Vienna Review of Books

The role of religion in fin de siècle Vienna would seem a closed case. As society escaped the grasp of the Church and the political landscape turned increasingly secular, one could safely assume that artists – the intellectual prophets of the changing times – had renounced God as an authority or even an influence. 

The following is based on two excellent books on the history and origins of Viennese football: 

, by Jonathan Wilson and European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport 

Richard Holt, J.A.Mangan, Pierre Lanfranchi, eds

Before I had ever been to Europe, I was served a Viennese meal by a Viennese friend in California. It was Wiener Schnitzel with Austrian-style potato salad and sour white wine.

WARUM KRIEG? DAS ERSTE WORT ALS WAFFE

The event “Why War? The First Word as a Weapon” seeks to raise awareness that one word can trigger a conflict. In a 1932 exchange of letters, the physicist Albert Einstein and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud discussed why people fight. Their correspondence will be supplemented with historical documents on war. In German.

2 Dec., 19:30
Kulturkabinett
21., Freiligrathplatz 6, (01) 270 79 17
www.transdanubien.net

INJUSTICE: WHY SOCIAL INEQUALITY PERSISTS

When Karl Kraus quoted some yea-sayer to the effect that Stefan Zweig with his novellas in translation had conquered all the languages of the world, he added just two words of his own: “Except one.” Indeed, malicious contemporaries of the socialite Zweig claimed that he asked university professors to check over his grammar.

In Yugoslavian literature, there have been few authors who drew the people so precisely yet remained so reluctant to choose sides as Ivo Andrić, the man who in 1961 won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel Na Drini Cuprija (The Bridge on the Drina).

How would you characterize the relationship between Austria and the Soviet Union from the signing of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991?

What is a home? A place on a map? A house wrapped in a relationship, or a role, or an identity? Not only: Home is also a sense of being present and awake to our true selves wherever we are, in every moment. 

For Georg Klaar, author of Last Waltz in Vienna, home became an abstract phenomenon, a choice to recover, since being Jewish in Vienna at the outbreak of World War II could only mean loss. My own sense of loss feels similar, at least to me: a life uprooted, and the struggle to find myself again in turmoil, surrounded by ambitious people and luminous places that feel alien and out of reach—being lost somewhere between voguish glamour and genuine self-realization. The book evoked my own hidden fears.