C'est la Viennese
Orgy of aesthetes or city of science? Plus, Freud sings Mozart.
This is the second part of a four-part series on genius, networking, and Vienna, based on my reporting from the “Vienna 1900” conference that happened at the Austrian Cultural Forum in May. If you haven’t read the first part, it would probably be a good idea to do so before reading this.
Things happen because people talk. The problem is, not everybody talks, contrary to what Neon Trees, in that one song, would have you believe.
By talk, I mean say what you really think. Despite our best efforts these days to create “safe spaces” for “dialogue,” to let “both sides” have a “voice,” and to encourage our peers to “speak your truth,” our go-to communication style is deceptive. If you’ve ever been part of a discussion where people say “these conversations are so important” or “we need to be having conversations like this,” instead of actually having the conversation itself, you know what I mean.
Whatever we actually think, there is pressure from all sides to manage the impression we make on other people. As a result, we often say the opposite of what we think. Not in a Freudian-slip sort of way—whereby what you say is revealing—but intentionally: It’s what you don’t say which, if said, could be revealing, even cancel-worthy. And that’s scary, because no one wants anyone to be mad at them. To stay in the good graces of your kin, then, you zip it. So, more of a stop than a slip. And hardly Freudian.
Even when we try to be “transparent” or “vulnerable” about, say, our mental health struggles and “trauma,” we now veil the expression of those struggles in therapeutic (and often pseudo-therapeutic) language. If we all refer to the same terminology, the thinking goes, if we all use the same words to describe how we think and feel, maybe then people might finally understand us—know us. Maybe that’s the way to “normalize” what we’re feeling so we don’t feel “othered” and “excluded,” but, rather, “validated.” We are encouraged to tell people what they want to hear, in terms they will immediately understand. We walk away still misunderstood because we don’t sound like ourselves; we sound like everyone else.
Let Neon Trees summarize: “Never thought I’d live to see the day when everybody’s words got in the way.”
So valid.
But we wouldn’t have the philosophy of Neon Trees without the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) convinced that the deepest truths cannot even be expressed with language: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” And we wouldn’t have Wittgenstein without the city that birthed him: Vienna. It was here, specifically around 1900, that everyone talked—really talked, everybody’s words getting in the way of everybody else’s, in universities, salons, and cafés.
And it was in Manhattan, just a few blocks away from Rockefeller Center, that the Austrian Cultural Forum hosted a two-day conference in May dedicated to the question of how talk, cultural synthesis, cross-disciplinary study, and networking made Vienna—the city of Freud, Klimt, Mahler, Musil, and Mach—the ideal cultural crossroads. If this “Vienna 1900” summit proved anything, it’s that Vienna’s virtues are within our reach, and its vices are ours to resist.
The location of the Austrian Cultural Forum, which calls itself “Austria’s leading cultural representation in the United States,” is apt. The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 with capital of what would today be around $3 billion. In the 1930s and 40s, it allocated much of these funds to kickstart the American careers of Viennese refugees, including the economist Ludwig von Mises, the anthropologist Karl Polanyi, and the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, as well as several members of the Vienna Circle of logicians. It also subsidized programs abroad, like Charlotte Bühler’s Vienna Psychological Institute, which became a more practical corollary to Freud’s Wednesday Psychological Society, as well as the Institute for Business Cycle Research, which compiled data to forecast economic trends, a novel and controversial practice at the time.
I don’t know whether the building of the Forum was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (no one got back to me when I reached out to ask), but, whoever funded it, even if it was just Austria’s Ministry for European and International Affairs, got their money’s worth: Passing through the building’s doors feels like stepping onto a spaceship—a very cultured spaceship.
Designed by Raimund Abraham, the 24-story building is skinny. The interior feels futuristic and cold. Many surfaces are metallic. But out of all the structure’s curiosities, the space it takes up is the most astonishing. The plot it sits on is only 24.5 feet wide and 81 feet deep. Somehow, Abraham triumphed over this constraint. Most likely, he did so with pleasure. His own philosophy, after all, was inspired by Ernst Mach, who in 1886 became the first person to photograph a shock wave and whose name we use to measure the speed of an object relative to the speed of sound (e.g., Mach 1). Abraham incorporated shock into his architecture. The building collides with, rather than comforts, whoever inhabits it. There is even a squeeze on the building itself as it collides with its adjacent neighbors.
