Cultural Amnesia Read Online Free PDF

sentimentality. A book about culture in the twentieth century which did not deal constantly with just how
    close culture came to being eradicated altogether would not be worth reading, although there is an ineradicable demand for uplift which would always make it worth writing. There could be a
    feel-good storybook about Vienna called, say, It Takes a Village . But it took a lot more than that. As a place to begin studying what happened to
    twentieth-century culture, Vienna is ideal, but only on the understanding that the ideal was real, with all the complications of reality, and none of the consolations of a therapeutic dream.
    Apart from the numerous picture books—which should never be despised as introductory tools, and in the case of
    Vienna are especially enchanting—probably the best first book to read in order to get the atmosphere would be Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von
    Gestern , which has been translated into English as The World of Yesterday . But there is a lot of atmosphere to get, and with Zweig’s memoirs
    you have to take it for granted that the great names did great things. A shorter and less allusive account, George Clare’s Last Waltz in Vienna , is an
    admirably direct introduction to the triumph of Vienna and the tragedy that waswaiting to ruin it. The triumph was a sense of civilization; a civilization that the Jews had a
    right to feel they had been instrumental in creating; and the tragedy was that their feelings of safe assimilation were falsely based. The triumph might have continued; the Nazis might never have
    arrived; but they did arrive, and everything went to hell. Clare’s book is unbeatable at showing that one of the consequences of cultural success can be political naivety. The lesson still
    applies today, when so many members of the international intelligentsia—which, broadly interpreted, means us—continue to believe that culture can automatically hold civilization
    together. But there is nothing automatic about it, because nothing can be held together without the rule of law.
    On what might seem a more exalted level, Carl E. Schorske’s book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna brings on the first wave of great names: Freud, Herzl, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Mahler, Musil, Schnitzler,
    Schoenberg, Otto Wagner and others. It is an impressive work, deserving of its prestige, but tends to encourage the misleading assumption that greatness is everything. In the long run it might
    seem so, but in the shorter run, which is the run of everyday life, a civilization is irrigated and sustained by its common interchange of ordinary intelligence. After the turn of the century, in
    Vienna’s case, this more ordinary intelligence began to make itself extraordinary through the essays and remembered wit that came out of the cafés. Of its nature, such a multifarious
    achievement is less susceptible to being summed up in a single treatise. Friedrich Torberg’s memoir Die Tante Jolesch ( Aunt Jolesch ), published after World War II, looks back fondly and funnily on a vanished world. A peal of laughter ringing in the ruins, Torberg’s book can be
    recommended with a whole heart. (It can also be recommended as a way for a student to make a beginning with German, because all the anecdotes that sound so attractive in English sound even more
    so in the original. Keep the original and the translation open beside each other and you’ve got the perfect parallel text.) But many of the names that shone brightest are destined to go on
    doing so from the far side of the language barrier. Half genius and half flimflam man, the polymath Egon Friedell—already mentioned in my preface, but being introduced twice fits his
    act—was a towering figure among the coffee-house wits. Somehow, in between cabaret engagements, Friedell found time to write Kulturgeschichte der
    Neuzeit , a mesmerizingclaim to the totality of knowledge. It was translated, in three whopping volumes from Alfred A. Knopf, as