There are many interesting essays in this volume, with those of Bahr, Schnitzler, and especially Hugo von Hofmannsthal most prominent. The initial gambit, to ask what Young Vienna did after the first flush of their fame in the fin de siècle, especially in their criticism of modern culture, is a good one. It all remains, however, strangely disjointed. Altenberg is prominent in the delightful photographs of Young Vienna at the beach in the introduction but almost entirely absent from the text. Karl Kraus, the nemesis of Young Vienna but Vienna's greatest cultural critic, pops up at times almost as a stalking horse when it comes to discussing Young Vienna's involvement in operetta or its members’ attitudes to aristocracy, but his own cultural criticism is not dealt with much at all. Theodor Herzl once wrote of Young Vienna that they lacked “intellectual coherence,” citing Bahr and his play Das Tschaperl in particular; and perhaps this is what is reflected in this volume (Neue Freie Presse, 7 Mar. 1897, p. 1).

There are clear trends within the papers. Bahr is shown, just as Herzl said, to be a man without intellectual coherence, a superficial thinker of the worst kind, for whom concepts like “baroque” could be slathered on anything during his interwar years—and, as it turns out, not only then. In the same review of Bahr's play, back in 1897, Herzl saw “Young Austria” as under the influence of the frivolities of Montmartre but also as “altwienerisch barock,” so Bahr's baroquism was of long standing. It is also a point well made by Kurt Ifkovits that Bahr's turn to reactionary politics, and even Nazi sympathies—a very antimodern stance—was not so different in its approach from his championing of the “Modern” back in the 1890s, which was itself a revolt against Naturalism, a modernism much more in tune with modernity. As Hugo Ganz (parroting Max Nordau) said in 1901, the “Modernitätsmode” was not so much “modern” as “reactionary” (Neue Freie Presse, 20 Apr. 1901, p. 1).

Along these lines, it was quite easy for Hofmannsthal to change from a “modern” poet in 1900 to an advocate of a cultural “conservative revolution” in interwar Europe because many of his sociopolitical attitudes did not have to change. Ironically, Hofmannsthal comes out of this volume looking quite good. In the first half, he is seen as an aristocratic elitist who tried to find a surrogate for the hierarchies of the fallen Habsburg monarchy in a reactionary form of Europe, as elaborated in Karl Anton Rohan's European Cultural League, or to counter the new, progressive German theater by setting up his own “Southern German” variant in the Salzburg Festival, using the same baroque ideology as Bahr to make his case. In the second half, however, it turns out this was not all that bad. The germ of this idea is set on page 103, when Tillmann Heise admits in a note that Hofmannsthal's positive idea of the Habsburg monarchy might have had something to it after all, given Pieter Judson's latest book on the subject. Later it is pointed out that Hofmannsthal was an antinationalist, had come to hate the war, was fascinated by the (imagined) culture of the Far East, and yearned for a Franco-German cultural reconciliation. In a fascinating essay on Hofmannsthal's prologue to Das Theater des Neuen, Marco Rispoli shows just how open, and even humorous, this supposed reactionary Kulturkritiker could be about the future of theater.

The figure that comes across best of all is Schnitzler. The “Zeitkritik” in his comedy trilogy, O du mein Österreich, and in his novella Casanova's Heimfahrt, is shown to be, on an extremely intelligent and ethical level, a devastating critique of the superficialities and immoralities of Austrian politics and culture—from anything but a conservative perspective. This is not surprising; what is a little surprising is the claim made that this is a novel insight because Schnitzler was regarded as an author of a “sunken world,” decadent and not relevant (145). This has not been true for decades, and this comment by Cristina Fossaluzza, in an otherwise exemplary essay, suggests that German literary historians might want to pay more attention to historians in the field.

Another quite old-fashioned approach in this volume is the idea that Young Vienna was, until well after 1900, completely divorced from the political realm. The case of Felix Dörmann shows something quite different. In one of the weakest essays in the collection, Dörmann is dismissed quite summarily (and prudishly) by Gabriella Rovignati, but he merits closer inspection (as other authors in the volume realize). For instance, Dörmann published a poem in the Neue Freie Presse (11 Mar. 1897) bewailing the fecklessness and inadequacies of Austrian politics. He, like Schnitzler, was not entirely divorced from the political. Dörmann's poem, notably, was titled O du mein Österreich (see preceding text). He also later wrote social reportage showing the terrible conditions for young women immigrating to Vienna. None of this is considered by Rovignati.

These oversights, the rather dated historical understanding, and the general disjointedness might be quite understandable given the enormous breadth of the subject matter. If a pattern emerges, it seems telling that the reactionary figures discussed here, the ones who became extreme antisemites or who even sympathized with the Nazis, were Richard Schaukal and Bahr, neither of whom were Jewish. Those who became ultraconservative but antinationalist and anti-Nazi, were Hofmannsthal and Andrian, both of mixed Catholic-Jewish ancestry; and those who were politically and culturally more progressive were Schnitzler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, and Dörmann—all of Jewish descent, as were a couple brought in at the end: Hugo Bettauer and Arthur Rundt. Admittedly, Beer-Hofmann, as a Zionist, was a nationalist, but a progressive one, and Salten was a lover of aristocratic pursuits such as hunting, but he despised the nobility and, as the author of Bambi, detested animal cruelty. But then nothing is ever simple.

Regardless of its faults, this volume gives much food for thought. It introduced me to someone, Rundt, who appears to have been a remarkable pioneer in the European reception of the Harlem Renaissance: his novel, Marylin, is a sympathetic portrayal of a mixed-race relationship—in 1928. Discovering that fact alone made reading this volume more than worth it.