Expressions of An Enfant Terrible

A“gay apocalypse” is how the modernist Hermann Broch described his home city of Vienna in the decade before World War I. Rapid industrialization meant that by the turn of the century Vienna was a thrumming metropolis of Zeppelins, tramways, typewriters, and vaulted bridges over the Wien. From the beginning of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1848 to the outbreak of war, the population quadrupled. But it was also a city of a comparatively conspicuous spiritual malaise; a city where recondite cults, Zionists, German Nationalists, and the Freud circle all flourished in contemporaneity; a city of Baroque grandeur that Otto Wagner was attempting to remold in a tapestry of iron, glass, and marble; and a city where revolutionary artists gathered in the coffeehouses while classicists hobnobbed behind the imperious façades of the academies.