Deborah Coen's excellent Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty invites us to view fin de siècle Vienna through the lens of the Exners, one of the city's most illustrious families. From the early nineteenth century to the Second World War, three generations of Exners serve as well-chosen guides to this heady time and place. Members of the family rose to prominence in physics, physiology, meteorology, avant-garde art, law and medicine, boasting no fewer than ten university professors as well as a Nobel laureate.
Coen moves adroitly over demanding and varied intellectual terrain to reveal an approach to the world that was specifically tailored to the politics and cultural constellation of Habsburg Austria. During the growing unrest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 1840s, the philosopher and patriarch Franz Exner left his university position in Prague for Vienna to help establish guidelines for educational reform. One of the lasting post-1848 legacies of Exner and his liberal colleagues was the introduction of instruction in probabilistic reasoning into the empire's secondary curriculum. They aimed to instruct future citizens to realize their freedoms while arming them against the forces that were seen to threaten liberalism and the stability of a vast and heterogeneous empire (including clerical dogmatism, splintering nationalism and Hegelian determinism). Exner and his wife Charlotte died young, but their five children and grandchildren would flourish.
Coen meticulously traces the works of the four gifted brothers Adolf (jurist), Karl (physicist), Sigmund (physiologist) and Franz Seraphin (physicist) and their sister Marie, who married a physician and became an important figure in the intellectual and social circles of the Exner clan. Coen shows how probabilistic reasoning blossomed toward the turn of the century into a significant moral and intellectual resource for an embattled Bildungsbürgertum. By quantifying uncertainty, she argues, liberals sought to avoid the spectres of left-wing anarchy and right-wing clericalism that beset Austrian politics and culture for the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond.
Coen's study does not rest content in the universities and salons of the metropolis, but follows the Exners to their summer colony, Brunnwinkl in lower Austria. Founded in the 1880s, this idyllic setting played host to rich cultural, intellectual, familial and professional interactions. The Exners counted among their students, teachers, friends and colleagues Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Sigmund Freud, Erwin Schrödinger and the writers Gottfried Keller and Marie Ebner von Eschenbach. Some of Coen's most interesting research shows how the lives of the Exners during the Sommerfrische informed their activities in the laboratory, courthouse and lecture hall. Sigmund Exner applied a statistical approach to cerebral localization and self-consciously fashioned his scientific persona as naturalist–hunter after his encounters with nature in Brunnwinkl. Seraphin and his student Erwin Schrödinger monitored ‘the respiration, the variable pulse, of the earth itself’ (p. 260) by measuring the electrical potential of the air at various altitudes. According to Coen, these open-air measurements – as opposed to those of the ideally (but never perfectly) isolated laboratory of the city – would dispose Viennese physicists to view fluctuations in nature, such as Brownian motion, not as disturbances or experimental artefacts to be explained away but as significant phenomena in their own right. A non-deterministic but nonetheless objective physics was to provide a viable alternative to Max Planck's determinist physics. Contra Paul Forman's account of acausal Weimar physics (‘Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (1971), 3, 1–116), Coen urges that Franz Seraphin and his students' probabilistic approach was not a capitulation to hostile forces: ‘Those who renounced the goal of certainty did so not in rejection of Enlightenment values but in defense of them. They “tamed” uncertainty by quantifying it’ (p. 13). While the work of Michael Stöltzner and others has helped historians of science to appreciate the special nature of Viennese science as a countervoice to German physics, Coen's book enriches our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of this development.
In the third generation, Felix Exner's studies of water movement in the adjoining Wolfgangsee informed his later work on Brownian motion and statistical meteorology. Felix would become an innovator in his studies of weather prediction, offering a critical approach to the Norwegian school of meteorology. Karl von Frisch (an Exner via his mother) also performed in Brunnwinkl many of the experiments on honeybee communication that would earn him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Towards the end, Coen's account loses some of its traction – von Frisch's account is not best characterized as statistical (indeed, this would prove one of the stumbling blocks in his later debate with Adrian Wenner), and his work under National Socialism deserves more nuanced consideration. But these issues are somewhat peripheral to Coen's concerns.
At its core, her book offers a compelling critique of Carl Schorske's still-influential Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980). Liberals, Coen shows, did not retreat into the private sphere as an escape from public life. Instead, the Exners' semi-private summer colony offered a space in which to hone the skills and dispositions that were best suited to their public lives. She urges us ‘to rethink the linked dichotomies at the heart of Schorske's thesis between reason and uncertainty, publicity and privacy’ (p. 3).
At times, the explanatory burden placed on this family seems great indeed, and one wishes that liberalism itself had been nudged a bit more into the role of explanandum. But overall, the book is an eloquent testament to the gains that can be made when a skilful historian treats interdisciplinarity not just as a methodological tool, but as an object of study in its own right. As such, Coen's study of the Exners achieves a truly cross-disciplinary reach. Her account is impressively erudite, ambitious and elegantly executed, and should be of enduring consequence to historians of science, family and gender, pedagogy and modern Europe.
