Cultural Amnesia Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Cultural History of the Modern Age in 1931, but it never took on outside the German-speaking countries. (In those, it came back into print after the fall of the Nazis and has been in print
    ever since.) His omniscient tone of voice was at least partly a put-up job, but the universality of his gusto remains an enduring ideal. The finest wit of all, the essayist and theatre critic
    Alfred Polgar, has never been substantially translated, and probably never will be, because his prose has the compression and precision of the finest poetry. But both men can still be appreciated
    for what they represent, and their names will crop up often in this book. What they had in common was a brilliant sensitivity to all the achievements of culture at whatever level of
    respectability—although not even Friedell was receptive enough to realize that jazz might be music—and what all the coffee-house intellectuals had in common was that they knew Peter
    Altenberg, who by their standards hardly achieved anything at all. Altenberg was a bum, and I place him near the beginning of this book—preceded only by Anna Akhmatova, whom he probably
    would have hit for a small loan—not just because the initial of his name is at the beginning of the alphabet, but because he was living proof, in all his flakiness and unreliability, that
    the life of the mind doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. In his case it didn’t even get him a job. Though he occasionally made some money from publishing his collections of bits and
    pieces, the money was soon spent, and he had to borrow more. But his very existence was a reminder to more prosperous practitioners that what they did was done from love.
    Vienna feels empty now. You can have a good night at the opera, and in spring you can drink Heurige Wein in the gardens,
    and the Klimt and Schiele rooms in the Belvedere are still among the great rooms of the museum that covers the world, and on the walls of the Café Hawelka are still to be seen the drawings
    with which Picabia once paid his bills. But after World War II the eternally fresh impulse of humanism came back to Vienna only in the form of the zither playing on the soundtrack of the The Third Man . The creative spirit of the city had been poisoned by the corrupted penicillin of Harry Lime—the juice of irreversible psychic damage.
    Nor did Paris ever fully recover from the Occupation, although that contention can still buy you a verbal fightwith resident intellectuals who are certain that it did. Humanism
    had a better chance of recovery in cities where its roots had never been deep enough to be thought part of the foundations. Post-war Berlin, whose civilization before the rise of the Nazis had
    been shallow and frantic, grew more fruitful than Vienna after the last Nazis of either city prudently shed their uniforms. In Tokyo, the pre-war coffee-house culture—so eerily mimetic of
    Vienna, even down to its brass-framed bow windows echoing the spare forms of Adolf Loos—melted in the firestorm of March 1945. But that culture had been the merest touch of the West, and
    before General MacArthur had barely begun his reign as visiting emperor, the influence of Western liberal creativity was back like a new kind of storm, a storm that put up buildings instead of
    knocking them flat, and turned on lights instead of switching them off, and accelerated, and this time in a less disastrous direction, the transformative process that had begun with the Meiji
    restoration in 1870, the process of a culture becoming conscious of itself—a process that will turn any culture towards humanism, even when its right wing, as Japan’s does, gives up
    its convictions only at the rate of a tea ceremony in slow motion.
    Today, in the second decade after the Berlin Wall came down, the still miraculously lovely Petersburg is only beginning to
    have again what it had before the Revolution: the magic of a poetic imagination on a civic scale. Moscow, which always had less of