This deftness at putting theory into practice was, I would learn, a particularly Viennese tendency. Economists, scientists, ad men—they all applied ideas to “real life,” said Richard Cockett, senior editor at the Economist and author of Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale, 2023), in his panel presentation. He went even further: He said that fin-de-siècle Vienna was a “city of science.”
For enthusiasts of “Vienna 1900” who think of it, lovingly, as an orgy of aesthetes and absent-minded professors, “city of science” is a surprising characterization. Stefan Zweig, in The World of Yesterday, his valedictory memoir about pre-War Europe, called Vienna an “epicurean city” with a “fanatical love of art,” where “native pride had focused most strongly on distinction in artistic achievement.” He sharply contrasted the Viennese “spirit of concord” with “German efficiency” and the “greedy will of Germany to rise supreme.” “We Viennese loved to chat at our ease,” he wrote, “[and] let all have their share without grudging it.” In Vienna, according to Zweig, “people believed in ‘progress’ more than in the Bible,” but it was a gentle, leisurely progress. To force anything was anathema.
Even the German and Viennese concepts of Bildung, the shared Teutonic tradition of intellectual self-improvement that crystallized during the Enlightenment, differed. The German Bildung connoted innate intelligence and upper-class status, traits that much too easily eventually found their way into racial analogues in Nazi ideology. The Viennese, by contrast, thought of Bildung more as a process of becoming rather than being, of experience rather than essence. One who was born outside the tradition of Bildung—non-German-speaking immigrants who came to Vienna from the outer reaches of the Hapsburg Empire, for example—could access its fruits through education, reading, and socializing. A Bildungsroman, after all, is a journey of a character through growth, not a portrait of an already-formed, perfect being.
The Viennese version of Bildung was built into the city’s universities, which were free and some of the most numerous in Europe during the late nineteenth century. Girls and boys ages 6 to 14 were mandated to go to school and the numbers of universities exceeded the rate of population growth from 1851 (101 universities) to 1910 (432 of them). By 1900, Austria had the second highest number of college students in all of Europe, surpassed only by Switzerland. But these students didn’t just study one subject. The University of Vienna only had four faculties: Medicine and Anatomy, Theology, Law, and Philosophy. This encouraged students to explore a variety of disciplines and didn’t require them to specialize until the very end of their studies. As Cockett writes, “There were no arbitrary divisions between ‘science’ and ‘humanities’—all was ‘philosophy,’ in its purest sense, the study of fundamental questions.” With polymathic idols like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner, the Austrians couldn’t help but design their educational system with the goal of creating more mythic, versatile geniuses.
But the most crucial thing about a Viennese education was how much of it didn’t happen at school. It happened first and foremost at home, in salons. Take the Wittgenstein household, the “Palais Wittgenstein,” as it was called. Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim were there. Grillparzer, the poet, was there. Mahler was there. Rodin. Not to mention Josef Labor. Piano recitals by Ludwig’s brother, Paul, were frequent, and the most important music critics, like Julius Korngold (father of film composer Erich Wolfgang), would show up to review them. Klimt called Ludwig’s father, Karl, the patriarch of the family, “Minister of Fine Art.” Indeed it all might have been too much, even for the young Ludwig. He wrote in 1947, four years before his death, at age 62:
I am so afraid of someone’s playing the piano in the house that, when this happens and then the tinkling stops, I have a sort of hallucination of its still going on. I can hear it quite clearly even though I know that it’s all in my imagination.1
Scarred by cultural saturation! Although “The House of Wittgenstein,” as Alexander Waugh titled his book about the milieu, was the greatest salon in Vienna, it was one of many.
When the home didn’t suffice, the café picked up the slack. After school, university students could find their professors at the cafés Central, Landtmann, and Prückel, holding court and discusses ideas. Zweig recalled attending sessions “for hours every day.”
In summary, a Viennese education wasn’t just formal. And because it happened in so many different places throughout the city, you would run into all different kinds of people and experience what Cockett calls “an easy flow between the professional world and academia… the dead hand of specialization had yet to intrude.” The state and the family both took responsibility for exposing young learners to a universe of ideas. This was, without a doubt, unique to Vienna. I’ll show that conclusively in the next installment.
And yet!
And yet, despite the open minds that this education fostered, science seems to be the one thing the Viennese minds couldn’t get behind. Cockett himself states that while the tide of Darwinism was sweeping Europe, especially Germany, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Vienna “emerged as a centre for Darwin-scepticism.” Hardly the kind of city that would seem to welcome radical scientific invention. To over-emphasize Vienna’s standing as a “city of science,” then, would be to diminish what made it unique. If we believe too much in this characterization, our image of Austria will start to resemble that of Germany.
