Cafes Reichsrat and Arkaden

Six years ago, I posted on some interwar Viennese cafés of historical interest, including the Arkaden and the Reichsrat. I noted the significance of the Reichsrat in connection with Viennese logicians and Wiener Kreis positivists. Specifically, Kurt Gödel presented some of his incompleteness results there in 1930 (to Carnap, Feigl, and Waismann).

In that post, I ventured a hypothesis about the location of the Reichsrat. It turns out that I was just plain wrong. The excellent logician Richard Zach, has found Café Reichsrat's location 'at the north-west corner of Stadiongasse and Reichsratsstraße/Rathauspark'.

In Café Griensteidl before 1897 (photo by Carl von Zamboni)

There's a new book on Viennese cafés: The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller [Berghahn Books, 2013]). The book's coverage reaches beyond Vienna to include papers about early 20th-century coffeehouses in Zagreb and Krakow. Also, there's a paper by Edward Timms called 'Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud's Vienna and Virginia Woolf's London'.

The book primarily explores the cafés' contribution to Vienna's intellectual firmament. Central European coffeehouses were great, semi-public venues (what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a 'third place') in which poets, mathematicians, politicians, journalists, psychiatrists, etc. etc. rubbed shoulders and shared ideas. Timms charts some of the relations among the Viennese café Kreise (circles) by means of a diagram (p. 207) that looks like a reproduction of the one he made for the first volume (Fig. 1, p. 8) of his magnificent biography of Karl Kraus. It's a good diagram, but Timms put a more complex one in volume 2 of his Kraus biography (p. 108). The latter diagram locates some of the Kreise in their preferred cafés and has the interesting label 'Vienna Circles: the Field of Cultural Producton'.

(For more about the many Vienna circles, see '"Wiener Kreise": Jewishness, Politics, and Culture in Interwar Vienna' by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman, in Interwar Vienna Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes [Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2009].)

There's very little about philosophers in the above-mentioned The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture. All I could find was an endnote in Shachar Pinsker's contribution (p. 96 n. 36, where Pinsker says that Wittgenstein and members of the Wiener Kreis frequented the Arkaden Café) as well as a brief mention of Otto Neurath in Steven Beller's paper (p. 56, where Beller says that Neurath and members of the Wiener Kreis often hung out in Café Herrenhof).

Pinsker's article is called 'The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism'. It has sections devoted to cafés in Lemberg and in Berlin, but the largest section concerns the coffeehouses of Vienna. In that part of his paper, Pinsker mentions the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, about whom Elias Canetti wrote. (Canetti referred to this author as Dr. Sonne.) Pinsker situates Ben Yitzhak in an important group of Yiddish and Hebrew writers who congregated in the Arkaden Café before and during WWI. Based on the memoirs of some of these authors, Pinsker characterizes this café as 'the place in which Jewish immigrants from Galicia felt at home' (p. 86). (The index entry for 'Arkaden Café' doesn't include a reference to Pinsker's discussion.)

Added (August 20, 2014): I noted in my post on Lviv/Lemberg/Lwow that the mathematicians and logicians of that city did much collaborative (and solitary) work in the Scottish Café. Some of those thinkers received part of their education in Vienna, so it wouldn't be surprising if Viennese logicians and mathematicians did some collaborative work in the cafés (as the physicists did).

Some quotations on Kenneth Fearing

Ron Capshaw notes that poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing was one of the founders of the Partisan Review.

I discovered Fearing's poetry in my first year as an undergrad. I've since had a weakness for his 'American Rhapsody (5)', which begins near the bottom of p. 649 of this old anthology. I've inserted that page below. (The poem appears to have been incorrectly labeled 'American Rhapsody (4)' in this anthology, though that might have been the correct numbering when this collection was published.)



Capshaw says,

When Fearing, who died in 1961 and would have turned 102 this week, was asked the $64,000 question when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950—“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”—he answered, “Not yet.”

David Orr: 'Fearing’s poetry is what you’d get if you threw five newspapers, ten comic books, Das Kapital, the script for The Big Heat, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury into a blender'.

Walter Kalaidjian (quoting something that Kenneth Burke wrote in 1935):

As [Kenneth] Burke pointed out ..., Fearing more than Cummings effected a powerful "fusion of ecclesiastic intonations (the lamentation) and contemporary cant (slang, business English, the imagery of pulp fiction, syndicated editorials, and advertising)."

Robert M. Ryley:

[Fearing's] "St. Agnes' Eve" is a little anthology of American styles, focusing attention not so much on crime and suffering and death as on their transformation into the language of film, newspaper, cartoon, poem, and ordinary speech. It is as if we are meant to see at work in the poem, and at a distance that protects us from its normally irresistible power, the mythmaking machinery of the whole culture.

