The broken circle

THERE ARE FOUR AGES OF MODERN VIENNA. Before the First World War, it was cultured and rich; from 1918 until the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, it was cultured and poor; from 1938 to the end of the Allied occupation, it was just poor; and from 1955 to the present, it has just been rich.

Viennese high culture thus lasted only about 40 years, from the late 1890s to the late 1930s. In that brief span, it was the laboratory for many experiments: some that helped to create our world; others that came close to destroying it. Creative destruction, as Joseph Schumpeter called it, was as Viennese as Sachertorte. It was the misfortune of the most brilliant minds to emerge there, however, that their most creative ideas were seen by the envious, incomprehending multitudes as destructive of everything they held dear.

Why were the first two periods, under the Habsburg Dual Monarchy and the First Austrian Republic, so much more creative than the era since? It was hardly a question of prosperity, for the postwar hyperinflation wiped out the savings of the bourgeoisie who patronised high culture. A century later, David Edmonds observes in a stimulating, scintillating new book on the Vienna Circle, the city has recovered its wealth but not its energy. While the coffee houses are still flourishing, their denizens argue about money and politics, never ideas. The difference between pre-war and present-day Vienna is, of course, the absence of the largest Jewish minority of any capital in Europe. The truth is that the Viennese got rid of their Jews and replaced them with tourists. Maybe they found tourists more gemütlich.

One thing about early-twentieth-century Vienna we think we know is that everyone who mattered was Jewish, or at least half-Jewish. But this is a myth. Klimt, Schiele, Webern and Musil were not Jewish; Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein and Schnitzler