"Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduring melodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films. Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese -- anxious to forget their troubles -- could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide." --

The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie--who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal.

"Based on his own family history, David Pryce-Jones’s virtuosic novel tells the tale of the Ellingens, one of the richest and most powerful Jewish families in the Habsburg Empire. Gustav will ascend from the poverty and obscurity of an orphanage to the pinnacle of Viennese society, steering the family’s fortunes through defeat in the Great War, the inflation of Weimar, and the perils of Depression. His only child, Henriette, must cope with the challenges of innocence and wealth. But her only child, Jules, will face a far more terrible challenge in the rise of Nazism. The Afternoon Sun is a vivid portrait of four brilliant generations and their Europe by a peerless observer who knew them as few others could."--

On February 26, 1938, 17-year-old Georg Klaar took his girlfriend Lisl to his first ball at the Konzerthaus. His family was proudly Austrian; they were also Jewish, and two weeks later came the German Anschluss. This incredibly affecting account of Nazi brutality towards the Jews includes a previously unpublished post-war letter from the author's uncle to a friend who had escaped to Scotland. This moving epistle passes on the news of those who had survived and the many who had been arrested, deported, murdered, or left to die in concentration camps, and those who had been orphaned or lost their partners or children. It forms a devastating epilogue to what has been hailed as a classic of holocaust literature.

"The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost. The novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler's troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time. Next we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis..."--Publisher description.

Theodor W. Adorno's classic study of Gustav Mahler's music defies traditional thematic analysis, which, according to Adorno, "misses the music's substance in its preoccupation with procedure." He reaches beyond the boundaries of conventional analysis for an understanding of the music through the composer's character, his historical, philosophical, and social background, and his moment in musical history. First published in German in 1960, this ground-breaking work quickly established itself as a bold new form of musical interpretation, expanding the framework in which the composer's character and, through this, his creations are more fully understood. Adorno illuminates his argument through evocative metaphors, vivid images, and unusual comparisons. The result is a densely layered, anti-systematic interpretation that reveals as much about Adorno as it does about his subject. One of the most original and highly regarded of modern musical commentators, and among the first to call himself a sociologist of music, Adorno was a philosopher, cultural critic, and composer. His unique critical method illuminated music by relating it to history and social milieu. He held that music was a nonconceptual language that represented yet transcended the social world; in music and art, aesthetic value and social relevance were necessarily united. The essential themes of his Marxism - reification, fetishism, the emancipatory role of art, and the dialectical relationship of affirmation and negation - were alive in even the most formal works of art. In Mahler's A Musical Physiognomy, Adorno views the composer's works as a continuous and unified development from his childhood response to the marches and folk tunes of the Bohemian village where he was born. But despite its traditional roots, Mahler's music intentionally breaks the balance of established musical language.

The oral autobiography of the controversial Vienna Aktionist, with archival materials and additional writings by Nitsch A pioneer of Vienna's postwar avant-garde and the most notorious member of the Vienna Aktionist group, Hermann Nitsch (1938-2022) united performance, painting and musical composition in dramatic, often blood-soaked rituals. Newly translated into English from the original German, this oral autobiography offers the readers Nitsch's life story in his own words. Over the course of an in-depth interview with Austrian journalist Danielle Spera, he recounts his family history, early childhood, the evolution of his artistic practice and the fraught reception of his work, as well as his various romantic and financial struggles. The interview is illustrated with images of his work, in the studio and in action; archival photographs; and other ephemeral material, such as flyers and news clips. Excerpts from Nitsch's writings, including "Blood Organ Manifesto" and "Verbal Poetry of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre," punctuate the interview between Spera and the artist.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler{u2019}s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories{u2014}an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus{u2019}s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti{u2019}s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein{u2019}s notebooks and Paul Celan{u2019}s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers

"A young Jewish boy strolls through Vienna and witnesses acts of anti-Semitism during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. At night he dreams of a superhero, Judah Maccabee, who appears to defend Vienna's Jews. When he awakes, he knows there will be no Maccabean rescue and he weeps. Years pass, the boy, now an old man, returns to Vienna and sees the Jewish community and the Temple have been restored. He looks for the eternal light in his Temple and can't find it. Then suddenly it becomes clear to him: The light was there all the time; it was in his own heart"--

This is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer's magisterial work -- available in English for the first time in full -- charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers' control, factory councils, and industrial democracy. The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer's unique theorization of an "integral socialism" -- an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy -- is a vital part of the left's intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.

Adolf Loos--A Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, "snapshots" of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos. "A valuable fine-grained portrait... The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos' original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos' own writing style). Richly informative." --Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture "Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer, ... reveals much about her ex-husband's mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes .... Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own.." --Judy Pollan, Modernism Magazine An intimate collection of vignettes reveals Loos' personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition, the book having enjoyed several reprints in German. The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos' last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architect's friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf Loos--A Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claire's niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author.

Selected by his daughter, Vivien, from Max Perutz's voluminous correspondence, the letters reproduced here portray their author with a spontaneity and directness no autobiography could have matched. They chronicle Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite and humorous pen, documenting the hopes, roadblocks and moments of elation of his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest ― unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin ― earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a remarkable and very human scientist, and delightful sketches of some of the people he encountered. Starting with lively letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Perutz's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters, unique in the annals of recent scientific history. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.