“Vienna – How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World” by Richard Cockett

I could not even begin to count the books I own and have read on fin de siècle Vienna, the Habsburgs, the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, biographies of prominent individuals who lived, or were born under the Habsburgs etc. Despite each book adding to what I already knew, after having read a dozen or so, the knowledge became incremental and often, I found myself reading chapter after chapter of material I was already familiar with. I nonetheless felt compelled to keep reading in case some new nugget came my way.

Most recently, this was the case with Kieron Pim’s excellent biography of Joseph Roth, Endless Flight, in which a quarter of the book was spent explaining the world in which Roth grew up. Once I got past the bits I already knew, the rest of the book was a fascinating exposition of Roth’s writing and a brilliant contextualisation of his work. 

Richard Cockett’s book Vienna – How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World is altogether different. It is the book on Vienna with information that will be new, surprising and unfamiliar to even the most ardent historic Austrophile. His book takes us a generation further along and proves what I have often written: If nineteenth century Vienna attracted genius, by the first decades of the twentieth, it was clear that the city was producing its own. With few exceptions, most of the individuals who emerge from this fascinating study of Viennese talent were born between 1880 and 1910. There were exceptions of course with Arnold Schoenberg born in 1874, and fin de siècle Viennese who contributed to modern thought despite living earlier. These include the physicists Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), and it is specifically with these two names that Cockett starts us on a journey that takes us to a Vienna that was far more than just a city of twelve-tone-music, secessionist painting and erotic literature. His narrative arch tells a very different story and one that was not based on the whims of taste, fashion or even aesthetics, but one that was based on empiricism and the compulsion post-cataclysm to create a “New Human” inhabited in the new society created by inter-war Vienna. Indeed, he sets up a city that was already in conflict with the subjective and the objective. He takes us into the arguments behind what could be scientifically proven and tested and what was mere speculation or the product of mind games of people such as Otto Weininger, Sigmund Freud or even Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In both cases, the Viennese who found themselves in these often-opposing camps were nearly all Jewish or politically incompatible with Nazi ideology. Many felt themselves to be ethically compromised by the Austro-fascism imposed by Engelbert Dollfuß after 1934. This meant that their dissemination of ideas would go well beyond the borders of the City and find their way across the globe. It is thanks to some of these Viennese thinkers, tinkerers and “machers” that for better or worse, the world now has fitted kitchens, shopping malls, focus groups and image-based advertising. Perhaps most characteristically dynamic of the last half century were the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and the “Austrian School” that politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan viewed as capitalism’s “silver bullet” promising prosperity for all. Behind each of these developments stood entire battalions of thinkers with factions standing in well-argued opposition. 

No city seems to have allowed more room for feminine professional thought and development than Vienna, once it managed to burst through the male bastions of its many universities and colleges. But once these barriers were broken, it is astonishing how quickly women moved into previously male dominated disciplines such as physics, maths, economics, architecture and law.

The seed of this dynamism was not so much fin de siècle Vienna – that was more the soil – but the lesser examined Vienna known as “Red Vienna”. This was the Vienna that became the Social Democratic fortress that emerged between the wars. It was the city that sought and found solutions to the myriad of social problems that resulted from an imperial capital after losing an empire, populated by impoverished multi-nationals with its bourgeoisie financially decimated. The movement in art, literature and music known as “New Objectivity” was merely the aesthetic expression of the civic solutions being sought by the city’s Socialist municipality. Just as New Objectivity and Schoenbergian serialism emerged out of the chaos of atonal Expressionism, so Red Vienna emerged out of the chaos of war and centuries of Habsburg authority.  As in the arts, it was a period when emotions were irrelevant. Finding solutions in order to create “the New Human” was the ultimate goal. The concept of “scientific” was applied to disciplines that had been purely practical or creative until then. It was the sober realisation that women and men were fundamentally, intellectually equal and in times of crisis, it was important to tap into everyone’s ability.  Housing, education, nutrition and human development became areas that demanded facts, not abstract ideas, or fanciful theories. Though not mentioned, I recall a prominent editorial by Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, a Life in the Woods, on the front page of the Neue Freie Presse, from December 31. 1919 in which he made a passionate appeal for un-squeamish sex education from the age of fourteen for boys and most importantly, for girls.  

