From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

A comparison of Vienna and Berlin, the two most significant centres of German-speaking decadence, provides insight into the relationship of social class and aesthetic experience in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1897–1914) prior to World War I and during the tumultuous period of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). The cultural and urban development of both cities, in their shared departure from nineteenth-century certainties, qualifies them for comparison in the context of decadence: Vienna’s imperial decline clashed with a radical re-thinking of tradition in art, and Berlin’s expressionistic distortions brought forth a brutal modernity that conservative thinkers considered to be the expression of racial degeneracy. To show how social history shaped the aesthetics of decadence at the time, the chapter focuses on the decadent art and writing of Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler in Vienna, followed by Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin, and Christopher Isherwood in Berlin.