Voltaire once said, “History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play on the dead.” As an historian, I am reluctant to agree with him, but in the case of Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna by Robert Weldon Whalen, I find myself in complete accord. The premise of the book has very little to do with history, but a great deal to do with the author's belief that at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “Modernism arose because God visited Vienna” (p. 4). Unfortunately, no one was aware of this event at the time. Professor Whalen, however, is confident that it occurred because the theologian Paul Tillich posited the existence of such moments which, in Whalen's opinion, is a proposition demonstrated as historical truth by the well-known fin de siècle interest in “the spirit” and the tendency of contemporary Viennese artists to refer to art in terminology borrowed from the lexicon of religion. Unfortunately, this is like claiming someone is French because they admire France and occasionally exclaim “mon Dieu!” Just as such a style of argumentation cannot prove a person's ethnicity, so, too, does it fail to establish proof of divine causality in the birth of Viennese modernism. To be sure, historians have a certain amount of latitude in formulating their interpretations, but what keeps them from validating Voltaire's view of the past is adherence to evidence. Alas, in Whalen's approach to fin de siècle Vienna, faith takes precedence over fact.

In nine stylistically well-written chapters Whalen uses his talent as a writer to repeat extremely well-known material about Vienna and the members of its avant-garde. Thus, the title of chapter one characterizes the Habsburg capital as the “Fairy Tale City” and proceeds to support this claim by citing one cliché after another. Only in the inclusion of interesting anecdotes culled from the Viennese press is any new material added to this and the other eight chapters. Despite intriguing titles, such as “Necropolis” (chapter two) and “The Feminine Divine” (chapter six), the book's content only succeeds in making manifest the famous line from Casablanca about “rounding up the usual suspects.” Thus, in the second chapter the hoary stereotype of a Viennese populace from the emperor on down preoccupied with death is trotted out as somehow indicative of God's role in the creative life of the city. Similarly, in the sixth chapter the popular image of carnal Vienna is affirmed by the statement, “Yes, Freud's Vienna was sex-drenched” (p. 188). In this latter instance Whalen is also careful to bring in Otto Weininger and Gustav Klimt, but the former's misogyny and the latter's eroticism, even when he meant to depict the life force, are hardly evidence of God's presence. It is simply not enough to cite this material within the context of a religiously based argument and expect that it will be transformed into evidence for that argument; yet, this is what Whalen is doing. No matter how many times Hugo von Hofmannsthal writes a poem about the oneness of humanity, Karl Kraus cries out for honesty, or the artists of the Secession speak of art as a religion, this is not evidence that “God visited Vienna.” To assert otherwise is to engage in a leap of faith.

Yet, perhaps making such a leap is what the author hopes for from his audience. After all, the book is published by the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, a press known for its specialization in books dealing with religion. In this regard, Whalen's book is probably suited to what may be its intended audience, namely one that wants to see the past in religious terms. For those who are not so inclined and for those who seek historical insight that is based on intellectual rigor rather than a belief system, this book has nothing to offer either as an example of the historian's craft, in general, or its application, specifically, to the complexities of fin de siècle Vienna.