Richard Cockett’s Vienna is in many ways a tour de force. The author’s provocative argument is articulated in the book’s subtitle: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. This sweeping history, which focuses on fin-de-siècle and interwar developments, while spilling into the Cold War era, is divided into three broadly chronological sections comprising eleven evocatively titled chapters. Cockett’s wide-ranging narrative considers numerous issues: eugenics and racial hygienists, interwar public housing, and the Institute for Experimental Biology (Vivarium)—to name but a few. The book’s bibliography reveals the author’s voracious reading of relevant English-language primary printed and secondary sources. The broad arc of the historical narrative is impressive and sometimes complicated, but Cockett’s lively prose is easy to read.
Who are the residents of Vienna who had these influential ideas? Cockett’s Viennese were “those who were educated in the city and contributed to its intellectual achievements, even if they were not born there” (5). Recognizing cross fertilization owing especially to interaction with the monarchy’s other intellectual centers, chief among them Budapest and Prague, the author notes that he does not feel the need to claim any figures he analyzes exclusively for Vienna. Still, the Czechs might want to have a word here about the claims he makes to Brünn/Brno, Moravia-born physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach, and Silesian-born Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel. The former spent much of his career at Charles University in Prague before returning to Vienna, where he had studied, while the latter spent just two years at the University of Vienna before going back to his monastery, also in Brünn/Brno, where he long tended his pea plants.
An imposing cast of characters marches across the pages of Cockett’s book. Chief among them are Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, members of the “Austrian School” (of Economics) and critics of Red Vienna, as well as Karl Polanyi, defender of Red Vienna and opponent of Mises, and Karl Popper, proponent of social liberalism. This is to be expected, because these men—and their experiences with Red Vienna that informed their later thought—are among the threads that hold the book together. The author does an exemplary job of explaining these men’s work and politics. Other historic personages include both well-known figures like artist Gustav Klimt, satirist Karl Kraus, mathematician and sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and Vienna mayor Karl Lueger, and the lesser known, many of them the wives of famous men. In this predominantly male book, the first chapter, “Growing Up Viennese: An Education in Liberalism,” is particularly male. In his discussion of education, Bildung (21–35), the author neglects to mention that the gymnasium education he is analyzing is solely limited to the sons (mostly bourgeois, often Jewish) of Vienna, because although six years of schooling had long been compulsory for girls and boys, the first female gymnasium opened only in 1892. Moreover, women would not be admitted to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna until 1897 and to the Faculty of Medicine in 1900.
“The Muse Has Had Enough: Feminism and Socialism,” part of the book’s second section, is the one chapter to incorporate many women’s voices. It is here that the author discusses female Bildung, tracing the close ideological and political connection between feminism and Red Vienna. In addition to Red Vienna’s “New Human,” Cockett briefly mentions the Viennese “New Woman,” a topic that Katya Motyl has analyzed in her recent monograph, Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934, and which is a topic of enquiry for an international group of interdisciplinary researchers.
The book’s third, and longest, section, “Emigrants and Exiles,” focuses on the wide-ranging Viennese contributions to the Anglo-American world. They range from architect Richard Neutra’s modern buildings that dot southern California, where they still draw admiring disciples of his visionary design, and award-winning director Billy Wilder’s innovative films. Many of the Viennese academics who came to the United States did so with the support of Rockefeller Foundation money and found homes in universities as well as in businesses on the East Coast, where they would affect developments ranging from advertising through consumer polling to shopping centers. The story of Viennese emigration to and exile in England is, in some ways, similar to that of the United States, although without the Rockefeller money. Most interesting to me in “The Balm of Muddle: The Viennese in Britain” is Cockett’s detailing of the well-known tale of the Cambridge Five: he places their Viennese communist recruiters, handlers, and associates at the center of the story, crediting their activities with having important effect on the early years of the Cold War.
Occasional unforced errors mar this book. There is sometimes an element of unnecessary snarkiness in an otherwise generous text. Is it worth wasting paper to speculate about whether Ronald Reagan read the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Friedrich Hajek’s The Road to Serfdom (1945) or not (299)? On the same page, why not tell the casual reader that an early reader of Hajek’s book, Oxford chemistry student Margaret Roberts, grew up to become Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher? Finally, it is unlikely that Paul Lazarsfeld or any other of his Viennese compatriots would have had a “thick Teutonic accent” (327), given that the term “Teutonic” refers to North Germans.
That the author is not a Habsburg historian is revealed throughout this breezy yet erudite text. While, for example, the color black may well have been the color of fascism (55), it was earlier the color of Vienna’s Christian Socials. Moreover, psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Dichter, born in 1907, is accurately described as born to a family of emigrants from partitioned Poland and the Bohemian Lands, not least because “Sudeten German” is an interwar political identity rather than a Habsburg provincial one (326).
A variety of readers should be drawn to this cross-over academic/popular book. Many will agree that the pre-1938 Viennese cauldron of ideas has played a key role in the modern world, although they may not buy Cockett’s entire argument, relying as it sometimes does a bit too much on anonymous sources: “Some have even argued” (246). This book will, however, have offered them much to think about.