Robert Polito:

Ordinary life rarely enters Fearing’s poems except through the slippery deflections of popular culture, and there is no snooty distance or criticism, as though for a poet and citizen of the 20th century the inescapable, omnipresent urban media assume roles that the natural world, say, performed for prior poetry.

Weldon Kees (1941):

[Fearing] has taken over and extended techniques of the anti-poetic common to both Whitman and Sandburg, supplementing them with more raucous tricks not unknown to the soap-boxer, the radio orator, and the side-show barker. Principal among these are the device of repetition, esteemed also by the writer of advertising copy, and the device of listing and cataloguing.

More from Kees' review of Fearing:

Contemporary civilization has been anything but reserved in providing its satirical writers with abundant horrors; and Fearing, who gathers up-to-the-minute horrors with all the eager thoroughness of a bibliophile cackling over pagination errors, has ... much cause to be grateful.

On August 3, 1914, Germany declared war on France...

The war began with Austria-Hungary opening fire on Serbia on July 28. The UK entered the war on August 4.

Stephen Evans on 'World War One: Germany's forgotten war' (BBC):

A book by Christopher Clark, an Australian historian based at Cambridge University, has become a run-away best-seller in its German translation. The Sleep-walkers analyses the run-up to the war and paints a picture of blunders and misunderstandings in the complexities of European imperial politics.

Norman Stone in the Evening Standard:

The First World War was part of the great question of British foreign policy since about 1840: Germany or Russia? The British opted for Russia in 1914, as they did again in 1941.

Martin Kettle in the Guardian:

In Britain the commemoration at the Imperial War Museum is fundamentally about Britain and British people. Step into the new galleries and you find yourself watching newsreel film about the people of Britain in 1914. In Berlin the commemoration is fundamentally about Europe and the wider world. Step into that gallery and you find yourself watching newsreel film from Berlin, Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg.

Deutsche Welle's WWI page (in English).

Spiegel International's WWI page (in English).

WWI pictures at the Atlantic.

WWI links with a focus on Austria-Hungary

From the BBC, 'Music on the brink' -- mostly Viennese music of the time; and a BBC postcard from Vienna by Professor David Wyn Jones, read by Jonathan Pryce.

John Horne reviews Tim Butcher's new book on Gavrilo Princip, and so does Robert Fox.

Review of a book about Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie Chotek. The book is The Assassination of the Archduke.

In WWI, one of Robert Musil's second-cousins, Alois Musil (aka Sheikh Musa al-Rweili), was Austria-Hungary's version of Lawrence of Arabia, except that Alois Musil, unlike Lawrence, had a mastery of many Arabic dialects.

Quoting Colin O'Connor, 'During the First World War, [Alois] Musil was sent to the Middle East to counteract the efforts of the great English Arabist T. E. Lawrence - or Lawrence of Arabia as he is known to many.' Back in Europe, Musil had a career as a theology professor. Some of his documents have been translated into English. Here's a pdf with a bio and photos.

Chris Kelly on her Austro-Hungarian ancestors, including Count Franz Clam-Gallas.

Stefany Anne Golberg quoting from Béla Zombory-Moldován's memoir of the first eight months of WWI in a Hungarian unit:

Nature slumbered … flowed on its course, impervious to the absurd behavior of men … The whole world was manifestly indifferent in the face of the life-and-death struggles of men: it neither took their side nor opposed them, but simply paid no attention.

More about this memoir, The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914. Here's an excerpt.

Kafka's diary entry for August 2, 1914: 'Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.'

Robert Zaretsky revisits 'Kafka's "The Trial" and World War I'.

English version of a comprehensive survey of WWI from an Austro-Hungarian perspective.

Here's the first item in Spiegel Online International's WWI series.

Dystopic bliss

Emily Witt's diary entry in the latest issue of the LRB has left me seeking a handy label for articles that effectively say 'Aldous Huxley's dystopia is here now', but in which the author affects an innocence of all such critique by mimicking the unknowing, sensation-seeking obsessions of a naif in an Aldous Huxley dystopia.

I'm sure there's more to Burning Man, but Witt makes it sound like a Pleasure Dome for millionaires. 

