This book is a very learned discourse about the image Vienna and Austria carried with well-known American visitors (medical doctors and students of Freudian psychoanalysis) and professional journalists and writers who “mediated” the perception of Americans in the 1920s and 1930s of Central Europe. It is a rich intellectual history of post–World War I Vienna (less Austria as only visits to the Tyrol and the Salzburg Festival by some of these Americans are mentioned). Starting with the eventually famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, who covered Central Europe as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News from Vienna in the early 1920s and who stayed devoted to Vienna throughout her life, and ending with John Dos Passos writing about the “heartbreaking” sight of Vienna “dying by inches” (275) of the post–World War II occupation period, this book covers a broad swath of Anglo-American writing on Vienna during the period between the two world wars. Vienna was destitute after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 and Austrians were poor, particularly during the years of the great inflation in the early 1920s. Americans flocked to Vienna during this period not only for the music and dense cultural events and the attractive window the city opened toward neighboring Central Europe and the Balkans, but also for the cheap living conditions it offered. Maybe some were also attracted by the city's loose morals, as quite a few of the characters in this book led promiscuous lives with multiple marriages (Dorothy Thompson, Hilda Doolittle, Kay Boyle, Muriel Gardiner).

In the late 1920s William Shirer covered the growing civil war–like tensions in Austria for the Chicago Tribune and John Gunther (1930–35) for the Chicago Daily News (ch. 6). Along with Dorothy Thompson they wrote many magazine articles that shone a light on the brutal crushing of the workers rebellion in February 1934 and assassination of Chancellor Dollfuß in July 1934. Shirer and Gunther also wrote bestselling books about the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the travelogue Inside Europe that shaped the image of Europe in the United States. Doctors (and poets) like William Carlos Williams came to Vienna for graduate sessions in medicine with the many famous doctors of the Vienna Medical School (ch. 4). Writers such as Ezra Pound and Thornton Wilder found inspiration in Vienna and built circles of local friends (ch. 5). To describe the years of Schuschnigg's “Austrofascism” (Shirer: “the dictatorship is much milder—the difference between Prussians and Austrians,” p. 246) as the calm “Indian summer” of the late First Republic (ch. 11, pp. 209ff), strikes this reviewer as naive. The chapter on the “catastrophe of the Anschluss” is one of the strongest (ch. 12). For people like Shirer (now reporting on the Anschluss for CBS Broadcasting), Vienna lost some of its gemütlich and gay appearance when he witnessed “Nazi mobs harassing Jews in the city” (247). The “charming Viennese” suddenly showed their seamy underside of rabid antisemitism. Now the strong ties of friendship built in early times came to produce results as Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, and Thornton Wilder personally helped Jews and old friends (Eugenia Schwarzwald, Marcel Fodor, Hermann Broch, Richard Beer-Hoffmann) escape the city and come to Switzerland or the United States with affidavits and generous financial support.

Zacharasiewicz defines his main theme, “Atlantic networks,” rather loosely. At one point it is “networks between North Americans visitors and people resident in Vienna” (148). Then more accurately: “transatlantic networks in Vienna as an international crossroads, and the interaction of many visiting Americans with prominent members of Viennese society” (170). Then he speaks of a “natural network” (214), when Hilda Doolittle (who did extensive sessions with Sigmund Freud [ch. 8]), recommended the Schwarzwalds, who “have a sort of hotel or club all of intellectual and artistic Vienna for gathers there [sic]” (214), to Thornton Wilder. Schwarzwald maintained a lively “salon” in interwar Vienna (see Deborah Holmes, “‘Genia’ Schwarzwald and her Viennese ‘Salon,’” Contemporary Austrian Studies 21 [New Orleans, 2012], 190–211). In his preface, he speaks of “social circles, made up of intellectuals and artists in the city of Vienna” (13). Loose “social circles” seems to me a more accurate description of the intercourse between Americans and Austrians than “transatlantic networks.” Social scientists have developed a very sophisticated theory of “networks” with nodes between individuals that can be graphed (like the cover of the book does). The author does not apply this theory to his analysis.