"At the beginning of the 20th Century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is for the survivors to pass on a story which hasn't ended yet"--Back cover

A biography and study of the psychoanalyst's career, family, personal life, and professional struggles.

Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth.

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the world of the substantial Viennese Jewish community crumbled. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrom, about thirty miles from Oslo. Although she loved many things about her new country and its people, Ruth's relationship with her hosts soon turned stale, then sour. Ruth became increasingly isolated in Norway until she met a soul mate, Gunvor Hofmo, who was to become a celebrated poet. Norway itself became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, and Ruth's attempts to join the rest of her family - now in Britain - became ever more urgent. She never left Norway, and in November 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was exterminated on arrival. She had just turned twenty-two. Ruth Maier kept a diary from 1934 until just before she was murdered. Despite being only in her teens she shows a sophisticated understanding of the political forces shaping central Europe as well as extraordinary prescience. The book is much more than just historical documentation, however. In a lucid yet highly lyrical style, with an incisive talent for narrative and a sharp wit, Ruth explores universal themes of isolation, identity, friendship, love, sexuality, desire, morality, justice and sacrifice. Most of all, however, she seeks what it means to be a human being. Published only recently for the first time in Norway, Ruth Maier's Diary is one of the most moving testimonies to emerge from this dark period of European history

A landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete."-- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review"Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument."-- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic"A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review"Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books"A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing."-- Newsweek

The author discusses the issue of "inherited guilt" as he interviews the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

"What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn? Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis. Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else's name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach - Alice's granddaughter - sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America. Impeccably researched and incredibly moving, Alice's Book sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish authors"--Publisher's description.

"Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was - along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce - a maker of our modern world."--Book jacket.

Set in the early 1900s, Viennese Romance tells the story of Michael Rost, an eighteen-year-old Jewish youth who travels to Vienna, hungry for experience. There, he forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path - prostitutes, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men alike. With a foreword that explains how this lost novel came to light, Viennese Romance is a seminal work that explores the conflicts faced by many Jewish intellectuals in early-twentieth-century Europe. A compelling portrait of a decadent society, it also lays bare the obsessive-destructive nature of love.

"According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophy is a 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cult-like following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna. Gottlieb's meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him."--from the inside front flap.

Analyzes the communal organization, political affiliations, and cultural contributions of Vienna's Jews from 1848 to World War I. After 1848, Jewish emancipation became an issue in party politics. Jews identified with the Austrian Liberal Party, with the Emperor and Germanism, in all of which they saw safeguards of Jewish emancipation. Analyzes the antisemitism of Schönerer's Pan-German Party, which found many adherents at the University of Vienna, and of Lueger's Christian Social Party. Describes the cautious reactions of Jewish officials, who supported the Liberal Party even in defeat and in the face of that party's desertion of the Jewish cause; the more nationalist faction led by Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch, a member of the Austrian parliament from 1884-95 and a militant fighter against antisemitism; and the Austrian Israelite Union set up in 1886 to encourage pride in Jewish identity and combat antisemitism. Surveys the role of antisemitism in the rise of Zionism. Suggests that the surge of antisemitism in Vienna, rather than the Dreyfus case, was responsible for Herzl's concern with the "Jewish question". Analyzes the Jewish self-hatred of Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger, and the role of Jewish identity and antisemitism in the life and work of Freud, Schnitzler, and other Austrian Jewish writers.

Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud’s publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams , Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break. The 250 letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank’s “anti-Oedipal” heresy, his surprising reconciliation with Freud, and the moment when they parted ways permanently. A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.

Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud's biography for the twenty-first century--a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours. Roudinesco traces Freuds life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis' annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siecle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire--an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire. Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity--the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved--Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture.

The films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us. His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including Metropolis and M . In America he made some of the most notable crime movies ( Fury ), noir films ( The Big Heat ), and Westerns ( The Return of Frank James ) of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent. Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself. This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. "For me," he said, "cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century."

"What if economics began with people? Carl Menger. Ludwig von Mises. F.A. Hayek. Murray Rothbard. Israel Kirzner. They're some of the most important and acclaimed economists of the modern era, and they all belong to an intellectual tradition known as the Austrian School of Economics. While many economists model people's behavior using idealized assumptions, Austrian economists begin by taking people as they are and build economic theories by examining the logical structure of the choices they make. This book introduces the key thinkers of the Austrian School and explains their insights on a wide range of economic topics. It also explains the relationship between the Austrian School and mainstream economics and delves into the criticisms Austrian School economists have mounted against communist and socialist economic thought"--

The history of Jews in interwar Germany and Austria is often viewed either as the culmination of tremendous success in the economic and cultural realms and of individual assimilation and acculturation, or as the beginning of the road that led to Auschwitz. By contrast, this volume demonstrates a reemerging sense of community within the German-speaking Jewish population of these two countries in the two decades after World War I. The fresh research presented here shows that although Jews may have experiences a deepening sence of impending crisis and economic decline, a renewal of Jewish communal life was taking place, as new groupings sprang up, including organizations for youth, for rural Jews, and for political groups such as Zionists and Bundists. Several chapters consider the impact of economis and political crises on German Jewish family life. Together, these engrossing essays form a complex mosaic of German Jewry on the eve of its demise.

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek's groundbreaking work that offers a "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's work is difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel and The Merchant's Contracts , all the more valuable. In Rechnitz , a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. More than a docu-drama, this work explores the very transmission of historic memory and has been called Jelinek's best performance text to date. In The Merchant's Contracts , Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In the age of the global economy, Jelinek turns the story of a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors, making this her most accessible work. Along with an extensive introduction by the translator that both contextualizes and analyzes the two brilliant texts, a DVD of performances of both plays accompanies this volume. Available for the first time in English, this is a collection that testifies to the power and universality of Jelinek's work.

Austria experienced remarkable economic and social growth in the years following World War II, especially considering the troubled nature of its politics. A small, land-locked country, Austria has emerged as the European Union's fourth richest state, yet it still wrestles with old decisions and demons. Merging personal observation with rich historical scholarship, a renowned journalist and award-winning memoirist tracks Austria's unique trajectory, beginning the origins of its peoples and following through to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Paul Lendvai investigates whether Austrians have come to terms with Hitler s Anschluss and the Waldheim affair and how they have met the challenge of Jorg Haider s radical right-wing ascendancy. Lendvai identifies a positive moral toughness, internal cohesion, and social discipline within Austria, especially during the years of occupation and subsequent crises, such as the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Yugoslav wars. A probing study of Austria's long quest for nationhood, this volume offers a firsthand look at the factors and players that have influenced an evolving power.Praise for the German edition: Daring, exciting, unmasking...Lendvai presents hitherto hardly known facts and] incredible details.& mdash; NEWS (Vienna Weekly)Lendvai seeks to explain what Austria is like. He has succeeded exactly in this endeavor.& mdash; Die Wel