The discipline of “German Studies” already struggles with letting Austria be Austria and not some satellite state of Germany. Indeed, thinking of Vienna as a “city of science” ignores Stefan Zweig’s real and important distinction between the two countries. Think of Paul Arnheim, a character in Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930-43). Arnheim is a Prussian industrialist, dilettante, and schmoozer who ingratiates himself in Viennese society. Eventually, the Austrian nobility is shocked to find him having come all the way from Berlin to Vienna for an official meeting about, of all things, a patriotic campaign to advertise Austria’s greatness to the empire in preparation for the emperor’s 1918 jubilee. And they really believe that’s the reason he’s there! All eyes are on him, like children staring into the Large Hadron Collider. The innocent staring into the face of industry. Until it’s revealed that he’s actually there to buy oil fields in Austria for Prussia. Such enlightened people, and yet they failed to presume any malevolent motives on Arnheim’s part, content to be merely astonished at his presence—classic Viennese aestheticism at work, even at the level of interpersonal relations.
And we can’t forget Vienna’s longstanding backwardness—its apprehension about embracing scientific advances, especially in medicine. As William M. Johnston writes in his 1972 book, The Austrian Mind, up until the late nineteenth century, Vienna had a “reverence for the dead [that] encouraged indifference to the living.” So much so that physicians prized “postmortem autopsies more highly than saving a patient.” The Viennese tendency toward what Johnston calls “therapeutic nihilism”—i.e. some things just can’t be fixed—ran deep, and was due in large part to the Catholicism of the society, a hard-boiled faith that everything is in God’s hands. This encouraged complacency: Better to let nature run its course and analyze what happened after. What Wittgenstein said about science in 1949 could have been said by any number of Viennese intellectuals who grew up when he did:
I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort.2
This is part of the reason why political activism wasn’t as pronounced in Vienna as it was in other European cities following the 1848 revolutions. Vienna only became radical and scientific when its brilliant minds realized they needed to come up with ways to rebuild their society after the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. Austria-Hungary had after all incurred the most casualties of any other country: 90 per cent of the original 7,800,000 men mobilized were either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. And even then, science would soon—indeed, too soon, with a shocking rapidity that exposed just how repressed yet frontal antisemitism was in the Austrian mind—morph into racial pseudoscience following the Anschluss. As Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess declared in 1934, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”
Maybe it was better that Vienna shunned science for so long…
Nevertheless, from 1918, when the Hapsburg Empire fell, to around 1934, when fascism ushered in the period known as “Black Vienna,” an unprecedented embrace of socialism led “Red Vienna” to produce idea-driven innovation in an effort to improve the deplorable material conditions of the industrial working class. All in an effort to create what Austro-Marxist politician Max Adler called die neuen Menschen—new humans. The most importance success to come out of this period is still Vienna’s municipal housing initiative. With two-thirds of middle-class Viennese currently living in subsidized housing, the program continues to make it one of the world’s most affordable cities, 100-years on.
It’s dazzling how much else got done after the Social Democrats formed a coalition with the Christian Socialists and won the Austrian general election in 1919. The House of Lords was dissolved, aristocratic titles discarded, royal palaces confiscated, the death penalty abolished; the jury system was democratized, the school system reformed, an eight-hour work day was introduced, universal adult suffrage was granted, and a graduated income tax was established. Unfortunately, in 1920, the socialists were defeated in the general election, leaving only the municipal socialism of Vienna. The city thus became, in Cockett’s words, a “small red dot” on the map of the most conservative country in Europe.
But if we look closely, around 1900, the seeds of Vienna’s future scientific advances were already latent, particularly in psychology. And even though Vienna at this time was emphatically not a “city of science,” psychoanalysis has stronger scientific roots than is typically thought. And it was just as much of a synthesis of disciplines as any science.
But to understand how psychoanalysis could have only originated in Vienna, we have to understand how Viennese its founder really was. And how he was just as music-pilled as he was psychology-pilled.
Or was he?
It’s because of the cross-disciplinary nature of ideas in Vienna, according to Princeton professor of literature Rubén Gallo, that in 1898 we find Freud whistling an aria from Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, as part of his “Revolutionary” dream.