There were countless “circles” that were inter-disciplinary such as the predominantly bourgeois,  Jewish “Junge Kunst” with the composer Erich Zeisl, the writer Hilde Spiel and the philosopher Fred Hernfeld (later in America, known as Alfred Farau). None of these coffee house circles was considered complete without a musical component. Far more significant and by no means a mere “coffee house circle” was the “Vienna Circle” or Wiener Kreis”. It was based at Vienna’s University from 1924 and bereft of artists of any sort. Perhaps for that reason, it would become the intellectual engine of logical empiricism and dominate municipal-policy debates during the inter-war years. Its members were economists, philosophers, logisticians and mathematicians whose central thesis was knowledge could only be verified by direct observation or deductive reasoning.  Empiricism was in the air, perhaps also explaining Arnold Schoenberg’s attempts to synthesise music and maths in 1923 when he began teaching his twelve-tone ideas. I suspect, that such artistic pretentions would never have been taken seriously by the dead-eyed thinkers of the Vienna Circle.

It is equally sobering when Cockett demonstrates how this focus on empiricism came at the price of ignoring the complexities of the individual or even an ethical response to humanity. The same mindset could and would lead to some of the most ruthless Nazis also coming from Vienna’s brainier circles. Eugenics and social engineering were undertaken by Viennese Nazis with an insensitive enthusiasm, arguably the direct result of sociological empiricism. No human price was too high to pay in the interest of provable outcomes. Though not mentioned, it tacitly reminds us of more recent debates on the ethics of whether experiments carried out by Nazi scientist could be used as a basis for contemporary research. The reduction of all life forms to the gods of science, mathematics and empiricism would prove to be a double bladed sword that could be used to better society, as was the case in Red Vienna, or justify the genocide of those individuals deemed racially or socially incompatible.

Against the hardened scientists and intellectuals who remained in Nazi Europe are those who fled, bringing the same calculating sobriety to new homelands. It was this tactless absolutism that impressed and intimidated when refugees dealt with new communities in new homelands. And though Cockett does not linger on music, there are so many inter-actions between the city’s musicians and its scientists, philosophers, doctors and architects that music in one form or another always seems to run in parallel. For example, the economist Katharina (Käthe) Marianna Pick was the sister of the composer and mother of musical therapy, Vally Weigl. The composer Walter Arlen’s first cousin and living in the same expanded family home was the advertising guru Ern(e)st Dichter. It seems unlikely without in-depth genealogical research that the many dynamic Viennese with the surname Deutsch were all unrelated: There was the musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch who organised the works of Franz Schubert and established that the six-year-old Walter Aptowitzer (later Arlen) had absolute pitch. Then there was the Socialist sports supremo Julius Deutsch, the Communist master-spy Arnold Deutsch, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch and the actor Ernest Deutsch. This is not even counting the number of thinkers and “machers” who grew up in musical households such as Karl Popper or Ernst Gombrich. Musical cross-fertilisation was just about wherever one looked:  the educationalist Eugenie Schwarzwald provided Arnold Schoenberg with the facilities to teach Alban Berg, Karl Horwitz, Anton Webern and Egon Wellesz. There would have been no Second Viennese School without her input.  Later, she hired Wellesz to teach music at her school for academically gifted girls.  Hanns Eisler and the Marxist philosopher Georg (György) Lukás bunked up together after being demobbed from the Austro-Hungarian army in 1918. Eisler’s father Rudolf compiled the dictionary of philosophical terms (still in use today) and his brother Gerhart was a Communist spy in America who was denounced by their sister Elfriede, better known as Ruth Fischer, the founder of the first Communist Party outside of Soviet Russia with her party card noting her as membership “no.1”. 

Cockett writes and edits for the Economist, so it comes as no surprise that the “Austrian School of Economics” with Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, Karl Menger, Oskar Morgenstern and others make frequent appearances and are even accorded their own chapter. I am no economist, so this was the chapter that challenged me the most, yet in the end also enlightened the most.  The Austrian School of Economics ultimately grew out of the ethos of the Viennese Circle of logical empiricism.  To put this in words, assuming I understood the basics of Cockett’s explanation, this simply means, economics that are provable by data and not extrapolated by historic speculation. As such, it was easier to tabulate markets and form a theory than to form a theory and then impose it on markets.  Markets are, in the end, people.  Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume it was an instrument of the political right, just because Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher embraced various aspects of the Austrian School. The Vienna Circle of 1924 was as much an element of Red Vienna as the social housing, adult education and deregulation of opportunities. Ideas of the Left from say Otto Neurath, or Karl Polyanyi and those that were  requisitioned by the right,  such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek of Gottfried Haberler all developed in the biotope of critical rationalism. As Cockett points out, these gentlemen (and some women) may have disagreed, but they were resorting to empiricism rather than the extrapolations based on historic hypotheses.

