“In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”
— Karl Kraus
Uneasy obsessions with sensuality, elegance, and manners; a growing sense of its own decay, mortality, and irrelevance; a recognition of the power of irrationality — all of these characterize fin de siècle Vienna. Vienna in 1900 was both symptom and landmark of modernity. The self-conscious and ironic grace of Viennese culture both obscured the role of the irrational and made it possible for that same irrationality to spring forth in the novels and plays of Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, the psychiatric work of Freud on dreams and neurosis, the paintings and drawings of Klimt and Schiele, the atonal music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. All of these figures were reviled to some greater or lesser extent by the traditionalists among the Viennese, but from nowhere else, and at no other time, could these figures have emerged. By 1918, the Habsburg monarchy and this same Vienna were dead, though its phosphorescent decay would glow in both Austria and in Germany until 1933.
Freud recognized Schnitzler (also a medical doctor) as a colleague and observer, and along with Schiele and Klimt perceived eroticism within this Old World elegance as inescapable but, unlike our own time, fully cognizant of the body’s own mortality. Klimt’s serpent-women rendered eroticism a part of sensualized nature; Schiele’s crabbed but vulnerable and provocative bodies stared out at the viewer, daring that viewer to look away rather than enter the perspective of the subject. That the suppression of this eroticism would give rise to hypocrisy was obvious; but there was a special appeal, erotic itself, to bearing in mind constantly and simultaneously the activities that went on in the ballroom and behind the closed doors of the bedroom. Social elegance suggested sexual and erotic elegance — but this was the culture of the shared secret, not the exploitation of the erotic and sexual for public titillation. Perhaps there was greater sensual freedom as a result. And, contrary to the arrogant assumptions of our contemporary cult of youth, the more an individual matured, the greater his or her ability to appreciate the possibilities of sensuality, which could be said to mature as well.
Design and style were central obsessions to the Viennese of the turn of the century; the care taken with simple household objects by the Wiener Werkstätte paralleled the care taken with the self-conscious design and style of the human bodies that inhabited those households: the body (both male and female) as aestheticized display object, adorned and unadorned. Few of Klimt’s and Schiele’s figures are wholly nude; they are draped in gold, or wear stockings, though the unadorned figures are easily imagined, even suggested by their apparel. No wonder either then that theatre was, of all the arts except music, of the greatest importance to the Viennese — it was there that styles were set, that self-presentation achieved its greatest mastery and mystery. The Ringstrasse, Vienna’s most theatrical architectual feature, is itself a masterpiece of duplicity — the Baroque to Classical to Gothic to Jugenstil buildings were all constructed in the mid-nineteenth century. Vienna was, simultaneously, dream and nightmare. Perhaps that is its dangerous attraction.
Fin de siècle Vienna, c’est moi? No, that’s foolish. It is of both greater and lesser comfort, though, to recognize something of oneself in a dead historical era. It explains affinities, intellectual and emotional, even if ultimately I can come to no final conclusions.
Satirist Karl Kraus called Vienna “an experimental laboratory for world destruction” early in the 20th century, and described the results of these experiments in his massive satire The Last Days of Mankind, first published in his magazine Die Fackel in 1918 and 1919. It begins with the start of World War I and ends in apocalypse; the final words of the play, spoken by God, are “This is not what I intended.” It has over time come to be considered a masterpiece of the documentary play — “The most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations,” Kraus said — as well as a central work in pacifistic literature.
The play runs to 588 pages in the English translation by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms; Kraus in his preface estimates that a performance of the full play would run to “ten evenings in terrestrial time.” Two theaters in Vienna attempted to perform the play in 2014, the centenary year of the start of World War I, but perhaps the most effective “production” of the play was Deborah Sengl‘s series of dioramas based on scenes from The Last Days of Mankind, with stuffed rats standing in for human actors, displayed at Essl Collection for Contemporary Art in Klosterneuburg from January through May of that year. (Alas, the Essl Museum closed permanently in 2016.)
Kraus’s satire, like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, transcends the immediate moment and aspires to universal significance, not only about war but also about the greed and violent inhumanity of the human race; we are all implicated and we are all guilty; neither Kraus, nor Swift, nor Heller exempted themselves from their satiric attacks. Sengl’s rats, posed like human beings in human situations, lead to an uncanny sense of identity between these animals and the characters they portray (dead though unstuffed as those people are), and thereby to the spectator’s own identification with these anthropomorphic figures. “The decision for the rats was taken relatively quickly, because I find that they are most closely related to people,” Sengl said. “They bear a resemblance to us. … It is not for nothing we humans … use them in order to pursue advances in research. There is a lot of common ground between us and the rats.” And every laboratory — whether at a university or a city itself — needs its research subjects.
I find Sengl’s work haunting even when divorced from Kraus’s play, its immediate inspiration. Born in 1974, Sengl says that her work is compelled “by an inner imperative … to react to my environment. … I think that, at his core, Karl Kraus was actually a very kind, tenderhearted, generous person who used his pen as a kind of protective device. … I do the same thing.” While there was no European land war going on in 2014, there is one now, and another war not so far away, rendering Sengl’s work, and Kraus’s, disturbingly contemporary once again.
