Vienna and the Birth of the Modern

Catalog description

This course takes Vienna's history as a starting point for studying how the modern mind fought to liberate itself from a past deemed overly burdensome, while embracing radical innovation and change. Students will develop a sense of the city's role as a laboratory of twentieth-century ideologies and ideas: liberalism and conservatism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, modernism and traditionalism. Most of the course's key themes will converge on what contemporaries referred to as 'the Jewish question,' a problem which most characters we will examine engaged with to some extent. Assigned readings will include texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (HIST-HEU)