One of many points, when I had to put the book down just in order to absorb what I had read, was when Cockett pointed out that the Austrian School’s ultimate aim was to take the model of the  Austro-Hungarian Empire and impose it onto the entire planet. First off, as long as I can remember, the Habsburg model has in my lifetime always been viewed as decrepit, clerical  and a system hoisted by its Roman Catholic  petard.  Cockett points out, however, that the Austrian empire was (largely) not an empire of conquests and colonisation, but an empire of treaties and marriage. This is in stark contrast to the British, French, Spanish, Turkish and Russian empires.  Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube – ‘Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry’.  It was an expression that originated in the fifteenth and sixteenth century in explanation of the rise of the House of Habsburg. As anyone knows who has lived in Austria, it is often cited that a letter or package could be posted in Czernowitz on Tuesday and arrive in Innsbruck on Wednesday. It was, in other words, a system of federalisation that consolidated trade, tariffs, taxes and currency, allowed free passage of goods and people without restrictions, while not interfering more than necessary within the running of individual nations or ethnic communities that made up the realm. The ultimate arbiter was the Emperor. And if racism, antisemitism, anti-Slav sentiment were present in the population, they were not present in the actual House of Austria.  How could they be? To favour one group over another would be to upset a very delicately balanced apple cart. This is why it took until 1897 for the Emperor Franz Joseph to swear in the antisemitic Karl Lueger, though he had won the election as Mayor of Vienna in 1895.  

It was this free and unrestricted flow of people, capital, services and goods that Friedrich Hayek put to Mrs Thatcher and would eventually turn in to the Single Market within the European Union. Indeed, it was Hayek’s ultimate work, his three volume Law, Legislation and Liberty that made the greatest impression on her. The work cited most often by Libertarians who have essentially requisitioned Hayek for their own ideological purposes is The Road to Serfdom, written in 1944 when intellectual arguments were rife as to how war torn Europe was to be rebuilt. Admittedly, Hayek was no fan of Communism, but elements of the Austrian School have served the left as well as the right.

Taking a slight detour, I was personally cast into utter puzzlement at a sequence of facts I found difficult to rationalise. The word “Brexit” is mentioned only once or twice in Cockett’s book, but the  think tank that most fundamentally supported Brexit was the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that supposedly disseminates the ideas and policies of the Austrian School, and most notably, Friedrich Hayek. And yet, Hayek’s stated objective was to create exactly the universal system that he knew and rated growing up in Habsburg Vienna. Indeed, when one takes the concept of logical empiricism, we can all remember the charts and economic models that showed how damaging it would be economically for the UK to leave the EU. These arguments were constantly met by exactly the sort of historic speculation and extrapolation that the Austrian School dismissed.  Though not stated, it seems clear that Hayek’s progeny would have Hayek turning in his grave. At least, this is how I understood things.

This is a remarkable book – some of it – indeed quite a bit of it I could disagree with. His treatment of music in the greater scheme of things is slight, and perhaps this is no bad thing. Only at the end of the book, he notes that for the Viennese of that generation, a reluctance “to leave a school of thought would negate an entire life’s work dedicated to methodical individualism”. This may have been true of Ernst Gombrich, but my goodness, it is not applicable to Arnold Schoenberg. And for this reason, I see the superficial treatment of music in this important book as rather a good thing, since music has a tendency to take over in similar books. The revolution in music definitely thought of itself as empirical and critical, but unlike so many other things described in this book, it saw the idea as more important than audiences, in other words, people. Schoenberg’s revolution remains inaccessible to most audiences even today, and perhaps the phenomenon of Schoenberg is even more important than his musical legacy.  (I speculate, and refer to my previous blog post)  This is something that Cockett emphasises again and again: the interest in people and motivation to create a “new (and presumably better) human” was the primary motivation; not gold stars in ivory towers. 

I’ll conclude with a sentence in Cockett’s own conclusion that says so much:

By its very nature, Vienna’s empire of critical rationalism was pluralist and inclusive, in that they privileged their intellectual disposition over the cruel and sectarian identity politics of ethno-nationalism that gradually closed minds and hardened hearts through Europe after the First World War as it continues to do today.