I’m still looking forward to my visit to Vienna in two weeks, and I’m not sure that it still deserves Kraus’s characterization as “an experimental laboratory for world destruction”; I can think of at least one city that better deserves that honorific. But the point is well taken even so, given the experience of the past century.
You can see more of Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankindhere, see her more recent work here, and there is a splendid American book based on the exhibition published by DoppellHouse Press, which includes a fine introduction by Marjorie Perloff. Alas, the catalog of the show published by the Essl Collection itself appears to be out-of-print, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Ebay.
The Stephansdom in Vienna, broadcasting to the world in living stereo.
Many years ago, when my father was in his 50s and 60s and I was in my teens and 20s, we used to sit together in the evenings and listen to WFLN, Philadelphia’s classical music radio station. For 24 hours a day, mellifluous, plummy-voiced disc jockeys (an unfortunate coinage, that) introduced the masterpieces and less-than-masterpieces of classical music, occasionally interrupted with a commercial break. Founded in 1949, for the first four decades of its existence it barely broke even, but that didn’t much matter; the station’s owners, families by the name of Smith and Green, weren’t particularly interested in turning a profit, only providing music to the city and its environs. In the late 1980s, however, the station’s ownership changed, and in an effort to turn a profit several programming changes were introduced. Instead of playing full symphonies and chamber music works, one got a movement of one, then a movement of another; many of those mellifluous voices were fired; and in 1997 the station finally turned to a pop music format. Announcing the ownership change on the air, Greater Media CEO Tom Milewski rationalized the decision, saying, “Classical music, is, we feel, best presented in a non-commercial context” — a context which wasn’t Greater Media’s, nor was it of many other station owners. So ended WFLN’s nearly half-century run, a run which had provided my father and myself a unique education in classical music.
There is of course still such a thing as classical music radio; here in New York, WQXR offers it, but fragmenting full compositions just as WFLN did in its later years. And streaming music services offer extraordinarily full libraries of classical music recordings and even live events (my preference is for iDagio and Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ service), with splendid sound reproduction through their FLAC formats. But I still miss classical music radio itself: knowledgable voices offering not only context but also companionship, the awareness that there’s another person at the other end of the connection, listening to the music at the same time as you were: a musical bond between these listeners, distance obliterated in an aesthetic experience.
Well, not any more. Recently I stumbled upon Radio Klassik Stephansdom, a radio station that airs in Vienna at 107.3 FM but streams as well, not only through their web site but through several other internet radio services. I’m not sure why I haven’t come across it before — this year the station celebrated its 25th anniversary — but I’m listening to it even now. (An extra appeal is that I get to practice listening to German, too — I’ve taken the language up again.)
The more I learned about it, the more impressed I was. Radio Klassik Stephansdom was founded in 1998 as the brainchild of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who himself flipped the switch in the Archbishop’s Palace in Vienna on September 24 of that year; “Shortly afterwards the Danube Waltz sounded, followed by greetings and blessings from Pope John Paul II,” according to the Google translation of this Archdiocesian web page about the anniversary.
Although RKS is funded and operated by the Archdiocese, in 2025 it looks like the station will be on its own. I must say that I find this a little sad. As might be expected, Radio Klassik Stephansdom’s music programming runs a little more towards the spiritual than the secular; not a surprise, especially when much great music of the past 500 years, from Machaut to Messiaen (whose 115th birthday was yesterday), was inspired by religious faith. The secular, however, also appears on the station’s playlists; just yesterday, RKS played Bizet’s Carmen with Maria Callas in the title role, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Callas’s birth.
I will be visiting Vienna little later this month and plan a visit to the Stephansdom with my kids, of course — it’s a site that can’t be missed, especially over the Christmas season. But over the past few days I’ve been imagining and envisioning the Stephansdom as I listen to some of the music that inspired its construction and has resonated in its halls, not to mention the religious, Christian faith that its architecture and that music reflects. Christoph Wellner, the editor-in-chief of RKS, claims as his area of responsibility: “To form a foundation for passing on the Christian message with the most beautiful music — on the radio, on the Internet, in the diocese, in Austria and worldwide.” Herr Wellner can consider it passed on to me.
You can listen to the station from anywhere in the world through their web site here. And below is the full Google translation of this page from the Archdiocese of Vienna, published there in September of this year, filling out the picture a little bit.
25 years ago, on September 24, 1998, “radio klassik Stephansdom” (then still “Radio Stephansdom”) went on air for the first time. At twelve o’clock sharp, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn activated the start control at a ceremony in the Archbishop’s Palace in Vienna, shortly afterwards the Danube Waltz sounded, followed by greetings and blessings from Pope John Paul II.
