl Schorske highlighted the “cohesiveness” of the Austrian intellectual and artistic elite at the turn of the twentieth century, while at the same time demonstrating that it was “alienated from political power.” Building on Schorske's seminal insights, my own research on the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus explored the generational shift that occurred around the time of the First World War, prompting leading artists and authors to become more politically engaged. To illustrate the resulting tensions between cultural cohesion and political commitment, I created a series of diagrams reflecting the dynamics of creativity.

The great strength of the “Viennese avant-garde,” according to the first volume of my Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, “lay in its internal organization.” By analogy with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, the whole structure of avant-garde culture could be pictured as a “condensed system of micro-circuits.” This idea was illustrated by a diagram entitled “Creative Interactions in Vienna around 1910,” incorporating fifteen intersecting circles, each of them centered on a dominant personality: from Victor Adler and Rosa Mayreder, through Freud, Kraus, and Adolf Loos, to Schoenberg, Mahler, and Klimt. Each was surrounded by a group of disciples, and the crucial feature was that the circles intersected, ensuring a rapid circulation of ideas. This model of creative cross-fertilization helped to explain that “contribution to twentieth-century civilization which has made the Vienna of Freud and Herzl, Schoenberg and Wittgenstein so renowned.”