As he tells it in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud dreams that he’s waiting for the train. On the platform, he sees an aristocrat, Count Thun, brush off an attendant and swagger into a car without showing a ticket. Freud also sees several people pay bribes for compartments. All the while, he is made to sit in a hot waiting room until the next train comes. Frustrated, he decides to insist on his right to be put onto the train. But instead of taking action, he starts to sing the aria from Figaro’s wedding, “Se vuol ballare, signor contino,” the challenge of Figaro to Count Almaviva. The rest of the day (in the dream), Freud has revolutionary thoughts against the count, who is known as “Count Do-Nothing.” But Freud recognizes that he himself is the real Count Do-Nothing, since, in the dream, he is about to embark on a vacation. That he is taking the trip in 1898—the fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 revolutions—further explains this uncharacteristic defiance.
Gallo, who is writing a book on Freud and opera, frames the dream as an instance of, in his words, “art trumping politics.” Instead of demanding his rights, Freud takes refuge in music. Gallo sees this as an indication of how important music was to Freud.
But it is well-documented that, compared to other Viennese, Freud couldn’t have cared less about music. As Peter Gay’s biography revealed, Anna Freud said her father “never went to concerts.” When he did, they were always operas. This affinity, coupled with his well-documented love of fiction, suggests that he gravitated toward the medium because of its literary, not musical, value. He loved narrative, character, and words. Absolute music—symphonies and chamber music—were most likely too abstract for him, their “latent content” beyond his grasp. He needed the suggestive potential of words.
Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and musicologist specializing in Viennese Modernism, jumped on Gallo’s perceived misinterpretation. Bow-tied, he conjured his booming bass voice to deny Freud’s musicality. He recognized that, unlike some of the great multitalented intellectuals in the city of music who doubled as worthy musicians (like Wittgenstein), Freud couldn’t carry a tune. Botstein pointed out that Freud boasted even in his recollection of this very dream that probably no one would have recognized the tune if they heard him singing it. Freud’s taste was also remarkably conservative. His daughters remembered him liking three operas by Mozart, Bizet’s Carmen, and Wagner’s Die Miestersinger. That’s it. No Debussy, no Richard Strauss. Not even the Waltz King, Johann Strauss. That Wittgenstein shared Freud’s musical conservatism (although the former knew more music) suggests that it was not just “the most original minds” who “had to contend with a public predominantly hostile to dissonant forms of creativity,” as historian Edward Timms wrote in his biography of Karl Kraus; sometimes, it was the radicals themselves who were resistant to change.
Why such a radical thinker as Freud could be so conservative in his artistic sensibility is the topic of a future essay. But one might rebut Gallo with a different explanation of Freud’s dream: He was, simply, Viennese. The Viennese, unlike their Hungarian neighbors, were not a people of political action. Their “Biedermeier” attitude, as Johnston calls it, was formed through Catholic piety and the longevity and stability (indeed, perceived immortality) of the Hapsburg Dynasty and resulted in an attitude of political resignation. While other European countries were in revolt in 1848, the Austrians were themselves a whole bunch of “Count Do-Nothings,” a condition that Freud’s subconscious seems to be channeling in the dream as he acts as a stand-in for the Austrian people, fifty years on from their inaction. And it doesn’t matter that Freud was Jewish. Viennese Jews largely considered themselves just as Viennese as the gentiles of the city because of the democratic culture of Bildung. It was Viennese to sing Mozart in Freud’s situation. Take any other middle-class, cultivated Viennese man—the odds, I think, are pretty good that he would also respond to injustice with song. Freud, despite his wishes of retaliation against the count, was conditioned to do nothing.
This is how enmeshed the different disciplines and arts of Vienna were, that even though Freud couldn’t carry a tune, his instinct in the dream was to sing Mozart, to channel his defiance through an aesthetic medium. He wasn’t special. It’s the other side of the same coin that led Wittgenstein to fear the tinkling of a piano in the house.
If Freud wasn’t special in his reaction to injustice, it seems only right to ask how special he was in his ideas. How much of them did he come up with himself and how many of them were drawn from other sources? And how “Viennese” was psychoanalysis? For that matter, how “1900” was it? These are the questions that George Makari, a psychiatrist, set out to answer in his 2008 book, Revolution in the Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, as well as in a whirlwind PowerPoint presentation at the Forum.
