Modernity and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

By Dana Harrison and Lizzie Himmel

Modernity means, on the most basic level, change. We speak here of modernity as concerning the attitudes of change in the world at the turn of the century. The word applies to cultural, political, social, and economical developments—industrialization, the architecture of Otto Wagner, the writings of the “Young Vienna” literati, and many more. What came with the modernist movements were twin sensations of excitement (joy in the newfound growth and possibilities) and fear generated by the departure from tradition and the feeling of security rooted in generations of history and the well-established ways of the past.
Karl Marx said of modernity in 1848, “all that is solid melts into air.” That which was “solid,” beliefs and practices time-honored and reliable, dissolved into the fast-paced, ever-changing environment we know today. Modernity is, in this metaphor, “air,” because it is flitting and uncontrollable.
The ramifications of this “melting” were both positive and negative. Those initially exposed to the changes wrought by modernism in many cases experienced what Marshall Berman in his piece "Modernity- Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," describes as “nostalgic myths of pre-modern Paradise Lost”—they felt they had been thrust into chaos from a world where they were once comfortable and safe. Words like “turbulence,” “drunkenness” and “dizziness” appear time and again, painting a picture of a society in the midst of a terrifying leap. What came was a world of contradictions, where in order for society be able to accept and take all these changes in stride, a new “modern sensibility” had to be established.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna was a breeding ground for modernity. After the fall of liberalism as a political force by 1900, individual thought was constricted from public expression to more intimate settings, resulting in the birth of the Viennese Coffeehouse Culture, where ideas were cultivated and exchanged. Artists and cultural figures of the time—Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Egon Schiele, and more—reflected the idea of modernity not only in that they rebelled against traditional and historical conventions, but also as a reflection of the resulting anxiety and insecurity of this act. Vienna at the turn of the century exhibits a blooming of the idea that one need not look to the past for legitimacy. Instead, these beacons of modern thought retreat from the political or historical to reflect on man in his present condition, personally, as an individual.