Quoting Bertrand Russell (on Harvard in 1914)

I miss in the professors the atmosphere of meditation and absent-mindedness which one associates with thought -- they all seem more alert and business-like and punctual than one expects very good people to be. And they are all overworked; President Lowell, whom I find utterly loathsome, is determined to get his money's worth out of them and throw them on the scrap heap when they are used up. -- From Russell's letter to Lucy Donnelly (March 20, 1914) (reproduced on p. 41 of Bertrand Russell's America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings. Volume 1 1896-1945, ed. Barry Feinberg, Ronald Kasrils [Routledge, 1973])

Link roundup mostly on literary Prussians & Berliners

Brecht portrait by Rudolf Schlichter (1926)

Michael Hofmann on Wolfgang Koeppen:

The one exception, the single oasis in thirty-five years of literary-commercial desert, the very last of the Sibylline books, is Jugend (Youth), which was first published in 1976 as number 500 in the iconic Bibliothek Suhrkamp series (there was really no limit to Unseld's generosity and thoughtfulness), when Koeppen turned seventy. "Dear Wolfgang," wrote the gallant [and long suffering Siegfried] Unseld as late as 1 July of that year, "I'm awaiting Youth every day, with the sort of intensity with which one only and always waits for youth." This time, for whatever reason, Koeppen didn't disappoint him. 

Adam Thirlwell on Michael Hofmann's translation of Gottfried Benn's poems:

Benn’s late style is one of literature’s great inventions, and the composition of this selection conditions its reader to concentrate on that phenomenon: from 1912 to 1947, a period of 35 years, Hofmann offers just twenty-four poems, while from 1949 to 1955, the last six years of Benn’s life, there are a lavish forty-eight.

Rebecca Schuman has three posts this week on Heinrich von Kleist. She focuses on his Kant crisis and the Marquise of O.

Steven Howe remarks on Kant in connection with Kleist's Schroffenstein Family:

Here one can detect the influence of Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy, which appears to have shattered his faith in the possibilities of absolute truth and knowledge. The fallibility of perception emerges, as a consequence, as a dominant theme and subject of reflection in Kleist’s work, and remains so across his entire literary corpus. In Schroffenstein, this manifests itself through the frequent recurrence of error and confusion, bred by the characters’ inability to communicate and their attendant susceptibility to misreading reality.

Trevor Berrett on Theodor Fontane's Irretrievable.

Last year, H. B. Nisbet published a 736-page book on Lessing. Reviewed in the LRB by Jonathan Rée.

In BOMB, Richard Foreman reviews Philip Glahn's new book on Bertolt Brecht. Here's the publisher's site for the book. It's also reviewed by Gregory Sholette at Brooklyn Rail.


A bigger Brecht book, by Stephen Parker, is reviewed by Donald Sassoon, and by John Yargo, and by David Blackbourn, and by Alison Flood.

Ingrid Rowland reviews Emily J. Levine's Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School:

Focusing on Aby Warburg’s library and two of its most illustrious users, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art historian Erwin Panofsky, [Levine] reveals the ways in which the distinctive qualities of a single place conditioned the development of ideas in a larger sense to create a “Hamburg School” of thought, a school intimately connected with Jewish experience in Imperial and Weimar Germany.

Hempel's influence on the DSM

Ever on the lookout for philosophers' influence on other disciplines, I was intrigued to find this 2013 publication by Massimiliano Aragona about Carl Hempel's influence on the early editions of the DSM. Hempel gave a paper in 1959 at the Work Conference on Field Studies in the Mental Disorders (which was organized by the American Psychopathological Association). The paper formed the basis of Hempel's paper 'Fundamentals of Taxonomy' in his collection Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965). According to Aragona, Hempel's 'neopositivist' approach to psychiatry's taxonomy helped to shape the DSM via the influence of the Anglo-Austrian psychiatrist Erwin Stengel (among others).

Quoting C. Wright Mills

One key thing about American mass culture ... is that it is not an "escape" from the strains of routine, but another routine, which in its murky formulations and pre-fabricated moods ... deprive the individual of his own fantasy life. ... And I would of course impute the leveling and the frenzy effects of mass culture in this country not to "democracy" but to capitalist commercialism which manipulates people into standardized tastes and then exploits these tastes and "personal touches" as marketable brands. -C. Wright Mills ('Our Country and Our Culture', Partisan Review [1952]: 446-7)

Quoting Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche on Capital in the Twenty-First Century and contemporary US fiction:

The arc of Franzenite fiction goes from leaving the bosom of an institution to finding a place in the world of markets and neighbors....Universities are natural subjects for the bourgeois novel of the moment because they have become expensive ways of replicating privilege, of falling in with the right sort of people, of learning the prerequisite social codes....An American Ivy League education is, first and foremost, a class marker....College has essentially replaced the debutante ball and the presentation at court....The characters in all these novels strive to understand society’s codes and then to obey them....The novel of the second gilded age is a novel for hoop-jumpers....This was the 1990s on campus: educated in the panvictimology of alternative culture, people of privilege learned to hate the source of their privilege while maintaining their own status in perfect working order. -Stephen Marche ('The Literature of the Second Gilded Age')