Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty

[Dave Monroe]

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty:
Science, Liberalism, and Private Life

Deborah R. Coen

392 pages | 22 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2007

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of
science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner
family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl
Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger,
artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s
movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and
fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich,
Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s
scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public
notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the
private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of
the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of
Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo5356655.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=mpK8yYo6NXwC