The fugitive thoughts captured below came to me while I was reading about, then visiting, the city of Vienna, Austria, a place much more famous for it

The mirror of Narcissus and the labyrinth of the Minotaur | the fifth wave

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2021-10-27 01:30:06

The fugitive thoughts captured below came to me while I was reading about, then visiting, the city of Vienna, Austria, a place much more famous for its composers and artists than its politicians.  Vienna arose as the Baroque wedding-cake setting for a single imperial dynasty, the Hapsburgs, who were known mainly for their ability to persist.  Emperor after emperor staggered into disaster, but from the Middle Ages to the end of the First World War the Hapsburgs managed to outlast their enemies.

The only ideology to emerge out of Vienna was political anti-Semitism.  The only politicians of note in its long history were Prince Metternick, master of repression, and Adolf Hitler, who began his career as a painter of Viennese monuments and ended it as the embodiment of the Satanic in politics.

Given this context, it should not surprise us that the movement of art for art’s sake that swept Europe at the turn of the 20th century displayed singular purity and intensity in Vienna.  Ambitious minds in London and Paris could opt for the great game of power.  The Viennese were smothered between the dead hand of the empire and the rise of the mass movements that would soon destroy it.  Art became more than a release:  it was a religion driven in part by a spiritual hunger to soar above the grime and conflict of the industrial age, in part by the simple wish to escape reality.

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