220117 Fin de siècle Vienna: Science and Material Culture of a Central-European Metropolis (S) (SoSe 2016)

At the time of its demise in 1918, as a result of the First World War, the multinational Habsburg Empire was characterized simultaneously by a multitude of internal fractures and a stunning intellectual prosperity. In the three decades around 1900, Vienna became the melting pot for a large number of artistic, cultural, and scientific traditions that gave birth to modernity in their respective domains, chiefly influencing similar developments in other metropolis. These changes include urban architecture; a handful of literary movements; twelve-tone music; biology, physiology, and medicine; psychoanalysis; statistical physics; and the philosophy of science. While scholars traditionally have focused primarily on a few outstanding figures, among them Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, and Boltzmann, recent scholarship in the U.S. and Europe has successfully mapped the interrelations among the different movements and carved out the peculiarities of Vienna as compared to the simultaneous developments in Germany and France; among them its own brands of fin-de-siècle culture, of liberalism, of empiricism, and cosmopolitanism within a multinational empire.
The aim of this class is to study this cultural and scientific turn with the help of selected papers and by explaining Vienna’s material culture, exemplified by some outstanding Archives, Museums, University departments and Laboratories where these developments have taken place. The goal is to understand the density of the social, cultural and interdisciplinary fabric of Vienna’s Fin de siècle.

Learning Outcomes
Explain and discuss the various segments of the historical culture of a metropolis.

Bibliography

Texts from a reader will be discussed during the classes.