Why Vienna?

[Mark Kohut]

I have actually read "Wittgenstein's Vienna," a book I posted an online review-summary of when first asking Why
Vienna? Not when it was first published but a fair bit of time ago.  I think TRP may have read it---yes, I know, I think he
must have read everything,--- BUT in this case it was published to high praise AND we know that TRP did know Wittgenstein's work 
to some degree. He quotes key lines and uses a few key concepts, it seems. 
 
So, My Leap................as I reread the online summary of "W'sV" and recall a perspective on a/the major theme of the book"
Here is from the summary:  "
  " the book's major themes. The authors argue that Wittgenstein's Viennese contemporaries were fundamentally critical of the official culture. The       Viennese cultural elite was a wide-ranging group sick to death of the inauthenticity of what Robert Musil would come to characterize as "kakania"--the multi-national and multi-linguistic empire held together by pomp and glitter manufactured by a tired and decrepit monarchical House of Habsburg and imperial bureaucracy that denied that anything was amiss until a crisis occurred. And then there was the "kaka" itself: a corrupted literature, an overly ornamented art and architecture, an over-romanticized music. "---my italics.
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A-and it was even more fully argued.....the authors made the case that the whole "bourgeoisie"--remember that word?---were complicit, were 
THE CAUSE of it......the middle-classes lived lies, lived out phony social selves, "masks and maquillage" say, (as in ATD)...[hence Freudianism could be born]....it was a CULTURE OF DECEIT.............................like the spy game is!

It was the kind of culture in which a writer of genius would find a link to the birth of spying..................to condemn it ALL.

There is a strain in AtD of linking the "bourgeoisie' to the whole continuum from spying thru the World Wars......the luxury liner that turns into the
battleship, for one example.........above may be one of the deepest?

mark

P.S. notice the phrase "over-romanticized music" and compare the remarks on "romantic" music in this section......


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