In its current edition, the Viennese church newspaper “Der Sonntag” recalls its beginnings a good quarter of a century ago. Austria was the last country in Europe to allow private radio, and only after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which found the right to freedom of expression to be incompatible with a broadcasting monopoly. Ten radio licenses were advertised, for which there were 150 interested parties. Originally, church broadcasters were excluded from the private radio law. This had to be changed after a complaint.
The then head of the public relations office of the Archdiocese of Vienna, Wolfgang Bergmann, and his employees saw the opportunity for a private church radio. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn immediately agreed to it, as he knew of private church radios from France.
In June 1997, the application for a license for the Vienna area was submitted. “In the entire free world, churches are not denied the opportunities of radio, I don’t know why it should be any different in Austria,” said Cardinal Schönborn in a broadcast at the time. The plan was a non-commercial special interest radio that would not be profit-oriented, but would cover its costs through income. The license application stated about the content: “The program wants to invite the listener to pause for a moment and recharge their batteries in the hustle and bustle of the day. It should be an oasis for the ears and soul for radio listeners, away from the constant hustle and bustle and without noisy disc jockeys.”
The archdiocese requested the frequency 107.3. In the spring of 1998, work began on converting a former student shared apartment on the top floor of the Teutonic Order House in downtown Vienna into office space. July 1st was the first day of work for the eight program designers at the time, three of whom are still in the team today: program director Christoph Wellner, editor Bernadette Spitzer and technician Martin Macheiner, who was there before everyone else during the renovation and therefore has personnel number 001. The first editor-in-chief and the decisive role in shaping the radio’s fortunes were in the hands of Anton Gatnar until 2014, who also took over management a little later. The current station manager is Roman Gerner.
Radio faces new economic challenges in the future. Since the Archdiocese of Vienna is planning significant savings in its own media sector, from 2025 the station will have to operate entirely on its own without any diocesan subsidy.
The “radio klassik Stephansdom” can now be received throughout Austria via DAB+. The station can be received terrestrially in Vienna on 107.3 and in Graz on 94.2. The number of listeners is around 200,000.
A plaque just outside of the Hotel Ambassador, Vienna, Austria.
I’m making yet another valiant attempt to conquer the German language — a few years of high school German apparently not enough to set me off the language forever — and as a Mark Twain enthusiast of course I came across his memorable essay about his own experience in trying to learn it. Much of what he says rings true (you can read all of it here), but I understand that Twain became fairly fluent in German, especially during his two-year stay in Austria just at the end of the 19th century. This was, of course, fin de siècle Austria, and also walking those streets were the likes of Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schönberg, and Sigmund Freud, who is said to have attended at least one of Twain’s several lectures there. Carl Dolmetsch has detailed the extent to which his Austrian visit affected his work, including its influence on “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and the still-neglected The Mysterious Stranger, as well as the essays “Stirring Times in Austria” and “Concerning the Jews.” I’ll be in Vienna myself later this month and look forward to making a small bow to the above plaque myself, the honor an acolyte pays to his master.
As I say, I can’t quibble with much of his essay, especially what Twain says about the dative case. “In the first place, I would leave out the Dative case,” he begins his suggestions for reformation. “It confuses the plurals; and, besides, nobody ever knows when he is in the Dative case, except he discover it by accident — and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it, or how he is going to get out of it again. The Dative case is but an ornamental folly — it is better to discard it.” But he is especially right, I think, about the language’s unique beauties. I quote the below, then will return to my homework, perfecting my use of the imperative case:
There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, from mere kindly feeling and honest good will toward the passing stranger, clear up to courtship; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects — with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; those also which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland; and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the SOUND of the words is correct — it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart.
Cover of Mineshaft magazine, issue #44, by R. Crumb.
Now available for holiday giving, issue #44 of Mineshaft magazine dropped into my mailbox in a plain brown envelope a few weeks ago, and as usual it’s a magazine to spend a few thoughtful evenings with. (And you can impress your friends when you leave it on your coffee table.) Among the highlights are tributes to the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin from Bill Griffith and others; a new, haunting story called “Nostalgia” from Christoph Mueller; Mary Fleener‘s meditative “Between the Worlds” travelogue; a Skip James portrait from R. Crumb; co-editor Everett Rand’s ongoing saga of Mineshaft itself; and great new stuff from Simone Baumann, Glenn Head, Drew Friedman, and company. I wrote a little more descriptively about Mineshafthere.
Mr. Friedman has called Mineshaft “the best magazine being published in the 21st century,” and who am I to argue with Drew Friedman? Certainly it’s one of the few magazines to which I maintain a subscription (the others are Acoustic Guitar and The Syncopated Times, which shows you where my head is at these days). You can yourself join the illustrious Mineshaft community easily enough; the current issue is available here, and you can sign up for a subscription here. And while you’re there, why not give the gift of bemused alienation to someone close to you?
Below, The Mighty Millborough himself discovers Mineshaft, as told to Christoph Mueller in 2011:
Well, not any more. Recently I stumbled upon 