Makari isn’t the first to ask these questions. Bruno Bettleheim, pioneer of child psychology, believed that the creation of psychoanalysis could have only happened in Vienna. In his 1989 essay, “Freud’s Vienna,” Bettleheim lays out some reasons why: the city’s fascination with insanity and death (heightened by a huge amount of suicides between 1860 and 1938, including the beloved Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, which made the Hapsburg Empire, in Johnston’s words, a “center for suicide”); a general “inward turn” brought on by awareness that the empire was in decline; and sex, best typified in the work of Arthur Schnitzler, who Freud called his alter-ego because his insights into psychology were so similar to Freud’s. Freud was always a little bitter that Schnitzler got to them through writing fiction while Freud got to them through grueling hours of treating patients.
But Makari’s reasons are more clinical, more specific to the developments of psychology and psychiatry themselves than to whatever metaphysical current was running through the Viennese people as a result of the waning empire. Specifically, he argues that psychoanalysis was a synthesis of various French and German schools of psychology. He says, for example, that it was French psychopathology that led Freud to develop his theory of psychic defense—the idea that the ego keeps the id in check. And it was Gustav Fechner’s psychophysics, the science of how physical stimuli affect the brain, that formed the groundwork for Freud’s efforts to locate the subconscious in the brain. German biophysics, the study of how physical and chemical laws affect the brain, also influenced Freud, especially through Ernst Wilhelm Brücke, who he studied with as a medical student.
But in the 1890s, biophysics started to go out of fashion. At the same time, as Bettleheim recognized, Romantic theories of mind and interest in insanity were coming back, after fading away around mid-century. It was the perfect time for Freud to synthesize all these different strands—both French and German—into one discipline. Psychoanalysis was, then, very “1900.” Freud just met the moment.
It was also very Viennese, but maybe not in the way Bettleheim led us to believe. Whereas Bettleheim attributes psychoanalysis’s Vienneseness to events in Austria’s history, Makari sees its interdisciplinary origins as something innate to the Viennese, a key facet of what we’ve been talking about—that peculiar quality of the “Austrian mind,” fostered by the infrastructure of the city, that allowed it to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas.
Makari presented psychoanalysis as an international science, and Freud as a man of science. Both assertions are rather bold. Famously, no one can agree on whether to call psychoanalysis a science, since so much of Freud’s theories are written in the form of literary essays. As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in his 2013 book of essays, One Way and Another, “Because of the uncertainty of its status—as an art or a science, as psychology or metaphysics, as religion or therapy, and so on—psychoanalysis has often had to define itself by saying what is is not.” Freud himself wavered on the characterization. On the one hand, he didn’t think you should have to have a medical degree to be an analyst. “Psychoanalysis is not a specialized branch of medicine,” he once wrote. On the other hand, and in the same breath—the 1926 pamphlet, “The Question of Lay Analysis”—he outlines a curriculum rooted in an empirical approach:
A scheme of training for analysts has still to be created. It must include elements from the mental sciences, from psychology, the history of civilization and sociology, as well as from anatomy, biology, and the study of evolution.
Huh, a Viennese who believes in evolution? Who would have thought?
“The history of civilization” could mean literature, philosophy, and the like (even though Freud did not know much philosophy). But this curriculum is heavy on the sciences. While his American colleagues dissented on the medical degree question—the “dead hand of specialization” had already intruded on American universities—Freud revealed his essential Viennese nature: Why be one thing when you can be many things?
Psychoanalysis is a mutt discipline. And not only that, but the “talking cure,” as Freud’s famous patient “Anna O.” called it, was based on the premise that one gains insight through saying what one really thinks. And sometimes one says what one doesn’t even know one thought! Which leads to one becoming so self-actualized to an extent that one never thought possible! And isn’t that the fullness of being?
It’s far from coincidental that the practice of psychoanalysis—the actual analyst-patient relationship—mirrors Viennese society as a whole. The more one talked and listened, whether in universities, salons, or cafés, to different people with different ideas, the more insight one gained. And that can sound banal; we always say this is the case. But do we really believe it? Looking at Vienna around 1900, we must.
In the next installment, I’ll write about a historian who chronicled the interactions between various circles of Viennese artists and intellectuals in painstaking detail: Edward Timms. Through Timms’ work, we’ll see both how unique Vienna was in its networking infrastructure and how maybe it’s possible to emulate its success with city-planning today. We’ll also see why I’ve mentioned almost zero women thus far in this series.
Sticky notes will be the main character.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64e.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 79e.