IWP Books

Fin-De-Siècle Vienna Reading List:

Fin-De-Siècle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske
Thinking with History by Carl E. Schorske
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin
Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
Indian Summer by Adalbert Stifter
For Browsing: Ver Sacrum

Jul 2, 2023

From Thinking with History by Carl E. Schorske:

I avoided a history major, which I felt would tie me down. Instead, I enrolled in Columbia’s two-year humanities Colloquium, which allowed one to construct one’s own program. Colloquium was centered in great books seminars conceived in a more classical spirit than usual in the university’s prevailing pragmatist culture. The seminars were team-taught by truly outstanding young faculty members, such as Moses Hadas and Theodoric Westbrook, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Watching their play of minds on the texts awoke in me for the first time a sense of the sheer intellectual delight of ideas.

The thought of an academic vocation, however, was slow in coming. Actually, I aspired to a career in singing, which I had studied since high-school days. By my junior year, the sad truth grew upon me that my voice simply had not the quality to support a career in Lieder and the kind of Mozart roles I dreamt of. In the same year, I enrolled in young Jacques Barzun’s course in nineteenth-century intellectual history. Barzun simply overwhelmed his few students with the range of the subject and the brilliance of his exploration of it. At work on his biography of Hector Berlioz, Barzun injected much musical material into his course. While I shared with my classmates the exciting experience that this course turned out to be, I drew one rather personal conclusion from it: intellectual history was a field in which my two principal extra-academic interests – music and politics – could be studied not in their usual isolation, but in their relationship under the ordinance of time. I was ready to pursue it.

Jul 2, 2023

From Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske:

The Jewish state as he conceived it in his pamphlet of the same name had no trace of Jewish character. There would be no common language – certainly not Hebrew. “After all, we can’t speak Hebrew with each other. Who among us knows enough Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language? That word doesn’t exist.” The new state would have a “linguistic federalism,” in which each would speak the language he still loves, that of “our fatherlands, from which we were forced out.” Only Yiddish, “the crippled and repressed ghetto language,” “the purloined tongue of prisoners,” would be abandoned. The hallmark of indignity must not survive in a cultivated cosmopolitan’s paradise. Religion, too, would be kept in its place. “Theocratic archaisms [Velleitäten]” of the clergy would not arise. “Faith holds us together, science makes us free.” The clergy, while honored, would be confined to their temples like the army to the barracks, lest they cause trouble to a state committed to free thought. In all its features, Herzl’s promised land was in fact not a Jewish utopia but a liberal one. The dreams of assimilation which could not be realized in Europe would be realized in Zion, where Jews would have the nobility and honor of which Herzl had dreamed since his youth.

Jul 2, 2023

New at IWP Books: Times and Tendencies (1931) by Agnes Repplier.